Microsoft Seeks Partners For a New Run at Yahoo

Microsoft positioning itself for a new run for Yahoo Inc.'s search business, has approached other media companies in recent days about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo's breakup, say people familiar with the discussions. More>>

Web Usability Video

Here is the video of the Web Usability Event on June 25 featuring Tom Chi, Senior Director - User Experience, Yahoo!, Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience, Oracle, and David Nelson, Sr. Experience Designer, Adobe Systems.

Google Learns To Crawl Flash Files

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Google has improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology. In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find. More >>

Turning The Long Tail To The Big Tail

In a seminal article titled The Long Tail, published in October 2004 on Wired, Chris Anderson described a new niche strategy where it became possible to sell large numbers of unique items in relatively small quantities.

In fact, what would have been uneconomic in brick and mortar businesses was becoming possible AND profitable thanks to the Internet.

This concept of the “long tail” flourished and now applies to many other situations, such as domain names, for example, as well as (and especially) advertising. In particular since Google’s impressive conceptual – and commercial – innovation with the famous pair AdWords-AdSense.

In an interesting post on this matter, Scott Karp does an excellent job explaining wherein lies the innovation: factoring relevance into the auction model!

Let me explain: from 1999 to 2001, AdWords operated on a CPM basis, or cost per thousand impressions, the fee structure in fashion at the time, where advertisers were billed based on the number of impressions of their ads.

However, as Sergey Brin himself said, “It didn’t generate much money”.

In his book, The Search, John Battelle tells us that income from AdWords rose to about $85 million in 2001, while Overture earned $288 million the same year with its auction model operating on a CPC basis (cost per click, or the amount an advertiser pays for each click on its ad).

An auction system enables the advertiser to determine the cost per click incurred when users visit its site as a sponsored link. The starting bid is set at 0.15 $ per click. When the visitor enters keywords that were bid on, the search engine results page offers sponsored links, with the highest bidder’s site at the top of the list.

But Google couldn’t simply use Overture’s business model, unless they wanted a lawsuit. Even so, the lawsuit still happened and lasted more than two years, until the parties came to an agreement and dropped the suit.

However, it’s the essential difference between the two systems that enabled Google to defend itself and avoid a sentence: where Overture automatically linked the top ranking in the results to the highest bid value, Google introduced the idea of relevance, or rather popularity, with clickthrough rate (CTR), whose official definition is:

the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).

In other words, the bid value now became just a component, factored by the applicable clickthrough rate. John Battelle explains it the most clearly:

(A)ssume further that Accountant One is willing to pay $1.00 per click, Accountant Two $1.25, and Accountant Three $1.50. On Overture's service, Accountant Three would be listed first, followed by Accountant Two, and so on. The same would be true on Google's service, but only until the service has enough time to monitor clickthrough rates for all three ads. If Accountant One, who paid $1.00 per click, was drawing more clickthroughs than Accountant Three, then Accoun- tant One would graduate to the top spot, despite his lower bid.

A tiny innovation, but it took Google from $85 million in revenue in 2001 to billions just 7 years later!

And that’s not all: since apparently no one as improved upon it, most of the major Internet players are still looking for a decent business model.

In fact, this notion of relevance is also at the source of PageRank, at the heart of Google’s success. They go hand in hand. A search marketer cuts to the chase: If you don't provide the results, you don't get the money...

Now, the other reason for mass adoption of Google’s advertising services is... the long tail, as John Battelle rightly describes (emphasis mine):

You think Amazon's got scale? You think eBay is huge? Mere drops in the bucket. Amazon's 2000 revenues were around $2.76 billion. But the Neil Moncreifs of the world, taken together, drove more than $25 billion across the Net that same year, according to U.S. government figures. That's the power of the Internet: it's a beast with a very, very long tail. The head-eBay, Amazon, Yahoo-may get all the attention, but the real story is in the tail.

The power of the Internet is in the tail!

This is how Google achieved such amazing success. It was the only one to match advertisers’ needs with the fuel they required in abundance on the Internet: RELEVANT content. With an innovative ad server that enables millions of small sites and blogs to monetize their content, or at least to hope to...

But where Yahoo! had a presence since the beginning – since well before Google and before running astray – today Jerry Yang's abdication hands Google 90% of the advertising pie practically on a silver platter (if antitrust authorities accept it... even as advertisers already devote about 70% of their search budgets to Google!). All the other ad servers combined share the remaining 10%.

Even so, in 2008 no one has any illusions anymore (as Emmanuel Parody commented caustically: AdSense paying for content? That’s a joke...) and UGC, even if it continues to be created at full tilt, is no longer monetized like it should be (has it ever been?). Leaving millions of content creators fed up with their content be reused and monetized by the Web giants without any satisfactory form of payment or revenue sharing.

* * *

Turning the tail...

A disruption in this success story is possible, however: it would just require turning the tail, to move from the long tail of UGC to the big tail, represented by the yellow part in the graph:

To illustrate my idea, in a predictable imbalance predicted indeed by Clay Shirky in 2003, the analysis of 433 blogs ranked by number of incoming links illustrated the concept of the long tail nicely, with at the head:

1. top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them,
2. top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and
3. top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links.

Now imagine an analysis of not 433 blogs, but tens of millions of blogs, sites, social network pages, etc.

Then you will understand that the head (the green part), which we will arbitrarily say equals 30% of sites/blogs/pages that would form the network’s core in the good old bow-tie theory (i.e., the core of most interconnected sites where the most links and traffic converge and are shared), no longer cuts it when the UGC mainstream now forms not the long tail, but the big tail of the Web, rather predominant today.

There is the real issue for UGC and the creators behind it: they lack representation: Everyone is mooching off their content to monetize it better than everyone else, but nobody really monetizes it at its fair value.

In fact, currently only the head attracts advertisers, while the tail is left to Google, which takes full advantage of it without fearing the inconsistencies...

My prediction is that the first player who succeeds in doing what Google did five years ago with AdSense, this time adapting relevance and fair revenue sharing for UGC, will introduce an even more formidable break with the past, with the added blessing of content creators, who are obviously the most harmed in and by the current system.

Turning the tail, moving from the long tail to the big tail, is the Internet’s next big challenge. Steve Ballmer himself says nothing less :

At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications. The most important application for the foreseeable future is search.

So we have all the data for the problem, and the first ad server that creates the RELEVANT mix to match advertisers’ needs on one side with the legitimate monetization expectations of content creators on the other side (matching the inventory of the latter based on the message of the former), will win the jackpot. Even if there are still a few unknowns.

Gloomy Search Terms Drive Traffic To Websites

According to Compete.com gloomy search terms helped drive more traffic to web sites. eg Hotel Carter showed up in the list because of its number one ranking on Trip Advisor’s “Dirtiest Hotels”. The finding site that typically sporting events, celebrity gossip and big-budget marketing pushes caused spikes in various search term referrals, but gloomy search phrases top the list. The chart below shows the 25 high volume search terms that grew the most from April 2008 to May 2008.

• The most common theme among the top 25 searches is death (indicated by black bars). While this may help to explain why the news tend to focus on morbid events, it also speaks to the fact that people turn (heavily) to search engines when trying to find more info on contemporary events.


• Gossip and entertainment related searches also bubble to the top (purple bars), highlighted by both Kimberly Caldwell and David Cook (American Idol contestants and alleged lovebirds) showing making the list.


• Seasonal trends can be pretty dynamic (blue bars), with Mother’s day Idea’s and economic stylus related terms peppering the top 25 growers.


• Large product and movie launches caused spikes in movie and video game related terms (green bars) as The Strangers, The Happening, Sex in The City, GTA4 and Wii Fit all made the list. What’s interesting here is that movie terms seem to coincide with advertising while game related search terms are (apparently) related to usage.

Russian Search Giant Coming To America

Russian search engine Yandex, is opening a facility in Palo Alto. The company has hired Vishal Makhijani, who was previously general manager of Yahoo's search group.

"We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the parent company. “We are excited to add a leading technology and business veteran in Silicon Valley to the Yandex team. Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to extend and improve Yandex’s core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience."

See: Search Gaint Yandex To Raise $2 Billion
See: Russian Web Advertising Market Booming

Ballmer Says Google A One Trick Pony

In an interview with the Financial Times Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gives credit to Google for seeing the potential of search and innovating in search. Ballmer admits:

1. Microsoft didn't see the business model for search.
2. The five year development cycle of Windows partly to blame.
3. Online represents a huge opportunity for Microsoft.
4. Live Cashback is not a strategy to buy market share.
5. Cloud computing and world’s media moving online.
6. Google is a single product company.

Here is the interview transcript.

FINANCIAL TIMES: So, you finally got rid of that other guy. Now we want to know what you’re going to do.
STEVE BALLMER: Onward and upward, baby. Onward and upward.

FT: What does it mean to lose Bill Gates from his full-time role?
MR BALLMER: Well, in a way you lose a talent like Bill, you lose a talent like Bill. But the culture of the place is built on a lot of things. It’s not just built on the leaders; it’s built on the leaders and the experiences that we’ve had, and the successes and the failures. At some point it’s not what leaders say, it’s the accumulation of sort of direction and experiences, successes and failures. The culture builds up itself.

I think his legacy will sustain itself, the kinds of things, you know, Bill values - intelligence and intensity. I don’t think Bill going away actually will detract from the culture. I’ve seen this at Wal-Mart. I mean, Sam Walton has been gone now quite a while, and yet the culture lives on in many ways. So, I don’t really think that’s a very big deal at all.

FT: How have you prepared personally for this?
MR BALLMER: [In college] we had to read some passages from [Max] Weber on the routinisation of charisma, talking about how governments in this case primarily move on and transition after a charismatic leader. So, you could say I’ve thought a little bit, and I picked it up and dusted it back off and looked at it. The truth of the matter is the important thing is to point forward and to keep people pointed forward. This is a funny transition, because - how do I say this the right way? Bill started the company, but for the people in the company it’s as much my company almost as it is Bill’s, in a sense. So, it’s not like we’re passing it to let me call it a second generation. I feel relatively first generation, let me say it that way, to our employees. I’m not Bill, but I have some of that first generation fairy dust sprinkled over me, so to speak.

FT: Microsoft’s share price hasn’t done much for years. Why not?
MR BALLMER: Well, I think in general we’re not that inconsistent with most large cap stocks. [Also,] for all companies there is a period in which your stock is priced very high on the expectation of growth, and then you go through a period where you’re in “show me,” you’re going to do that growth. This is what the market is supposed to do, it’s supposed to bid your price up in advance of profit, if it thinks you’re going to have them, and then it holds on for a while until you can surprise the market with yet another surge beyond expectations.

So, I think we have grown into what people expected of us in the late ’90s, and now people are trying to decide what do they expect of us, and that gets down to essentially three or four key questions. Are we going to stay strong in the businesses where we have established ourselves? Are we going to be able to move into big, new businesses like online, TV, and phone? Are we going to continue to drive [the] enterprise business, because I think that’s a sleeper for many people, it’s been the thing that’s really propelled a lot of our growth over the last several years, and are we going to be able to get emerging markets really figured out with the high software piracy there?

You know, our share price was sort of on a different trajectory. Then we announced our bid for Yahoo, and that kind of changed the trajectory a little bit. As investors try to think, how are they going to succeed in online, what kind of investment is going to be required, how much value can they create, I feel very good about our prospects. Certainly I feel very good about our results. We’ve out-performed most of our industry in terms of profit growth over the last five years.

FT: The Yahoo bid was taken partly as a tacit admission that you needed to do something fairly radical. Was that a fair response?
MR BALLMER: No, it’s inaccurate. It may be fair; I can’t comment as to fair. In a sense online is our best deal, isn’t it? We’re small; the other guys are big. There’s a market out there. We have only one way to go, and it’s up, baby, up, up, up, up, up!

We thought we could accelerate the upside in a way that was value-creating. At the end of the day, Yahoo was not an online strategy. It was a way for us to accelerate our own online strategy. They didn’t want to sell. We were relatively disciplined about the financials You know, it’s funny, because we’re founders, I think [shareholders] wonder whether we really care about creating shareholder value, and yet I think we were far more disciplined than 95 out of 100 companies would be.

FT: What lessons are there from Microsoft’s late move into search?
MR BALLMER: I think we have to keep agile. I do fault us for the speed with which we dove into search, primarily because we didn’t see the business model. And I give Google credit for innovating in the business model around search. They did a nice job on that, and that’s why they won.

I think one of the mistakes we made, and I think we’ve said this before, is having a five-year gap between Windows releases did calcify our ability to react to anything, because there was a five-year window basically where a big part of our R&D resources were fairly locked in. It doesn’t mean everything should be a six-month cycle, I don’t believe in that, but we’ve got to have more flexibility in our R&D commitments than that.

FT: How do you deal with search now?
MR BALLMER: I think we have three things we’ve got to do. There are some things that we just have to, as we say, ante up to be in the game: relevance, cap-ex, responsiveness. There are areas in which we’re going to differentiate and make Google play catch-up. And then there are areas in which we’re trying to change the rules. I think Google is going to have to decide whether they want to come with us. If this Live Cashback thing is successful, they’re going to have to decide if they want to play the game or not. [Note: Microsoft’s Live Cashback service, announced last month, pays a rebate to internet users if they make a purchase after finding an online merchant through a Microsoft’s search engine.]

FT: Is Live Cashback a way to buy market share?
MR BALLMER: No. Well, I don’t know. If somebody else comes out with a product and says my product is better and cheaper, is that buying market share because they made the thing cheaper? That’s all we’ve really done here.

Search looks free, but, of course, search isn’t really free. It’s not free to the advertisers. So, what we’ve said is we’re going to change the way the money gets divided. In today’s world the search provider basically keeps everything, and we’ve said, look, we’re going to share that money differently, some to the advertiser, some to the user, and some to us. Is that buying market share? I think that’s called reinventing the business model in a way that makes the business more competitive, and we’ll see if it works or if it doesn’t.

I’ve got to tell you, in every - other than the battle with Open Source, every other competitor, I love being able to come into a room and saying we’re better and we’re cheaper. We’re going to try to say we’re better and we’re cheaper basically. I don’t think this is sort of the end of the story by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it tells you we’re going to do things a little differently.

We’re going to have to climb up one [market] share point at a time, one innovation at a time. I don’t think this is something that changes, flips overnight.

FT: Why hasn’t that approach worked so far? You’ve been at it for some time.
MR BALLMER: No, no, we’ve been building up the basic ante primarily. We had no search engine and we had no paid search engine. We had to build. Then we had to get one round of feedback on where we weren’t up to snuff. Then we had to start tactical differentiation. Now we’re starting some business model differentiation. We’ve got some UI innovation.

You know, the world isn’t very smart about technology businesses in the sense of thinking they move super quickly. Things do move quickly, there’s no question, but generally at the end of the day you have to be fairly patient and persistent with innovation in order for it to beak through.

FT: A lot of people are now saying Yahoo was Web 1.0 and would have been difficult to do, and you should instead be looking at the next thing - Facebook or social networking, whatever comes after that.
MR BALLMER: I think people don’t understand what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications. The most important application for the foreseeable future is search. It’s where you start things. It’s where you express intent. It is important.

I don’t think we can say, okay, well, we’re going to be in the ad platform business, and we’re going to do it just on the strength of non-search based assets. We have to be in the ad business, and we’ve got to have a good chunk. We don’t have to dominate, but we’d better have a darn good chunk of the search market over time, and we’re working away at it.

FT: How long are you going to do this job for?
MR BALLMER: I’ve told everybody I think I’d like to do it until my youngest goes to college, which would be nine years from now. I mean, it might wind up less, the board might not want me here, but that’s kind of my life planning horizon.

FT: How do you want to be judged? What goals have you set yourself for that period?
MR BALLMER: I set two kinds of goals: innovation goals, and what I’ll call relative goals.

The relative goals: I’d like to see our company increase its share of profit from all companies who have software as a core capability. I’d like to see us increase our share of the pool. What we are is we’re a software innovation machine. We can turn that machine and apply it in different places. We’re not just a desktop company or an enterprise company; we’re an online company, we’re a software embedded in devices company. And we should be able to outgrow the rest of them.

We’re not going to do that without the right innovation. [That] rolls up into five or six big themes. How do you redefine the way people interact with technology, big screen, little screen, medium-sized screen? How do you redefine the user experience and redefine the definition of how these devices relate to each other? We’ve got some big ideas in that area. I’d like to get those accomplished in the next nine years.

All of the world’s media advertising communications is moving online. I would love to be the company that does the best job at helping people put information online, create new forms of information and communication for that online world, and then that helps people - helps businesses monetise them and consumers consume them.

[We’re] going to move to a world in which more and more of computing is done in the cloud as opposed to corporate datacentres We’ve got a big initiative about transforming essentially enterprise computing and taking costs and complexity out of that.

Last but not least, the ability to let people not only get at information but then to analyse it and use it, we’re already talking about this some in the context of consumer search. We say it’s not really about search; it’s about the task. How do I find and act, find and analyse, find and get insight. I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of innovation in that area.

FT: What sets Microsoft apart as it pursues all these things?
MR BALLMER: I think we’re the only company in our industry that’s got any track record of persistence. Some companies get it right once. We’ve gotten it right twice, because we stay after it.

FT: Is that he core attribute of this company, persistence?
MR BALLMER: I think our long term - I’d call it our long term approach, which is a combination of taking on bold challenges, being patient, being persistent, being relentless. There’s an accountability and in some senses you’ve got to be relentlessly accountable and you also have to be willing to stick with things. We don’t pull back; it’s not what we do.

Sometimes we get shareholders who will question us on that, but I think it’s our great strength. It’s what built Windows, it’s what build Office, it’s what built our enterprise business, and what’s going to let us build the search business. It’s what letting us build a TV business.

FT: Have you learned anything from competing with Google, for instance their speed?
MR BALLMER: I haven’t seen speed out of Google really. I mean, come on. They have one product. It’s been the same for five years - and they have Gmail now, but they have one product that makes all their money, and it hasn’t changed in five years.

I mean, they have a gestalt, but gestalt is gestalt. Let’s talk about the reality. The reality is one product makes 98 percent of all of their money, search. Oh, they have two products, AdWords and AdSense. They have two products, both search-based, that make all of their money, and it hasn’t changed a lot in five years. I’m not giving them a hard time, but we’ve got to learn - if you say, what have you learned, we try to learn from people’s successes, not from people’s gestalt. The gestalt is yet to be proven.

Yahoo To Pay Google $250 Million Break Up Fee

I am puzzled, was Yahoo in such dire straits that they could not negotiate a better deal? Yahoo has agreed to pay Google a break up fee of $250 million if the partnership falls apart within the first two years.

If the Services Agreement is terminated by either party within 24 months ... Yahoo! is required to pay to Google the sum of $250,000,000...

Under the proposed deal Yahoo anticipates on making $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first 12 months following implementation. On a profit basis Yahoo could probably be even losing money.

Not only is Yahoo in a position to lose money but in 2 years its search advertising business will be obliterated by Google, Yahoo would have become dependent on Google for its search advertising and in the process handed Google a multi billion dollar monopoly.

See: Yahoo's Casualties in Search War

Search Report: Google Up, Yahoo & MSN Down

Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr-08	May-07
www.google.com	68.29%	67.90%	65.13%
search.yahoo.com	19.95%	20.28%	20.89%
search.msn.com	5.89% *	6.26% *	7.61% *
www.ask.com	4.23%	4.17%	3.92%

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Percentage of U.K. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	May-08	Apr.-08	May-07
Google Properties	87.30%	87.69%	78.28%
Yahoo! Properties	4.09%	4.01%	8.58%
Microsoft Properties	3.72%	3.65%	5.46%
Ask Properties	3.07%	2.89%	4.96%

Note: Data is based on UK Internet usage over the four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007) from the Hitwise sample of 8.4 million UK Internet users. Note that the percentages for the search properties include the .uk and .com domains.

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key U.S. Industries
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2008 to May 2007, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, Business and Finance, Sports, Online Video and Social Networking categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - May 2008

Category	Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, May-08	Percentage Change in Share of Traffic From, Search Engines, May-08 - May-07	Percent of Category Traffic from Google, May-08	Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, May-08 - May-07
Health and Medical	45.76%	3%	30.86%	5%
Travel	34.81%	11%	24.26%	21%
Shopping and Classifieds	25.48%	2%	16.84%	8%
News and Media	21.70%	7%	14.53%	10%
Entertainment	24.33%	17%	15.76%	22%
Business and Finance	18.15%	14%	11.73%	22%
Sports	13.09%	17%	8.81%	24%
Online Video*	29.94%	37%	20.78%	52%
Social Networking*	16.50%	18%	9.98%	21%

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
* denotes custom category
Source: Hitwise

Microsoft: HP's Searchbar Search is Over

Microsoft has entered into a significant new deal with HP to have the Microsoft Search Bar distributed as the default on all new HP consumer computers, starting in 2009. Here's the official press release from Microsoft.

The searchbar stakes are potentially very, very high. Most users don't mess with default settings, which means that the default search will be used for a *lot* of searching at Microsoft Live. Microsoft's overwhelming share of the browser market appeared to give them the advantage in this space early on. However Google's search results superiority combined with legal actions against what was a virtually monopoly by Microsoft's on the IE browser. These twin forces kept Microsoft in virtual search darkness, a very distant third to Google and Yahoo in search despite the fact that Microsoft controls the browser which still maintains over 80% of the browser market with Firefox (with Google as the default search) in firm second place.

Microhoo - Here It Goes Again - OK Go

I think this speaks for itself!

Google on Search Quality: Through a Glass, Darkly

Udi Manber at Google suggests that they are working for better transparency in the rankings process but I recommend you do not hold your breath, because he's certainly right about this:

For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design.

Strategically I believe Google continues to make a mistake that ultimately is their great achilles heel, though Microsoft and Yahoo have been so busy fumbling their online balls they don’t seem to understand why more transparency is a good thing even in the search sphere.

Google's idea is that transparency leads to sharing ranking secrets and that leads to abuse of those rules. Sure, there would be some of that, but better would be to involve the online community in the definition and policing of spammy material, and also to be more responsive to webmasters who have questions about why their sites suddenly disappear from the rankings or - far more common and mysterious - are simply downranked to the degree they no longer get Google traffic.

This last type of penalty, "downranking", offers one of the few instances where Google actually comes very close to lying to webmasters (in my opinion they cross this line and lie to webmasters), implying that when “your site appears in the Google index” you have no penalty when in fact the downrank penalty by Google is severe, leading to almost no Google traffic. If you are an advanced SEO person you will know what is going on, but in probably the best example of how the lack of transparency backfires at Google you'll find that only advanced SEO marketing folks and spam experts are familiar with the many subtle algorithmic penalties that Google dispenses with algorithmic ruthlessness.

Mom and pop businesses are often hung out to dry with these penalties or - more often - simply ranked lower than they should be because they have failed to perform basic SEO on their websites. Most businesses - even some large ones - have no idea what SEO even means even though their business may be living or dying on the search results. Also common are websites who hire or associate with questionable or incompetent SEOs (which constitute well over 90% of all SEOs). These folks often have no idea that they have violated Google’s improved-but-still-too-ambiguous webmaster guidelines.

In fairness to Google they do have a huge scaling challenge with everything they do. Dealing with milllions of sites and billions of queries can’t be handled with massive numbers of new staff. They need only a tiny fraction of their efforts going into staff solutions or they'll be overwhelmed. However this is what the socializing power of the internet is for. Digg, Wikipedia, and many other sites effectively police content quality without massive labor costs. Another option is to charge websites for quality reviews that would identify problems rather than leaving the site at the mercy of a sometimes predatory SEO community.

So Udi I would like to be happy that you and Google are bringing more transparency to the process but forgive my skepticism that Google will give more than lip service to a much broader, open discussion and corrections of the many ways the ranking process has failed to deliver something that is really, really important to users and should be important to you: fairness.

Microsoft Live Cashback Launches

Today Microsoft is launching the Live Search Cashback program where using Microsoft Live search will sometimes present you with listings for products that are related to your search query.


Following the cashback links or searching within the Cashback environment will lead to a comparison shopping feature of the Cashback program that Microsoft promises will surface the best deal of all they have listed after it offers you a discount on top of the company's price.

Microsoft says:
Each time you click a Live Search cashback listing, you'll find great deals on the product you chose. Your results will clearly list the cashback savings you'll receive off the store price, and your final bottom-line price that includes tax and shipping costs...

It will be interesting to see how people react to this approach from Microsoft which is clearly an effort to move one of the most lucrative search niches - searching for products - to Microsoft and away from search leader Google. If Cashback can unearth the best bargains on the same products featured at Google it could be a big winner as buyers are unlikely to show money-losing loyalty to Google simply because they prefer it for searches. However if Microsoft fails to deliver on the promise of cheaper products Live Cashback is likely to go down in expensive flames.

Search Gaint Yandex To Raise $2 Billion

Russia's biggest internet firm Yandex plans to raise up to US$2 billion in an initial public offering that would give the company a public valuation of US$5 billion according to Reuters.

Yandex topped both Yahoo! and Microsoft with 528 million search queries (or 2.2 percent of European searches) in March 2008, according to comScore. Yandex reaches over 62% of Russian internet audience with more than 47% of all searches conducted in Russia, followed by Google, Rambler, and Mail.ru. Yandex reported revenues of $167 million in 2007.

The company was founded founded in 2000 by CEO Arkady Volozh and CTO Ilya Segalovich. They currently own about 30 percent of the firm and have raised $5.3 million in capital from investors.

See: Russian Web Advertising Market Booming

Microsoft Email #2 Leaked: Online Strategy

For those of you trying to figure out where Microsoft is headed or trying to head here is another memo. This time from Satya Nadella, VP Search for Microsoft. On Monday we published Kevin Johnson's email to employees on Microsoft's Key Initiatives.

satyamemo - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: satyamemo

WaMu's Whoo Hoo Campaign Success

Washington Mutual aka WaMu, launched their multi-channel Whoo Hoo! Campaign back in Feb'08. As they put it, the Whoo hoo marketing and advertising campaign is all about tapping into customers' emotional reactions to capture the essence of what it feels like to bank at WaMu.

The site is distinctly bright and flashy - literally and figuratively as it is built in flash - using decided large doses of bright blue, green, and magenta. What is interesting to note about it is that the reported uptick in search traffic to the WaMu site as a result of this campaign has been double digit. According to Compete.com:

Visitors to the WaMu domain rose 5% from February to March. Following the start of the Whoo Hoo! campaign in February, search traffic surged with a 59% boost in consumers visiting WaMu’s savings pages, with a further increase in March (+55%). Yahoo! search traffic to WaMu’s checking pages grew by 69% from February to March, with Google traffic also climbing an additional 13% since February. The term "wamu" appeared in searches between January of 2008 and March of 2008 over 1,000% more times than in all of 2007 combined.

Clearly, impressive and proof positive that marketing and working all channels drives on- and offline traffic and ultimately revenues.

Microsoft Email Leaked: Focus Search, Social Media, Display Ads & User Experience

From: Kevin Johnson
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 1:30 PM
To: Platforms & Services Division; APSP FTE - Adv & Pub Solutions Platform; Employees.all.corp.adf@main.corp; Employees.all.adf@main.corp
Subject: Online Services Strategy Update

We have been executing against the core strategy I first presented at our Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2007 to go after the growing opportunity in online services and advertising. Four pillars have formed the basis of our strategy:

1. Consolidate ad platform and win in display
2. Innovate and disrupt in search
3. Deliver end-to-end user experiences across PC, phone, and web
4. Reinvent portal and social media experiences

We have many options that support acceleration of our strategy. As announced earlier today, we are also considering new alternatives for a transaction with Yahoo! which do not involve a full acquisition. At this time, we have not made a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo!, but we reserve the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo!, shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft, or with other third parties.

Regardless of the outcome of any new discussions, it is important that we continue to move forward to strengthen our online services business. The fact is that we are not where we want to be in this business yet and we've been in this position longer than we'd all like. To that end, we will be accelerating elements of our core strategy, and breaking ground in new areas.

On Tuesday, Brian McAndrews is hosting advance08, our annual advertising conference here in Redmond. Over 400 leaders from across the media, technology and advertising landscape will be here for two days to engage in dialogue on industry trends and opportunities. These leaders are some of our closest partners in the digital transformation of the advertising industry, and they recognize the increasingly important role Microsoft plays in this transformation.

We are very excited to have these customers and partners on campus.

Brian's keynote will highlight our unique position in the advertising industry. It's amazing to see how far we've come with the aQuantive acquisition in differentiating our advertising platform. This foundation is paying off, with Q3 advertising revenue growth of nearly 40%, a rate that has accelerated over the past two quarters while growth rates at Google, Yahoo and AOL have slowed.

On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core algorithmic search, and at the same time, we are investing to differentiate in vertical experiences and to disrupt the current model. You'll hear more about our plans Wednesday.

advance08 will underscore our commitment to search and online advertising, and you'll continue to see announcements demonstrating our progress in this space. Earlier this week, I spoke to leaders across our online services business about our core strategy, the importance of acceleration and a set of actions we are taking, including:

1. Innovate and disrupt in search - We will disclose some elements of our plans with this week's release of search and sharpen our focus on user experience and business model innovation. The work we have done over the last 4 years on search has established a solid foundation to build upon.
2. Win targeted distribution - With this release of search, we are now ready to throttle up broader distribution initiatives.
3. Reinvent portal and deliver new experiences across PC, phone and web - We are building our new releases of Windows 7, Windows Live wave 3, Windows Mobile 7, Internet Explorer 8, Search and MSN with an eye towards optimizing and unifying experiences and scenarios.
4. Fix our online branding - Our brands are fragmented and confusing today, and we recognize a need to clarify and align our online branding. We are now driving forward to address this opportunity.
5. Win in display advertising - We have an advantage in tools, agency assets/relationships and a team laser-focused on capturing the display ad platform opportunity. As we build from a position of strength, we will increase engineering resources to drive even more innovation.
6. Build on our strengths in Europe - As measured by comScore in March, our online business in Europe is doing well. We have over 3 times the page view volume and nearly 7 times the minutes of usage compared to Yahoo!, and 68% reach to internet users throughout Europe. We will double down on our investments in Europe and expand on this strong position.
7. Expand strategic partnerships - In addition to our organic innovation agenda, we will expand strategic partnerships that increase inventory on our display ad platform, enable new paradigms in search and accelerate growth in key geographies.
8. Pursue small, targeted acquisitions - Looking forward, we will focus on small, targeted acquisitions that support our work in search, complement our value in the ad platform and help us grow scale in key geographies. Recent acquisitions including Rapt and YaData are examples of these types of acquisitions.

The PSD leadership team is actively working on the FY09 budget, including resources and investments to support the actions above. Additional elements of our work will be revealed in the coming weeks, leading to our Financial Analyst Meeting in July where I will share more details on our strategy and business/financial outlook.

As we move forward, I want to remind everyone that we are well positioned to compete. We have some of the industry's best assets on our side: technical and business talent, global scale, a culture of self-criticism and tenaciousness, a healthy balance sheet and an unparalleled product portfolio. It's time for us to seize the opportunity.

Thanks again for your continued leadership and focus on our business. If you have any feedback or thoughts, please feel free to send me mail.

Regards,

Kevin Johnson

A Penny For Your Pageview: The Profit Potential of Social Applications

As social applications like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and dozens of others attain sky high valuations few are focusing much attention on how poorly most of these social networking sites monetize their enormous traffic levels.

Microsoft's Emerging Business guru Don Dodge, in an excellent post about Social Networking, notes an example where a Facebook application only manages to generate $6,000 to $15,000 per month revenue with page views of .... wait for it .... three hundred million per month. This disparity is so great I'm wondering a bit about his source for those numbers, but it is certainly clear that social media monetization is no walk in the PPC park.

Google's dominance in the very lucrative search pay per click market has made Google the global online advertising leader in terms of advertising traffic and advertising revenue. Despite this success, even Google has been failing to find another holy grail. YouTube may eventually justify its huge valuation in indirect ways, but it does not appear to be a very healthy way to capture revenue for Google or for affiliated video publishers.

Likewise Facebook's key advertising revenue has come somewhat indirectly - from a guaranteed advertising deal with Microsoft rather than from clever internal advertising schemes like Beacon, which practically blew up in Facebooks ... own Face when issues were raised over privacy and potential misuses of Facebook user account information.

People, and certainly the advertising market, are still adapting to social networking so it is too early to know if social networking will prove to be as fertile a ground for advertisers as search. What is clear is that not much revenue is growing there yet.

Google Reports Better Than Expected Q1, Stock Soars

Google stock soared in after hours trading to over $500 per share after a very favorable earnings report that suggests Google is doing a much better job of pulling revenue out of paid advertising clicks. After hours GOOG showed a gain of over 11% from today's closing price.

Reuters Reports

Wall Street Journal: Yahoo and Google May Become Search Bedfellows

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo and Google are closer than ever to a deal where Yahoo would outsource their search monetization to Google. Google continues to do a much better job of producing revenue from searches - some estimates suggest that Google gets more than twice Yahoo's revenue per search click.

Yahoo also is continuing to negotiate with AOL as part of Yahoo's efforts to stave off a takeover by Microsoft.

The Journal suggests that Yahoo's April 22 earnings report may play a key role in the Microsoft takeover argument. If Yahoo comes in with strong earnings it will strengthen the idea that the Microsoft bid is too low, but if earnings are weak it will support Microsoft's efforts to force a Yahoo merger against the will of the current Yahoo board.

Disclosure: Long on YHOO

1 Million Dot .CA Domains Registered

A landmark one million dot-ca (.ca) domain names have been registered in Canada. According to the Canadian Internet Registry Authority, the dot-ca represents Canada on the internet and is a means to verify you are dealing with a Canadian or Canadian business online. Dot-ca now reportedly ranks seventeenth in the list of internet domain name registry. Would be interesting to know how many of those domain name owners also registered dot-com (.com) versions of their sites and redirect to their .ca counterpart.

Domain name registrations, in general, are on the rise. As of Dec. 2007, there were 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the top level domain names (TLDs), an increase of almost 33 million domain name registrations since the end of 2006. The total base of country code top level domain names (ccTLDs) was 58 million, a 33 percent increase YOY. Across all of the gTLDs and ccTLDs, .com has the highest base followed by .de (Germany), .net and .cn (China), and .uk (United Kingdom) and .org. tied for the fifth spot with approximately the same number of domain name registrations. (Source: Domain Name Industry Report)

But how do cctlds rank on a Google.com search? It seems to make sense that cctlds would rank better on Google's regional/local search engines e.g. Google.ca versus Google.com and would help to serve geo-location relevant search results. In fact, supposedly if you do a Google search in another country, Google is able to anticipate the user's intended destination based on their originating IP address and can determine their location and redirect them to the country specific site - which is a huge user experience plus. And if you don't want to be redirected, you can notify them.

Total Number of Searches Increase 9% in March

The number of searches in the U.S. on the major search engines increased from 9,882 billion in Feb'08 to 10,771 billion in Mar'08 representing a 9% jump. According to comScore, Google sites were the biggest beneficiaries and accounted for more than 6.4 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo sites with 2.3 billion, and Microsoft sites with 1 billion.

Google also continued to lead as the top search engine with a 0.6% increase in the share of searches followed by Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL which all experienced decreases in their market share.

comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location

Searches Query Volume by Site

Search Entity                Feb-08        Mar-08      Mar vs. Feb
Total Core Search             9,882        10,741         9.0%
Google Sites                  5,855         6,438        10.0%
Yahoo! Sites                  2,136         2,296         7.0%
Microsoft Sites                 953         1,012         6.0%
AOL Network                     488           512       7.0%
Ask Network                     450           503        12.0%

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location

Share of Searches (%)

Search Entity                Feb-08        Mar-08      Mar vs. Feb
Total Core Search            100.0%        100.0%         0.0
Google Sites                  59.2%         59.8%         0.7
Yahoo! Sites                  21.6%         21.3%        -0.3
Microsoft Sites                9.6%          9.4%        -0.2
AOL Network                    4.9%          4.8%        -0.1
Ask Network                    4.6%          4.7%         0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Yahoo And AOL Talk Merger

Yahoo and AOL are in discussions to combine their web operations reports the WSJ. The move is aimed at thwarting Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo.

The terms being discussed between AOL would fold into Yahoo and make a cash investment in return for about 20% of the combined entity. The deal which does not include AOL's dial-up access business values AOL at about $10 billion. Yahoo would use the AOL cash investment and put up additional funds to buy back several billion dollars worth of its own stock at a price somewhere in the middle of the range between $30 and $40 a share reports the WSJ.

Yahoo To Test Google Ads

Yahoo said it plans to carry search advertising from Google as part of a test that could lead to a broader partnership reports the WSJ. The two-week trial, which will be limited to U.S. traffic and no more than 3% of Yahoo's Web search queries, is designed for the two sides to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader search ad outsourcing arrangement. Yahoo already had been in negotiations to outsource its Web-search advertising in Europe to Google since last year, say people familiar with the matter.

Citigroup Global Markets analyst Mark Mahaney estimates that Yahoo could boost its cash flow more than 25% annually by outsourcing all its search advertising to Google. Some investors have called for Yahoo to abandon its own search advertising system as a quick way to boost its revenue. Analysts predict that outsourcing its search ads to Google would boost Yahoo's cash flow, since Google's system generates significantly more revenue for each search query than Yahoo does. Under such an arrangement, Yahoo would likely garner a majority of the revenue and Google keep the rest as a commission.

In a press release, Yahoo said "the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result. " Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has previously said "We believe having a principal position in both search and display advertising is critical to creating...long-term shareholder value".

The Offline Impact Of Online Advertising

Web advertising stimulates off-line sales and in most cases, online campaigns increase sales more at advertisers’ retail cash registers than on their websites, according to a report by comScore.

The data was gathered by observing the behaviors and purchase patterns of over two million people that had installed comScore's tracking software on their PCs. The conclusion was that online advertising influences consumers' behavior

A study conducted for a retailer with more than $15 billion in annual revenues (most from their store) revealed that U.S. sales increased by 40% online and by 50% off-line among people exposed to an online search ads and display-ads.

The study also found that people tend to respond "with their wallets" more to search ads than to display ads. Search ads are text advertising that appear on search engines based on a search query and only appear after a user has searched for that term. They are generally more costly per impression than are display ads. The study concludes that using both types of ads in one campaign increases sales more than the two, added together, do in separate campaigns.

Search Engines Must Delete Data Within Six Months

A European Commission advisory body on data protection has said that search engines should delete data held about their users within six months reports the BBC.

The proposed rule specifieds that "Search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for."

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months and MSN does the same after 13 months. The body said search companies were not "clear enough" on their data protection policy and the recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could possibly lead to a clash with search companies. The recommendation could have broader implications such as getting user consent before serving them personalized advertisements.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "Google takes privacy incredibly seriously; protecting our users' privacy is at the heart of all our products. It is the reason we were the first company to commit to anonymising our search logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our preference cookie lifetime."

Search engines presently collect and store information every search query such as search term, IP address, browser type, time, and number of clicks. The search engines say this information it required to better serve the user. The advisory body said search engine providers had "insufficiently explained" why they were storing and processing personal data to their users and that personal data of users should not be stored or processed "beyond providing search results". The report also said search engines did not need to gather additional personal data, beyond the IP address of a machine being used, in order to deliver basic search results and advertisements.

The advisory body said, "Search engine providers mention many different purposes for the processing, it is not clear to what extent data are reprocessed for another purpose that is incompatible with the purpose for which they were originally collected". Thus search engines should not use personally identifiable data to improve their services or for accountancy purposes. Nor should personal data stored for security purposes be used to improve services and if search engines enriched personal data about users from third parties they could be breaking the law unless customers had given explicit consent. It said users should have the right to access, inspect and correct all the personal data about themselves held by search engines, including their profiles and search history.

The report issued a set of obligations to search engines firms, including:

• Search engines should get informed consent from users if they correlate personal data across different services, such as desktop search
• Search engine providers must delete or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal data once they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected
• Personal data should not be held by search engines for longer than six months
• In case search engine providers retain personal data longer than six months, they must demonstrate comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service
• It is not necessary to collect additional personal data from individual users in order to be able to perform the service of delivering search results and advertisements
• If search engine providers use cookies, their lifetime should be no longer than demonstrably necessary
• Search engine providers must give users clear and intelligible information about their identity and location and about the data they intend to collect store or transmit, as well as the purpose for which they are collected

No Giggle At Google As Layoffs Begin

Google's newest employees learned on April fool's day that they would no longer have a job. The employess today were assured that it was not a joke but real. Vanity Fair reports that "DoubleClickers’ heads are rolling left and right. Hopefully, Google’s generous severance package—two months pay with an additional two months if you sign a non-compete agreement—will keep them from jumping out the window. Google’s suggestion? Take two months vacation and don’t even think about it. Or start looking now."

It is rumored that the entire DoubleClick finance department will be let go. DoubleClick’s U.S. workforce of about 1,500 will be reduced by 300. In a statement, the company said: “Since our acquisition of DoubleClick closed on March 11, we have been working to match and align DoubleClick employees in the U.S. with our organizational plan for the business. As with many mergers, this review has resulted in a reduction in headcount at the acquired company.”

Yahoo Unveils Smart Mobile Search

Yahoo announced a new mobile search strategy for Yahoo OneSearch at the CTIA Wireless trade show.

Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo OneSearch said users will get "instant answers to any query, not just web links." This means that search results will expand from traditional hyperlinks into other media. A search for "New York" could yield subway schedules, for example, or a search for local sushi restaurants could bring up available reservations.

OneSearch will be incorporating voice-enabled technology similar to GOOG411. "Consumers can search for anything, including flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants, and more, by simply speaking," according to a report put out by Yahoo. More>>

Who's Spending On Social Networks?

US online social network ad spending is predicted to near $1.6 billion this year according to a survey by eMarketer. The figure includes all forms of advertising appearing on social network sites, including branded campaigns as well as search, video, local advertising and ads delivered via ad networks. According to the survey 29% planned to spend over $2 million, 11% planned to spend between $1 - $2 million, 26% planned to spend up to $1 million and 34% planned to spend less than $300,000.

Breakdown of Online Social Network Planned Marketing Spend by Marketers and Marketing Agencies - March 2008

Spending Amount               Percentage
$2,000,000 and over              29%
$1,000,000 - $2,000,000          11%
$300,000 - $999,999              26%
$300,000 and less                34%

"At those amounts, social network spending may still be categorized as experimental for many marketers. As in many other developing advertising markets, much of the spending on social networks is driven by leading-edge marketers who are willing to take risks," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer.

Video Ads Appearing On Google Homepage

Google has finally figured out a way to pay for the YouTube acquisition. Video ads, have started appearing on Google's search results page according to a report from Digital Inspiration. Video ads from AT&T appeared on the Google search page for the keyword “phone” - the video clip remains hidden until you click the “Watch Commercial” link. You then get to see the video in a neat drop-down video player. Google is possibly charging higher rates for the video ads since it is served only on-demand when requested by the user. Though these video ads appear with other CPC ads on Google search results, the advertiser will pay when users click to see the video, even if they never click through to the advertiser’s site.

Google's February Search Queries Decline 5%

In February, Google Sites extended its share of core searches to 59.2 percent, up from 58.5 percent the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 21.6 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.6 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.6 percent).

comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location

Share of Searches (%)

Search Entity                Jan-08        Feb-08      Jan vs. Feb
Total Core Search            100.0%        100.0%         0.0
Google Sites                  58.5%         59.2%         0.7
Yahoo! Sites                  22.2%         21.6%        -0.6
Microsoft Sites                9.8%          9.6%        -0.2
AOL Network                    4.9%          4.9%         0.0
Ask Network                    4.6%          4.5%         0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 9.9 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 6-percent decline versus January. Each of the five core search engines experienced search query declines as a result of February being a seasonally soft month for overall search activity. Google Sites saw more than 5.8 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.1 billion, and Microsoft Sites with 953 million.

comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location

Searches Query Volume by Site

Search Entity                Jan-08        Feb-08      Jan vs. Feb
Total Core Search            10,492         9,882        -6.0%
Google Sites                  6,139         5,855        -5.0%
Yahoo! Sites                  2,332         2,136        -8.0%
Microsoft Sites               1,030           953        -7.0%
AOL Network                     514           488        -5.0%
Ask Network                     475           450        -5.0%

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Source: comScore

Online Advertising Shift To Continue In 2008

Interesting comment by David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer

"Several elements unique to the Internet will support continued US ad spending growth even if other media falter."

"The greater ability to measure ads online will likely encourage marketers with reduced budgets," Mr. Hallerman said. "Those same marketers are finding that the audiences they need to target are spending more of their media time on the Web."

Search will account for the largest portion of online ad spending in 2008, at 40%. That percentage will decrease slightly through 2012, when it will account for 37.3% of US online ad spending. Conversely, spending on rich media and video advertising is set to grow as a percentage of online ad spending, rising to 18.5% in 2012 from 10.2% in 2008.

Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani said US ad spending would increase 4% in 2008, up from an estimated 3.3% in 2007. Ms. Quadrani said that, despite fears about the economy, marketers still have reason to spend on advertising. "Many marketers face an extremely competitive landscape with products that aren't very different from those of rivals. They also have raised prices and need to advertise to get consumers to continue to buy their goods."

Google Becoming A Portal Say Experts

Is Google evolving into a portal? That was the debate at SES New York. Of the 1.2 billion or so search queries on Google during a one-week period in January 2008, 17% of the queries were sent to Google destinations reports James Lamberti, SVP, Search and Media, comScore.

"The search result page is beginning to operate as a destination. The consumers are a priority. Not the marketers," said Lamberti. Google sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own multi-media properties, such as YouTube, over six months. That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.

John Battelle, CEO, Federated Media, said "Google's moves, including its purchase of YouTube and use of video overlay ads on that property, suggest the company is rethinking its business model."

Battelle also wondered out loud whether Google gives preferential treatment to its own content, such as Google Finance over Yahoo Finance? "It's interesting, if you put in 'stocks,' Google Finance comes up first... It used to be that Yahoo was first," he said.

Jack Menzel, project manager for Google's Universal Search, said the aim is to provide relevance. "We try not to promote ourselves any more than we believe is fair," he countered. "We try to be relevant as possible and not biased toward ourselves."

Battelle went on to say exact what most are thinking these day. He said, "You guys are becoming a media company and let's call it that." He went on to say that he had met with comedian Damon Wayans previously and Wayans told him that he's a YouTube partner, has a revenue sharing arrangement, and indicated that YouTube guarantees his channel 60 million impressions.

crgslst Searches Craigslist

crgslst announced the launch of a slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist presently does not have a multi-search service. The tool combines RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX to populate the search fields. Housing Maps, does a similar thing, the site displays the apartment listings on Craigslist using Google Maps.

Google Now Searches Within A Site

Google has recently launched the ability to search within a site from the Google search results page. Smack dab in the midst of your search results, you can be served up a search box to directly search the site you are seeking. The idea is to get you to the exact page on the web site.

Baidu Voice Search Uses Live Operators

China's 920 million telephone users have a new way to search online for information. Baidu.com (BIDU) just announced its new voice-activated search. Upon dialing 400 666 8585 the call will be answered by a Baidu engineer who will performance the search and offer search results based on the request. Search results can be provided back to the search requester (user) using voice or sent via SMS to the user's mobile phone.

Baidu Omniture To Improve Ad Experience

Baidu (BIDU), China's leading search engine has selected Omniture (OMTR) to provide web analytics and online optimization services. Baidu is looking to improve the advertiser experience by providing better data points on China's fast growing web audience.

Omniture's timing is great because the U.S. economy is slowing and ad spend budgets for ad services, tools and infrasture will follow. By signing up Baidu, Omniture is getting some insulation. Omniture's clients include companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Time Warner's (TWX) AOL, and eBay (EBAY), which have strong presences worldwide.

Key Industries Using Google For Search

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing February 2008 to February 2007, the Travel, Entertainment, Business and Finance and Sports categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google
Percentage Change February 2007 - 2008

Category                     Search    Change     Google    Change
Health and Medical           43.74%       -1%     28.69%       -1%
Travel                       32.97%        9%     22.17%       19%
Shopping and Classifieds     25.30%        0%     16.26%        6%
News and Media               21.43%        3%     14.04%        6%
Entertainment                23.98%       13%     14.96%       13%
Business and Finance         17.46%       13%     10.97%       23%
Sports                       13.53%       14%      8.75%       19%

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
Source: Hitwise

U.S. Searches For February 2008

Hitwise, just released searches traffic for February 2008. Google accounted for 66.44 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending February 23, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.59, 6.95 and 4.16 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.87 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engines
Domain              Feb.-08       Jan.-08        Feb.-07
www.google.com      66.44%        65.98%         63.90%
search.yahoo.com    20.59%        20.94%         21.47%
search.msn.com       6.95%        *6.90%         *9.30%
www.ask.com          4.16%         4.21%          3.52%

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 2/23/08, 1/26/08; 2/24/07) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Source: Hitwise

Ask.com To Rebrand As Site For Women

Ask.com is abandoning its effort to compete with Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives reports the SF Chronicle. About 40 employees will be laid off as a result.

The company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions - about recipes, hobbies and children's homework. The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the Southern and Midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.

Ask ran the Internet's fifth-largest search engine in the United States with a 4.5 percent market share, according to comScore Media Metrix. Google holds a 58.5 percent share.

AOL Yahoo Talk Merger

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo and AOL's parent Time Warner have stepped up talks over creating an alternative to Microsoft's and Google. The talks center on a deal that would fold Time Warner's AOL Internet unit into Yahoo. If the merger is successful and executed well it could be a strong alternative to Google & Microsoft.

AOL has been organizing all their advertising divisions into a single unit to better compete with Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and ad networks such as Facebook and MySpace. (NWS).

Operation Google: The Search War Has Started

Bill Gates will today announce the launch of Search Server 2008 to rival Google's Search Appliance. The software allows users to search files and documents inside their corporate network. However unlikely the expensive Google Appliance which is a box with software, Microsoft will offer the service as a free software download. Yes, you heard that right! No hardware, no packaged software. It will be a web offering featuring online administration, reporting and provisioning features.

Essentially, Microsoft is beating Google at it own game with this web offering. Today's announcement targets Google's weak spot - Enterprise. It is also interesting to note that for the Search Server Microsoft's has adopted Google's traditional sales model, that does not require customers to buy expensive hardware, lock-ins and Google has adopted Microsoft's style tactics with the Google Appliance.

All Paths Lead To Search
Couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced the purchase of FAST Search, an enterprise search specialist. The thinking is that if customers start using Microsoft's search products on their network they might start using Microsoft's internet search and advertising products.

Last week, Google announced a web site publishing tool called Google Sites for enterprise users to set up and run their team collaboration similar to SharePoint, which allows workers to share documents and plan projects on secure web sites.

If Microsoft gets traction on the enterprise side and that translates to search traffic on Live.com and ad dollars on adCenter. Then Microsoft would have made inroads into Google's lucrative advertising empire. Google will not sit on the side lines either. Operation Google has begun - the search war is under way.

January Search Rankings

In the January 2008 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 7.7 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.5 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), and AOL LLC (903 million).

comScore Expanded Search Query Report January 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
Expanded Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
	Dec-07	Jan-08	Percent Change
Total Expanded Search	13,523	14,595	7.9%
Google Sites	7,165	7,735	8.0%
Google	5,651	6,181	9.4%
YouTube/All Other	1,514	1,554	2.6%
Yahoo! Sites	2,363	2,456	3.9%
Yahoo!	2,326	2,427	4.3%
All Other	37	29	-21.6%
Microsoft Sites	963	1,060	10.1%
MSN-Windows Live	927	1,024	10.5%
Microsoft/All Other	36	36	0.0%
AOL LLC	N/A	903	N/A
AOL	N/A	522	N/A
MapQuest/All Other	N/A	381	N/A
Ask Network	416	477	14.7%
Ask.com	238	286	20.2%
MyWebSearch.com/ All Other	178	191	7.3%
eBay	508	467	-8.1%
Fox Interactive Media	350	384	9.6%
MySpace	342	376	9.9%
All Other	8	8	0.0%
Craigslist.org	220	256	16.4%
Amazon Sites	215	167	-22.2%
Facebook.com	102	109	6.2%

Source: comScore

Click Fraud Claims 28% Of Search Ads

According to Click Forensics, click fraud rates for content networks grew to 28.3% in Q4 2007. In other words 28 cents from every dollar went to fraud. What this report is saying is 28.3% of (PPC) providers and publishers revenue/profits are attributed to fraud. I found it disturbing that the rate was so high and if concerned that advertisers could use the information to take legal action against pay-per-click (PPC) providers and publishers to reclaim their ad spend. So I set out to clarify it.

I asked Click Forensics CEO Tom Cuthbert if he could provide me more information about the sample and ad spend size. A company spokesman responded "Our data is derived from a statistically significant sample of live PPC campaigns from the 4,000 advertisers, agencies publishers. We do not share data on the spend size. However, our advertisers include top ten financial services, retail and travel companies as well as smaller businesses. It is representative of the search advertising industry as a whole and crosses multiple search engines and publisher networks."

"In 2007 we saw a significant jump in the industry average click fraud rate when compared with the average rate for 2006," said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics. "As the FBI and USAToday have reported, fraudsters are using more sophisticated means to perpetrate click fraud, including infiltrating mom-and-pop e-commerce sites. As a result it's more important than ever before for advertisers, publishers, ad networks and search engines to cooperate and share data in order to stem what's on target to be an even worse problem in 2008."

Some of key findings from the report include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That's up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
• The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.
• Q4 2007 click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007.
• In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).

Microsoft - Follow The Money

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is all about online advertising. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO has said that in a few years online advertising will account for as much as 25% of Microsoft's revenue. Ballmer is hoping that acquiring Yahoo will help Microsoft catch up to Google. However, acquiring Yahoo will not give Microsoft the revenue nor the search market share it is seeking for, as Yahoo's strength is in display advertising not search advertising.

Microsoft Seven Times Bigger Than Google
Microsoft's share of the display advertising market is already about 7 times larger than Google's. Yet, Microsoft's online business racked up a loss of $248 million during the quarter ending in December 2007. Microsoft and Yahoo combined will have a market share of about 25% versus Google's 1%.

Where The Money Is
Google accounted for 65.98% of U.S. searches, while Yahoo and Microsoft combined accounted for 27.84% of U.S. searches in January 2008. It is search advertising that is propelling Google. The revenue that Microsoft is seeking is in search advertising not in display advertising which the Yahoo purchase brings.


Focus On Search
Microsoft should be looking to really acquire Yahoo's search and related advertising business as that is where the growth is. Display is experience some softness in pricing as more and more and networks spring up daily targeting niche verticals. However, in the long run Microsoft should benefit for Yahoo technologies and properties that are strong in display as that is where users will be hanging out. Further Microsoft's relationships with Facebook and Digg should add to this. Hence that is why Google is busy working on applications and initiatives such as Open Social that will keep users hooked on Google.


Image Source: Forbes

Bill Gates Drops Facebook

Microsoft Chairman and Founder Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook and has delete his account after being hassled by thousands of fans. The Chairman was inundated by over 8,000 friend requested a day and thousands of loan refinance requests fueled by the mortgage meltdown.

Chairman Gates became so hooked on the site that he decided to invested $240 million regardless of valuation just to own a piece of it. He spent about 30 minutes a day chatting with friends and searching the site (ah that's where he got the idea to buy a search engine - more about this in another post).

A Microsoft spokesperson said that Chairman Gates hasn’t deleted his account, but that he has stopped using it because he was inundated with friend requests. However, another Microsoft spokesperson said later that sadly Chairman Gates has had to close this account.

Disambiguation of Search Results? Yup, Google's got that

Just last week, in an email exchange with another search blogger, I wondered when Google would provide options for disambiguation of search results.

When you think about it, that's an obvious requirement for the Results page of any serious search engine. If I query for the search term "Java" - does it mean that I'm looking for results about the programming language, the coffee, or the island in Indonesia?

There's no way for the search engine to be able to tell, although personalization could provide clues. The easiest solution, as I wrote back in 2006, is for the search engine to just ask - which is why Wikipedia offers this page: Java (disambiguation) . Alternatively, the results can be grouped into various categories for the user to choose from, which is another way of doing the same thing.

Until now, Google has been mostly following a third option, which is to simply pick the most popular category regardless of the user's real preference; this can lead to some strange results, as highlighted in my earlier post on deconstructing real Google searches. But this approach doesn't really cut it, since it ignores all the unpopular search results - it's very possible that the long-tail searches can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few "popular" searches.

There has also been a limited amount of disambiguation offered by Google's "related searches" feature.

Well, no more. Google appears to be experimenting with offering disambiguation directly by grouping search results into categories. See the screen shot below, that shows Google search results for the query: "freebase" . Effectively, the results page seems to be asking: do you mean, the free semantic web database, or the other kind, associated with drugs? Or a third alternative: FreeBase - a free Windows software program to configure the Apple AirPort Base Station.

The use of horizontal ruled lines to separate the sections, is a nice touch!

Obviously this is some type of test; I certainly hope it's successful. I can't wait to see this feature become mainstream among the major search engines. It will be a big step forward in Search!

Googling Away From Search Advertising

Andy Beal recently wrote that Google's stock is far from the $2000 a share predicted by Henry Blodget publisher of InternetOutsider. After missing analyst estimates and the announcement of the Microsoft - Yahoo takeover (predicted here), Google's shares (GOOG) have been hit very hard. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram who own majority of the Class B shares (which control the company) have seen the fortunes drop by US$16 Billion collectively. The Microsoft Yahoo overture shows Google's vulnerability. Over 90% of the company's revenue comes from search advertising. If I ran Google, I would have used the high share value as cheap currency to make acquisitions of web products, tools and services companies that litter Silicon Valley to transition to a provider of multiple web offerings and reduce the dependence on a single revenue stream. Google's market value has dropped US$70 Billion from it's peak - that is a lot of acquisitions.


Image from Marketingpilgrim

Google Gathers And Exposes Social Graph

After the let down of Google's Opensocial attempt, Google has now launched Social Graph API, which aims to be a centralized place which web services can use to access relationships between people. So, how does it work? FOAF and XFN are used to provide information about relationships between people in hyperlinks. For instance, an example of XFN hyperlink would be "<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">" which says that Jeff is my friend. Google's crawler which already indexes links for its search engine, will now also build a social graph. This social graph is then exposed in the form of an API which will be accessible by any third party. And how does Google create a social graph from links? If me and a friend are following each other on Twitter, then it will consider us friends. So, if I visit any third party site and specify that I represent the following twitter account, then that third party site can query the API to tell me that my friend is also using this service presently. Another way is the use of affiliation; that is, I mention my Facebook profile on my blog and Twitter account on my Facebook, then Google's Algorithm will know that all three pages belong to a person named Mayank. Using this (maybe) public information, my public profile is made along with my connections which any third party can use. Of course, this also leads to the possibility of fraudulent information being generated and owned. That is, what is stopping people from claiming that they are Larry Page? Would an equivalent to bombing of search results be possible here? I don't see an answer being offered presently.

Facebook and Google are both part of Dataportability. Dataportability and people indexing can, of course, both co-exist. Though it's yet to be seen in what form these services will be provided and when they will reach an inflection point beyond which a user expects availability of this information everywhere. What we can at least be sure of is that the social graph will be openly offered in the not too distant future which will enable many useful services. Here is a video telling more about Google's attempt.

Google Misses Estimates - GOOG Shares Crash

Google's fourth quarter earnings missed Wall Street estimates, sending the stock crashing after hours.

According to Thomson Financial, Google's fourth quarter revenue came in at $4.83 billion, which was up 51% from a year ago. After advertising sales costs revenue came in at $3.39 billion, below the $3.45 billion analysts had expected.

"We're very pleased with our performance this quarter," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "It reflects strong momentum in our core business, growing receptivity to our new business initiatives, and improved discipline in managing our operating expenses."

Google's closest rival Yahoo! also disappointed Wall Street when fourth quarter net income fell 23% from a year ago. Microsoft a laggard in the space is gaining some traction with users and this might give a lift to their search advertising unit adCenter. Which in turn would increase the pressure on keyword pricing which will ultimately affect the earnings outlook for Google and Yahoo!

Keynote Speaker For Conference - Gil Penchina, CEO, Wikia.com

Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.com will be the first headline Keynote Speaker at the upcoming WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. Wikia is a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. They currently support over 4,700 communities in more than 70 languages. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software. Explore their existing communities or start a new one. The company also just released Wikia Search, a community driven search engine.

Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wikia.com, the largest commercial wiki information and news site, that generates hundreds of millions of page views per month via 800,000 pages of content created in 70 languages in the last three years. Hot topics include the largest World of Warcraft game information resource, travel and city guides and deep-diving fan sites on entertainment topics. Prior to Wikia.com, Gil was an executive at eBay for 8 years, most recently as a regional VP for eBay in Europe. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.

Don't miss his keynote! Craig Newmark, Craigslist Founder, will be the other Keynote.

Is A Yahoo! Takeover Imminent?

Last year when I met Terry Semel, Yahoo’s CEO, and asked him if a Yahoo takeover by Microsoft was inevitable, he looked at me as if he had swallowed a frog. This week at CES, Joe Hunkins asked David Filo, Yahoo’s co-Founder, the same question and if he had met with Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Chairman & Founder, to which Filo responded he had not. However, the evidence seems to be mounting to the contrary and rumor mills are gathering speed. Is this all baseless? Let's examine.

Microsoft, which is a distant third in the search market has outwardly stated that it has ambitions to be the leader in the domain. According to the latest Hitwise report of U.S. Searches (Dec 2007), Google continues to dominant with a 65.98% share, Yahoo follows with 20.88%, and Microsoft lags behind with 7.04%.

Microsoft’s Reality
There is simply no way Microsoft can close this gap organically. Hence, Microsoft has been coming at it from all angles such as the Facebook investment, which I thought a mistake (this week Bruce Jaffe, Chief Acquisition Officer, Microsoft left the company), the acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer this week and aQuantive earlier this year. The company was so eager to respond to Google’s foray into text to speech service 1-800-GOOG-411 that they spent a US$1 Billion to purchase Tellme. Tellme is a really a call center automation service not a text to speech service based on a web crawl as 1-800-GOOG-411.

The bottom line is Microsoft needs a major boost in search traffic to flow through its search property LIVE.com to challenge Google’s lead. The quickest and only way to achieve this would be an outright acquisition of Yahoo. This would give Microsoft 28% of the U.S. search market share, which is still less than 50% of Google’s U.S. search market share, but sufficient enough to be considered a formidable competitor.

Yahoo!’s Reality
Yahoo shares are trading near 52-week lows, giving it a market capitalization of approximately $31 Billion. However, this does not include the value of Yahoo’s investments such as Yahoo Japan, Alibaba.com and Alibaba Group. According to Valleywag, Yahoo Japan, of which Yahoo owns a third, is worth $25 Billion, putting Yahoo's stake in it at nearly $9 Billion. Alibaba.com, a Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo directly owns a 10% stake, is worth approximately $17 Billion, putting Yahoo's stake at about $1.7 Billion. Yahoo also own a 40% stake in Alibaba.com's parent company, Alibaba Group, which runs Yahoo China, which has an estimated of $8 Billion and $16 Billion. Yahoo has other investments like G-Market.

Based on the above calculation the combined value of Yahoo’s investments add up to over US$15 Billion. The current valuation of Yahoo based on the Nasdaq listing does not fully reflect Yahoo’s investments, which if realized would give Yahoo a valuation upwards of US$45 Billion.

Right Timing
Microsoft would be wise to take a run at Yahoo at the current valuation, acquire the traffic to fuel Microsoft’s search and advertising properties, become a formidable competitor to Google and possibly make realize a 50% return on its investment just by unearthing the full value of Yahoo’s investments.

Remove Your Content From Google

There is a useful video from Google providing tips on how to prevent the indexing of web pages you don't want Google to crawl so it doesn't show up on the web.

The Search Party

The New Yorker has a great but lengthy article on Google's expanding lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. and why it has become a necessity. According to Alan Davidson, Google’s senior policy counsel, “The political brand was very weak. Because we were not here to define it, it was being defined by our enemies.” He paused a moment, and added, “ ‘Enemy’ is a strong word. It was being defined by our competitors.” More >>

Google To Extract Text From Images

This is super cool and interesting. Imaging having your flattened gif text or video being read and indexed by the search engines - in particular, Google. Well, it might just happen. Google has apparently filed an application with the World Intellectual Property Organization to patent such a technology. "The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image." Already in Google Image searches, you get the image thumbnail view, title and url of the webpage where the image resides, and image dimensions, file size, and format. This proposed technology would take this a step further to improve and possibly increase the search results of universal search on Google - i.e. web, images, maps, news, shopping, blogs, books, etc. This way we can be assured that our multimedia assets are fully utilized and leveraged in improving their findability and discoverability. I wonder how this will work for highly stylized text like a checkmark used to denote the letter "v" or gif text that is highly pixelated by design. Would this technology be able to read and interpret such characters?!

Currently, we depend on the ALT attribute text for indexing of imagery but it has been suggested that this has been decreasing in relevance due to misuse. So, what's next? Will search engines be able to interpret and imply meaning to standard iconic images without text like an envelope used to denote email, or interpret shapes like the map of the US or an animal or a graph or even recognize photos or caricatures of popular people. There are lots of interesting things that can be done but I guess we will have to wait to see.

Wikipedia Founder Releasing Wikia Search

Wiki-hosting company, Wikia, is set to release Wikia Search, a community driven search engine, on Monday. Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who is behind this says the goal is to let volunteers improve search technology collectively, the way Wikipedia lets anyone add or change entries, regardless of expertise.

Wikia Search's tag line is "building a new open global search engine" and is focused on enabling transparency in how the search systems and algorithms work, crowdsourcing so everyone is able to contribute, improving the relevancy and accuracy of search results, and protecting users' privacy by not storing or transmitting any identifying data. Wikia Search will launch with only about 50-100 million indexed webpages which is a fraction of the billions of pages indexed by major search engines.

Baidu (China's Google) CFO Dies

Baidu, the top search engine in China, reported that Shawn Wang, CFO, Baidu.com, was killed in an accident on December 27, 2007.

"We are all completely shocked and deeply saddened by this tragic news," said Robin Li, Baidu's chairman and CEO, in a statement that described Wang as a "tremendous leader" and "wonderful friend."

The company did not provide details of the fatal accident, except to say that it took place "in China during the Christmas holiday vacation."

Wang had helped guide the company through its 2005 IPO on the Nasdaq. A new CFO has not been named yet.

Could Google Break-Up AOL or Trigger IPO

In December 2005, Google invested $1 Billion for 5% of AOL as part of a search and advertising partnership. The terms also gave Google the right to force Time Warner, parent of AOL, to conduct an AOL IPO or buy AOL's stake back at "fair market value" as of July 1, 2008.

Beginning on July 1, 2008, we will have certain rights to require HoldCo to register the HoldCo interests held by us for sale in a public offering. If we exercise this right, Time Warner will have the right to purchase our interests for cash or shares of Time Warner stock based on an appraised fair market value of our equity interest in HoldCo in lieu of conducting an initial public offering.

At the time of the investment, AOL was valued at $20 billion. Industry sources estimate AOL’s valuation to be approximately $10-$15 billion today (same as Facebook’s paper value). If that is correct, it represents a realized loss of $500 million for Google on its investment.

However, Google is probably in no hurry to dispose of the investment, especially when Google's search deal with AOL is still generating revenue. I would assume by July 2008, sufficient cash would have flowed through to Google to make up for the paper loss. More importantly the deal has enabled Google to lock up valuable search and search ad market share on a huge property. What is that worth? We all know what Microsoft paid Facebook for a taste of that.

It also puts Google is a position of strength when it comes to renegotiating the deal if the current valuation holds. I would also assume that Time Warner would be happy to sell more of AOL to Google because it puts more money in their coffers.

An AOL break-up or IPO would be likely if Google wanted to sell its stake – which does not make sense because it puts a large chunk of search and search ads market share up for grabs. However, a senior officer of AOL told me that some layoffs are still pending and that many AOL employees are praying for an IPO so that they can start feeling Googley.

Local & Social Media Predictions for 2008

As it is the tradition at this time of year, business blogs everywhere start posting forecasts and predictions for the year to come. Here are, without further ado, my 2008 predictions for local and social media:

1. The year of Identity. One of the big challenges of social media is having to sign-up and add your friends in a multitude of web sites. Expect 2008 to be the year where this problem becomes a major issue and gets potentially solved through identity interoperability initiatives like OpenID.


2. Social is now everywhere and open. The last few months of 2007 have set the stage for a very social 2008. Any new major initiatives will include social elements by default and will use existing standards like OpenSocial, DiSo or Facebook.


3. Fragmentation & personalization of media. Given the lower barrier to entry for new local/social projects, user and advertiser fragmentation will continue to accelerate in 2008. From a user point of view, this will lead to new personalization tools allowing consumers to create their own unique media view.


4. The year of ad networks. As a corollary of point #3 above, given that user fragmentation will accelerate, an increasingly large number of ad networks will pop-up to aggregate consumers into a critical advertising mass. It's all about advertiser defragmentation. Directory publishers will want to become ad networks themselves to push their ads outside of their core destination sites in order to increase their total reach.


5. Content wants to be distributed. That's the second corollary of point #3. Increasing user fragmentation requires content producers to atomize their content and push it in the fabric of the web. Think of your business in terms of content units or atoms (some inspiration came from Clay Shirky's "fame vs. fortune" post from 2003).


6. Social graph-based search. I am now a firm believer that social graph-based search will be the future of search (including local search) and we will see this concept gain some tractions in 2008. I think humans will always trust recommendations and advice from people in their "social network" (friends, family, colleagues, known experts, etc.) more than a machine. Online word-of-mouth is the biggest local search opportunity out there.


7. More M&A activity in local. 2007 was quite active from a local M&A (Idearc buying Infospace's directory business, Citysearch/InsiderPages, AT&T/Ingenio, Marchex/Voicestar, etc.) but I expect 2008 to be even more active given i) the need for directory publishers to execute on their strategies and ii) the need to aggregate traffic to increase advertiser ROI.


8. Mobile: the year before the big bang. 2008 will be the year where a solid mobile development base (open devices, networks, platforms) is established leading to an explosion in 2009. Watch for the Google spectrum bid in January.

Agree? Disagree?

Google Zeitgeist List Available

Every year end, Google puts together a "Year-End Zeitgeist", a look at the most popular and fastest-rising search terms. Not surprising, 2007 was a big year for politics and celebrity shaninigans. There were also some timeless themes that surfaced: what is love, who is god, and how to kiss, etc.

Here is the Complete list for 2007.

Mahalo Goes Social

Mahalo, the human-powered search engine where users submit links, and whose Chief Technology Office, Mark Jeffrey, will be presenting tonite at the WebGuild, has announced today that they have launched a social networking component to their search service. Called "Mahalo Social", it offers features which foster community building amongst users who submit links allowing them to make friends and share links with each other.

Ask Launches Privacy Feature

Ask.com is looking out for its users' privacy. The search engine currently completely disassociates search history from a user's IP address and User ID information after 18 months. Well now, Ask.com has enabled a privacy feature called "AskEraser" that allows its users to exercise greater control over their search query history. Users can turn on AskEraser at the top right hand corner of the Ask.com site from either the homepage or a SERP page to prevent their search activity data, which includes search terms, clicks, IP address and any user/session IDs assigned to users, from being saved and to ensure it will be completely deleted from the Ask.com server within a "number of hours". Once a user has turned on AskEraser, it is enabled across multiple same browser type sessions and across search types like Images, News, Video, etc., until the user actually turns it off. You do need to turn it off to use "MyStuff" and "Options".

I tried it out and hopefully my search query has been erased by now. It's kind of a cool feature but I am not sure how much I would actually use it. As most compulsive searchers, I have not been trained to make that search privacy choice before so I just search away. It's an extra two clicks to enable it. I am not really all that concerned about what I search for but I can see how if having your information saved is a concern, this feature can become habit-forming. I didn't care for the popup asking "Do you want to turn on AskEraser?" appearing everytime I wanted to enable it. I would prefer if it was an easy toggle between on and off. Clearly, Ask is cookie'ing users to maintain the AskEraser state across browser sessions, it would be nice if they could remember that I previously opted into it so I already know what it is, or give me the option in the popup to check to not display that window again.

Google Enabling Twice the Links Into Sites

Google is reporting that they have now doubled the number of Sitelinks that lets you jump directly to specific pages deeper in a site. Sitelinks are basically a set of deeplinks or jumplinks that appear below certain search results on a Google SERP page. They have apparently been so popular that Google has tweaked their algorithm to start displaying up to eight Sitelinks per site instead of just four allowing users to get a good snapshot of a site's content and more easily access additional areas of a site. Sounds like something you as a site owner and user might want, then expect to see even more sites sporting Sitelinks with more descriptive names as they are working on making that happen as well.

Ask.com Top Searches for 2007

In case anyone missed it, Ask.com also released their "Top Searches for 2007". Topping the list for the second year in a row was 'MySpace', followed by Dictionary, and ironically Google. Top presidential candidate searches were Barack Obama followed by Hillary Clinton. I am not a sports buff but for those of you who are, the top sports team searches were the Red Sox and Cowboys. Top TV show searches were Hannah Montana and Family Guy. And, this is a different one, the "Top Celebrity Search of Pregnant Stars" (not just of celebrities :)) was Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. Although, I wonder if that includes queries for "JLo" as well.

Google and Yahoo also announced their Fastest Growing Search Terms and topping the list for Google was iPhone and Barack and Hillary were also in the running for both Yahoo and Google as well as Facebook but was a no show on Ask.com's top list. MySpace didn't show up in the top ten for Yahoo but did for Google and Ask.com.

Complete list for Ask.com.

Social Graph and Search

We will be hoding our next event on the "Social Graph and Search - Impact of the Social Graph on Search and Discovery" on Wednesday, December 12. Headlining the panel discussion will be heavy hitters: Shawn Gold, Former SVP of Marketing & Content at MySpace, Steven Marder, CEO & Co-Founder of Eurekster, Mark Jeffrey, CTO of Mahalo, and Levy Cohen, CEO & Founder of Collarity. Don't miss it!

Get more details here >>.

Google Announces Fastest Growing Search Terms

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google announced yesterday on the Today Show, the fastest rising search terms on Google in 2007.

Here they are:
1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

Yahoo also released their "Top Trends in Search" list yesterday for 2007.

News Stories - top 10 news stories:
1. Saddam Hussein
2. Iran
3. Iraq
4. President George W. Bush
5. Oil and Gas prices
6. Barack Obama
7. Hillary Rodham Clinton
8. San Diego Fires
9. Afghanistan
10. Virginia Tech

Complete Yahoo list.

Microsoft Finds Its Groove To Counter Google

Microsoft unveiled new tools and an accreditation program to help advertisers improve the quality of their search advertising campaigns and help optimize web sites for Live Search.

1) adCenter which is similar to Google Adwords now has a Add-in for Excel 2007. It will enable adCenter customers to easily research keywords to help them reach and capture the right audience with their paid search advertising campaigns. Users of the adCenter can now rapidly build keyword lists and plan keyword strategy based on a variety of attributes including relevance, historical cost information and projected volume, and manipulate the data in the easy-to-use Excel format. The tool will help advertisers quickly understand keyword popularity and trends and gain valuable insight about demographic and localization information of actual queries.

"The adCenter Add-in for Excel raises the bar for search- and data-driven marketing tools. The ease of use with Excel and vast amount of keyword data are all extremely valuable for the online marketer," said Jeffrey Pruitt, executive vice president of Corporate Partnerships at iCrossing. "This product helps unlock the true power of search data, providing access to more data than any other engine, enabling increased understanding of consumer behavior and intent. Within minutes of using this tool, a savvy marketer will be able to discover new information to help drive more successful, consumer-driven campaign strategies."

Data accessible via the adCenter Add-in comes from Microsoft's Keyword Services Platform (KSP), a revolutionary set of Web service application programming interfaces related to keyword technologies, including keyword recommendation, forecasting, categorization and monetization. The adCenter Add-in, which will be available Jan. 8, 2008, provides easy access to the tremendous amount of data available through the KSP and is the latest technology from Microsoft adCenter Labs to be fully integrated into adCenter following customer trial and feedback.

2) Webmaster Center is a portal specifically designed for webmasters and search engine optimizers. It provides all the necessary resources to optimize a Web site for achieving the highest possible algorithmic or "organic" listing on Live Search. This includes information about how Live Search crawls and indexes site pages; site map creation and submission; statistics about Web sites currently indexed by Live Search; consolidated content submission guidelines; and new content and community resources.

3) adExcellence program provides agencies and advertisers with the opportunity to become certified adCenter experts similar to the Google Adwords Certification. The program offers more than 20 free training modules and a fee-based examination, providing users with the ability to demonstrate to their customers and prospects that they are fully trained and proficient in using adCenter. Accredited members will be listed in the adExcellence Membership Directory and will receive an adExcellence logo for use on their Web sites and marketing collateral.

Promote Your Website For $1 A Month

Network Solutions has come up with a clever way to promote your web site to 30 million visitors a month for a $1.

The service enables you to place an ad inside your own whois record. Instead of just displaying contact information and your address you can now place whatever text you want inside the record. The service called “Enhanced Business Listing” allows website owners to place more descriptive text inside their whois record. When anyone looked up the whois record they would see your opening sales pitch before they even approach you about buying your domain.

Enhanced Business Listing is the complete opposite of their Whois Privacy service which is designed to protect your website information from anyone looking up your whois record.

What would be a more valuable service would be if they verified information about your company and put that in the whois. Such as, Registered Doctor in New York City. If the registrar could authenticate claims I can guarantee Search Engines would use those authenticated claims and boost the sites in their index based on those claims. Now that would be an enhanced whois service", said Jay Westerdal of DomainTool.

13 Ways To Power Search Using Google

Here are some tips on power searching using Google.

1. Explicit Phrase: Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing. Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.

Example: “internet marketing”

2. Exclude Words: Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising. To do this, simply use the “-“ sign in front of the word you want to exclude.

Example: internet marketing -advertising

3. Site Specific Search: Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the “site:somesite.com” modifier.

Example: “internet marketing” site:www.webguild.org

4. Similar Words and Synonyms: Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms. To do this, use the “~” in front of the word.

Example: “internet marketing” ~professional

5. Specific Document Types: If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”. For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.

Example: “internet marketing” filetype:ppt

6. This OR That: By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).

Example: internet marketing OR advertising

7. Phone Listing: Let’s say someone calls you on your mobile number and you don’t know how it is. If all you have is a phone number, you can look it up on Google using the phonebook feature.

Example: phonebook:617-555-1212 (note: the provided number does not work – you’ll have to use a real number to get any results).

8. Area Code Lookup: If all you need to do is to look-up the area code for a phone number, just enter the 3-digit area code and Google will tell you where it’s from.

Example: 617

9. Numeric Ranges: This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip. Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers. You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods. This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.

Example: president 1940..1950

10. Stock (Ticker Symbol): Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.

Example: GOOG

11. Calculator: The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.

Example: 48512 * 1.02

12. Word Definitions: If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the “define:” command.

Example: define:plethora

13. Searching for URLs containing certain words. Use the "inurl:word" modifier.

Example site:webguild.org inurl:google

Thank you to i-hack.org for sharing this.

Nasdaq Launches Internet Index

The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:

1) internet access providers
2) internet search engines
3) web hosting
4) website design
5) internet retail commerce

"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom.

However, they NASDAQ did not provide a break down of the index composition. Many in internet industry have relied on Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to be a proxy of the internet industry. Why not! Google operates:

1) the largest search engine
2) the largest online advertising network
3) the largest online video site
4) the third largest social networking site
5) one of the largest payment flow services, email and mapping services

Soon Google will be a big player in:
6) mobile applications
7) productivity applications
8) online storage services (other than email)

The Roles of SEO and Paid Search

To understand where SEO fits in the marketing mix, you first need to consider the behavior of the online consumer. When searching for a product, either hard goods or services, the first step is typically a very general search like "home theater" or "dresses." As searchers become more familiar with their options, they conduct more specific product searches. The evolution of a consumer's search for a digital camera might look something like this:

1. Digital Cameras
2. Digital Camera Reviews
3. 5 Megapixel Cameras
4. Inexpensive 5 Megapixel Cameras
5. Canon PowerShot A460

What we can infer from this behavior is that as consumers refine their search, they identify more specific product needs and, therefore, move further down the Long Tail of search. By entering a more general search term, the consumer is identifying himself as an information seeker. As a search becomes more specific, the consumer is far more likely to become a purchaser.

In the paid search arena, more general terms like "digital cameras" are in higher demand and, as a result, are more expensive than more specific ones. Many online retailers can't afford to compete with online giants like Amazon or Buy.com in paid search for exactly this reason. This is where building the right SEO strategy will complement a paid search campaign. Identifying challenges in a paid search campaign will help focus efforts in SEO.

Of course, the mid-size retailer may not be able to procure a page one organic search result on a general term like "digital cameras." In a popular category like this, the first page (or two) is often completely filled with reviews and articles. Moving slightly down the refinement spectrum to "5 Megapixel cameras" offers great opportunity for the smaller retailer to secure visibility in organic results.

Tracking & Measurement
To better understand how SEO and paid search work together, advertisers need to stop looking at them as separate entities. In traditional media, we don't seek a separate brand impact from print and broadcast channels, but rather their collective effect on overall brand goals, despite differences in their delivery and consumer mindset. The same holds true here. Once you begin to measure results of paid and organic together, you can capture the full spectrum of consumer behavior in the search space.

One approach gaining ground is to track the first and last keyword activity of consumers via cookie - regardless of whether the activity is through paid or organic search. By first and last activity I mean the first keyword entered by a consumer that led to a click and the last activity that led to a conversion. So, for example, if a consumer enters "plastic spiders" into Google, clicks on a paid search result and does not make a purchase, but then returns five days later through a search on "Halloween party" and makes a purchase through an organic link, we understand significantly more about that consumer's behavior by evaluating the overall search experience -- rather than just tracking the session that led to the purchase. As a result, optimization will be far more meaningful and, of course, accurate.

The divide between SEO and paid search is narrowing, particularly in the Google arena. As Google continues to evolve in an effort to enhance the experience of its users, Paid search results will mirror organic results more closely. One example from this year alone is the increased weight the Google algorithm places on landing page relevance in paid search campaigns. In short, we can no longer view SEO and paid search as separate efforts, but two complementary disciplines within your overall marketing mix.

Tony Orelli is vice president, business development, of SendTec, Inc., a marketer providing a full complement of multichannel agency services integrated with the search channel.

Bad Search Ideas And People Backing Them

ChaCha, a human powered search engine that plans to take on Google has raised US$10 million. Mike Arrington, test drove it. He concluded that the human powered search guides weren't particularly knowledgeable about the web. He searched for the UK equivalent of Digg and and human guide responded “What is Digg?”.

Mike, concludes that "ChaCha is a bad idea ... poorly executed. In a sea of dumb startup ideas, ChaCha stands apart as more awful than just about all of the rest."

Another such company is Powerset, when I met with the VCs at Mayfield Fund several years ago, they said investing in search would be a bad idea. They were actually clueless about the space. However, after the Google IPO, they funded Powerset and now they are claiming to have become experts in search. This happened with another of their startups called "JotSpot" that was going to take on Google - which eventually got sold to Google. Today, Powerset is in trouble (aside from the fact that it is a bad idea), Mayfield has no expertise in search. They are simple opportunists trying to make a quick buck on the Google craze by hoping to sell to Google again.

The Best Search Engines

According to a recent article in Newsweek, many start-ups and up-and-coming players are in the pipeline chipping away at Google's search dominance. In some countries Google apparently barely registers on the search engine radar. Google has less than 2 percent of the search engine market in South Korea. Naver, the country’s most popular search engine, receives 100 million queries each day and over half of the population of 48 million has used it at some point. The site has been around for 5 years and has amassed a huge database of questions and answers to draw upon, 70 million at the last count. More>>

Google's Gmail Rolls Out IMAP

Google's Gmail, (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced that Gmail users will have access to IMAP. IMAP allows users to synchronize their e-mail across multiple devices.

This will be good news to users of iPhone and third party email clients that utilize the Gmail service. With IMAP if you delete an email from one device that action will be synced with Gmail so that you do not have to delete the same message twice. Presently Gmail uses POP which downloads the email to the device however actions performed on the device are not synced with Gmail. So if you access you email via multiple clients you end up preforming the same task again.

A Google spokesperson said, "One of our core philosophies at Google is we don't want our users' data ever to be held hostage. We want them to be able to take their data and do whatever it is they want to do with it. In the case of e-mail, that means taking their contacts to various devices, accessing their e-mail from any device or any e-mail client that they choose."

Google on Fire - Profits Jump 46%

Google reported a 46% rise in profit that topped Wall Street expectations, fueled by accelerating market share gains and tighter cost controls. The weaker U.S. also worked in Google's favor.

Third-quarter net income rose to $1.07 billion, or $3.38 per diluted share, compared with the year-earlier quarter's $733.3 million, or $2.36 per diluted share. Excluding one-time items, profit was $3.91 per share in the latest quarter. Gross revenue rose 57 percent to $4.23 billion.

"We are very pleased with the impressive growth we experienced across our business," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

Google is growing faster than Yahoo and Microsoft. Google led the U.S. Web search business with 57 percent market share in September, up from 56.5 percent in August, according to comScore Inc data. It is even more dominant internationally, with more than 70 percent of the audience for Web searches.

Web Advertising Keeps Powering Google

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) shares have broken past the $600 mark as the search engine juggernaut continues to capture more sales from companies shifting advertising to the web.

The web advertising market in the U.S. is expected to grow 29% this year to $21.7 billion and then more than double by 2011. Search advertising is estimated to account for about 40% of that, according to EMarketer Inc

Google has 64% of the US search volume, followed by Yahoo at 22.88% and Mircosoft at 6.59% according to Hitwise. Google is expanding its reach to other platforms such as mobile and online video via YouTube to capture more real estate on the web to further entrench its dominance in web advertising.

Last week Google started delivering ads on YouTube and the company is also testing ads on mobile. The company is also seeking to capture a slice of the online display advertising market via the purchase of DoubleClick.

Google is parlaying its lead in search into other areas of online advertising such as social networks and personalization. iGoogle, is the company's fastest growing web property. It enables users to built a customized web page by integrating data feeds and widgets. Widgets are a fast growing piece of the web display advertising market.

The company also operates Orkut, the world's second largest social networking web site only to MySpace (Hi5 is 3rd, Facebook it 4th). However, most of Orkut's users are based in Brazil and India. If the company can increase the adoption of Orkut in the US they stand to benefit from the ad dollars shifting from the Web 1.0 likes Yahoo to the Web 2.0 web sites.

Google's Constitutional Amendment: The Right to Rank as they see fit

Some of the most lively debate and controversy at search conferences surrounds the issue of Google and their ranking tactics, especially those surrounding links to and from other websites.

At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose the most interesting (and confrontational) session involved search engine optimizer Michael Gray taking Google's Matt Cutts to task on Google’s aggressive stand on commercially driven linking.

The stakes of the ”right to rank“ question may become even higher in the context of a recent Microsoft v Google case, where MS is suggesting in their court brief against the Google Doubleclick merger that the merger will create something like monopoly conditions in the online advertising space because (according to Microsoft’s sources) Google+Doubleclick serve more than half the world’s online advertising.

Although I don’t think MS is attacking Google ranking methods directly here it will be interesting to see if Google claims that since their algorithm does not rank the free “organic” listings on a commercial basis the suit has less merit than it would if they *did* favor sites in the organic listings. This would, of course, beg the key point that Google’s ranking power is now so high that it can make or break companies - offline as well as online - depending on how they rank in Google's “free” organic search listings.

Some would argue that this power confers on Google an obligation to minimize the collateral damage when good sites are excluded or downranked due to aggressive ranking policies, and maximize the correct rankings using, if necessary, more human intervention.

Google’s success has to a large extent insulated Google from the growing criticism in the webmaster community. Some of that criticism is self serving, e.g. spammers who are unhappy that old spam tactics now fail them, but much of the criticism is coming from users, webmasters and companies who are frustrated because of improper ranks for even the most obvious queries.

Google blames the spammers for this, but it’s a dynamic process and more transparency from Google - perhaps with stronger forms of site and webmaster ID for “official” or clearly white hat sites - could go a long way to solving these ranking problems.

Marissa Mayer SES & Searchnomics

Those who missed Marissa Mayer's Keynote at SES can listen to her Keynote at Searchnomics which is identical to the one she did with Danny Sullivan.

Marissa Mayer at Searchnomics delivering her keynote. Her keynote at Searchnomics was one of the best keynotes ever and I have seen many.