Out Googled: What Is Your Google Strategy

Out Googled is a period series covering the strategies of companies and even entire industries to counter the enterance of Google (GOOG) in to their domain.

At its core Google is search and advertising, however the company has many tentacles and its looming presence can be felt in many areas such as;
- online applications
- mobile & telephony
- ecommerce & content
- social networking
- gaming & virtual worlds
- hosting services
- measurement & analysis
- publishing & broadcast
- space technology

Google is rapidly moving into new markets and reshaping existing industries. As long as there is a web component to a product, given its sheer reach and power, Google is possibly better positioned to serve the needs of the 6 billion plus addressable market for web based products independent of platform.

So what is your Google strategy? Send us your story.

Yahoo's Casualties in Search War

Semel maybe out but so are 10 of Yahoo's 26 executives (see then and now). A 40% turnover in executive management in one year is pretty high. I guess the battle against Google is taking its toll. Semel, who didn't know what email was before he arrived at Yahoo has left behind a trail of destruction. The vacancies are being filled by Susan Deckers' friends according to sources. Susan, who takes over as President of Yahoo, is famous for saying that "Yahoo's goal is not to be number one in search". Besides losing all this "talent" in a short time, the company is losing millions in severance compensation. Several employees said that Farzeed Nazem, CTO, spent more time filing papers with the SEC over stock options purchases and sales during his 11 year hibernation. The WSJ says it reinforces doubts about Panama when the guy overseeing the global rollout leaves smack in the middle of it. A senior Yahooligan (Yahoo employee) described Panama as larger than the Titanic and that it will help Yahoo capture more search advertising dollars.

Here is the list of executives jumping ship:
Terry Semel, CEO
Susan Decker, CFO
Lars Rabbe, CIO
Dan Rosensweig, COO
Farzeed Nazem, CTO
Chris Castro, CCO
Lloyd Braun, President, Yahoo! Media
John Marcom, VP International, Yahoo!
Phu Hoang, VP Engineering
Daniel Finnigan, VP Classifieds

At the annual shareholder meeting Jerry Yang had nothing to say about Yahoo's business but human rights. Yesterday, he released a statement saying "Terry has given Yahoo! six of its best years".

Yahoo, hosting the Titanic party at its campus in Sunnyvale, CA.

Yahoo Focused On The Past

Angry shareholders voted down proposals to tie executive pay to competitive performance and challenged the company's human rights policies in China at their annual meeting. The meeting was focused on the past three years and a little about the how the company intends to respond to Google's growing dominance.

"I am going to sell all my shares!" said Dotty Webber of Sunnyvale, CA. "He was talking about macaroni and cheese and how people like to eat it. There was nothing about their internet strategy. I went to the Google meeting and Eric Schmidt talked about how Google plans to help the world with the internet."

There was very little said about search, online advertising or Panama. Little to no mention about the acquisitions such as RightMedia or inroads Microsoft is making. No mention about the growing influence of MySpace among brand advertisers or the lock YouTube has on online video. "I don't see much change going forward, the performance of the past three years is set to repeat itself", said Eric Jackson, President, Jackson Leadership Systems. Jackson is a shareholder activist and has a even launched a campaign on YouTube against Terry Semel.

There was more talk about the human rights violations in China and Yahoo's efforts to change that. "They see this as a problem and are looking into it", said Patrick Doherty, Comptroller, The City of New York. A memorandum was issued outlining Jerry Yang's view on human rights to all.

"Search Is History", says Yahoo!

As the company realizes that it can no longer compete with Google, it is saying the future of web search is history. Yahoo says the model for getting information via the browser is outdated. In the future relevant information will be delivered directly to readers. "The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about 'me.' It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user," said Tapan Bhat, VP, Yahoo!'s Personalised Home Page.

Interestingly, iGoogle is about personalization and Google has been making alot of noise of about it. Suddenly, it has become the core focus at Yahoo. Yahoo has been losing market share to Google in search and has been recasting itself as a company not focused on search. In fact Susan Decker, CFO, Yahoo has said previously that "Our goal is not to be number one is search". "They've realised they can't compete with Google on search." said Deborah Schultz, a Silicon Valley-based marketing consultant.

Search continues to gain wider adoption as an enabler for online commerce and soon may become the platform for commerce. Billions of dollar are being channeled into search as major marketers and brand advertisers see the efficiency of the medium. The river of money is finding its way mostly to Google. In fact the company does more in reveune in a single quarter than Yahoo does in a year. The entire Searchnomics conference is focused on the importance of search to web sites and online businesses.


On Tuesday June 12, 2007, Yahoo holds it annual shareholder meeting. Yahoo's Terry Semel was the highest paid CEO in 2006, with total compensation of $71.7 million, according to the AP. That is two times more than the $27 million in total compensation for the New York Yankees' Alex Rodriguez, baseball's highest-paid player, and higher than the typical pay A-list stars like Brad Pitt who earn $20 million a movie, plus 20 percent of the gross box office take.

There is even talk that Microsoft may buy the company. That would give Semel a graceful exit. However, the word is that the company is not attractive enough to any single major buyer to advance their product line, not at that price. Jeff Clavier, a venture capitalist at SoftTech, said: "The problem with Yahoo! is that they're trying to be all things to all people but they don't do any one thing particularly well."

All this is making investors, partners and customers very nervous. Several advertisers and partners are moving to Google; Friendster, a social networking site, moved to Google from Yahoo to better monetize its user base with Google's larger ad platform and deeper inventory. If this trend continues, Yahoo maybe history before search is.

You're a Nobody Unless You Google Well

If your name does not come up on Google you are nobody according to an article published by the Wall Street Journal.

Today, employers frequently Google their candidate prior to even calling. Interviewers often search to see if what a candidate say on their resume could be verified online. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit.

Parents to be are turning to Google to find unique names for their children. They explain they want their children to stand out. Google, John Smith and you will get 209,000,000 searchresults and as people flood the web this is going to be a growing problem.

To increase visibility musicians are turning to unique sites like Gruuve where they can be found. Eg. a search for "U2" on Google is getting very noise but a search for "U2" on Gruuve brings us the band.

For web professionals WebGuild is building its own version on an online directory. People in the web profession can add themselves to the directory and use it as an online biography which they could provide to reporters, employers, for speaking engagements and more.

Sir Martin Says Google Is Frienemy

I was at "The Future of Advertising Conference" at Stanford and Sir Martin Sorrell, Chairman, WPP, the largest advertising holding company shared some interesting stats about the advertising business.

1. WPP has a market share of approximately 25% of the global ad business, annual billings of $60 Billion and yet only $200 M of that is with Google.
2. Google's revenues are approximately $11 Billion and at $200 M, WPP is one of Google's largest customers. So Google's tail is very very long and they are just getting started.
3. He went on to say that Google is a FRIENEMY - Google is your friend in the short term and enemy in the long term. His reasoning was Google wants access to large advertising account, that they do not have relationships with and that is where the friendship begins.
4. There was little mention of Microsoft or Yahoo and it understandable as their respective foot prints in this space is still considered baby steps.

On May 16, 2007, the WebGuild will be having an event of The Future of Online Advertising with all the heavy weights including Google. The panel will share insight into the future of online advertising from several perspectives of paramount importance to web professionals, seos, sems or search engine marketers, web analytics professionals, online merchants, venture capitals, entrepreneurs and anyone that uses a website to acquire customers, service customers or monetize customers. There are still a few spots left. If you miss this then there is always Searchnomics, which delves deep into search advertising and search & marketplaces and must attend for all web professinal.

Viacom the next Olivetti - Lawsuit Business Model

Olivetti once ruled the office terrain until IBM and Microsoft arrived. The once mighty typewriter company has been reduced to a manufacture of compact discs and printer drives for Microsoft. Disc are dead and Microsoft is in trouble. Viacom the owner of MTV and other TV brands is going through hard times and even more hard times await the company's future. TV audiences are shifting to the internet, Tivo, cable and other mediums. Following the TV audiences are advertisers. Today, production costs have dropped so much that major studio backing is not necessary to produce professional quality movies or music.

However, distribution is as important as ever and YouTube is distribution without the expensive overhead. Also, content creators no longer need to get into restrictive licensing and ownership agreements with the studios in the hopes of getting distribution. YouTube provides them control over their content and efficient ways to monetize it.

The lawsuit by Viacom against YouTube's parent Google is a desperate attempt by dying company to stay alive. Also, going forward you will see more as the old studios and networks adopt lawsuits as a key piece of their business model, claiming that shows and recordings that are not being watched on TV or listened to on the radio are being consumed on the internet. Get with the program.

Friendster says Ya Who? & Runs to Google

Friendster, a social networking website switch to Yahoo competitor Google. It is forecast that Google’s display ads based on web search will be integrated in Q2 of this year. Google paid out $3.3 billion to its online advertising partners in 2006.

Friendster hopes that this new deal with the search giant will generate much needed revenue by improving access to advertisers. "As a top-25 global web brand with 19 million monthly unique visitors and 6 billion page views per month, this agreement with Google allows Friendster to leverage the best industry platform to monetize our high-growth business," said Friendster business development VP Aaron Barnes.

Friendster boasts 37 million registered users spanning 75 countries of which 1.3 million are in the U.S compared with around 61.5 million at MySpace, according to comScore.

This leaves Yahoo out in the cold, just weeks after launching their advanced ad platform, Panama.

Publishers Take Control FAST

FAST has introduced a new product called AdMomentum. AdMomentum provides, publishers with a private-label contextual advertising platform, eliminating the need for third-party services and enabling them to better monetize their content and serve their clients (advertisers).

AdMomentum is targeted at online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers. It enables them to better sell locally and nationally, to both their audiences and advertisers. Publishers can grow their revenues and reverse the tide of ad dollars that are going to third-party services.

“Publishers want to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively, and this has been difficult to do with third-party platforms." said John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST.

“Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today,” said Sue Feldman, IDC's Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies. “Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue and AdMomentum provides this infrastructure for publishers to manage and monetize their online content. It's a digital marketplace in a box."

"Contextual advertising continues to drive the advertising economy, and publishers everywhere are looking for ways to deliver more qualified leads to their advertisers," said Stephen Baker, CEO of Search at Reed Business.

“To meet the needs of our customers, we have to meet the needs of their customers – the readers and advertisers that support their businesses,” said Dylan Fuller, Senior Product Director at FAST. “There’s a reason why contextual advertising has done so well with readers and advertisers, and now publishers will be able to make the experience even better. They know their customers better than anyone else, and with the right tools they can better serve them.”

New media getting more ad money

According to a study from the American Advertising Federation, as much as 73% of online marketers are reserving 20% of their ad budgets for new and emerging media. About 12% of those marketers say they reserve between 21% and 40% of their marketing budgets for new media.

Advertisers are betting on new mediums like television programs viewed over the internet, text messaging and social networking to be among the top categories. The study also indicates that marketers want new ways to use traditional media (78%), a balance of traditional and non-traditional media (75.5%) and increasing awareness of new media properties (57.7%) in order to remain competitive.

One surprising result from the study is that many of those polled believe traditional mediums are in need of a make-over. The respondents indicated that newspapers (51.4%), network television (34.5%), radio (33.8%) all needed to be overhauled to remain competitive with new media like social networking sites, online video and other consumer generated media.

Magazines are not exempt from the overhaul message that marketers are sending. According to the categories of business magazines (46%), women's service (25%), fashion and beauty (18.8%) and men's (17%) magazines are all in need of a make-over to remain competitive in today's market.

The WebGuild event on Feb 15, 2007 held at Google Headquarters examine Online Video: Revolutionizing Advertising & Marketing. The panelists will be;
YouTube Jordan Hoffner, Director, Worldwide Web Syndication, YouTube
AOL Timothy Tuttle, Vice President, AOL Video, AOL
Fox Todd Murtha, VP, Business Fox Interactive Media, Inc.
NBC John Saroff, Content Acquisition Leader, NBC
Moderated by
Daya Baran. Chief Gruuve, GRUUVE

SideStep Steps into $15 Million

Travel search engine SideStep said it raised $15 million in its Series C round, led by Norwest Venture Partners. "SideStep will use the funding to aggressively scale key areas of the business, while growing its leadership position in vertical search and building out its media and user-generated content offerings." To date, SideStep has raised approximately $32 million. Other competitors include Kayak which has raised $30 million.

Lately, Norwest, Charles River Ventures, WorldView and many other hardware oriented venture capitalists have been investing in consumer internet. This is the domain of seasoned pioneers like Ram Shriram of Google. Forbes calls him the man with the midas touch. Ram has many stellar successes to his name including Junglee which was acquired by Amazon and Netspace - in which he was a key player.

Norwest is an investor in Turn (the new CPA ad network), which wants to challenge Google Adsense. Turn is led by Jim Barnett. Jim Barnett sits on the board of SideStep.

Also, Norwest is an investor in Yatra, an India based travel search engine. Ram is an investor in ClearTrip.

It is yet to be seen if the new entrants can stay in the kitchen when it gets hot. After all the were the same folks asking Serge Brin and Larry Page, why another search engine was necessary when Yahoo and MSN existed. I am betting on the "clear" winner.

Danny Sullivan - 'Social Media Engines' are Next Big Search Thing

Danny Sullivan said recently that 'Social Media Engines' are Next Big Search Thing

Social Media engines like Gruuve, Digg and StumbleUpon are the new traffic powerhouses. Now search marketers have another channel to reach consumers in addition to Google and Yahoo.

According to Danny, TechCrunch gets much of its traffic from Google, Digg and StumbleUpon. These "social media engines" are not merely smaller vertical search engines about which search marketers can say "oh, I'm not up on Digg. I might look into it later," Sullivan writes.

These vertical engines are becoming the equivalent of major search engines in their niches. Eg. Gruuve is creating the Google of Music. Gruuve has over 20 million bits of music information. Thousands of users from MySpace come to the site everyday for discovery and recommendations.

The WebGuild Social Search event featured Gruuve, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Best Search Websites 2007

Submit and rate your favorite search websites
Click here.

If you can't find the site you are looking for or if it is not on the list please submit it.

Rating Criteria
Accessibility:
Weak - contents are accessed by scrolling through site's pages
Acceptable - contents are made more accessible via a simple search engine or other finding aid
Strong - site incorporates its own search engine with sophisticated search capabilities

Content:
Weak - site consists primarily of links to other sites, some of which are broken or not useful
Acceptable - some unique material; links to other sites are annotated, up to date, and useful
Strong - contains material unique to this site; goes into sufficient depth for research purposes; is accurate and up to date

Authority:
Weak - site's creator is not identified or lacks the credentials or training to present material of value to serious researchers
Acceptable - site's creator is clearly identified and can reasonably claim the authority to present research quality material
Strong - individual or organization maintaining site is recognized as an authority in this subject area

Navigation:
Weak - site is not organized into manageable segments or is confusing to navigate
Acceptable - site is well organized and navigation is clear and consistent
Strong - material is presented in manageable units; access to contents is logical and intuitive

Design:
Weak - site is bland or else so loaded with graphics and features that it is torture to wait for the connection
Acceptable - graphics contribute to the material being presented and enhance the aesthetics of the site
Strong - site loads quickly when initial connection is made; graphics are well-integrated into the design

Accessibility:
Weak - contents are accessed by scrolling through site's pages
Acceptable - contents are made more accessible via a simple search engine or other finding aid
Strong - site incorporates its own search engine with sophisticated search capabilities

People Power Search

Last week Jimmy Wales Wikipedia foounder, announced the launch of user-based search. Now there is another start up called ChaCha put a different spin on called people power search. On the company's website it says is ChaCha is a smart search engine powered by human intelligence, a place to find exactly what you're looking for without sifting through millions of results and intelligent search results from people who are knowledgeable about the very thing you are looking for.

I tried it out but for now I will stick with Google and for social search I will stick with GRUUVE where I am the Chief Gruuve and maybe Wikipedia.

Wikipedia founder to launch search engine

Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, is planning to enter the search engine market with a user-based search recommendations engine.

He said that the human judgment is better than any computer search algorithm. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Mr. Wales said the technology will be similar to the that he perfected at Wikipedia. The venture will be called Wikiasari. The commercial venture will be developed by Wikia, also founded by Mr. Wales. The venture will be backed by Amazon.com.

In my opinion this is very similar to StumbleUpon where a community of users generate recommendations to web sites based on the users likes, similarity and relevance. This phenomenon is also know as social search. For more on StumbleUpon and social search visit WebGuild Social Search

Another twist to user generated search engines, is the Google Custom Search Engine (which I wrote about in October), which allows users to have control over what shows up in their search index.

The Google Custom Search Engine enables users to restrict searches to specific pages and websites, offering them the possibility to customize searches. They can choose which pages will be included in their search index, how the pages are arranged in order of priority and what the final page will look like. They can even decide if other users can contribute to the index. The user has total control over the search process. The big idea is to sift the relevant information from the irrelevant, in contrast to generic search engines that make no discriminations. To try out the Google Custome Search Engine please check out the top right hand corner of this page.

Populist Search Vs. Social Media

by David Berkowitz, Director of Strategic Planning, 360i

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING MIGHT SEEM old-hat and mainstream compared to emerging social media channels, but search's auction-based media buying is far more revolutionary. Despite the hype surrounding the new social advertising channels, however, some of the largest deals lately have involved sites that rebuild barriers to entry that search marketing demolished. The future of advertising might look like a mashup of the past. One of the most radical things about search engine marketing is that anyone can take part in it. To start, you generally need a credit card, $5 for a setup fee, a basic Web site, and Internet access. For just $1 a day, you can start making the phone ring, and if your business can scale, you can wind up spending over $1 million a month with search.

Spending more money on search marketing (not factoring in the use of agencies or technology) buys more reach and frequency, rather than perks or discounts off the rate card. For search advertising itself, the market sets the price, and advertisers can only buy more or less of it; beyond that, advertisers can then work to buy it more efficiently.

The populist dreams of search marketing haven't been perfectly realized so far in terms of every last mom-and-pop business joining in, but the search engines have come a long way. Additionally, through services like pay-per-call advertising and some types of mobile marketing, advertisers don't even need a Web site, dropping one more barrier to entry. With any advertiser being able to take part in the efficiencies of auction-based media online, the democratization of marketing is undeniably real.

While search marketing is still in its early stages--it's hardly a decade old--much attention now is turning toward social media, which is hailed as the future. Yet the future, by some indicators, looks more like the past when compared to the auction-based system. As examples, we'll turn to MySpace and YouTube, which together have reached $2.5 billion in deals with Google this year (the former through an advertising partnership, the latter through acquisition). There are some notable differences between buying with the new players and buying on Google.

The biggest differences are evident when you consider what more money buys you. On a basic level, it's possible to run text-based contextual ads on YouTube and MySpace for little money and with little effort. Yet by buying well into the five figures of display media on MySpace, you can have a custom profile that includes videos, mobile downloads, IM content, basic Flash content, and other features; six-figure spending levels buy even more features, including mashups, personalized photos, and RSS and podcast feeds. Similarly, YouTube is looking to do media deals at a certain five-figure threshold, and it sets six-figure thresholds to let marketers own custom channels.

It's a far cry from the auction-based system, and these buys lend themselves much more to martini lunches than market efficiencies. That should be very comforting to some. It's a sign that while every medium will likely flirt with the auction-based system and perhaps even adopt it for a large chunk of inventory, media buying and planning skills will remain relevant. Some media, such as a souped-up MySpace profile, don't lend themselves well to auctions. If that means some smaller businesses can't advertise there as well, those advertisers will still be welcomed by the search engines.

Auction-based media, as exemplified through search engine marketing, won't replace the old models. To enable online properties with an audience and a compelling advertising vehicle to reach users en masse, a traditional media deal established at a set price and settled with a handshake may be the most efficient kind of buy. The bigger challenge will be for Google, which has earned its billions through auctioning media and now finds itself selling media the old-fashioned way.

That the future will resemble the past shouldn't be so surprising. Social media is media, after all, no matter how you sell it.