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October 4, 2004


Blogger Founder, Evan Williams, Saying Goodbye to Google

Evan Williams, the founder of Pyra Labs/Blogger and currently the Blogger Program Manager, has just posted an announcement on EVHEAD (his blog) that he's leaving Google this Friday.

Google purchased Pyra Labs in February 2003.

William's mentions that he's gotten the "itch" to start a new company but isn't commiting to anything at the moment. He also writes that it's time to "pay attention" to other parts of his life.

Problems at Google?

Williams says that his departure has nothing to do with with Google or Google management. He writes that "all and all they've been awesome" and have "pretty much" allowed him retain control of Blogger since purchasing the company.

So Why the Departure?

The reason I'm leaving probably comes down to personality more than anything. I've just always been stubbornly independent-minded -- even when it wasn't necessarily in my best interest...When I started at Google, I knew I was giving up my independence and knew I probably wouldn't like that eventually. So I promised myself I'd stay at least a year. I stayed for a year and eight months and have had a fun, fascinating, and extremely educational time. I'm honored to have been a part of Google for such a historic period.

Good luck Ev! Enjoy the time off and when the time is right, we're looking forward to learning about your new company.

Just for Fun: Remember the Early Days

Here's a look at the Blogger and Pyra home pages from 1999.

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Early Blog Reports From Microsoft's Search Champs

Microsoft's new Search Champs team has met, and now their blogs are reflecting comments. Microsoft Search Champs - morning from David Weinberger gives some names and some self-characterized breakdowns, like that there are three "search manipulators" and one "story-teller." He finds the discussion lively, but an NDA prevents specific details from coming out. Liz Lawley finds the discussions a free-for-all: search champs meeting thoughts. Dave Winer says he's there but has yet to post. I'm sure that will come, so keep an eye on Scripting News. Meanwhile, via a post from our forums, a list of everyone there complete with web feed links: Hotshots: The Members Of The MSN Search Champs Advisory Group.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2004, 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Social Networking Meets the Yellow Pages

Stefanie Olsen reports in a CNET article about a new project from Bill Gross, the CEO of Idealab: Idealab chief stakes out new direction in search. IdeaLab is where Overture (known at that time as GoTo.com) began. To be unveiled at JB's Web 2.0 Conference, it's called Insider Pages.

The Web site lets people sign up to connect with friends and mine their recommendations for local shops and services. The free product, still in experimental form for Los Angeles residents only, puts a new spin on social-networking services like Friendster by infusing it with the local insider feel of Craigslist.

The article mentions that Seattle-based company called Judy's Book is about to launch a similar service.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


More Chinese Censorship At Google? I Think Not

Zhang Lin's translated account on Epoch Times, My Experience of Google's Censorship, explains how a search on his name at Google reveals tons of "omitted" results, another apparent sign of Google caving into the Chinese authorities.

Well, almost certainly not. It's pretty normal that if you go to the "end" of results for any query on Google with a lot of matches, you'll get an "omitted" message. This is Google's way of telling you that there are a lot of pages it considers similar to each other.

OK, it is annoying that when you go through some of these omitted results, they may indeed turn out to be more unique that what Google's automated processes think. But that's a Google indexing problem, not a conspiracy with China.

Heck, search for my name, Danny Sullivan, on Google. When you get out to the 816th (or so) result, you'll notice Google comes up with this message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 816 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

It's fair to say, China had nothing to do with "omitting" these results that seem largely about me from the initial Google search. The same is almost certainly the case with Zhang Lin's situation.

Zhang Lin's also upset that Google's "Chinese Department" failed to correct an "obvious mistake" of not listing him tops. Another sign of Chinese government interference?

If so, then perhaps the race car driver Danny Sullivan will be complaining to the US government that Google fails to list him at the top of Google's results instead of me, clearly another obvious mistake. Or in reality, just a sign that relevancy is in the eye of the beholder (for more on this, see my In Search Of The Relevancy Figure article).

Any search engine censorship of material in response to national laws is a concern to searchers (and nor as I've written is Google alone in doing this). But it's also a concern that censorship may be assumed, when it actually doesn't appear to be the case. That's the situation as far as I can see it here.

In a related story, Google China censorship: more mentions a program those in China can use to overcome filtering and mentions that Yahoo China does filtering as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2004, 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Tech Preview 2 Now Officially Live

MSN's Search Tech Preview 2 is now "officially" live and ready for testing. It was available for a short period of time on Friday but was soon taken down. You'll find an extended entry from me about what's in the new release here: MSN Search Preview Back Online.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Redball Launches Discussion Search Engine

Not much to say on this one (they don't have an English language interface yet) but Redball.info from Austria has launched a new engine that claims to provide searchable access to 100,000 newsgroups, and 90,000 mailing lists. Lycos recently launched a "discussion search engine" that Chris reviews here.

A bit more about Redball.info in this news release.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Semel Speaks at Harvard

Terry Semel spoke to MBA students at Harvard on September 20th. Yahoo CEO Describes Art of the Deal from HBS Working Knowledge has the story. Semel sheds some "behind the scenes" info about the Overture and Inktomi acquisitions.

The fuel for Yahoo since he arrived, he said, has been acquisitions. The biggest price tag to date has been for Overture, a search advertising company, for $1.63 billion. This negotiation was seemingly interminable--"We closed and got board approval three times," he said--but it also illustrated the importance of careful analysis and patience, Semel said.

"Our teams established a relationship, and everyone liked each other. We were [Overture's] biggest client already by far. They could not afford to lose us as a client, and every day we would remind them of that.

"There was just one problem for us: There was nowhere else for us to go."

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Yellow Pages Publisher Launches Search Marketing Program

Dex Media Pursues SME Market, Analysts Ponder Relevancy
Source: Media Post

Dex Media, publisher of print edition Yellow Pages, has designed a new program, which aims to help small- to-mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) establish both an online presence and a search marketing campaign. Analysts say the new product is simple enough to incentivize SMEs to allocate spending, but worry whether the cost-per-click (CPC) model is relevant to their needs.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Microsoft's Search Champs A Man's Club?

Microsoft's new Search Champs initiative, which involves 30 bloggers to help the company brainstorm search, counts only one woman among 30 participants. That's Liz Lawley, who comments about the situation here: i feel very alone. Super search guru Tara Calishain would have been an obvious (and excellent) choice. And she was but couldn't make it, as she comments here: Microsoft's "Search Champs" Team.

OK, brainstorming quickly between Gary and I, how about:

I'm sure we're still missing plenty of women -- and we could go even longer if we added names of people purely involved on the search marketing side of things (or employed by other search engines, like Monika Henzinger at Google or Srinija Srinivasan of Yahoo).

In short, there are plenty of women in search out there. The real issue might be that they don't all have blogs, so they may not have been visible to blogger Robert Scoble, who helped organize the Microsoft search champs. He comments here: In trouble with Liz.

Postscript: Robert tells me Microsoft asked him specifically to gather people who weren't already known for being involved in the search industry, so he mainly went after those he felt blogged interesting things about search on a more casual basis. That's one reason some on the list above may not have been included.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2004, 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Yahoo Local Tabs

With the launch of Yahoo Local today I've noticed that Yahoo can now add a tab for Yahoo Local on the streamlined search.yahoo.com interface. The option to customize search tabs using this interface has been available for several months.

Btw, Yahoo Local is also available for the Australian market.

Finally, take a look at the Yahoo Australia home page. Select Local Search. You should see the search interface change to Local Search without a page reload or moving to a new page.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Keyword Search Audio From First Presidential Debate

C-SPAN and StreamSage (the folks behind CampaignSearch) have just made available the chance to keyword search the audio of the first presidential debate, find results, and then click to view the section of the debate where your search terms are spoken. StreamSage uses voice recognition technology. It's not perfect. I would expect that the other debates will be available. To access material:
1) Enter Search Terms
2) Click search
3) Sort results by date, the link to do this is right below the search box
4) Select results and watch video segments with RealPlayer
5) This database contains more than material from the first debate. C-SPAN's "Audio Track Search" contains 175+ hours of keyword searchable C-SPAN content.

Speechbot, from HP, also uses voice recognition technology. This database contains nearly 15,000 hours of keyword searchable radio material.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Just the Facts

An article from BBC Online, The future of facts, takes a brief look at information quality and authority issues on the open web and then discusses what a couple of companies are doing about it.

The article mentioned is Kozoru, a product being developed in the U.S. that we blogged about here. This post also contains a mention of GuruNet.

Also mentioned in the article is Smart Search technology from Ask Jeeves and Ask Jeeves UK. You can see Smart Search in action when you search for newsmakers/celebrities, want to know who won an Oscar, or need basic links/info for a specific location. Unlike the "old Jeeves" where question and answer sets were built by humans, most of this is done by automated mining specialty databases. Instead of just providing links to possible answers we're seeing actual answers given (mined from "trusted" sources) or direct links to focused sites. This way the searcher is not only saving time but also being directed to quality material similar to how a good librarian might suggest a specific reference resource. One of the five laws of libray science (yes, laws exist) is to "save the time of the reader." In some ways Smart Answers is doing this for the web searcher.

Finally, 82ask.com is mentioned. This is a UK based service that answers questions via SMS. We blogged about another SMS service here.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2004, 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Yahoo Paid Inclusion Can Be A Bargain

Fredrick Marckini looks out how paid inclusion on Yahoo can bring in traffic more cheaply than paid placement through Yahoo-owned Overture, in some cases: Paid Inclusion Beats PPC in Many Markets, from ClickZ.

Of course, it's also cheaper because the traffic is less predictable. You don't know if you'll actually show up for a term. If you do, you could be anywhere in the listings, rather than near the top. That potentially mean less traffic than with paid placement.

On the flipside, paid inclusion ironically is a paid route into the free or "natural search" results that searches are more likely to click on, as the article notes. That could mean more traffic for you, in some cases.

For the many issues paid inclusion raises, see my past article: Going Beyond FTC Paid Inclusion Disclosure Guidelines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2004, 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Candidates Missing Out On Search Ads

From Business 2.0, an interesting article saying that political campaigns are failing to consider search in their marketing mix: Political Campaigns Are Missing the Boat on Paid Search. The Dean campaign found it effective. But others haven't got on-board. Good quotes. Thanks to Search Engine Guide for the tip.

Meanwhile, an article from MediaPost, Pew Study Reports Meager Spending On Web Ads By Political Campaigns, discusses a new survey of online media ads for campaigns. Don't get your hopes up about getting some real stats on political search spending, however. The survey only tracked banner ads. Survey can be found here: Presidential Campaign Advertising on the Internet.

Here's also some other articles on search and political ads:

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2004, 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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