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October 2, 2005 - October 8, 2005

Sergey Brin: The Video Lecture

Several weeks ago Danny blogged about Professor Marti Hearst's "awesome" UC Berkeley class featuring many presentations by some of the biggest names in the search biz including Battelle, Pedersen, Norvig, Dumais, Horowitz and MANY others. Even more exciting, all of the lectures are on the web and archived.

This past week it was Sergey Brin's turn to speak to SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business.

View the lecture here (RealVideo). It runs about 40 minutes.

I haven't had a chance to watch Brin's presentation yet, I will, but this news release offers a few highlights and quotes:

Casual and relaxed, Brin talked about how Google came to be, answered students' questions, and showed that someone worth $11 billion (give or take a billion) still can be comfortable in an old pair of blue jeans.

...it was his unspoken message that was most powerful: To those with focus and passion, all things are possible.

Simple ideas sometimes can change the world, he said.

On Wikipedia: This is a simple idea ? one you would assume would not work, but it does, said Brin. One reason is scale: it taps the power and potential of a global audience.

We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important," related Brin.

On Other Companies -- Microsoft?

Burning up time and energy worrying about what other companies are doing is a mistake, he said. Instead, think about where you and your enterprise are going, your ambitions and your hopes.

Brin also touched on free speech issues in China and what role, if any, Google could play in ending the digital divide.

Posted by Gary Price on October 8, 2005, 8:46 PM | Permalink

Schmidt Talks To Advertisers, Mentions 300 Year Timeframe (again) Before Google Makes it "All" Searchable

Google's top exec team is hitting the road. At Web 2.0, Google's, Omid Kordestani, chatted with JB. Today, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, spoke at the Association of National Advertisers Annual Conference in Phoenix. His presentation was titled, "Technology Is Making Marketing Accountable." News.com's Elinor Mills was there and reports in: Google ETA? 300 years to index the world's info.

If this 300 year until Google has it "all done" number sounds familiar, it is. Schmidt said the same thing, sort of, back in June when he spoke to Delaney and Barnes at The Wall Street Journal (see Battelle's summary here). News.com even posted on the 300 year comment back then.

I said "sort of" a moment ago because today's comment is slightly different from what Schmidt said June although I think he's talking about the same thing. In June, Schmidt was quoted saying it would take 300 years to "organize" all of the worlds information. Today, he said it will take 300 years to "index" all of the worlds info and make it searchable. In othe words, that's when Google's mission will be reached. The 300 year number was obtained after Googler's did a math exercise.

Well, unless Google is working on some type of human longetivity program (who knows, maybe they are, how about some sort of vitamin called "GoogleNim Chewables" featuring all of your favorite Google personalities), none of us will be around to see Google's mission accomplised. Nevertheless, this 300 year estimate makes for interesting talk and keeps Google's name in the press (what else is new). Maybe Bill Gates will soon say it will take MSNjust 200 years to get it all done. Now, there is a feud for you. (-:

Indexing is Not Always The Same as Organizing
In my opinion, there is a big difference between indexing content (putting it into a database) and then organizing/providing access to it and the allowing people to find what they're looking for without much effort. As the database grows larger the organization becomes even more important.

Once the content is identified, licensed (if needed), made digital (if needed), the actually indexing is relatively easy especially when compared to the organizational part. Access and organization are two different things.

Even today, it's possible to be indexed by a large web engine but that doesn't mean your site(s) will be easily found (especially since most people only look at the first few results) and every site can't be on the first page. Of course, being able to judge the quality, currency, accuracy of the info (criticial info skills) are more important than ever before but that's another story for another time.

What About 50 Years?
On a related note, in Chris "SearchDay" Sherman's new book Google Power, Sherman tells the story of a conversation he had with Craig Silverstein, Google's CTO, where Silverstein estimated it would take Google 50 years to completely crack the invisible/deep web problem of pulling useful data of out large/specialty databases.

Of course, 50 years is also a long time (I just turned 40) but I'll again say that just having data in a large, often uncontrolled database, doesn't mean people will find it. I think these are some of the reasons that so much money and effort is being spent on developing verticals (aka specialized databases) both from the large search companies as well as many smaller players. Smaller, focused databases, can also help contribute to a perfect search.

More From Mr. Schmidt
So what else did E.S. have to say today? Here are a few highlights.

+ When he [Schmidt] arrived at Google four years ago he was skeptical consumer of text ads. "You've got to be kidding! People actually click on this stuff? And they do."
+ Technology and the interactivity it enables, such as the ability to measure an Internet ad's success rate by viewing how many people click on it, is shifting power in the advertising industry from executives at corporations to consumers, he said. "The power is moving from us to the end user; it's occurring by the power of the personal computer, by the power of the cell phone," he said. "Thirty years ago we would make the decision (about ads). Now, that person, that individual makes that decision.

+ Schmidt predicted there will always be ads on the Internet but that there may be an "ad-free subset" of the Internet that might offer a different way for people to pay for things, such as using micro-payments.

Note: Does "Google Wallet" and online payment systems sound familiar? Btw, I just blogged this week that the company is recruiting for Inside Sales people for Google Payment Systems.

+ On Google Wi-Fi in San Francisco

Schmidt mentioned that the plan arose out of work that several engineers did on a system that would allow companies to make money offering such a service. "It's an interesting experiment," he said. "If it scales and if it is successful, we think it's going to be very good for the world.

+ On U.S. Copyright and Google Library Project

A "fair use" provision under the law allows for excerpts of copyrighted material to be used and Google will only display snippets of copyrighted text, he said. "That model seems to be durable," he said. "We're very, very careful if copyright is owned..."

I do my best to explain the basic differences between Google Print for Publishers and Google Library in this post.

Much more in the Elinor Mills article: Google ETA? 300 years to index the world's info.

Postscript: If you're interested in learning about just how much info is out there, make sure to take a look at the How Much Info? 2003 research project from UC Berkeley.

Postscript 2: Credit to Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen for a comment he sent to me via email. Lenssen said that it's likely that Google will release their full product in 100 years but keep it in beta for 200 years. This comment has had me smiling and laughing all afternoon because PL (as always) is right on the money.

Posted by Gary Price on October 8, 2005, 7:39 PM | Permalink

Finding "Patterns" in Your Face

Spotted on Searchblog and elsewhere, news that Google demonstrated a tool at Web 2.0 today that uses pattern recognition to determine sex in photos. You're right John, it sure sounds cool. I can't wait to see it (no pun intended) in action. Plenty of other companies and organizations are also doing work in related areas like finding visually similar imagery.

I've posted about just a few of them including Cydral and LTU Technologies in the past. More about LTU here including presentations from the Search Engine Meeting. Finally, Freenet.de from Germany (interface translated here via Yahoo) allows you to limit your search for imagery that must include the face of a human. Another option allows you to limit to terms that actually appear in the image itself. To give it a go, open another tab, and run the your search using the German language interface (and some German words).

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 9:55 PM | Permalink

A Free General Reference Newsletter (Fun Too!)

I thought I would toss out an FFU (free, fun, useful) monthly newsletter.

This newsletter is provided by The World Almanac and Book of Facts, a classic and authoritative reference book that's published annually. In fact, it's one of the best-selling (if not the best-selling) American reference books of all time. Its been published since the 1860's. Some online services make it available electronically as well as being available for Palm devices.

OK, now the free stuff. Each month on The World Almanac web site provides a useful monthly newsletter (free) of (key events, holidays, national days, etc), a review of news from the previous month, celebrity birthdays, obits, historical info (This Day in History), and more. The newsletter is lots of fun to browse, yes, browse.

Access to the newsletter is easy and about as straightforward as it gets. Simply head to The World Almanac site and look for the "Free World Almanac Newsletter" link. Here's a link to the current (October 2005) issue. An archive of all newsletters back to 2001 is also available. You can even receive the newsletter by email.

This might be the type of resource you'll want to cache locally (My Web, FURL, Google Desktop, Filangy, etc.) and turn into an easy to use searchable database of fast facts. Of course, you can also limit your search to site:worldalmanac.com [foo] and search most of the material.

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 9:29 PM | Permalink

How Many Feeds Really Matter: Part 2, New Numbers from the Bloglines Database

Today at Web 2.0, Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves, updated his "What Feeds Matter" blog post from July using some new numbers obtained by mining the Bloglines database. Jim has been nice enough to let us post them. You can find his PowerPoint stack here.

According to the numbers Lanzone shared today:
+ Currently, 1.3 million feeds in the Bloglines database have at least one subscriber, what Jim calls, "blogs that matter." Why? Someone has made the effort to subscribe to them.
+ 36,000 feeds "really matter" since they have 20+ subscribers. Lanzone calls these feeds the ones that "really matter." Of course, Jim's comment was tongue-in-cheek.
+ 14,363 feeds have at least 50+ subscribers. These feeds "really really matter." Again, another tongue-in-cheek comment.
+ 437 feeds have at least 1000+ (aka "totally sweet" feeds) Lanzone said jokingly.
+ 60 feeds have at least 5000+
+ 1 feed has 50,000+ subscribers (which one? Slashdot)

More about Jim's thoughts about why these blogs/feeds matter in his original July blog post that also includes some good comments from Findory's Greg Linden.

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 9:08 PM | Permalink

ad:tech - Your Cred Is Slipping!

Jeez, guys - get it together!

ad:tech is burgeoning in size and global reach as the online advertising industry's all-encompassing (and theoretically, all-knowing) mega-conference.

But if they don't clean up their act -- and soon -- ad:tech will have to cancel their e-mail marketing sessions.

I've just received not the first, but the second e-mail blast for ad:tech NYC. The subject line is: TEST.

Once is a mistake. Twice? Inexcusable.

It's not just me, guys. People really are talking. Didn't anyone at your ESP suggest you maybe rethink this?

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on October 7, 2005, 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daily SearchCast, Oct. 7, 2005: Barry Diller Talks Search, Google Comes to D.C., A Look at an Engineering Search Vertical, Top Search Ranking Factors & More!

Today's search podcast covers applying to be in the MSN adCenter pilot, a list of top search ranking factors to consider, unscrupulous web hosting companies adding extra links, average searches per searcher increases, Google opening an office in D.C. and more!

Tune-in by listening to this MP3 file, listening via WebmasterRadio at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our Odeo channel or through iTunes via this link (or use alternative iTunes instructions explained here). Below are links with more information about the stories that were discussed.

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 4:35 PM | Permalink

Welcome Back, I-Search Mailing List & Detlev!

SES moderator Detlev Johnson has resurrected the twice-weekely moderated discussion list that was once one of the few sources of regular interaction for the search marketing community back in the early days. The long-lost I-Search discussion list, originaly moderated by Marshall Simmonds, predated most search forums, and was a regular hangout for most of us back then.

Detlev's new mailing list is named, appropriately enough, SearchReturn, and it has all the familiar trappings of I-Search. One of the nicest aspects of the list is that it's carefully moderated by Detlev, so you only get on-topic, thoughtful posts in the twice-weekly mailings.

It's free to sign up for SearchReturn. It's also available as an RSS feed, and you can also check out the online archives of past editions. More information is available here.

Andrew Goodman, the last editor of I-Search before it died, created his own discussion list that's also worth checking out. SEM 2.0 is an invitation-only Google group, and members are expected to have intermediate to advanced search marketing experience to join.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 7, 2005, 2:54 PM | Permalink

First Fast Impressions of Google Reader

I haven't had much time to "play" with the new Google Reader from Google Labs (beta) but here are a few VERY fast impressions, things I'm suprised not to see from the outset, and other things I would love to see in future releases. One thing is for sure, competition is almost always good for the searcher and it will be interesting and likely exciting to see what Bloglines, My Yahoo, and other web-based readers offer in their next releases.

+ Given that Google is a "search company?", I'm surprised that you're not able to only search content from your selected feeds. Bloglines does offer this feature.

+ No advertising on any pages. Is advertising coming?

+ Since it's all about sharing, what about being able to easily share individual posts with non-Gmail users?

+ Since Google is a global company (and beyond) I would have expected to see at least a few interfaces in a few non-English languages from the outset. Yes, it's a beta, I know.

+ I would appreciate an option to add feeds to my Google Reader directly from Google Blog Search. The same goes for feeds from specific news sources from Google News (assuming feeds are available).

+ I hope Google will eventually offer a mobile version of its reader. This is one of the primary ways I interact with feeds. My Yahoo feeds are available via My Yahoo mobile. Bloglines also offers a mobile version.

+ Let's see, I can have feeds in my Google Sidebar, on my Google Personalized home page, and now in my Google Reader. How about a way to unify my subscriptions and also what I've seen/read with all three tools.

+ The default sort of articles is by relevance. Google defines it this way, "[Google Reader will] guess what's most relevant to you based on how you use Google Reader (such as which items you decide to actually read). Btw, Findory launched a personalized feed reader a few weeks ago. More about that here.
If sorting by time is more important to me, I can't seem to find a way to change the permanently change the default to time.

+ Options to change default font and point size.

+ A tool/widget to notify when new headlines become available. We've been told that one is likely to be available soon.

+ The chance to use Feed Reader with the Opera browser. At the moment, it's a no go.

+ Searching for new content. MSNBC offers 19 feeds but a search for "MSNBC" only shows 4 feeds. Yes, more are available when including other terms but a basic search should show all possible results.

+ How about spell check when searching for new content. A typo for "search engine rondtable" offers no suggested spellings/corrections.

+ More documentation via the FAQ. (Thanks to those who helped me access it. Some did say it was difficult to find.)

Postscript: Very cool, I must say. You can listen to podcasts/MP3 material directly from the Google Reader.

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 2:11 PM | Permalink

New Google Reader For Feed Reading

Continuing its push into the universe of blogs and feeds, Google has launched a feed reader application. Google Reader is a browser-based application that works with virtually all popular browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Google Reader is "the most comprehensive feed finder available," said Jason Shellen, the Google product manager who spearheaded the development of the program. Comprehensive, yes, but Reader also adheres to Google's trademark simple, easy-to-use design philosophy. "We're trying to find an easier find and subscribe model for feeds," said Shellen.

The program features a Google search box at the top which allows you to search for feeds or do an entire web search. Like most other feed readers out there, Google reader has two panes. The left side displays your reading list and the feeds you've subscribed to, and a preview pane on the right allows you to read feed content.

Content can be displayed by relevance or date. Reader also employs algorithms that learn your content preferences and prioritizes content accordingly. This is similar to the auto-discovery feature for news that's part of the Google Sidebar.

Built-in sharing capabilities allow you to email feeds through your Gmail account, or post content to a blog (currently this only works on Google's Blogger-powered blogs). Don't have a Gmail account yet? If you're in the U.S. and have a SMS capable phone, you can sign up for an account by following these instructions.

Google allows you to import your feed subscriptions from other readers, and provide an export mechanism so you can move your Reader subscriptions to another feed reader.

Google just announced the Reader at the Web 2.0 conference, so I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet. I did get a demo of the program last August when I visited Google, and was impressed with what I saw at the time—particularly with the auto-discovery feature that recommended feed content based on what you read. Findory offers a similar service for feeds.

To get Google Reader, visit google.com/reader.

Gary is busy playing with Reader and will post his comments on the program shortly.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 7, 2005, 1:30 PM | Permalink

Google's Omid Kordestani Talks; Larry Page Enjoys Timing Queries

Conversations between John Battelle and search industry officials at Web 2.0 keep pouring out of the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. This time, the SearchViews team (thanks!) offers highlights of a conversation between John and Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development at Google.

Battelle: Lots of new announcements converging on Microsoft. Given the experience with Netscape, do you think about that as Google makes new announcements every other day? Kordestani: The business model works. Google is obsessive about users & services. Part of the culture is to focus on new ideas but learn from the past. We'll only fail if we fail our users. Google is not focused on competitors.

I often wonder if "every other day" as John puts it means that there are just too many announcements for the average person to keep up with. Sure, those of us who follow the industry TRY (it's not easy) to keep up with what's going on (sometimes not allowing us to get much sleep).

Recently a few non-search types told me that with Google announcing something new/different everyday it's difficult to keep up and have time to understand what's new, different, and useful before they get word of another annoucement. In other words, it can be confusing. Of course, another reason (and a GOOD one) for Google's constant stream of announcements is that it helps keep others out of the mainstream press or at least, reduces the amount they're discussed. Everything Google seems to do appears newsworthy. Their contest to find a new chef was mentioned all over the place. Talk about brand reinforcement. It's all part of Google's brilliance and something everyone else must struggle with, at least at the present time.

Kordestani also tells JB that he thinks Google is just getting going and adds that Larry Page still thinks that Google doesn't work very well.

While we're on the topic of Larry Page, Elinor Mills from News.com shares other comments that Kordestani made during his Web 2.0 conversation. He said, "Larry literally sits in front of our search engine and counts how long it takes...He doesn't think it is fast enough." Yes, Larry speed/peformance is important (my search for your name just took .07 seconds, that's fast) but given Google's responsibility as a research tool and it's already rapid speed, try not to forget that search and IR from the point of a researcher or advertiser is more than about how fast something is returned.

Btw, this is not the first time we've heard that Larry doesn't think Google works very well. Back in May 2003, Page told Walt Mossberg during the D: All Thing Digital Conference that he thought Google was terrible.

I would like to meet the search executive who publicly exclaims that their search engine is perfect and couldn't get any better. If someone said this I think we would all walk away as fast as possible. (-:

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 12:39 PM | Permalink

Barry Diller Chats with Battelle at Web 2.0

Several sources including Red Herring, SearchViews and Clickz all offer highlights of John Battelle's conversation with the new owner of Ask Jeeves (I mean Ask.com) Barry Diller at Web 2.0.

Here are a few highlights:

From Red Herring:

?I see my company getting involved in making product in the vernacular?producing, financing, distributing film and digital products,? said Mr. Diller. ?That?s something that comes naturally. Everything is going to end up being in digital [format].?

IAC/InterActive fist considered acquiring AOL.

?We first thought AOL was it,? he said. ?How was the price tag? Let me say it was high.?

Why Search?

?We started this journey a few years ago when we were very worried about global search because we thought it could distintermediate our business,? he said.

On Internet Advertising

?The migration of advertisers is going to keep on coming to the Internet,? he said. ?So, we thought, ?if we fail, and we don?t gain share, this will be OK.??

From SearchViews
Diller Talks Google

Battelle: What comes to mind when you think of Google?
Diller: You mean the evil that I would do to them?
Battelle: Does Google bother you?
Diller: No, why would they bother me? They're the first to clean the page up and offer just the box - genius. And then they delivered relevant results.

Josh Stylman and Peter Hershberg from SearchViews offer their "take away" from the Diller/Battelle conversation. They say that Ask/IAC does not plan to "out-Google Google" but IAC is, "going to focus on trying to be a totally differentiated service.

From Clickz
Diller Talks More Google

"It's a great service. Is it going to have 35 to 50 percent market share over time? Anything can happen."

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 11:15 AM | Permalink

Google Opens Lobbying Office In Washington D.C.

It looks like I have some new company here in DC, Google. According to Andrew McLaughlin, a Google Senior Policy Advocate, big "G" has opened an office here.

The Google Blog says that Alan Davidson, will lead Google's lobbying efforts. Key issues that Davidson will be working on many issues including:

+ Net neutrality
From the blog, "hould network operators be able to block their customers from reaching competing websites and services (such as Internet voice calls and video-on-demand)? Should they be able to speed up their own sites and services, while degrading those offered by competitors? Should an innovator with a new online service or application be forced to get permission from each broadband cable and DSL provider before rolling it out?"

+ Copyrights and fair use
Quite the popular issue these days given the Google Library Project

+ Intermediary liability
From the blog, "Not surprisingly, we don?t believe the Internet works well if intermediaries and ISPs are held liable for things created by others but made searchable through us."

Much more in the Google Blog post: Google goes to Washington.

Postscript: Yahoo has had an government affairs office here in D.C. since 1999. You can read a bit about it in here and here.

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 10:53 AM | Permalink

NetRatings: Average Searches Per Searcher Increases; Google Top Ranked In August 2005

Gavin O'Malley's, Media Post article: Search Activity Jumps In August, reports on some new search stats that were released by Nielsen//NetRatings yesterday.

Numbers

5.04 billion searches in August across 65 engines, that's up 10% from the 4.6 billion searches in July

Average searches per web searcher grew to 42 in August, increase of 7% from July

Top Engines for August

Google--46% of all searches

Yahoo--23% of all searches

MSN--11% of all searches

AOL Search--8% of all searches

Ask Jeeves--2% of all searches

Posted by Gary Price on October 7, 2005, 10:19 AM | Permalink

Search Forums Roundup: Oct. 7, 2005

Today's SearchDay, Search Engine Forums Spotlight, features our weekly links to this week's hot topics from search engine forums across the web: Google and Sun in Collaborative Effort - MSN adCenter Pilot Program - SEO For Multilingual, International & Dynamic Web Site - Yahoo & Partners Plan Open Source Digital Library - "Bad" Keywords; Do They Damage My Campaigns? and more.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 7, 2005, 10:00 AM | Permalink

Google Says Taiwan Label Fits International Naming Conventions But Will Review

Google Blogoscoped points to an update on the Google Maps/Taiwan issue I wrote about earlier. From Google defends map service listing at the Taipei Time, Google responded to Taiwan's complaints to say that calling Taiwan a "province of China" is consistent with international naming conventions. Google is going to review the situation, however. The San Jose Mercury News raises an interesting point about people perhaps thinking they need to apply to China for permission to visit Taiwan. Taiwan is apparently still pressing for a change.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 9:03 AM | Permalink

Review Of GlobalSpec Engineering Search Engine

A Look at a Tool for Engineers: GlobalSpec from Shirl Kennedy over at Resourceshelf gives you a nice rundown on the GlobalSpec search engine, "by engineers, for engineers." If you need engineering related info, this targeted crawler aims to please.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 8:50 AM | Permalink

Beware Hosting Providers Inserting Links Into Your Content

Rogue host changing customers' websites over at SEO Forum is an interesting read and warning to those to watch their hosting service. What's PhilC describes there is a hosting company that was unbeknownst to clients was apparently inserting links at the bottom of client pages to benefit the host. The screenshots here tell the tale much better. Apparently, the tactic was supposed to be stopped but started again.

Moral for anyone? Look at the cached pages you have in the major search engines. They'll show you what the search engine spider saw -- and any links that you might not realized were cloaked without permission to feed to the spiders.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Obnoxious cloaking scam.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 8:43 AM | Permalink

Weblogs.com Ping Server Bought By Verisign

Dave Winer's Weblogs.com ping service has been purchased by Verisign. Dave does a rundown on the sale here. Verisign does a rundown here. Why do you care? You probably don't need to.

Blog search engines and feed reading services can and do take pings from Weblogs to understand when content is updated. But it's not the only service you can ping, if you want to send out notifications.

But why wouldn't you depend on pining Weblogs? Right now, there's no reason not to. But while Verisign pledges pinging will remain free, it also talks about adding "value added services" for a fee. Potentially, that could mean getting some pings out faster than others. Or not. We don't know, and it remains a "we'll see type of thing."

The main point is this. Ultimately, I think pinging will be heading down a path of pinging the most important places in addition to any centralized server. So if Weblogs suddenly did get all into charging for rapid response, you'd still be able to notify other places despite it.

For example, you can (and should) ping Yahoo directly as explained here. Yahoo doesn't need to wait for you ping Weblogs or even Blo.gs (the service Yahoo bought in June).

Technorati has its own ping server, and I expect that any major player may ultimately have their own, perhaps with registration barriers or other systems to cutdown on ping spam. Any smart marketer will hit these in addition to a centralized server.

The entire pinging thing got you down/head spinning? Basically, most of this is probably built into the blogging tool you use. But a good starting place for more is Ping-o-Matic, which helps you send pings manually if you need to, plus has useful background.

By the way, in addition to Verisign buying Weblogs.com, the ping system, AOL yesterday bought the entirely different Weblogs Inc. network of blog sites.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 8:15 AM | Permalink

News.com Gets Top 100 Blog List

News.com has a new Blog 100 list, including a search and media blogs category. There's no page for that category I can point you at, but Threadwatch made the list, and you can see the write-up here (congrats, Nick!). From there, you can see other search blogs. Well, you can see the only other search blog on the list, John Battelle's Searchblog (congrats, John!), written up here.

Despite News.com often citing our Search Engine Watch Blog, we suck and don't make the list. In reaction, we're going all Googly and not speaking to News.com until June 2006 unless added to the list. Just joking! (and the two are talking again, anyway).

Think we ought to be on the list? Hey, help us out and drop a polite word to News.com here. Pretty please, with sugar on top? If not for me, how about Gary? He works so hard, and he always gets down if we don't make lists like this.

You might also mention adding Barry's Search Engine Roundtable or Google Blogoscoped, among others. Other search blogs? Surely there can't be more! Absolutely, and a good starting place is our blog roll of search blogs. We even list News.com :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 7:37 AM | Permalink

Top Ten List Of Search Ranking Factors

Earlier I posted about Rand Fiskin's list of search ranking factors and how I wished they could be rated in order of importance. As I later wrote, Rand invited some people to take a stab at doing that. Today, he's posted the revised list, as he explains more here. Below is the top ten list and average scores (5.0 would be the highest you could get, meaning it was deemed super important).

Title Tag - 4.57
Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
Accessibility of Document - 4.31
Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
Keyword Spamming - 3.69

Overall, I had a few problems with some of the things even included on the list and how they were defined. There were some factors I didn't think were well explained or unclear on how to vote. But the good news is that what emerged is an excellent starting list of factors for anyone to consider.

Using this view, you can go through and see the factors with contributor comments. For Search Engine Watch members, continue to the longer version of this post for a further rundown on my comments about the most important factors.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Top Ten SEO Factors.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 7, 2005, 6:13 AM | Permalink

Sharing MSN Virtual Earth Maps with MSN Messenger

Here's something I'll be trying this weekend.

Yesterday, Via Virtual Earth announced a new and very cool service that allows MSN Virtual Earth users who also use MSN Messenger the option to share maps with other MSN Messenger users (individuals or groups). Very cool! This items was first posted late last week on the Virtual Earth Blog. You'll find more info and screen caps on the 25HoursaDay blog and on Chandu Thota's WebLog.

Posted by Gary Price on October 6, 2005, 7:08 PM | Permalink

MSN adCenter Pilot Program Opening In US

Todd "Oilman" Friesen finally wakes up my newsreader with a post to his long dominant blog with a great post. MSN adCenter Pilot Program from him repots an email from MSN saying the US pilot program is now looking for takers. The pilot is invite only, but you can hope to get picked by signing-up here. The email covers stuff we've reported before, how ads will rotate in on a portion (25 percent) of MSN's pages, with the rest still coming from Yahoo. See also Microsoft Opens adCenter & MSN Keywords To Singapore & France and More Details On New MSN Keywords Program from the blog. Want to discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, MSN adCenter Pilot Program Notification.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 3:28 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Oct. 6, 2005: Google Mixes Maps Into Local, A Search Engine For Leonardo Di Vinci's Notebooks, Tagging Google Results With Wink, Making Keyword-Based Feeds Easily & More!

Today's search podcast covers Google mixing maps with local, Google after college students again with print ads, the Scirus science search engine beefing up, a search engine for Di Vinci's notebooks, tagging Google results via new service Wink, getting keyword-based feeds, a Google Earth scavenger hunt and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 3:14 PM | Permalink

Semel On Yahoo Being New To Search, More Open To Google

Terry Semel at Web 2.0: "We'll Always Be More Open Than Google" from Yahoo's Jeffrey McManus is a very nice rundown of the Q&A between Yahoo CEO Terry Semel and John Battelle out at Web 2.0. But man, my jaw dropped at some of the positioning of Yahoo as both "new kid on the block" and being "more open" than Google, especially with paid inclusion still hanging in there at Yahoo.

Battelle: What do you make of Google's strategy?

Semel: I think Google have clearly done a very good job in search. I think that probably the difference would be that they were the pioneers. We're now full speed ahead, been in search less than two years, others are coming in, and I think that's healthy.

Google the pioneers? Yahoo just turned 10 years old earlier this year and has been doing search from day one. Literally. It was born out of search. Yes, Yahoo has only had its own crawler-based search engine using its own technology for about two years, rolled out in February 2004. But to suggest that the other eight years of life weren't about search?

Let's be clear. Yahoo was the pioneer. Google was the second mover. Yahoo rediscovered search religion (helped by realizing what a lucrative religion it is), and that competition is very, very welcomed. I love Yahoo for coming in and giving Google a renewed, healthy and tough run for the money. Forget Microsoft as the threat, as I've written before. Yahoo is Google's most serious threat, breathing down its neck in many ways, ahead of it in some others. But it's hardly some new kid of search.

Battelle: [Google may enter the jobs space] You've got hotjobs. From the historic approach that goog takes is scrape and aggregate as opposed to own. Will you give a feed to google?

Semel: We'll always be more open than they are. [applause from audience] we began with RSS. yahoo in general sees ourselves as an open platform with the ability to publish on yahoo.

I guess it's never struck me personally that Yahoo is somehow more open than Google. I've seen them both fairly open and closed in their own ways. But it is interesting to hear the audience at Web 2.0 apparently feels they are closed, hence the applause. Then again, I'm also curious how much of that audience feels Google is closed because Google may not be interested in partnering for their products and technologies. Google definitely has a "we'll invent it ourselves" attitude.

If openness is in terms of accepting content, Google deserves more credit here. Google has never played the paid inclusion game, sending out mixed messages of saying they have everything to searchers but to site owners that they'd better pay to make sure they're included.

Let's take shopping as an example.

Want your products listed in Froogle? Go to the Froogle home page, and you'll see at the bottom:

Information for Merchants

And that link takes you to a page that tells you:

You can list your products on Froogle for free.
Unlike other online shopping sites, Froogle costs nothing. There's no spending account to set up and maintain. No cost-per-click. No cost, period....
You can upload a feed containing addresses, phone numbers, and hours for your physical stores. We'll display this information along with your business listings on Google Local. Learn more.

Now go to Yahoo Shopping. Want to get listed? Look at the bottom of the page, and you'll see:

Want to see your products in Yahoo! Shopping? Build your own online store or Advertise with us

The "Advertise with us" link takes you to this:

Promote Your Products Your products will be featured prominently in Yahoo! Shopping and appear in highly relevant areas across Yahoo!, giving you access to millions of motivated buyers.

Pay for Performance Inclusion in Yahoo! Product Search and buyer?s guide pages is based on a cost-per-click price that varies by product category. You pay only for leads directly to your site.

So who is open in this case? Not Yahoo, in my book. Yes, Yahoo does also scrape content from across the web, but paid inclusion is the main way you get in as a merchant. There are benefits to payment -- merchants do complain about wishing they could pay Google for better support. But the fact you aren't paying by the click to be included at Google while Yahoo does -- what's going to make you think Yahoo's more open there.

From the searcher perspective, I think it's fair to say that when you come to Yahoo Shopping, you're expecting a comprehensive search experience and not assuming payment is an influence. It tells you on the home page:

Welcome to Yahoo! Shopping.
Sign in to save products, find the lowest total prices, and get recommendations! We have tech product recommendations for you with SmartSort.

Say you go into the FAQ area and decide you want to understand what's offered. You'll probably reach the What Is Yahoo Product Search page, the first page listed that says:

Yahoo! Product Search is a new search tool designed to help you find a comprehensive listing of products available on the Web. Yahoo! Product Search enables you to search through millions of items from thousands of merchants, so you can find, compare, and buy almost anything.

To be fair, if you go to the third link on the FAQ, the What are Yahoo! Shopping listing page results? page, you'll then learn:

Yahoo! Shopping listing page results are Yahoo! Product Search results relevant to a specific Yahoo! Shopping browse category.

By default, all products from a particular store are grouped into one listing. Each listing features an individual product and includes a link to "more results" from that store. Listing page results generally include products from merchants affiliated with Yahoo! Shopping or in other financial relationships with Yahoo!, but they also may include results from other, non-affiliated merchants.

Disclosure is there, but it would be so much more open to make this directly in the actual search results -- or better, figure out a way to not charge for inclusion or shift away from a pay-per-click model for it. Paid inclusion remains the big fly-in-the-ointment with me about Yahoo. I hate constantly having to bring it up, as a spoiler to all the other great things that they do. But it is a spoiler of Yahoo's making and one completely within its control to eliminate.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 3:09 PM | Permalink

Searching for a Good Forum

Forums, discussion groups and other online communities can be great sources of information, but the good ones can be hard to find, and time-consuming to monitor. None of the major search engines offer specialized tools to search specifically in forums, so you need to rely on more specialized tools to find what you need. In today's SearchDay article, Finding Treasure in Boards and Forums, I talk about several of these forum-specific search tools and the unique features they offer.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 6, 2005, 12:36 PM | Permalink

Hitwise Blogs Search Stats

Hitwise is a great source of data about what people search for, and Bill Tancer over there who heads global research has started up a new blog here already filled with some nice gems.

Search Term Pairs looks at spikes for searches on engagement rings versus wedding dresses. Notes from Vegas: Search Terms and the Competitive Substitute looks at how searches for online poker go up as sports betting drop, making him wonder if the same people are doing both but can't afford to do both at the same time.

Batman is in, Elmo is out tells me the Thunderbirds costumes I got for the kids for Halloween aren't making the top ten list of terms containing costumes. Guess I should be dressing them up like pirates, the top term, or Batman, the second. Pirate was a top term last year. Elmo, it turns out, is not.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 12:07 PM | Permalink

Google Scholar Does Some Advertising

A quick follow-up to Danny's blog post from about 10 days ago over Google placing small ads in college papers that lead users to the Google University page. Schoogle, a blog the focuses on Google Scholar, reports on a new ad reminding students that they can find "authoritative resources" "before sunrise" with Google Scholar. According to a SEW Blog reader, like the other ads this one also points to the Google University page which only includes a small icon for Google Scholar.

It's not that Google Scholar is a unworthy tool, are you kidding? It's far from it.

But university libraries, big and small, have also been doing a good job providing remotely accessible databases (dorm access, home) available 24x7x365, for years, long before Google was even around. Ah, yes, it comes down to marketing and branding once again, and Google is just so very good at it. Why couldn't Google also help the university libraries market other services and specialty databases?

If I was a university student studying psychology, I could also use Psychology Abstracts, and have many authoritative results in my hands (sometimes with full text) in seconds even at 3am. If I needed to, I could use the database to really focus my search query on precisely what I need. Like we talked about yesterday, using a specialized database can give your search more context and allows you to use tools that are specific to the material contained in the resources, perhaps even creating a more "perfect" search. Again, this type of stuff is not for everybody but I would like to think a university student and faculty member should know about the specific resources that are available and useful to their area of study and have some, not a lot, of an idea how to use them. As a former academic librarian, I fully realize that this is MUCH easier said than done.

With Google Scholar, at least at this point, we have little idea of what is and is not covered in the database, especially when the professor asks that the source MUST (a frequent request) be peer reviewed. What about a list of sources included in Google Scholar with start and stop dates? Another example, I want information about injuries to soccer players. What type of query suggestions or modifications will ask if I'm talking about soccer or football (what soccer is called outside of the U.S.)? Running an OR search is going to get me lots of unwanted material on American Football injuries.

While I'm honored, ResourceShelf*, would not qualify.
* Worth pointing out that the last issue of ResourceShelf Google Scholar has cached was in March 2004. Also, the title was parsed incorrectly.
The title of the site is ResourceShelf. "Resources and News for Information Professionals" is the subtitle. Btw, it's a blog hosted by Google's own blogger service. (-:

Posted by Gary Price on October 6, 2005, 10:50 AM | Permalink

Wink & Web 2.0 Search Panel

Web 2.0: Looking for new ideas in search is a short rundown on new entries into the search space talking at the Web 2.0 conference this week. Search Panel - Web 2.0 from ClickZ covers the same panel. Both focus mainly on Wink is a tag-based search engine and backing TagCamp to help create a standard tagging taxonomy. PubSub also talked of wanting to have more standard ways to structure information.

In case you missed it, tags were hot but don't seem to be as hot as in the past, as the problems with tagging that anyone should have expected have cropped up. But now "camps" are hot in the wake of FooCamp and BarCamp (for those not lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp) and campish-Web. 2.1. So add some camp to your tags, and they're hot again!

Actually, camps sound pretty cool. I want to do SearchCamp, except it would be for kids, teaching them to search better.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 9:39 AM | Permalink

Google Enterprise OK For US Government Secrets?

Google: Fit for intelligence work? from Federal Computer Week looks at Google's enterprise search being used by some US government networks and some experts questioning whether the technology is "unfit" for classified work. But some Google enterprise "teammates," info tech firms trained to develop Google enterprise and bring it into security settings, say it's OK.

When one expert says, "For those things that Google does find, it will rank them based on popularity," it doesn't sound like they understand the enterprise product.

Yes, popularity is key in Google web search results. But it's not really an issue to my knowledge with non-web enterprise data. However, the point of Google enterprise not really being a tool for spotting patterns sounds right.

FYI, Gary noted last year that Convera has been tapped by agencies such as the CIA for search needs. The CIA tapped into Inktomi technology back in 2002. In 2001, CIA-backed In-Q-Tel picked Stratify to help spot patterns.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 6, 2005, 9:19 AM | Permalink

Video Search Grows in Attention and Usefulness

Paul R. La Monica, over at CNN/Money has written the article: I want my WebTV!, and asks if video searching is the "next" big thing. I think it's already the "next" big thing and will get even more important as more content gets digitized, licensing agreements get signed, and the public becomes aware of the technology. The future is bright IMHO not only on the consumer level but also on the enterprise/business level with services like TVEyes and Critical Mention. Btw, it's not just video but all multimedia content. In the past few months we've seen both Blinxk and Podscope begin offering podcast searching. Speechbot from HP has been demonstrating keyword audio searching for years.

Posted by Gary Price on October 6, 2005, 8:45 AM | Permalink

Google Merges Maps & Local, Brings North America Out of Beta

Google Local and Maps are now a single unified service, known as Google Local.

"Google maps has always integrated local listings, and I think this takes it to the level we always have seen it from the engineering level," said Brett Taylor, product manager of Google Local.

With the new integration, if you have a saved location in Google Local you will now see a map of that place when you start a search, rather than later in search results. You'll also be able to use the satellite imagery and hybrid map/satellite photo combination when viewing local search results.

Maps and Local have been unified in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Japan. Both the U.S. and Canada versions have also been moved out of beta and are now official Google services.

Google Maps will still be available at maps.google.com.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 6, 2005, 12:00 AM | Permalink

New Content Added to Elsevier's Scirus Science-Specific Database

Scirus is a specialty web database that focuses on science-specific material from publishing powerhouse Elsevier. Scirus combines open web material with content from many specialty databases (both free and fee). Today, Scirus announced a new partnership with the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) to include its collection of theses and dissertations from NDLTD member institutes in the Scirus database.

Scirus has indexed over 200,000 theses and dissertations, in more than twelve languages, including English, Portugese, French, German, Spanish and Taiwanese, among others. The theses and dissertations are from institutes around the world, including their largest content contributors Library and Archives Canada, Hong Kong University, Brazilian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (IBICT), MIT, University of Uppsala, National Sun Yat-Sen University of Taiwan (NSYSU) and Virginia Tech.

Scirus has been mentioned several times on the SEW Blog and it's a database that I plan to "pimp" in the near future. Scirus received an honorable mention in the Specialty Database category during this year's Search Engine Watch Search Awards.

Fast Fact: One of the largest, if the not the largest, database of dissertations comes from UMI/ProQuest and contains more than 2 million titles dating back to 1861. Newer disserations (past two years) can be searched and previewed online for free. It's also possible to order the full text and have it delivered via mail or online.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 5:54 PM | Permalink

A New API From Yahoo: Yahoo Shopping User Product Review

Web Developers might be interested in learning that earlier today Yahoo released the Yahoo Shopping User Product Review API.

The User Product Review service allows you to display user reviews about a particular product. These reviews can be sorted in three ways: latest reviews, most recommended reviews or the highest rated reviews; either in ascending or descending order.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 5:19 PM | Permalink

Free Searchable Version of Da Vinci's Notebooks Now Available

Over on ResourceShelf (aka my other site) our Deputy Editor, Shirl Kennedy, has posted the news that askSam is at it again. This time, they're offering a free, searchable databases to (search/view/browse) online or offline. Today, askSam has posted Leonardo Da Vinci's Notebooks. Cool! To view offline, you'll need the askSam reader but that's also free.

The Notebooks are over 1,500 pages filled with all sorts of information. It's not a page-turning novel, but a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of history's great figures.

You'll find a list of other askSam searchable databases, also free, on this page.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 5:07 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Oct. 5, 2005: Google And Sun Partner On Toolbar, Yahoo Acquires Upcoming.org, AOL Adds Saved Searches, Finding Movie Info, Saving The Ask Jeeves Butler & More!

Today's search podcast covers more on Google and Sun partnering to distribute the Google Toolbar and other cooperative moves, Yahoo buying events listing service Upcoming.org, AOL adding saved searches and other features to its web search, getting more out of the Internet Movie Database, a campaign to save the Ask Jeeves butler and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 3:38 PM | Permalink

Intel Uses Nearly-new Ad Units for Yahoo! Takeover

If you find yourself at Yahoo!'s home page on Thursday, you'll see Intel's implementation of what Yahoo! calls its "Expando East" and "floating element" ad units. In non-Yahoo-ese, that's a 300x250 rich media ad down the right side of the page, which resolves to 300x100, along with a floating rich media unit that moves around the page outside the traditional ad space.

The implementation has only been done once before, by Pepsi's Mt. Dew in August. The ad, featuring pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, is part of its new Centrino campaign pushing the entertainment power of its latest processors, and it really is a break from the specs-based ads most tech companies use, or even from Intel's own surreal Blue Man Group ads.

"A lot of technology advertisers will do more traditional advertising -- the 'speeds and feeds' kind of thing," Elizabeth Harz, category development officer for technology at Yahoo!, told ClickZ News. "This is a great example of a marketer talking about the benefits of technology, and really making the connection between technology and life benefits, instead of technology for technology's sake."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on October 5, 2005, 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Court Says Yahoo Speech Engineers Can Continue Working

A California judge has not issued a restraining order and 12 speech software engineers at Yahoo will be able to continue their work for the time being. The other day I blogged about Nuance, a speech tech company, filing a lawsuit against Yahoo saying that a group of engineers that moved from Nuance to Yahoo were now providing Yahoo with trade secrets. A hearing about the case is schedule on November 14th.

The order issued Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court said the court was unable to properly assess whether any wrongdoing had occurred, and therefore declined to grant Nuance's request for a temporary restraining order against Yahoo and the engineers.
"We are pleased with the result today that the court did not grant the request for a temporary restraining order," Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo said in a statement. "We continue to believe the allegations in the lawsuit are without merit, and we plan to continue a vigorous defense."

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 1:18 PM | Permalink

New Video Engine Debuts; Chat With Founder of TVEyes/Podscope

Two video search items on my desktop today.

First, word of a new video search engine named SearchforVideo. I plan to take a longer look at this one in the future but for now I can report:

+ RSS based Keyword Alerts Available
+ Desktop Search App Available
+ Video clips come from a wide variety of sources including local tv stations (for example, here are a few I found via KNBC in LA)*, Wall Street Journal, MSN Video, Yahoo News, Fox Sports
+ Appears many of the local tv station video clips come via Feedroom.com, another company we've blogged about in the past.
+ Default sort of search results is by date (most recent first)
+ From what I can tell you're conducting a metadata search, in other words you are not searching every word spoken in a video clip
+ Ability to submit your RSS video feed.

After a quick look, SearchforVideo reminds me of a metasearch video service for new, often news video content, that compiles material from numerous sources.

Second, for months I'be been blogging about TVEyes (a fee-based service) that is well worth checking out especially for those of you who monitor media mentions and their free, Podscope service that allows you to keyword search transcripts of podcasts. Today, Robin Good has a great interview with the founder of the company, David Ives. An audio version of the interview is also available. Btw, TVEyes/Podscope just signed a deal with AOL.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 1:18 PM | Permalink

Calishain and Her Kebberfegg

Our friend and fellow Web Search University faculty member, Tara Calishain, has release yet another new RSS tool named Kebberfegg (Keyword Based RSS Feed Generator) (now that's a name for you) that makes it quick and easy to create and then receive keyword-based RSS alerts from numerous sources. At the moment, over three dozen feeds are available.

Using Kebberfegg is easy.

First, enter your keyword strategy into the search box.
For this demo, I'll use the query "multimedia search."
Then, I select a category or categories of feed sources I would be interested in receiving.
I decided to select the following categories: Web Search Engines, Technology, Press Releases, and Multimedia.
You can choose the output as a plain ol' RSS link on an HTML or OPML, that you can import into a feed reader
OK, I chose the HTML option and now have a page of direct RSS links (preconfigured for my "multimedia search" query, ready to add to my aggregator.
You'll see an RSS button or a second button to add the feed directly to My Yahoo.

Where are the feeds coming from? Lot's of places. My Kebberfegg results pages included feeds from PR Newswire, Ice Rocket, and Blogdigger Audio Search.

Finally, Tara welcomes suggests for sources that offer keyword based feeds. In fact, I suggested a few early this morning and she's already added them.

Postscript: Tara, how about adding a direct link (link you do with My Yahoo) to add feeds to Bloglines?

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 12:59 PM | Permalink

Play The Google Earth Contest

Some Google Earth devotees out they might be interested to learn about a new Google Earth contest from a Denver company.

From the site:

Using Google Earth placemarks and web pages, we've created the world's biggest interactive game.

In order to beat the GameMaster, you must follow the clues and utilize the Checkpoint feature to move ahead.

Once you've beaten the first GameMaster, you'll advance to the BIG GAME of EARTH CONTEST where you'll compete with other self proclaimed super sleuths for BIG REWARDS!

A list of "big rewards" is not provided but a few of the pages mention that if you "win" you get an "unlocked" expert version.

Aside from that material and a basic tutorial, that's all the info provided. An email address is also included.

Team play is available and according to this page, "encouraged."

That's it. It looks like fun and one of these days I might give it a go. If you play, share your thoughts (good, bad, indifferent) in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 11:42 AM | Permalink

New Save Jeeves Blog & Campaign

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable points to the new Save Jeeves blog, started by a former Ask Jeeves employee who wants the butler mascot to stay. Whichever way it goes, one thing is for certain. Controversy over whether the butler should go will only help raise awareness of Ask.com. Look for:

MSN to consider whether the butterfly should be stuffed into a collection jar.
Yahoo to debate whether it should love the exclamation mark from Yahoo! (yes, please. I mean yes, please!)
Google to announce a competition for a better logo (someone blogged about it needing one recently, can't find the link, sorry. But I doubt they were the first to say publicly the Google logo, well, could be a lot better).

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 11:18 AM | Permalink

ClickTracks 6 To Offer New Analytics Features

ClickTracks 6 is coming out on October 12. The popular web analytics tool, which I use myself, will offer a variety of new features including:

Time Splitting: Seeing visitor behavior at different times on one screen
Site Archiving
A/B Split Tracking
Sales Funnels
Browser-based, rather than client-based, report viewing
Page-based keyword reporting

A rundown on what's coming is here. Andrew Goodman's been through a demo and gives it a thumbs-up in his review at Traffick here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 10:48 AM | Permalink

VNU Buys Into Blogs; Denton Giggles to the Bank

This is the first blog publishing deal that feels really corporate.

A pact was reached between Nick Denton's Gawker Media and VNU, publisher of Billboard and Adweek, to expand tech blog Gizmodo into European markets. Posts from the English language blog will be translated into five languages -- including French, Italian, German, Dutch and Spanish -- and augmented with entries geared toward local markets. These are written by VNU bloggers.

For Denton it looks like a slam dunk. He lends the Gizmodo brand and content, and gets a chunk of whatever ad revenue results. For VNU, this is clearly a test: Can we buy our way into blogs by licensing popular titles? (all due respect to Adweek blog Adfreak)

Posted by Zachary Rodgers on October 5, 2005, 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Group Formed To Help Develop Mobile Search

Group Plots Future of Mobile Search from ClickZ covers a new "Mobile Search Working Group" that's been formed by the Mobile Marketing Association. The MMA group aims to help carriers bundled branded mobile search solutions into their service packages. Frankly, I'd like the group or any group to bang carriers over the head that I don't want to be tied to any one search solution. I want the freedom to choose whatever I like. The groups home page is here, but the additional information the page points you at has yet to actually go live.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 10:39 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Acquires Upcoming.org Events Listing Service

Yahoo has announced on its search blog that it has acquired events listing and calendar service Upcoming.org, which it expects will help improve the offerings of its Yahoo Local service. You might recall in my recent write-up of Yahoo Local changes that I mentioned it was unclear where Yahoo was getting its events information. I still need to (and will) follow up on that, but Upcoming obviously will be playing a role now, too -- if it hasn't been already. The Yahoo blog points to posts that each of the Upcoming partners have to say on the move, and Jeremy Zawodny does a nice all-in-one quote roundup of that here.

Postscript: Yahoo tells me doesn't disclose its current events feed partners, but that Upcoming content will eventually flow into Yahoo Local. Yahoo also plans to maintain Upcoming as a standalone site.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 10:29 AM | Permalink

Google Names Princeton President Shirley Tilghman To Board

News from Google that it has appointed a new member of its board of directors, Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University and professor of molecular biology there. She's not yet been added to the full board list, which you will find here. Tilghman brings the board up to 10 people, and she becomes the first and only woman on the board.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 5, 2005, 10:18 AM | Permalink

AOL Bolsters Web Search

AOL has rolled out a number of new features on its search.aol.com service. Although AOL search is powered by Google, it has a very different look and feel, and the new features make it a compelling alternative to the web search powerhouse.

More details about AOL's new offerings in today's SearchDay article, New Features at AOL Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 5, 2005, 10:12 AM | Permalink

On Library Card Catalogs, OPACs, The Perfect Search & Teaching Searchers

My mind is going a million miles a minute over the whole "Perfect Search" discussion that kicked off this week. Instead of getting it all out now, I plan to do in small doses while at the same time, hopefully, sharing some cool resources at the same time. Let me add a few comments to Danny's most recent post and add a few additional views on other issues.

First, while the human-edited model might have scalability issues, it doesn't mean that these types of tools (for example, general web directories) from non-commercial organizations are now, no less valuable to many searchers.

Sure, they're not the biggest in overall size (vs DMOZ) but the quality of the sources in these tools and their often meticulous maintenance is often what matters to a web researcher. For example, take a look at the LII, Infomine, and the Resource Discovery Network (here's an overview of the service that I wrote for SearchDay).

Remember, a good library does not have everything in its collection. "Collection Development" is a major part of library education and these directories, are good examples of this concept brought to the web. They also show that having some human involvement from subject specialists, librarians, etc. can prove useful.

Danny wrote:

The human-compiled card catalog looks only at book titles and short human-written descriptions of the books, maybe 25-75 words in all.
The crawler-compiled card catalog will let you scan every word on every page of every book in the library.

Let's stop using the term "card catalogs." They haven't existed in years. In an overwhelming majority of cases, card catalogs are now electronic databases that are called Online Public Access Catalogs ("OPACS") for short. Too long of a term? No problem. Consider them an "electronic library catalog" or the "library database". One thing is for sure, very rarely will you find paper cards. Yes, those good old paper cards had/have value but today's OPAC also offer lots of features.

For example, some allow you to get new book announcements via RSS. By the way, many libraries make these databases searchable for free over the web. Services like RedLightGreen allow you the chance to search hundreds of library catalog databases simultaneously and then allow you to customize for your local library's holdings. Heck, RedLightGreen will even format your bibliography for you. More about this service here.

Also, OPAC records of today often contain much more than the 25-75 words that Danny writes about (though to be fair, he's talking about web directories versus web search, rather than library paper card catalogs versus electronic library catalogs). Frequently, you'll find tables-of-contents, book reviews, snippets, web links, and more. The Library of Congress has an entire department called the Bibliographic Enrichment Team doing work in this area. Yesterday, Syndetic Solutions released even more info that can included in library catalogs.

Oh, how could I forget? Library book catalogs are not the only database tools available via the web (for free). Here's an article about some of what's out there. Lots of specialty databases (full text articles, too).

Second, Danny writes that the crawler-compiled OPAC will let you scan every page of every book in the library. Yes, in theory that's true and well, could be a great thing. Here's the problem. More unstructured data (words) could mean more false drops especially when you add-in the fact that most people only enter a few words in a web engine and only look at the first few results.

This is true whether or not the material comes from scanned books or just plain old web pages. If I had searchable access to every word in every book and entered "Football" I'm going to get back with millions and millions of hits and also have issues with precisely what the term means? American football? What most of the rest of the world calls football (aka soccer)?

Sure, the power searcher will have the skills to create a great search strategy from the outset and then refine as needed using the right tools. However, to this point, the typical open web searcher doesn't do anything like this and likely doesn't even know that have some of the tools to do it. Who is going to show them?

What I'm trying to say is that a bigger database doesn't necessarily mean better and in fact often means less precise results, especially when you're dealing with primarily, but not entirely, uncontrolled content. Some electronic databases also attach subject headings, descriptors and the like to help the searcher focus. Folksonomies could help but, IMHO, the jury is still out on their use and application. One thing is for sure scalability is an issue, I'm not denying that in the least.

Another part of a library school education is something called the reference interview. It involves a human working with a researcher and help them determine specifically what they're looking for and then provide the tools and search strategies to find the info. Good interviewing is a difficult skill to master. Perhaps what we need automated Q&A technology to help the searcher determine what they're looking for and then help them find it. Regardless of how good it is, it's still will not be a human.

Of course, dynamic clustering (we can talk about that at another time) might also play a role especially in the area of subject access and scalability. As Vivisimo says, its technology can quickly offer "selective ignorance" and help the searcher eliminate from a large results set what they don't want to see or need. In other words, increase precision with little work by the searcher while at the same time letting the page speak for itself.

Next, Danny writes, "It will find not just all the matching pages but often rank them so you are getting the very best ones." True in theory but as databases grow larger and larger, this will become more and more (increased recall lowers precision) of a challenge given the fact that very few people take advantage of the tools that are already available that can produce better search results. Udi Manber from A9 said a few months ago that search engines (at least for now) are not mind in the mind reading business and will have to invest in better thinking. He's right.

I also want to comment about what my friend, Jim Lanzone, from Ask Jeeves said:

That is not how people search, and neither you or I or any number of Web Search Universities is going to change that for the vast majority of searchers.

Look, I've been a "faculty" member of Web Search University (Chris, too!) since the first WSU met in 2001 and fully realize that we're only reaching a small, very small, number of people who are primarily professional searchers. However, and I think Lanzone would agree with me, web search training or as Eszter Hargittai calls it "practice," especially for students and educators, can only be a good thing.

As I've said many times, a little goes a long way. Search engines (with the money to offer training) should think of it as both a way to attract new users (in an age where many think there is just one search tool) and also as a public service.

Hargittai wrote in 2003:

Results from a study I conducted on average users' ability to find information on the Web suggest that there is great variance in whether people can locate different types of content online and their efficiency in doing so. These findings imply that simply offering an Internet connection to those without access will not alleviate differences or the so-called "digital divide." Rather, providing training is a necessary component of making the medium a useful tool for everyone.

So, do we have a new digital divide forming? Those who can access info quickly and efficiently and those who can't. I wonder if Rheingold has commented on this?

Finally, one more issue (for another time) is not only the ability to find and access information efficiently and in a timely manner but also having the skills to analyze the content for accuracy, currency, bias, etc. These skills are equally important to just being able to find what you want in the first place, especially in the web age.

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 8:06 AM | Permalink

Pimp My Searching: Internet Movie Database

Danny mentioned yesterday we've been planning a "Pimp My Search Engine" series to help readers get more out of their favorite search engines. Well, we're off! However, today I won't be telling you how to pimp one of the big, major search engines. Instead, I want to help pimp you as a searcher by getting you to a great specialty/vertical search engine. That's none other than the very popular Internet Movie Database from Amazon.com.

IMDB has become a standard and respected reference database for film and TV information. For film, TV, and pop-culture freaks, it's also a great deal of fun.

The IMDB is more than just a "enter a movie title or actor's name and get results" type of place. Sure, that type of search works fine, but it only scratches the surface of what IMDB offers.

Buried, deep (and I mean deep) within the IMBD web site is this amazing Power Search page search interface that can help you find an incredible amount of movie/TV info within seconds. I learned about this interface when a news librarian asked on a listserv I monitor to come up with a solid list of movies filmed in Denver. IMDB got me a list in about 10 seconds.

Specifically, I went to the Power Search page, and in section two, entered Denver in the "location" field and got nearly 200 matches. A perfect list? Probably not, but no reference tool is 100 percent accurate.

Sure, I could have gone to Yahoo, MSN, or Google and started searching and searching but they aren't the best tool for this type of specific reference request. This IMDB interface understood the context of my search was about TV and movies and only that.

I probably could have called Denver or the Colorado Film Commission to get a list. Well, that's true, but I'm not sure everyone would think to do that and heck, this was easier and faster. Plus, this interface offers many more options. How about comedy movies that filmed in Denver between 1970-1980 and were rated R? No problem! (There were four, by the way, including that Clint Eastwood classic, Every Which Way But Loose.

By the way, this is not the only other specialty search interface the IMDB offers. Another favorite is the Name Search/People Working Together database. Just enter names and see if they've appeared or worked together.

For example: How many movies (if any) have Gene Hackman and James Gandolfini been in together? Put both of those names in the "Names" box, click "Start Name Search," and a new page loads with both actors listed. Check the boxes next to their names, then click the "Look up joint ventures" button. Back comes the answer:

Crimson Tide (1995)

Get Shorty (1995)

Mexican, The (2001)

Have fun!

Posted by Gary Price on October 5, 2005, 7:51 AM | Permalink

Search Engine Employees Appear on Technology Innovators Under 35 List

I was reviewing the new Technology Review list of top innovators under the age of 35 (the TR35) and came across three names in the search, online info business. Make sure tointeresting. review the complete list, a very interesting read. A tip o' the SEW Blog cap to:

+ Stewart Butterfield, 32
Flickr/Yahoo

+ Dennis Crowley, 29
dodgeball (acquired by Google)

+ David Pennock, 34
Yahoo Research

Others on the list include Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) and Regina Barzilay, 34 (MIT). During her time at Columbia University, Barzilay helped develop the automatic news summarizer, NewsBlaster. The service remains online today.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2005, 10:51 PM | Permalink

Sun To Distribute Google Toolbar & Closer Relationship Beween Two; McNealy Says, "Lots of Money Flowing Both Ways if We Do This Right"

The Google and Sun Microsystems press conference is over and word is that Google and Sun have announced a "multiyear" strategic relationship for Google to cross-promote their technologies. Bottom line: another potential jolt to Microsoft software dominanance especially, MS Office. The relationship will begin with the optional inclusion (not yet available) of the Google Toolbar in upcoming downloads of the Java Runtime Environment. Financial terms were not disclosed but Sun CEO, Scott McNealy said, "There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right."

Here's a review of some of the press coverage to this point:

News.com

You mean Google makes an annoucement and it wasn't a big deal from the get go? Say it isn't so. (-:

Key Facts and Quotes:

+ As part of the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in downloads of the Java Runtime Environment from Java.com. The new functionality will be available soon.

+ Due to the popularity of Java on the desktop, downloads of Java have more than doubled year over year, reaching 20 million per month.

+ The distribution of Java and the Google Toolbar underscores Google's advocacy of Java technology.

+ The agreement between Sun and Google also kicks off further collaboration between the companies on projects like OpenOffice.org, the open source productivity suite that is the world's leading suite on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and Linux--and the leading alternative suite on Microsoft Windows.

+ "Working with Google will make our technologies available more broadly, increase options for users, lower barriers, and expand participation worldwide." --Scott McNealy, CEO Sun

NOTE: You can already register by email and be notified when the Google Toolbar for the Java Desktop will be available. From the looks of it, the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer (kind of ironic) will be the version distributed by Sun. Sorry Firefox fans (at least for now). Scott

Sun CEO Scott McNealy said the toolbar, "will appear in weeks if not days."

From Reuters:

Financial terms were not disclosed. "There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right," McNealy said.

From AP:

Eventually, the Java component could be offered to users who download the free toolbar that offers quick access to Google search, spell checking and a popup blocker.

From Forbes.com:

"We believe that this heavily promoted [Sun and Google] announcement is overblown, and does not represent a real definitive product threat to Microsoft's Office," S&P Equity Research. The Sun and Google partnership is "primarily as an enhanced distribution platform for each company," the research firm said.

From The Register:

The problem, however, is that even Google freaks - the types who would be excited if the ad broker started conducting mandatory, aggressive anal probes under the Fistoogle brand - won't find much to cheer here.* They've already got the Google toolbar, and are tooling around like, well, you know. For its part, Sun already serves up more than 20m downloads of Java per month. Will the availability of the Google toolbar - something already available from Google - make people want to download Java more? No, this deal centers more around the obvious - marketing.

* Wow, that's one strong comment. Comment of the year? It's a contender. (-:

From News.com

John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice president for software. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that what separates the Toolbar distribution deal from others the company has is the "vastness" of it.

Google also committed to buying more Sun servers, though Schmidt refused to detail how many or what type. That's significant, given the search giant's prestige as an Internet company and its reliance so far on machines it has built itself.

Pending agreement of project programmers, Sun will add a Google search bar to OpenOffice.org, an office software suite Sun turned into open-source software in 2000.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2005, 2:53 PM | Permalink

Shopping Engine Become.com Plans Move Into Japanese Market

Word in this Red Herring report that Michael Yang and the shopping research/comparison shopping engine, Become.com has plans to expanded into the Japanese search marketplace. The move is in partnership with Japanese information technology services firm, Transcosmos.

He [Yang] said his company chose to enter Asia through Japan because it was a bigger market than China. However, he said that Become also has plans to expand in China, but did not specify a time frame....Become Japan will be headquartered in Tokyo, and will launch with a staff of 15 in a 2,000-square-foot office.

Recently, Smarter.com, also in the shopping search space, announced plans to expand their presence in the Chinese marketplace. Alan Wallace from Smarter.com also alerts me to the fact that Smarter.com has been working in the Japanese marketplace for about six months.

More in the article: Become Expands in Japan.

For more about Become.com's offerings, see the SearchDay article: Become.com Offers Comparison Shopping.

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2005, 2:29 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Oct. 4, 2005: Yahoo Leads Open Source-Style Digital Library Program, Google Bids To Do Free Wi-Fi For SF, Seeking Better Query Refinement, Google Maps And Border Disputes, Wedding Proposal Via Ask Jeeves & More!

Today's search podcast covers more on Google's partnership with NASA for office space and data, more signs of a potential Google Calendar, whether site owners should get paid for carrying Google house ads, a list of nearly 100 factors to rank web pages, finding out the truth behind urban myths, a new way to create your own search engine and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 2:28 PM | Permalink

September 2005 Search News Recap Posted

The latest edition of my monthly Search Engine Report newsletter is now online, recapping tops stories in search from the past month. You can read it online or receive it via email for free by signing up here.

If you're a Search Engine Watch member, the latest edition of Search Engine Update newsletter has also been posted. That newsletter carries more items than the Search Engine Report newsletter and goes out twice per month.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 2:24 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Blog/Feed Search Coming

We had an unplanned glimpse of Yahoo's blog search in July, and now it looks like the service is going to formally emerge. Spotted via Steve Rubel, BusinessWeek cites Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz saying it might come as early as this week (or next week, depending on what you consider "next week" to be). Of course, Yahoo began offering blog search at Yahoo Korea back in August. Read Korean? Check out the service here. FYI, the glimpse of Yahoo "blog search" we had before was really for feed search. And Google's "blog search" is more accurately called Google Feed Search, as I explained here. Blogs aren't the same as feeds; feeds aren't the same as blogs!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 1:06 PM | Permalink

Google Seeks Sales Team For Payment Solution -- Also, Google Job Openings in the OC

We know that Google has plans in the online payment business (Google Wallet?, something else?). Today, I noticed that Google is now advertising positions for people to sell their "payment solution". It's an inside sales job based in New York City.

Inside Sales Representative, Google Payment Solutions - New York

Google is looking for upbeat, focused and well-organized individuals to join our Inside Sales team for Payment Solutions. You will be part of a group of specialists dedicated to expanding and supporting Google's merchant solutions.

Also, if you love Orange County, California (just ask Danny if you need a few reasons why you should) I noticed that Google has posted several positions to work in their Irvine, CA sales office. Positions include:

Posted by Gary Price on October 4, 2005, 12:01 PM | Permalink

Mastering Google AdWords

Google likes everyone to believe that using AdWords is a snap, requiring no more than five minutes and a credit card to get going. Seasoned search marketers know otherwise, understanding that creating a sponsored link is just one small aspect of managing a successful AdWords campaign.

Now we've got an excellent guide to AdWords written by Andrew Goodman, who's both an expert with the program on behalf of his search marketing clients, but also an astute and acerbic observer of Google's business practices. His new book gives us a concentrated dose of experience and insights that make a fascinating and highly valuable read. I've got a review of Andrew's new book in today's SearchDay article, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Google AdWords.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 4, 2005, 10:00 AM | Permalink

More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog

Yesterday, I wrote of how search engines could do a better job of query refinement and indeed did so in the past, especially because there was more human involvement in the search process. That drew out Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves, who sent me an email raising a good point that humans haven't gone away just because of the expense. Humans also have a "scale" problem. More comments from Jim on that are below, along with a further look at the scale issue and the need for the Google Generation to rediscover query refinement.

I agree with both Jim and Christopher Coulter, who commented on Robert Scoble's reference to my blog post:

Yeah well the Yahoo Human-Edited model couldn't scale, so you get Google Pagerank automational noised chaos. It's back to 1996 all over again. And the best 'search' is with a database

Indeed, humans haven't scaled well in terms of helping us gather content from across the web. Crawlers do a great job of that. I used a library metaphor on my ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories post earlier this year to explain why directories, after some promise, went away in the face of crawlers.

In short, imagine you go into a library and can use one of two card catalogs to find books on a topic you are interested in:

The human-compiled card catalog looks only at book titles and short human-written descriptions of the books, maybe 25-75 words in all.
The crawler-compiled card catalog will let you scan every word on every page of every book in the library.

The crawler-built catalog is far more comprehensive. It's also far more up-to-date. Remember, in the library of the web, the books often rewrite themselves or add pages in the way books in a physical library do not. Humans simply can't keep up with that activity.

The key, of course, is that the crawler service isn't just comprehensive but relevant. It will find not just all the matching pages but often rank them so you are getting the very best ones.

While humans don't scale well in the info gathering and retrieval side, they can play a role. More on that in a moment, but first, here's what Jim said in response to my post:

To say that the problem with human editors was due to it being "expensive" is true, but I don?t think it goes far enough to explain the problem.

Sure, Ask had great relevancy, but only for a single-digit percentage of the overall query stream. That is not how people search, and neither you or I or any number of Web Search Universities is going to change that for the vast majority of searchers.

Algorithmic search was the only solution to that problem because only an index of billions of pages could meet the user need that exists across the long tail of rare queries.

At its peak, the Ask Jeeves "knowledgebase," as it was known internally, matched on about 85% of searches. That was a lot. However, it was only picked 20-25 percent of the time, despite having premium placement at the top of the page.

Sure, some searches resulted in far higher pick rates than this. But the vast majority did not. Therein lay the problem. And due to the exquisite overpromise made by the premise of question-answering and the butler, this had consequences for the Ask Jeeves brand.

The brand was lucky, on the other hand, to gain a foothold in the market early on, and to hold on to millions of users because of it. But at the end of the day, people use a search engine to find what they need - quickly. That foothold would have become more tenuous had we not bolstered our ability to answer searches (questions or keywords) more accurately, more quickly, and more easily, than the original Ask product could deliver.

Today, with a combination of algo search, structured data search (Smart Answers), and unique tools that help people find things faster (Zoom, Binoculars), we are delivering against user needs exponentially more than we did before.

At the end of the day, this is about playing defense, not offense, against that wide and vast stream of searches. Most people are going to do what they want with that little white box, and will not have the patience of learning how to "search better" or set up a bunch of parameters ahead of time. The minute we understood this and started intuitively responding to their searches with better results and options, the more loyal those users became to our search engine.

Again, I agree with much of what Jim says. Historically, we know that searchers don't read help documentation, don't make use of options, don't do anything much beyond put a word or two in that black hole of a search box and get sucked in to click on whatever seems like the first "normal" result that comes up. Put a bunch of refinement links/suggested searches in front of them, and they're likely to just ignore those as being "weird" and move down toward the real results.

Solutions? First and foremost, do break the habit! I've taught search classes for many years, and people are amazed that when they look a bit past the standard 10 listings, there are options and suggestions that are useful.

In fact, we'll be doing a "Pimp Your Search Engine" or "Bling Your Search Engine" series shortly via SearchDay to try and help many readers understand some of the many features that are offered to you on your own favorite search engines that habit just may have blinded you to. Get 100 results at a time! Pop open new windows from search results! Discover easy ways to refine your queries!

Beyond that, let's see the search engines do more to make use of both humans and automation. I do want a human-created knowledgebase at Ask Jeeves and elsewhere to return.

Maybe it has to be much smaller and serve only the very most popular queries. But why not make it that if I type in hotels on Ask Jeeves, the automatically-generated "Narrow Your Search" options off to the right-hand side might be determined to make more sense to show up in the main part of the results, to better help people narrow in.

Moreover, look at what I get now at Ask Jeeves in that Narrow Your Search section:

Why not step beyond the automation and for this type of broad, common search, come up with some human-generated suggestions, such as:

Find a hotel by price, location or other options
Find the official site of a hotel chain
Find reviews of particular hotels

Those aren't perfect solutions/options, but I think they make the point. There ought to be more the search engine can do to have an actual dialog with people in the right cases.

I know, the risk is the less Google-like the results are, the more likely people are to feel uneasy or unsure about using a search engine. Well, the Google Generation needs to be smacked upside the face.

Honestly. Google has been an absolute, horrible failure in helping people refine their queries. It's no wonder people today may not even realize there are query refinement options out there beyond Google and before it existed, given that the major leader in the space hasn't made use of these. Let's see all the search engines dare to experiment more with these features and applaud them with they do.

By the way, speaking of applause, notice this over at Yahoo for hotels:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals

Yahoo! Shortcut - About

That's listed right above the first search result. I checked it out AFTER making my suggestions above, and you can see Yahoo's hit two of the three things I thought made sense. Great work, Yahoo! OK, cynics will say these links just help push people into Yahoo's own travel search areas. Yes, but they are good areas. People should be checking them out!

Why might you miss these links? Because they still don't look like the "regular" results that are numbered. So maybe they need to change. Maybe instead of being like this:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals

Yahoo! Shortcut - About

Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability

Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call.

Category: Lodging Reservation Services
www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

It needs to be more like this:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals

The Yahoo Shortcut links above will take you to our special travel search areas designed to let you scan the web for hotel prices and information. You can sort by price, location, amenities and more.
Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability

Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call.

Category: Lodging Reservation Services
www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

Again, top of my head stuff. But I think it makes the point of the "dialog" being presented in a more listings-style format. Maybe, maybe, that might help users see stuff they're missing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 9:50 AM | Permalink

Apple Europe Crackdown On Google Ads?

Spotted via Steve Rubel, Apple Cracks Down on Google AdWords at TidBITS suggests that Apple may be pushing on Google to enforce rules preventing advertisers from having ads show up in response to its trademarks in Europe.

Though the ads were initially said to have been stopped because of the use of the word "Mac" in the ad text, it later turned out that the complaint involved ads targeting that word that were showing up in the EU. The solution seemed to be restricting the ads to show up only in the US.

Google's trademark policy differs in the US and the UK. In the US, you can target ads to show up in response to terms that are also trademarks. You simply cannot use trademarked terms in ad COPY, if a trademark holder objects. In the EU, Google may restrict the ability to target ads to show up in response to terms that are also trademarks AND/OR the use of those terms in ad copy.

Why? Google has faced different lawsuits. In the US, the GEICO case found that linking ads to terms that are also trademarks was not confusing nor a trademark violation. But the court did think the use of trademarked terms in ad copy potentially might be confusing. Google's policy in the US gave it an end run around this.

In the EU, Google's lost cases about ads being triggered by terms that are also trademarks, thus the tighter policy.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 8:52 AM | Permalink

SEO Big With Small & Medium Sized Businesses

No Guesswork Here: Web Sites Work For SMBs at InternetNews.com has a few search stat tidbits worth noting. A survey has found that among ways small and medium-sized business promote their sites, SEO is ranked second, 54 percent, just after email at 60 percent. That's SEO as in non-paid search. Paid search (or PPC) was ranked fourth at 20 percent.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 8:25 AM | Permalink

BodyBuilding.com Builds $48 Million In Sales Off Natural Search

Via Gary Stein, How BodyBuilding.com pumps up sales by word of mouth marketing from Internet Retailer looks at how BodyBuilding.com expects to make web sales of $48 million this year largely off of traffic driven by free search listings. Rather than spend on search ads, the company has tons of articles that serve as fodder to attract natural search engine traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google's Many Projects & Interests

With rumors that Google might be teaming with Sun to push OpenOffice, Google morphs into multifaceted juggernaut from the Associated Press is a nice overview of the many different moves Google has been making recently and speculation on where it may go.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 8:12 AM | Permalink

Taiwan Not Happy With Being A Chinese "Province" In Google Maps

Via SEO Book, Taiwan tells Google it is not a China province from Reuters has Taiwan asking Google to stop calling it "Taiwan, Province Of China" on Google Maps, as you can see here. Out of curiosity, I went looking at a few other hot spots to see how Google was handling them.

Macedonia is labeled that way on the map but identified as "The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," which I gather is the UN preferred name for the country. The country itself uses "The Republic Of Macedonia," which is recognized by several other countries, including the United States.

As for Cyprus, the Republic Of Cyprus is shown to occupy the entire island of Cyprus except for the two small UK-run Sovereign Base Areas. In reality, the Republic Of Cyprus occupies two-thirds of the southern half of the island, with the northern third occupied by the Turkish-backed Turkish Republic Of Northern Cyprus.

As I understand, the UN and all governments other than Turkey recognize that the Republic of Cyprus has sovereignty over the entire island, so perhaps Google might argue the label is correct. But the border between the two areas is very real, as anyone who has to cross it knows. The map simply doesn't reflect that physical reality.

How about MSN Virtual Earth? I'd say it escapes criticism in two of three cases, because it doesn't supplement the map labels with descriptions. In other words:

Taiwan is just labeled as Taiwan, with no mention of it being a province or not of China
Cyprus is just labeled as Cyprus, and while a dividing line is shown, no further labels are given to say what portion is part of the Republic of Cyprus.
Macedonia is called FYROM or FYRO Macedonia, so the choice there isn't open to interpretation. MSN is going with the UN-backed name, rather than the name the country prefers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 4, 2005, 8:01 AM | Permalink

Google Not Alone In Desire to Build San Francisco Wi-Fi Network

In my post about Google filing a proposal to provide free Wi-Fi access throughout San Francisco, I tried to make it clear that Google wasn't the only company filing a proposal with the city. I think some believed that it was Google all the way. A News.com article by Stefanie Olsen: Google faces obstacles in S.F. Wi-Fi bid, does a great job taking a look at some of the the other companies in the running and notes that whatever company, if any, is chosen, they will face "lawsuits or legislation" according to the San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsome.

Olsen mentions that, Ericsson, Motorola, Nortel, SeaKay/Cisco, Symbol Technologies, SkyTel, Extreme Networks, GigaBeam and Metro-Fi are some of the other companies that have submitted proposals. The Wall Street Journal reported that Earthlink has also submitted materials.

...consumer privacy is a concern, Newsom said in response to a question at the conference about the possibility that companies providing Wi-Fi access would be looking to gather data on the location of users to deliver ads, in an example of the value of such information. [Mayor Gavin] Newsom's office will form a five- to seven-person committee, which includes [Chris] Vein, [director of the department of technology and information services for San Francisco], to analyze the proposals and make recommendations on them within the next three weeks. After that time, the committee will make specific requests for information for a network.

If the network is a go, the city hopes to have it up and running sometime in 2006.

Btw, as noted in my earlier post, a spokesperson for the for Mayor Newsome said Google will not receive an advantage because of their high or what News.com calls their "celebrity" profile.

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 9:17 PM | Permalink

Details about Europe's i2010 Digital Libraries Program Emerge

The European Commission has officially announced its plans to develop and build a digital library. The News.com article: Europe aims to rival Google with digital library reports:

According to an EC announcement on Friday, the aim of the project is to digitize and preserve records of Europe's heritage--including books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music--and make it available online to all European citizens. To make this happen, the European Union is proposing high-level cooperation between the member states and has set a deadline of Jan. 20, 2006, for first comments on the plans.

Ah, cooperation. It's a good idea especially in the library digitization world. Of course, talk of cooperation and actual cooperation are not the same thing.

You've got to wonder if Brewster Kahle, David Mandelbrot and other members of the Open Content Alliance team are working to convince this large digital library initiative to become a member of the alliance. It would seem to make sense, especially for searchers.

You can learn more about i2010 Digital Libraries program on its home page. The official press release is announcing the program also available.

Postscript: A brief rant. I completely realize (aka not naive) that Google is Google and whatever they do gets most of the press attention. The word Google gets people's attention. However, digitization programs have been going on for years, long before Google was even around. Heck, Project Gutenberg was around before Larry and Sergey were even born. Why does the press seem to believe that every other project must "rival" Google Library (I know it sells papers, gets clicks, I'm not naieve). Yes, Google Library is a massive and important undertaking but turning into a contest or war seems to make little sense. Other digitization programs (some large and some very small) working to digitize important materials are also crucial. Let the content, the quality of the digitization, the ease of access, be what really matters.

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 7:25 PM | Permalink

Google Plans to Partner With Sun

Another week and another partnership for Google. This time it involves Sun, not the star but the computer company. Of course, with Google's new deal with NASA, maybe Larry, Sergey and Eric have some a plan to harness the power of the Sun (we do know they have power issues) and Sun Microsystems is also involved. Ok, sorry, enough of me trying to be funny. Beta News and others are reporting that Google and Sun Microsystems will announce a collaboration project during a press conference tomorrow morning at The Computer History Museum in San Jose.

The press conference will begin at 10:30am PDST/1:30pm EDST and will be webcast here. Btw, when Google Earth launched Google registered the domain GoogleSun.com.

Postscript: News.com speculates on what might be announced saying that it, could shift personal computing out of Microsoft's domain and into Google's." Wow, that's a lot of speculation. Much of the talk about what's up focuses around Google and Sun doing something together with Sun's free, open source, OpenOffice software suite.

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 6:54 PM | Permalink

Project Gutenberg Founder on Digitization, ebooks and the OCA Launch

In my story today about the new Open Content Alliance and in my story last December about Google Library, I make mention of
Project Gutenberg, this book digitization project that creates "ebooks" has been going strong for almost 35 years (that's like a millennium in online info time). Here are some new stats and links about PG courtesy of Michael Hart.

Needless to say, Project Gutenberg's founder, Michael Hart, is a pioneer, if not THE pioneer when it comes to ebooks. He has lots to say on the topic. Below is an email, a commentary really, about the Online Content Alliance that he shared with me via email and allowed us the chance to reprint. Questions or comments can be sent to Michael at: Hart@pobox.com.

Yet another consortium of multi-billion dollar institutions has thrown its hat into the eBook/eLibrary ring today, just 9 months before the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg's placement on the Internet of the first eLibrary element, on July 4th, 1971.
Last December 14th Google used a multi-million dollar blitz of television, radio and print media to announce the Google Print revolution: "Today is the day the world changes," but so far it has been difficult to get even a handful of books from their project, some 10 months later.

I am wondering of the news media will give the same kind of coverage to a second such announcement, which will also put up an alliance of an Internet search engine giant with some multi-billion dollar libraries. I will be watching all the news programs tonight in eager anticipation, as I was doing last December, but I fear that "once burned/twice cautious" might take some of the wind out of their sails/sales.

However, this effort has one huge advantage: "The Internet Archive," run by my friend Brewster Kahle. Brewster is one person who has a proven ability to put an enormous resource on the Internet for the whole wide world to use.

This difference is such that I am willing to bet that Yahoo! gets off to a better start in the next 10 months than did a rather completely false start by Google.

Of course, the real test will be to see how long it takes a project such as this to reach a million eBooks, since there are already well over 100,000 eBooks already available free for the taking on various Internet sites, perhaps 50,000 of them from the various Project Gutenberg sites.

Here's a hope that a few years from now anyone can have the advantage of a million book home library, and in even a few years more to ten million books sitting on one inch of your own bookshelf next to your computer.

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 4:48 PM | Permalink

Is Your Site "Trust Worthy"?

Consumer Reports WebWatch wants "Trust Worthy" publishers to raise their hands -- in a full-page October 24 "New York Times" print ad.

Today, publishers received a letter asking them to pledge to adhere to CR's five credibility guidelines for all Web sites. Sign the pledge and the name of your organization will join The New York Times, CNN, WebMD, ING, Monster, Barnes&Noble and others who have vowed to uphold it.

The uh-oh moment is where the letter reads: "Should we not receive a prompt response, your company name may appear on our Web site and other communications as a site that has not complied with our guidelines."

There's a literal blacklist side of the ad. A list of company names will be published under the heading: Trust Worthy?
Copy asks: "Your company name here...or here?"

Consumer Reports isn't only trying to promote its Oct. 26 Trust or Consequences event in DC. As the letter points out, if your site isn't in compliance with the guidelines, all it may require are one or two simple fixes.

That, or the prospect of getting your company's name into the Times for free, will hopefully impel more than one site to give best practices a second thought.

So well done, Beau Brendler (director of Consumer Reports WebWatch).

Posted by Rebecca Lieb on October 3, 2005, 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time To Tweak Your AdWords Campaign?

Tune Your Google Ad Campaign from Kevin Lee at ClickZ provides a ton of tips on things to consider if you've been running AdWords but haven't tweaked your campaigns for awhile.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 3:22 PM | Permalink

Keeping Yourself Out of Web And Other Databases

Ann Harrison's, Wired News article: 'UnGoogleables' Hide From Search, offers a profile of Geri Agalia (not her real name), a person who values her privacy and is trying to keep info about herself out of the Google database. We've seen stories like this before.

Allow me share a few comments:

From the article:

"More people are finding they're leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web -- where Google's merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name.

Look, I can be as tough on Google as anybody, but always pinning these issues on Google is well, totally unfair. Many other crawlers are out there and accessing much of the same data as Google is. The person who wants/needs/desired to get to this info (often much more personal than what club you might belong to) will know to look elsewhere. Plus, trying to keep material only out of Google (I see lots of these stories) does not keep it out of other databases. Kudos to Ann Harrison for mentioning this at the end of her article but it should be an issue of "web search engines" not just Google.

Philadelphia real estate investor Victor Lindt says he's surprised his name doesn't show up on Google, especially since he once owned a well-known pastry shop that was covered by the local and national press.

If someone had the desire/want/need to learn more about Mr. Lindt they could look many other places besides Google like invisible or deep web databases. Lots of public record databases remain on the deep web. For example: if you've been involved in a U.S. Federal Court case, court dockets and filings might be available via the PACER database.

No doubt about it, web search makes things easier to find but the person who wants personal info is likely to have a database toolkit with hundreds if not thousands of free and fee-based tools to LEGALLY find what they're looking for. Now, you're likely saying the typical "troublemaker" doesn't have the time to check thousands of public record files. However, fee-based services like KnowX and Intelius aggregate lots of this material.

Finally, I regularly get email or read list postings about people outraged with Google's (not any other) online phone number lookup database. They want to know how to get their name and number out of the system. Here's the page. However, as Google correctly points out, simply getting out of Google phone database doesn't mean that it will be removed from others.

Trying to remain completely and totally private in the United States might be possible. Very difficult, but I guess possible. Laws in other countries make this a completely different issue. However, saying that some of the problem is Google's fault is ridiculous. However, it may be understandable given Google's prominence and a general lack of understanding on how large open-web engines work.

Note to search engines (not only Google): As a public service and to aid some privacy concerns, why not spend more resources (beyond a page buried on your site) teaching people, especially webmasters, how to keep material out of your databases. Keeping content off the web is becoming a frequent question we get asked at training sessions. I guess this also points out the fact that many people don't understand how web crawlers work. Btw, just placing this removal info on your blog will do little to no good. Why? These people are likely not to read your blog.

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 3:21 PM | Permalink

Daily SearchCast, Sept. 30, 2005: Mobile Search, Yahoo Site Explorer, MSN Shopping Search Refinements, AOL Saved Searches & More!

Friday's search podcast is now belatedly posted -- sorry about that! It covers trends in mobile search, Yahoo's new Site Explorer service, new shopping refinement options at MSN Search, AOL gaining a Saved Searches feature and more!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 3:11 PM | Permalink

Silicon Valley SIG To Meet Again On Mobile Search, Gains Blog

The Silicon Valley Search SIG group I mentioned earlier now has a Search SIG blog to keep you informed of events. The next one is on mobile search, being held at Google on October 10.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 3:06 PM | Permalink

Search May Not Be From Branding, But It Will Still Pull Branding Spend

Hmm. Reading MediaPost today, I came across Graydon Carter Disses Search Ads. That's Vanity Fair Graydon Carter, who seems to think the internet must be best viewed as EITHER a branding or direct marketing medium and appears to come down on the side of direct marketing, since he remarked about not being able to remember a single ad he's seen on Google.

The remark came at a Magazine Publishers Of America event last week, where a panel of editors defended print ads by bashing online, MediaPost reports. Well, you'd expect them to, I suppose -- at least, if they haven't figured out how to tap into online ad spend, as well.

I think the web can do both branding and direct marketing. Search -- meaning keyword-targeted search -- is definitely more of a direct marketing aspect, in my book. Yes, marketers I talk with do find there is branding value to be had along with search. More and more are also turning to search to build brand. But I think those magazine editors are right if they feel people still will be largely looking at other ways to build brands than on the pages of Google.

No, the threat isn't that Google, Yahoo and other search engine result pages will become brand building powerhouses. Instead, the threat the magazine editors and publishers really face is that the direct marketing ads people spend on search can be easily measured, are currently still relatively cheap and for many, can be self-funding. Put money in, and you can get more out in sales.

So where do you get that extra money? You pull from the branded advertising that many feel is poorly measurable and overpriced. In short, brand advertising offline will continue -- but it just might not be seen as valuable as it once was.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 3:03 PM | Permalink

Update On Search Ranking Factors List

Earlier I posted how Rand Fishkin had created a list of nearly 100 factors that search engines might consider in ranking web pages. I also wished there was a way for everyone to contribute and rate the factors. Now he's working to let a small number of people vote and contribute to refine the list, then he's going to do a revision. He explains more here. Postscript: Previously I had a link to the voting page that Rand's using for his small focus group. I pulled it down, because he didn't intend for everyone to get to use it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 2:41 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Accused of Trying to Steal Trade Secrets

It seems like everyday we have a story involving lawyers, courts, and search companies Today, is no different. News.com reports that Nuance Communications, a California speech technology company, has asked a California court to place a temporarily restraining order on about 12 speech engineers who left Nuance and are now doing interactive speech work at Yahoo. The lawsuit claims that Yahoo is trying to steal trade secrets.

In its court documents, Nuance alleges that Yahoo "gutted" its research and development unit and hired away 13 of its engineers. Nuance also alleges that its former vice president of research and development, Larry Heck, helped Yahoo hire a dozen of his engineering staff.
"We think the complaint is completely without merit and we are going to defend ourselves vigorously," said Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars. She declined to offer further comment.

Btw, did you Yahoo offers a service called Yahoo by Phone that allows you to get sports scores, weather, contact info (from your contact folder), and even listen to your email (not just Yahoo Mail) over the telephone? It costs $4.95/month.

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 2:25 PM | Permalink

Call Tracking Is For Everyone, Even If Pay Per Call Isn't

Honestly, all the hype over pay-per-call often makes me shake my head. Yes, it can be a simple way for people without web sites to get search-targeted traffic. But people who say they'd prefer a phone call rather than a web site visit because they can track and act on the call? Then just run an ad to a page with your phone number! That's cheaper than doing pay-per-call, and you can still get the call. Pay Per Call vs. Call Tracking: Walk Before You Run from Justin Sanger at ClickZ looks at this "walk before you run" approach in more depth. He rightly explains that pay per call is not the same as call tracking. Calls can be tracked without going into pay per call, and many would benefit by doing so.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 1:53 PM | Permalink

Search Ads & Trademarks Cases Beyond Google-GEICO

R.I.P. Geico versus Google from iMedia Connection is a nice rundown on other cases on the docket that involve trademarks linked to search ads and how they have become more important now that the Google-GEICO case has been settled.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 1:47 PM | Permalink

Google After SEM Execs To Woo & Train Agencies?

Google Searches for SEM Talent at ClickZ covers how various search marketing firms are reporting that Google's after their execs apparently to beef up its agency outreach. It follows on a recent Yahoo hire.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 1:43 PM | Permalink

Blinkx.tv Will Now Host and Serve Your Video Content

Blinkx.tv is joining others, namely the Google Video Upload program, in allowing users to upload and any all video content for free. The service is called MyBlink.tv. In other words, Blinkx.tv will now host and serve your video content for free. Searchers/viewers will also be able to watch your online video for free but eventually give owners a chance to sell access to their content." We've also heard talk about Google possibly doing the same thing.

Like the Google Video Uploaded program, Blinkx will serve the video in Adobe's Flash Format. Unlike submitted video material at Google, material submitted to Blinkx will be "transcript" searchable. So, if your friend says, "This is an awful vacation," on a video you submit, you'll be able to search those words and go directly to that portion of the video.

At launch, My Blinkx.tv only plans to feature noncommercial video content (aka video blogs) however, according to this InfoWorld story, "the company intends to strike deals with commercial video producers to include their videos in the service as well."

I'm curious to see how good Blinkx does in finding and removing material still in-copyright from the service. The same goes for Google, where I still easily find in-copyright content that's viewable. Just yesterday, the Google Video homepage that now offers suggested "random videos", suggested a several minute clip of Late Night With Conan O'Brien taped off of NBC.

More about My Blinkx.tv in the InfoWorld story: Blinkx improves multimedia search engine.

Btw, Blinkx.tv also offers transcript search of podcasts.

Note: Video search services, along with adding user submitted video ( there are sure a lot of Jackass wannabees out there) what about working with producers, often educational organizations, of video and audio lectures (ResearchChannel.org, MIT World, and thousands of other new and archived sources of lectures, special presentations, etc.) and make sure there content is regularly crawled and added to your databases?

Posted by Gary Price on October 3, 2005, 1:03 PM | Permalink

Robert Scoble Wants What We Had -- Better Query Refinement. So Do I!

Robert Scoble's just finished reading John Battelle's book The Search and ponders creating a new chapter to follow John's ending one on "The Perfect Search." In short, Robert wants better query refinement. Well, we've had in the past and maybe will get again in the future. Below, I'll walk you through how exactly what Robert wants came and, sadly, went away. Plus my own thoughts on The Perfect Search.

Robert writes:

Now, go to "hotel" and you'll see what I call an intermediary at the top (hotels.com). You'll also see Hilton, Marriott, Best Western, among others.

But that's not what you wanted. Remember, you were going to New York. So, you realize your search isn't specific enough. So, you enter "new york hotel."

Now we're getting somewhere. Lots of hotels. But, the first one is a hotel in Las Vegas. That's what we call "noise." Google can't decide between hotels IN New York or hotels NAMED New York.

Ahh, now you are understanding the problem. Today's search engines don't understand the CONTEXT of your search.

Yep, that's the classic problem. Nor is it a new one that today's search engines are grappling with. They've understood it for over a decade.

This is what I quoted WebCrawler creator Brian Pinkerton saying when I wrote my How Search Engines Rank Web Pages page originally back in 1996:

As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, "Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying, 'travel.' They?re going to look at you with a blank face."

OK -- a librarian's not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they're going to ask you questions to better understand what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can't rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

Many search writers have quoted Brian on this, because he's explained it often and well. A search engine, unlike a librarian, can't interrogate you. It can't ask further questions to help you narrow in on what you are looking for.

That's why the regular trend of someone trotting out a super-magical "natural language" search engine is always laughable. The pitch generally goes something like, "This search engine is smart enough to know when you typed in a sentence about AIDS that you meant AIDS the disease rather than aids as in something that helps you."

That would be great if people entered sentences with a variety of terms helpful for analysis. They don't. They enter anywhere between one to three words, typically. There's no context to analyze.

Instead, what you really want is someone to ask you further questions and give you options to explore. As Robert writes:

So, what COULD search engines do? Well, first, give me some choices at the top of the page. Why couldn't search engines ask you these questions:

1) "are you looking for hotels in New York or named New York?"
2) Are you looking for hotels with free Wifi?
3) Are you looking for hotels with great views?
4) Are you looking for hotels nearby major tourist destinations?
5) Are you looking for hotels with above average ammenities like super large bathtubs, well stocked minibars, etc.?

Indeed, they could. Indeed, they have. That was the claim to fame for Ask Jeeves, when it launched in 1997. As I wrote then:

[Ask Jeeves] provides matching web pages, but results are usually prefaced by questions aimed at helping users find the information they want. For example, a search for "Bill Clinton" brings back a results pages topped by these questions:

+ Where can I find information about US President Bill Clinton
+ Who ran for U.S. President in 1996?

That's what Robert wants. And it worked. Ask Jeeves had great relevancy that helped it gain marketshare that it continues to hold on to today because of this initial "question answering." But it wasn't natural language search technology that made it happen, as people often mistakenly assume about Ask Jeeves. It was a bunch of human editors who watched the queries that came in, then made questions to help refine your search further, then linked you to preselected pages that seemed to have the right answer.

My Ask Jeeves: Asking Questions To Give You Answers article from 1998 looks even further at this:

Enter Ask Jeeves. The service does an impressive job of getting people to what they want by asking questions.

For example, imagine you want information about cars. Enter "cars" into the Ask Jeeves search box, and the service comes back with questions like:

+ Where can I find product reviews for cars?
+ Which models of cars are most frequently stolen?
+ Where can I locate information on the history of automobiles?

In front of each question is a Go icon. Choosing it takes users to a web site that answers the question.

The secret to the accuracy of Ask Jeeves is human intervention. About 30 people work full time creating the knowledge base of questions, which currently numbers about 7 million. They come up with ideas on their own, especially for popular topics, and they also watch what people are actually searching for.

So what happened? Why don't we STILL have the refinement Robert wants? Because humans are expensive, and analyzing links was cheaper. Google popularized that, and all the search engines went the crawler/algorithm/automation route. Ask dropped its editors.

So did MSN, by the way. MSN used to have editors that did this type Ask Jeeves-style refinement. As I wrote back in 2000:

New "Popular Search Topics" links that now appear below the search box, after you perform a search. These are suggestions designed to help you easily narrow your request to a particular topic, if your original search was ambiguous. For example, in a search for "saturn," you'll see these options:

+ Saturn Corporation (auto manufacturer)
+ Saturn (planet)
+ Sega Saturn cheats (game hints)

Select a topic, and the search engine will rerun your request focused around that particular topic. However, the real beauty to these is that you're not simply giving the search engine new words to search for, such as "planet saturn," if you were to choose the planet-oriented topic. While those words will appear in the search box, behind the scenes they are mapped to other words that editors at MSN Search believe will bring up the best sites for that topic. Moreover, the editors may have preselected what they believe to be the best sites for that particular query.

That's just one example of the hard work going on at MSN Search to improve the quality of their results. A team of editors closely monitors search logs and provides human intervention where needed to improve the listings. Misspellings are a good example. Consider:

That editorial oversight I always felt was a key reason why MSN did, at one time, have very good relevancy. But in the quest to embrace links and crawling (and cost savings with that), it went away.

How about Yahoo? Yahoo's human compiled directory structure helped make the service popular in my book because the directory lead to query refinement in a way the crawlers couldn't match. You can still get to that, as I explained in my recent Google Ranking Itself Tops For Britney Spears & The Need For Better Categorization post, but you've gotta work hard to get there:

The reality is every search on any search engine will have some irrelevant results. Ideally, what you'd want for a popular and broad query on Britney is to get a better classification of types of results you can see: official sites, fan sites, sites about her film career, Britney as a part of popular society and so on. Since everything has some relevancy, such groupings help ensure you get into a particular area related to Britney that you're interested in.

For example, consider if you searched on Yahoo Directory, where you could see all directory categories like this:

Rock and Pop > Britney Spears

Rock and Pop > Anti-Britney Spears

Britney Spears Concert Tickets

Britney Spears > Lyrics

See how the "topical relevancy" of all things Britney is divided into four major areas? How about the 208 topics that Clusty finds, which include:

Britney Spears pictures (36)

Fan (19)

Nude (25)

Album (18)

Artists, Art (19)

Galleries (10)

Married (7)

Britney Spears lyrics (7)

Launch (5)

DVD, Amazon (6)

MTV (4)

Britney Spears Online (5)

Britney Spears Posters (5)

Britney Spears Tickets (5)

Totally Britney (5)

Baby One More Time (7)

Stage (5)

N Sync (5)

Semiconductor Physics (2)

Sadly, the demise of human-powered directories on major search engines has all but killed such categorization from really being show to searchers.

I've seen various prototypes of query refinement tools from smaller players over the years, and query refinement at the major players isn't dead, of course. Ask Jeeves just improved its Zoom tool, for example. In addition, the continued growth of vertical search helps. It's easier to give you lots and lots of options of hotels to choose from when you're in a travel vertical search engine. That's because unlike in regular search, you're probably in a better frame of mind to make use of relevant drop-down boxes and checkboxes that would be ignored in web search.

Overall, I share Robert's frustrated times 100! One of the reasons I've found tagging a waste of time, as I ranted in my Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior piece, is because search engines have had tools to help us better refine our results and cluster pages into topical areas. It's just been ignored -- ignored to the point that we're making use of tools like tagging to make up for what we ought to get from the search engines directly.

John's seen Robert's post and gives a few comments here. Tim Bray touches on Robert wanting the Semantic Web here. General comments from those reading Robert's post can be found on his blog here.

FYI, John asked me for thoughts on The Perfect Search that didn't make the cut for the book. But if you're curious, here's what I emailed him back last September. I'll ask him if I can add in the email I was responding to, that puts my response in better context. If so, you'll see it added here later. My response:

I can't imagine such a world. It makes a nice pitch for the search companies, but knowledge is a messy thing.

If we're talking about indisputable facts, it's a bit easier. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. I know of no one who questions that.

Who was the first person on the moon. Neil Armstrong -- unless you are of the contingent that believes moon landings never happened. OK, I think those folks are crackpots. But the perfect search that comes back with Armstrong isn't the perfect search for them.

What's the answer to gay marriage? Who killed Kennedy? Was Bush right or wrong for going into Iraq? Is the MMR vaccine safe for children?

None of these can be answered definitively. They're more than just questions with nuances. They're questions that have answers ultimately determined the by reader themselves, answers that may be different for each person, based on what they choose to believe after reviewing many opinions.

I can envision a system that tries to collect for you a variety of references on topics. Maybe it even assembles them into an encyclopdia-like, wiki-like page. The assemby of this knowledge might be considered "answers" by some. To me, it still represents the start of a knowledge quest. It's akin to exactly how search works now -- a list of references, with the searcher still needing to explore.

I'm sure we'll see search advance on simply pointing people to the easy stuff, the facts that can be produced, direct navigation to web sites and so on. I'm also sure we'll see search improve to better understand what we're interested in, based on past habit and visits. But all knowledge will never be accessible, unless they figure out a way to digitize the minds of everyone living and dead. Even when dealing with what knowledge we do have chronicled, distilling a perfect answer is impossible. God could provide a perfect search as you outline. Search engines aren't God today, and they'll never be.

Having said this, I was agast last year when some Wi-Fi exec likened Google to God in Friedman's column. While we may not have the perfect search, nor will we, some people may believe search engines (and the web by extension) already offer it.

We've had articles about judges searching the web themselves to see if they can dig up evidence. Fox News lamely tries to defend calling the BBC anti-American by citing search counts. Students apparently are abandoning traditional research methods and assuming the magic little search box brings up the right answer. I've watched people spend tons of time searching for a company's phone number rather than just calling information. Two television shows I watched this week had characters talking about how they "Googled" something, with the assumption that whatever they retrieved must be correct. Some people already believe a perfect search tool exists, and the way it is shaping them is that they're relying on it too exclusively.

So the threat is this. In a world where people believe a perfect search exists, that world may fail to seek out knowledge in other ways. Someone blogs something that's factually incorrect. Search picks this up. There are no other references out there. Search is perfect, ergo, what's wrong becomes right. No one bothers to actually follow up on the fact.

I was fortunate enough in college to hear Loren Needles from Analytica talk about the need to fully question any facts. At the time, he talked about how a recent hurricane had been blamed for a dropoff in some economic indicators. In short order, he quickly demonstrated how there was no way the hurricane could have cause a dropoff of such extent. Despite this, newspapers across the country accepted the explanation as fact.

That's what a perfect search potentially does for us, makes us less questioning because we think the answers are all in that little box. They aren't, nor will they ever be.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 12:41 PM | Permalink

Skip The $79 Ranking Software

Change the name, and the warning that CJK Cybermedia gives about $79 software package could be just as applicable. In general, submission or rank improvement software of any type has never been that useful, in my experience.

This review explains how the software generates queries on search engines that contain the terms you want to be found for plus your URL. So if you wanted to rank well for "cars" and your domain was "bestcars.com," it would send Google and other search engines a query for [cars bestcars.com] or something like that.

No, that's not going to make you any more "popular" to search engines in my book. I spotted the review via SEOmoz as did Google's Matt Cutts, who does some further debunking in his $79 SEO software? post.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 11:58 AM | Permalink

Being Indexed Versus Being Ranked

SEO Practices: Indexing and Ranking from Mike Grehan at ClickZ is a good reminder that being indexed by a search engine isn't the same as ranking well. It's only when a page ranks that you'll gain traffic, and getting the page to rank comes down to great content attracting good links, in his book.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 11:44 AM | Permalink

Google Wins Age Discrimination Suit

Google Prevails in Age Discrimination Suit from the Associated Press covers Google winning in an age discrimination suit that was filed in July 2004. Brian Reid, one of AltaVista's founders who went over to Google, filed the suit when he was aged 54 and alleged that he was told by a Google exec that he didn't fit into Google's youthful atmosphere. Reid's firing from Google cost him stock options estimated to be worth $38 million. Reid's complaint against Google was also featured in John Battelle's new book The Search (page 233-234).

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 10:47 AM | Permalink

Threadwatch Turns One: Congrats!

Happy First Birthday, Threadwatch! If WebmasterWorld has been the SEM industry's Slashdot, and Gray Hat News fills the role of The Onion (and happy birthday Gurtie!), Threadwatch to me has often been our tabloid newspaper. Like the The National Enquirer or The Sun, it can have that simultaneous feeling of reading a scandal sheet and thinking you shouldn't! But it's far from all scandal and sensation. Nick's built a great community and resource that I turn to regularly. You can drop your own greetings at the site's thread, Threadwatch: 1yr Old Today.

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 10:08 AM | Permalink

Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz Proposes Via Ask Jeeves Search Results

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable is getting married. He proposed to his girlfriend by getting her to type her name into Ask Jeeves, where the Ask Jeeves team kindly helped long-time Ask Jeeves-watcher Barry by rigging up a custom answer. Hmm -- perhaps something that could even be a future product offering? Barry tells you more here: First Ever Wedding Proposal via Search Engine. Congrats, Barry and Yisha -- and Happy New Year, as well! Want to send your congrats? Drop them a note at in the thread at our SEW Forums, Wedding Bells For Rustybrick, As He Proposes Via Ask Jeeves!

Posted by Danny Sullivan on October 3, 2005, 9:50 AM | Permalink

A New Alternative to Google Print

The Open Content Alliance is launching today, with plans to make thousands of books, multimedia files and other materials freely searchable and accessible and online. Unlike Google Print, however, anyone adding content to the Open Content Alliance must have permission from copyright holders.

Gary has more on the new initiative, including comments from one of Google Print's harshest critics, in A New Digital Library Alliance Makes its Debut.

Posted by Chris Sherman on October 3, 2005, 9:36 AM | Permalink

Google Bidding To Provide Free Wi-Fi To San Francisco

Google has joined the competition along with 11 other companies including as Earthlink to provide San Francisco residents and visitors with free wi-fi. San Francisco expects to decide on a vendor within weeks. If Google is selected, it says it could have a network up and running within weeks, as well. Google says it doesn't have plans to expand free wi-fi beyond San Francisco, though the company has already said previously that it sees helping promote universal internet access as part of its corporate mission. Below, a round-up of coverage on the news.

According to Om Malik's post from Friday:

Google officials say San Francisco residents (and visitors) will enjoy a free 300 kilobits per second, always on connection anywhere in the city. As part of its proposal, the company says it will be offering wholesale access to other service providers, who will offer higher throughput connections to their customers.

Verne Kopytoff and Ryan Kim in the SF Chronicle add that Google isn't the only company bidding on the project.

Google's was one of more than a dozen competing bids received by the city before its deadline Friday. Officials will review the submissions and decide which, if any, of the candidates gets the green light...

The article goes on to mention that Google's Chris Sacca, the person in charge of Google's bid, hasn't determined yet if paid ads will be part of the service but will sell access to the network for companies who want to offer paid services. Coverage from the Associated Press is also here.

In case you're wondering a spokesperson for the SF Mayor Gavin Newsome said the decision would be made in weeks not months and that Google will receive NO advantage because of their high profile (aka just being Google).

At this point I could ask what any of this has to do with search and organizing the world's info, but doing that is old, repetitive, and a waste of time. Plus, Google is into what Google is into which is just about everything. With their published corporate mission statement, they are able to spin just about anything into being about organizing info and providing access to it. I even joked about that last April Fools Day. (Postscript from Danny: Google has said promoting internet access is part of its corporate mission, as explained here).

A day after the news came out, Google in San Francisco: 'Wireless overlord'? from News.com gives a rundown on what are people saying. Some wonder about Google knowing to much about their users.

"They will know much more information about your activities" than they can glean from a stationary PC, Ira Victor, managing partner for security information firm Data Clone Labs, said in an interview.

One thing is for sure, this Wi-Fi info could provide truly "local" and if required, time-sensitive search advertising if Google decided to provide ads. You're using Google Wi-Fi and hitting tower near the 1600 block of Market Street at 11:20 am. Then, an ad appears asking you if you're interested in walking just a few steps and having lunch at the Zuni Cafe at 1658 Market St? If you make reservations via the Google Reservation and Ticket Service (just guessing about this initiative), you'll get 10% off lunch, 20% if you come between 1-2:30pm. You'll also get a Google t-shirt (some autographed by Google execs), and a chance to win a ride aboard the new NASAGOOGLE spaceship. Heck, if you're also a Google AdWords customer, they'll knock a few bucks off of your next bill. (-:

By the way, Dan Gillmor also touches on the Google vs. privacy issue in his blog post saying it's an issue that keeps appearing. More on that topic later.

Others in the blogosphere speculate what this might do to the telecom industry and many agree that Google is once again driving innovation. Let's also not forget Google's plans to build it's own telecom network.

Of course, since Google's bid is one of many and it will not be getting any special attention (-:, we'll have to wait and see if they even have the opportunity to provide the service.

Posted by Gary Price on October 2, 2005, 2:06 AM | Permalink

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