Category Archives: search

Yahoo 2.0 Trumps Google 2.0 …. again.

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As Jeremy has noted, microformats are slowly but profoundly moving the web to the open, data rich, info cornucopia we’ve all been dreaming about. Yahoo is clearly the leader as “Web 2.0 Stylist” and one wonders if Google is going to be left wondering what hit them as developers and users move increasingly towards the simple but data rich environments Yahoo’s been creating for some time.

I’m beginning to wonder if Yahoo’s challenge in increasing market share, and thus stock price, is counterintuitive. Yahoo has effectively matched Google in search quality and has created a LOT of excellent applications and rich APIs while Google has simply stuck to a few great basics like gmail and search.

Perhaps the choice is simply overwhelming people who are thus choosing to stick with Google’s search interface (still simpler than Yahoo’s). Malcolm Gladwell has noted that when presented with too many purchase options people actually may choose fewer items than if presented with a smaller number of options. Could Yahoo’s problem be that they simply are doing too GOOD of a job ushering in Web 2.0 ?

Update:  When Jeremy over at Yahoo took me to task on this post I realized I’d not expressed myself clearly and it looked like I was talking about a search comparison.  (I’m leaving the post intact since he references it with a lot of comments.)  I was not talking about  Yahoo vs Google in search as much as Yahoo vs Google in the many other 2.0 projects like Flickr, APIs, and social networking features where I think Yahoo is beating out Google but not getting enough credit for seeing the future of the internet more clearly than most.

Kayak vs Sidestep = $200 Savings!

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After gushing over Kayak's great flight search I realized I had not used Sidestep in some time and should give it a try.   In my opinion Sidestep used to really suck, requiring download of software to your browser and in my limited experience did not deliver good rates. 

Now, like Orbitz and Kayak, Sidestep allows easy browser based searching.  However for the 2-3 legged cross country flight I'm currently researching (MFR to BWI), Kayak blows away Sidestep and Orbitz with an American Airlines flight that is a whopping $200 less.  

This could be a quirk due to my rural Oregon location but I'm impressed nonetheless.  I also REALLY like Kayak's intuitive interface and the ease of selecting your previous searches very quickly.    Rates from the big systems are updated three times per day and availability can change even more frequently, so it's a good idea to search using the same criteria several times before you "give up" on a good rate.  Persistence pays in the bookings game and Kayak makes it easier to stay on task. 

Eventually I'll try to do a better more  balanced comparison where I'll pick a bunch of routes and run them on the different consolidation systems to see who wins, but first I'll do a few more of these quickie comparisons such as Kayak vs Yahoo's fairly new offering "FareChase".

Kayak.com shines as airline ticket tool

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My initial experiments with Kayak over a year ago left me unimpressed, but Kayak.com has evolved into one of the best tools for finding cheap flights.  There are several notable features that make it a great way to search for flights when you have some flexibility and want a good price:

* You can select a date range of up to 3 days before and after your departure and return.  Without this feature Orbitz was probably better than Kayak for discount flight seekers, but now that Kayak's got it you are able to get a good fare picture for a range of dates.  

You must sign up for this but all that requires is a 10 second email signup.  A huge hat tip to Kayak's team for recognizing that even requiring a name and address is a barrier to sign ups.  Get all that mundane detail from people later or not at all.

* Also great is Kayak's ability to select different arrival airports with immediate fare updates allows you to fine tune your driving to flying ratios.   Especially helpful when traveling to areas where several major airports may be in close proximity to many final destinations.   BWI, IAD, and PHL for example or SFO, SMF, and OAK in California. 

Bill Gates to become full time philanthropist and leave Microsoft management over next 2 years

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Bill Gates' passion has become his outstanding philanthropic work, mostly relating to global health initiatives, and today he said he'd leave his day to day management of MS over the next two years.

Although the future of Microsoft may be in question thanks to the rapidly changing online, open source and competitor environments, this is a great day for international development efforts.  

In addition to saving over a *million* people from tragic deaths due to disease, the Gates Foundation has brought an entrepreneurial, innovative approach to the development of global health solutions.   I'm thrilled that Gates – still a young whippersnapper – will devote his substantial intellectual and monetary resources to the world's greatest challenges.  Bravo Bill!

Fortune Magazine: Is Slashdot the Future?

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Back in February David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine's senior editor, raved about Slashdot and SourceForge as the future of media.   He focuses on the power of content and communities generated by users and notes how effectively and powerfully Slashdot manages content and community with minimal staff. 

Kirkpatrick ponders the implications of open source "revolution" noting that open source is:

… Creating something of tremendous widespread utility for the ego value …

How powerful will ego be in shaping the media landscape of the future?   I've been noting at events like Mashup Camp as well as chats with people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc that large numbers of extremely bright people are motivated to a very large extent by pride and virtuosity rather than a narrow focus on money.    It's not just coincidence that corporate giants Yahoo and Google began in academia as non-commercial projects.   Both were inspired more by the interests of their creators than by a quest for dollars, yet rose to become two of the most successful companies in the history of commerce.
Of course profits and selfishness will play significant roles in the future of almost all companies, but perhaps the ability of the internet to leverage time, skills, and social connections so effectively is also generating more ego-based economic activity than ever before.

Online vs Offline Advertising – an epidemic of irrationality.

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Matt McAlister is unimpressed with online advertising.

OK, but take a look at OFFLINE dude! I replied to him over at his blog:

I think you may be overestimating the abysmal stats behind conventional advertising. Online, the 1% of people clicking into an advertiser's site at a cost of perhaps .15-.25 is very good. For example if you advertise a website prominently in a print publication you should expect perhaps 1/10th to 1/100th that level of performance (1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 readers) clicking to the site. I've tested this result using unique URLs and large print ads and the results were…underwhelming. I've seen no study to contradict my own results though I've noted many ad buyers tend to evaluate ad effectiveness in very questionable ways, such as when a $20,000 print campaign results in a few thousand leads and the conclusion is that it was a huge success.

Context ads have redefined the relationship between content and advertising in a positive way for both advertisers and publishers, and until a LOT more money flows from absurdly overpriced offline media to online, and thus starts to close the ROI gap, I think it is unreasonable to expect online ad models to change much, although do see them moving away from PPC and towards pay per action models which make performance measures somewhat more straightforward and PPC fraud almost impossible.
I think many online folks simply have no idea about the incredibly poor performance of offline advertising. My working hypothesis is that most advertising buys have negative ROI but that media companies and sales reps have done a very good job of convincing ad buyers that their advertising is working.

This article suggets that Google's failure to get high bids for print ads was an anomoly.  On the contrary I think this is a glimpse of the future of advertising, which will continue to move online until relative ROIs balance out.

Google selling print failed because print advertising is *dramatically* inferior to online and Google customers know this. Even online campaigns generally have negative ROI, but I suggest that most large, image driven print campaigns have negative ROI unless flimsy methodologies are used to measure ROI.

Few clients measure print effects well if at all, allowing advertising reps and companies to BS their way to keeping TV and print in play which is the main funding source for large media companies.

Based on my observations and experiments with print and online advertising in the travel sector It's an epidemic of irrationality, where few bother to measure ad effectiveness and those few who do measure it, and find print generally fails to deliver positive ROI, simply turn to subjective justifications for continuing failed campaigns.

Yahoo Maps “Go ahead, commercialize me”

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Jeremy via the Yahoo Developer Blog clues us in that Yahoo has "lifted many of the restrictions associated with the Yahoo! Maps APIs. Until today, the APIs were available only for non-commercial use unless you applied for an exception. The concept of commercial and non-commercial has gone away and exceptions are no longer necessary in most cases".   [bolding and italics added by bold Italian Renaissance Artists]

Although I'm not surprised about this (Yahoo and Google reps at Mashup Camp in February were indicating that the future for API use was going to move  along these lines) I think it's superb and cool and a huge hat tip to Yahoo for, as usual, getting the big Web 2.0 picture right and right on.
The concept is echoed by Eric Schmidt at Google in his recent LA Times interview:
We don't do our own content. We get you to someone else's content faster. 

As a publisher I'm loving this.  Give me simple but robust tools and an advertising network and I'm happy to find content and work to create sites and share the revenues with those who manage the network and the APIs.

The Internet Open = news at the speed of enthusiasm

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The French Open ended moments ago, and already the Wikipedia biography of winner  Rafael Nadal – aka "Raffy Boy" for those of us who don't know him – has been revised to reflect the win against Roger Federer.

This news items, like the big tech news items of today Scoble leaves microsoft which was accurately posted extensively at many blogs before conventional news outlets could even have hoped to find out, strongly indicates that the internet has the potential to react to breaking news more quickly, more accurately, and perhaps most importantly, *VERY CHEAPLY*.    Millions of potential reporters are out there, enthusiastically posting blog items or revising websites in response to what interests them.
Can all that info and energy come together in BBC style global network fashion?   Certainly it has not happened yet and BBC remains the best global news distribution network by far.  However it should not take long for news mashups to leverage the millions of online reporters who daily post tens of millions of online reports into a simply spectacular news resource.  

Although it may be too far ahead of it's time to succeed, I sure like like Newsvine, which I think gives us a good glimpse of the future of news, which dovetails nicely with the future of the internet, which dovetails nicely with … our future.

Scoble leaves Microsoft!

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Robert Scoble, one of the world's most influential and well-known bloggers, is leaving Microsoft for startup podtech.net

It's not official until he announces it tomorrow at Vloggercon.com, but in typical blogOsphere fashion the news is out before it is news.    Looks like Robert notified a few folks who called a few others who posted about it and it'll be old news by the time he announces tomorrow.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Robert at the MIX06 conference and he's a great guy.  I'm very surprised that Microsoft allowed this to happen though I'm guessing it's because the corporate structure made it hard to reward him appropriately for his enormous contributions to Microsoft as one of their most prominent online spokespeople.    Also I'm guessing he was frustrated by the slow pace of change at MS. As such a well-connected guy I bet he wanted to jump into the excitement of Web 2.0.  Microsoft is missing much of the point of Web 2.0 as many have noted – in fact it they aren't careful Web 2.0 could kill Microsoft, and Scoble's departure is notable in that respect.   He was Mr 2.0 at Microsoft and now he's gone.

Microsoft's loss is Podtech's gain and I'll look forward to seeing Robert more often now that he's heading to Silicon Valley. 

Is Web Surfing Dying?

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I'm still big on "web surfing" and prefer bouncing around from site to site to RSS feed readers and customized home pages like MyYahoo.

However, as information online continues to explode and as blog content replaces website content as the freshest and most interesting stuff online, I think we'll all be moving to a more structured environment for pulling in information. This won't stop our surfing but it will tend to reduce the time surfing and increase the focus on topics of interest to us. Interestingly, this may mean we'll be less inclined to bump into "new" ideas. On the upside it may allow more in depth analysis as we refine the niche sources to the best of class in our areas of expertise/interest and learn to organize the information and data associations in more effective ways.

I think these RSS vs Surfing developments may be more profound than most realize. At MIX06 it was clear that Microsoft was going to focus heavily on RSS feeds as a key online distribution tool. Yet it was striking to me how Bil Gates (who I respect) and MS in general seemed out of touch with the big news of Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee both are good at seeing the future and they seem to suggest there are profound changes in emphasis for the online world – a shift to community/collective intelligence/complex webs of interconnected dynamic data/ etc. This is not directly related to the future of surfing but will influence it greatly, and I think Web 2.0 may not be as compatible with "navigation via surfing" as the old web.