Category Archives: search

Watch out for the … Amazon!

Posted on by
1

Over at Webmasterworld someone was noting Amazon's new free commercial website service and wondering if they were watering down their brand with all the new online services Amazon is offering. 

To the contrary I think the Amazon strategy is brilliant and the idea is to water down the OTHER brands by commoditizing things like commercial sites and search. The relationships they are establishing will pay modest but very long lasting dividends.

The global search niche, by comparison, is hugely profitable but is always threatened by "the next best thing" since users will tend to jump to the best search having little stake in the brand itself.

Amazon has nothing to lose in the areas of free website, storage, web services, etc. I think they are very clever to provide complex, data intensive services.

They are also lucky to have one of the best tech evangelists in the form of Jeff Barr who is spreading the word about some of the new services in his excellent presentations such as the one he gave at MIX06. 

Google v Kinderstart Lawsuit over downranking

Posted on by
1

Eric Goldman offers his summary of the Google v. Kinderstart lawsuit, and I think he speaks for many online people in his aversion to government regulation of search. However, I'm not as persuaded as he by the Google arguments, which ring increasingly hollow given the complexities of the ranking process and the onslaught of spam, which seriously inhibits the ability of search engines to rank sites optimally for users.

Our Online Highways site suffered a similar fate to Kinderstart in February 2005 when Google traffic dried up almost overnight. As one of the most comprehensive travel sites online it is still not clear why the site was downranked. Google has assured us we have "no penalties" and only have changed from algorithmic ranking issues. Our pages are still in the Google index yet Google users are unlikely to find us despite the fact we have arguably the best treatment of several travel topics. Note ohwy.com/uz/ which was developed by the Silk Road region's top travel guide publisher.

Frankly I'm surprised how sympathetic Goldman is to the notion that the cornerstone issue here is Google's right to do pretty much whatever they please regardless of the consequences. I'm guessing he was hardly this generous with Microsoft's attempts to monopolize search using the browser.

The "hands off of search" is a slippery slope, especially when granted to companies that make 97% of their revenues from advertising. I strongly contend that there are solutions that help users and enhance Google's long term prospects which some feel are in great jeopardy due to ranking capriciousness.

The solution is to create MUCH better feedback mechanisms for webmasters and companies that suffer from ranking irregularities. Google's actually started such a process though I think it's only addressing a small percentage of the growing number of legitimate concerns about ranking changes.

Web 2.0 is brought to you by …..

Posted on by
Reply

Wow, O'Reilly sure pissed off a bunch of Web 2.0 people fast!

My take on the controversy which has become a top Web debate this afternoon, posted at O'Reilly's blog:

I've defended O'Reilly's corporate action since clearly Tim coined the term and Tim has done more to foster Web 2.0 notions than anybody else.

But you need to throw in the towel here as I'm confident Tim will do when he returns to this firestorm of protest.

Right or wrong the "Web 2.0" mark is not worth this level of hostility to the idea of "owning" a term celebrating the collective sharing of networked intelligence. Many rights are worth fighting for. Owning "Web 2.0" clearly is not.

Big Profit Eludes Myspace.com – why?

Posted on by
Reply

This excellent New York Times article outlines how Myspace evolved from a spammy junk site to one of the internet's top destinations, second only to Yahoo in page views according to several sources.   I remain skeptical Myspace has more traffic than EBAY, but clearly they are huge and growing at a jaw-dropping rate from last year.  

HOWEVER, Myspace is NOT hugely profitable with only 1/20th the revenues of Yahoo, the top online destination in terms of pages viewed.

I think the explanation is simple – Myspace traffic is dominated by young onliners who are enthusiastic and spend many hours per day online but have little interest in most advertising and not much money to spend.   I doubt this will change.  

We've noted at our US history site, which appears to get most traffic from school searches, that it is hard to match users and advertisements.

Google Analytics

Posted on by
Reply

Wow, I've got to hand it to Google – again – for offering an extraordinary application at no charge.  Google Analytics was formerly "Urchin", and cost about $500 monthly.  It's an extremely robust log analysis tool that allows detailed "drill down" examination of things like referrer logs, page views, and much more.  A very clever user friendly tool called "site overlay" allows you to explore the click through rates of a home page's (any page's?) internal links.   Very helpful in designing navigation for the site.

Perfect Search = Advertising problems?

Posted on by
Reply

Issues about Search are generally and wrongly presented as technological or computer challenges when in fact they are best viewed as *advertising* challenges.     Ultimately the search winner will be the advertising winner  (Now that winner is Google with Yahoo, MSN, and ASK working hard to catch up).  I'm suspicious that innovation is now driven more by advertising than by "quality search" considerations.  Certainly innovation is now mostly *funded* by advertising and bets placed on the quest for ad dollars.  

I suggested in an email exchange recently:

…. a "perfect" search engine set up like Google would make much less *directly* from ads since it would always deliver a perfect organic (ad free) result.   I suppose in some cases there would ALSO be a perfect ad match, but there is an interesting natural tension between profit, search quality, and market share.

Tom observed in response:

…let's assume a perfect search result is one where each search result has a bit of information that's of interest to the searcher; and since it's perfect, the search engine has gone over the results and found superficially similar results that don't contribute new information content, ranked the results according to useful information content, and generally done a perfect job.  I think there's still room for product promotion in there, especially if I'm looking for a product, which I increasingly do on the 'Net.

I replied:
I agree if we ssume as below that perfect search still does not really match us exactly to our query. But I'm more optimistic about search and think that when combined with personal histories and other inputs like query refinements, it'll come close to reading our query intention with extreme accuracy.    People would still BUY stuff as a result of search but it would be hard to use the existing models for advertising which associate only those willing to pay with the relevant results lists. 

Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.

Posted on by
Reply

I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.

Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.

Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.

I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.

Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".