Blogrolling Rolled Up...

Blogrolling, one of the early weblog services companies, has been acquired by Tucows.

My prediction: expect to see a lot more of this happening this year.

Funny Google Hack: Goodle

Via Blogoscoped, Goodle, which is a parody of Google News that shows just good news....

Page on IPO at TED

I've been traveling, so forgive my tardiness on some postings. I'm briefly in NYC for a day or so of the SES show, and also some other meetings.

Meantime, some good stuff here and there. First, Larry Page has some comments on the Google IPO craze in a Reuters story here.

The story was filed from the TED show in Monterey, one of the few places reporters can get access to folks like Larry in a relatively relaxed environment.

(Page said) he was "dismayed'' by the amount of conjecture being reported as fact.

"We've made no statements about an IPO,'' said Page, who along with Sergei Brin founded Google in 1998. (Note: Not really true. At the SES show last August Sergey in fact admitted the IPO would most likley happen at some point in the future...)

"I have been a bit dismayed at the level of speculation that has been reported as fact. It's pretty amazing the stage we're at... Even when we don't do anything in some area, people make stuff up,'' Page told Reuters at a technology conference in Monterey, California.

Page also pointed toward new applications for Google's service:

"On the more exciting front, you can imagine your brain being augmented by Google. For example you think about something and your cellphone could whisper the answer into your ear,'' he said.

Eric S. on Orkut TOS et al

Eric S. gave a talk at Berkeley yesterday, and Geodog has posted coverage. Observations on Orkut TOS, power use, forcing Google execs offline, the IPO ("we don't feel forced to do it" or somesuch) and more.

Research Asst.

I'm in need of a research assistant for my book. Lots of reporting, organizing, mind melding, and probably some dull work too. I'm interviewing grad students from UCB, where I work, but I thought I'd hang it out here as well, given what an interesting group this readership has proven to be. Some of you might know someone who'd be perfect, or, some of you lurkers out there might be perfect yourself. Ideally the right person is based in the Bay Area, practically, it's someone who is looking for experience, rather than a huge paycheck. Send recommendations my way at jbat at battellemedia.com. Thanks!

WebFountain, Technorati Visits

Spent the day talking to two very interesting companies, one huge with massive scale, the other tiny, with massive scale. I'll post a report on both soon, watch this space.

And Your Point Is?

A soft-shouldered editorial in the NYT today from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author who is also on the editorial board of the New York Times, and writes the occasional "editorial observer" column for the paper. As I was recently reminded by a good friend, it's wise to step back and remember who the audience is for these kinds of things, as opposed to jumping all over the Times every chance that comes up. So, having done that, I still don't quite get what this editorial adds...in the end, it says that Google is really important and that it won't go away, and summarizes all the things Times readers already know about the company. He concludes that the Internet is, contrary to what he thought some years ago, quite useful, in large part thanks to Google. Well, welcome to the party, Verlyn. Glad you're aboard.

Being Seen As Rich Is A Burden

Don't be evil....

Yahoo Says Yes, Google Said No....

With regard to my earlier post on Oceana, cruise ships, CBS, advocacy ads, and Google...seems Yahoo has accepted Oceana's advertising, the same ads (I think) Google rejected.

Oceana (an environmental group for readers just joining us), crows in a release:

Oceana's Chief Executive Officer, Andrew Sharpless, praised Yahoo! for not bowing to pressure from big corporate advertisers and allowing Oceana to express its positive message of preserving and protecting the world's oceans.

"Yahoo should be applauded for having the courage to put freedom of expression before sales. If Royal Caribbean and the cruise industry can pay to publicize themselves in whichever venue they please, then we deserve to be able to show the facts about their environmental records. The public has a right to this information, and, much to its credit, Yahoo recognizes that," said Sharpless.

I wonder if Yahoo even knows it's "taking a stand"?

Why Stern Matters

I've been thinking lately that blogs could learn a lot from talk radio. I'd not gotten to the point of really looking into this idea, which I am sure has been discussed in the blogosphere to no end. But the whole Stern thing seems to throw it in some relief. Dan and Jeff have made the point, and I agree, if Howard Stern leaves Viacom, he should go to satellite/net radio, and that'd be the killer app those media need to take off.

(BTW it's interesting to note how attenuated regulatory reach has become, in that it's really only premised on the "public airwaves." I'm not anti-regulation, but it seems to me we should trust people to make their own decisions about what information they want to consume. Banning Stern and others from the "public" airwaves does very little, in the end, save create "private" channels outside of regulatory (and therefore common cultural) reach. In other words, by forcing our citizens to make choices outside of our attenuated cultural commons, by refusing to be inclusive in what we allow into the public space, we are weakening our social fabric, driving conversation underground, and lessening the trust and responsibility which binds us as a society. Is that a good thing?)

Notwithstanding the larger regulatory questions, Stern leaving radio and heading for the Net could be a great thing - for the Net, in any case (it's also quite unlikely, but...). If he did, it would create all sorts of interesting issues from the standpoint of programming and UI. The program is predicated on real-time community - the call ins, the references to breaking news, etc. When it heads to the internet, it will, I would hope, be wrapped in all sorts of new media forms - time shifted, cut and pasted, linked, etc. The show will change, for sure, and many, many new shows will thrive in the traces Stern would create. If Stern does do this, I hope he and his folks think it through. They shouldn't adopt a Clear Channel/Viacom/Comcast-like approach to the Web, but instead try to do something that feels native. Stern has a chance to be an innovator in a new medium. He already has plenty of money. Why not try this?

Though I don't listen to Stern much, I'll warrant I'd listen to a lot more if it were on the web, and searchable. Some of his bits are amazing, many are lame, and some are really offensive. But it'd be great to pick and choose, like we do with blog items, news reports, and most other media on the web. Stern being Stern, he'd also figure out how to make money on the show, which is not a bad thing for web media models to boot.

In any case, it'll be fun to watch what happens next. My guess is that nothing happens, he gets a slap on the wrist, everyone promises to play nice, and nothing changes till the next election cycle. But you never know.

Compare Yahoo and Google Results

Via Google Blogoscoped, a neat tool that visually compares results at the two giants.

Semel Says: Social Networking Is Interesting...

At the (corrected) Commonwealth Club in the Valley last night, Semel said he's keeping an eye on social networking, and that he sees a day when Yahoo might have ad-free services. You bet......

Ryan Bails from MSFT

CNET reports that former Overture CTO Paul Ryan has left his job running MSFT's new paid search efforts after only four months. I wonder, why?

Patents - Simmering Under the Surface...

It's good to know there's a reporter out there covering this space who has an institutional memory. Stefanie Olsen reminds us of the importance of patents in the search game, and in particular of the simmering litigation between Google and Yahoo. She also includes this gem in her round up: "Amazon.com has also laid claim to a patent that could affect search-related advertising. In March, it updated an application for a method of auctioning off ads that appear on a Web page." I'm going to see Udi, who runs A9, later this week. I am sure interesting things are coming out of that shop.

PS - if you're a patent watcher, head to Gary's site, where he posts search related patents on a monthly basis...

News, Rumor Roundup

Off the Berkeley for the day to teach, but a few things worth pointing you toward.

First, the rumors are flying again about Jeeves being in play. CBS Marketwatch is fueling them, saying AOL might buy the company and drop Google. I don't think so, but you never know. Andy Beal has a nice interview with Ask's VP of Tech in today's SEW.

As long as we're talking rumours, my ruminations on FindWhat brought up some interesting private email, and one of them led me to thinking that, in the end, it might make a lot of sense for FindWhat to bulk up by merging with LookSmart, which is obviously hurting since its loss of MSN. What do you think?

Lastly, AP reports on Eurekster and other challengers to the search giants. Includes mentions of Grokker and Feedster, and quotes from Googlefolk claiming they are "watching the innovations" and will respond this year with their own.

The New Lycos Page Is Up...

And all I can say is...it sure ain't for me. It smacks of that cloying, wannabe-cool-but-really-kinda lameness that, well, that happens when you try too hard. But...then again, I'm certainly not in the demo they seem to be going for (the same demo as everyone else in the media business, it seems - 18-34, single). It is interesting to see them pitch this in the clothes of a pure media play. The home page feels rather like a promo for a show on the WB. It just might work. Who knows.

Search is still right there at the top, anyway.

Industry Brains Launches RSS Paid Listings

Our buddy Matt is a pioneer over at Infoworld. Full text of press release is in the extended entry. Snips:

IndustryBrains, the only business performance based media firm that specializes in contextual, site-specific advertising, announced today it has expanded its business to include syndication of paid listings to publishers participating in RSS-driven content feeds....
Just as with IndustryBrains’ web-based paid listings, its RSS technology is private-labeled by partner sites and is completely transparent to the user. This enables publishers to leverage their brand and relationships with advertisers who are willing to pay more for placement on a highly regarded site. IDG’s Infoworld and CMP Media’s Techweb Network have implemented IndustryBrains listings as part of their category specific RSS syndication.

IndustryBrains Introduces Paid Listings
on RSS Feeds

IDG’s Infoworld and CMP’s TechWeb Network Computing First to Sign On

NEW YORK (February 25, 2004)  IndustryBrains, the only business performance based media firm that specializes in contextual, site-specific advertising, announced today it has expanded its business to include syndication of paid listings to publishers participating in RSS-driven content feeds.

RSS, “Really Simple Syndication” as some may call it, is content syndication method used by many online publishers to deliver news and story content to users that have opted in to a particular topic.  Users, on a daily basis, have the ability to specify content topics, which are presented mostly in summary format. A user, if interested in a particular article, must click to the web site to get the full content. RSS is viewed by many as a more efficient way to aggregate news and content tailored to individual interests.

“As more and more people turn to RSS to gather news and information, we want to meet them with listings resources than helps them contact advertisers with product offers that match their RSS content interests,” says IndustryBrains CEO Erik Matlick.  “This is a natural extension of the paid listings service we now provide for scores of websites.”

Just as with IndustryBrains’ web-based paid listings, its RSS technology is private-labeled by partner sites and is completely transparent to the user. This enables publishers to leverage their brand and relationships with advertisers who are willing to pay more for placement on a highly regarded site. IDG’s Infoworld and CMP Media’s Techweb Network have implemented IndustryBrains listings as part of their category specific RSS syndication.

“The success we have experienced from IndustryBrains’ paid listings on our web sites gives us confidence that the same results will be generated by using their technology to deliver listings on our RSS feeds, said Matt Mcalister, General Manager of Infoworld. “We expect that advertisers will also want to pay a premium to appear in RSS enabled pages and stories. Users are actively expressing an interest in a particular subject matter by subscribing to specific content offered by a specific publisher.”

Maria Bradley, Business Development Manager of CMP’s Techweb Network, also concurs. “This is a far superior model for us than generalized listings from SEM networks. Advertisers know they are reaching an audience of extraordinary composition, and are willing to bid far more aggressively to be near the top of our RSS listings.  This simply means more revenue for us.”

IndustryBrains already services more than 2,000 paid listing advertisers in the technology category.  The company expects to syndicate a great many of them over to RSS enabled listings.

Launched in 2002, New York-based IndustryBrains , is the only business performance based media firm that specializes in contextual site specific advertising. IndustryBrains offers custom publisher solutions for monetizing content and search pages. Real-time tracking and reporting allows publishers to easily manage advertiser relationships and optimize revenue. For advertisers, IndustryBrains offers contextual category placement on premium sites like Infoworld, ComputerWorld, PC Magazine, EETimes, Network Magazine and BusinessWeek. Advertisers bid for placement on site-specific categories that are related to their business. Listings are delivered whenever a customer performs a search on the specified terms throughout its network of 50+ premium sites.

Joi On Search in Japan

Joi Ito, who I first met at Wired in the early 90s, has been at the cross of a lot of very interesting roads. In this post he reminisces about his role in search in Japan, with anecdotes about Yahoo Japan and Infoseek. A fun read....

Whitman Again Stresses Google Is Not Competitor...But Plans Local Play....

In this AP story covering a Goldman conference in AZ, eBay chief Whitman says she sees Google and Yahoo and other search players as enablers of her business. "We think both natural search and paid search are allies of ours," she said.

But, in the same speech, she noted that eBay is planning to get back into the local auction market, something they tried in the late 90s that did not take off. The story failed to note the obvious: local search is a very hot market right now, and I doubt that has escaped Whitman. Search is not a competitor? Perhaps. But just to be sure...better shore up the local angle. (AP story via Gary, thanks!)

Froogle Goes Wireless

Google Labs announced today they've enabled Froogle over wireless. Cool - now you can compare prices using your mobile phone or PDA....

From the release:

Users may find this service especially helpful when they're out shopping at a retail store and are interested in searching Froogle to compare prices online...Using the Froogle wireless service is simple:
- From a WML-enabled phone, point the browser to http://wml.froogle.com
- Enter search terms in the box and select the 'Search' button
- Use the phone's keypad arrows to scroll through the results.

Google Pioneered It, Jeeves Does It, Now...

...an alert reader points me to the fact that Yahoo is giving Google serious imitation-is-the-best-flattery treatment today (Thanks, Steve).

Taunted by Tatas

The folks behind Booble are at it again, taunting Google and posting press releases at "Tauntedbytatas.com" seeking to portray themselves as a harmless parody site that is being bigfooted by the evil Google. I don't buy this. When Booble came out, it was claiming to be a serious adult search engine, serving a real need. It wasn't very good, but it claimed that it was going to be a business. Now that Google's asserting its trademark rights, which in this case I think is entirely warranted, they have changed their stripes, and are a "parody site". The whole thing is sophomoric. In fact, I'd not be surprised if this whole thing is being run by some bored kid in a college dorm room interested mainly in porn and selling mugs and tshirts.
(thanks, Gary)

Net Penetration Surpasses Cable...

But of course, that's due to cable modems....MediaPost reports....

This is important as it relates to the psychology of the media buyer. Cable is a huge market, nearly $81 billion or so if I recall (more media revenue stats, head to the census, thanks Gary...). When advertisers realize that that net has better distribution than cable, there will be something of an "aha" moment. I'm feeling ever more confident of my prediction that online ad revenues will surpass expectations this year....

SEW: Local Search Needs Small Biz

Good overview of the local search market on SEW today, in particular a good summary of some of the hurdles to sustaining growth in what might be called the "Yellow Pages" sector - those really small businesses which account for billions in local radio, newspaper, and Yellow Pages advertising:

To achieve any sizeable revenues from the local market, paid search needs to gain small business advertiser adoption. But how much of the small business market will pay-per-click (PPC) be able to penetrate? There are some very practical challenges, which include:
* The complexity and time involved in keyword bid-campaign management
* Limited ad inventory and competition between national and small business advertisers for that inventory
* The absence of local sales channels to "push" PPC to small business advertisers
* The lack of websites among as much as 70% of small businesses

These are not insurmountable by any means, though they should not be minimized.

Worth noting that Verizon's SuperPages deal with FindWhat to OEM FindWhat's auction process goes live next week on Superpages site...It's also interesting to note that Verizon did *not* do this deal with Yahoo or Google...

KeepMedia Launches RSS Feeds

KeepMedia has decided, it seems, that RSS will aide them in promoting singups to their service. From a spokesman: "We launched an RSS feed today at http://www.keepmedia.com/rss/featurednews and plan to launch others in the near future. Our RSS feed contains an average of 12-15 stories per day. Our editors pick several big stories each day and provide related articles from our 160+ magazines. We will frequently select stories from the archives that serve to provide historical background. At this point, we have found that we are the only RSS source for the overwhelming majority of magazine and newspaper titles on the KeepMedia newsstand. Linked stories are free to RSS users and to anyone who accesses those specific stories. ...If a blogger links to one of the stories in our RSS feed, his audience will have free access to that story, however, if they want to further browse or search on KeepMedia and are not subscribers they will hit our paid-wall."

This means some stuff previously behind registration walls will be available for blogging...The company also announced new relationships with The Atlantic and USA Today.

FindWhat Buys Again...

Pretty soon I'll have to take the time to really grok FindWhat. The company has been on an acquisition tear, merging with espotting, buying Miva, and today announcing it has purchased Comet (best known for that cursor download in the late 90s, now a search/platform/web privacy company).

OK. So FindWhat, in the end, is a strong second-tier pay-per-click network. Like Overture or Adsense, they match buyer and seller via paid search keywords. They have a distribution network, and they have an advertiser base of tens of thousands. Their biggest client is Lycos. They serve a significant base of advertisers, and with the addition of espotting, which has 20,000 advertisers, they are now a force in Europe.

The also have an SEO business, and with Miva, which sells ecommerce software to small businesses, they are looking to be a force in the SME website building space. In essence, they hope to sell loads of SME services to their advertising clients. Yahoo has a similar play. With Comet, FindWhat has acquired a company in the metabrowser/privacy/OEM space. I'm not sure I get the play here, but I aim to find out when I head to the Search Engine Strategies conference next week in New York.

Findwhat's stock is on a tear, up about 110% over the past year. It's earnings and revenues are also on a tear - its last quarter revenues were up 57%, and earnings have increased for 11 consecutive quarters. The company posted about $72 million in revenues for 2003.

So...what's up with FindWhat? Any readers out there have experience with this company?

Mainstream 2: Google Founders on the Hustings

When Peter Jennings calls, you usually pick up the phone. In the ongoing battle for the PR edge, Larry and Sergey have been named "Person of the Week" by ABC News. The piece is pablum - warmed over TV Dinner fare - but it's interesting nonetheless to see the founders on this new press offensive. (Thanks, Beal.)

Search Ratings for January

Via MediaPost, Neilsen Netratings reports that 39% of the US population used search engines last month.

The top five search venues in January were Google (59 million visitors), Yahoo! Search (46 million), MSN Search (45 million), AOL Search (23 million), and Ask Jeeves (13 million).

Bravo...

Scoble asks search giants for "access to the variables." In other words, let users play with the guts of the engine, so they can tune the results to their liking. I hope the folks at MSFT are listening to one of their own. This kind of transparency, while problematic from a spam standpoint, would be most excellent.

Surprised? TIA Lives On

Via IP, this Newsday piece reminds us that the TIA never really went away...

NYT, Wired Weighs In

As predicted, the big boys have turned their attention to the Yahoo-Google story. The NYT has a piece today (I'm quoted, I'm quite sure it's one of the few times "full-tilt boogie" has made it into a business story) giving an overview of the Yahoo side, and Wired, in a cover package, pretty much runs what's left of the Google story into the ground.

Now, I'm not going to spend *too* much time on this, but I did give the Wired package, which runs 15 pages - an eternity for most magazines - a hard read over the weekend. It fails on all kinds of levels. (When they post it, the package will be here.) And yet, it succeeded on the meta level, which is to say: Google *is* a huge story in the Wired space, and should be treated as such.

(more in extended entry below)

The Wired piece (it's the April issue) was clearly a concept play, driven, it seems, by an editorial meeting where someone said - "Hmmm...April. What's happening in April?" ...and someone else said "That's when Google is supposed to go public."
Response: "Well then let's get a story on that!"
"Well, they aren't talking to anyone."
"Ummm...OK, how can we do it anyway?"

The result is this package. The cover features a tricolor (yes, red, blue, green) lithographic treatment of Larry and Sergey, with the one word proclamation "Googlemania!" Not exactly advancing the story, nor giving us the wonderful concept covers Wired often does so well. The cover and table of contents promises all sorts of insights into the pre-IPO Google, but in fact, delivers none. Instead we get a generalized essay about what it's like to be in a white-hot Valley company before an IPO - not Google, mind you, but we do get to hear from various entrepreneurs who've been there. OK, but...not exactly what we were looking for, or what we felt was promised to us. The package then goes on to introduce us to a search engine optimizer (Bruce Clay, for those keeping score), a runner who uses Google in some inexplicable way to train better, an entire page of Peter Norvig's head (I mean, I like him, but...). There's an essay on how Google and Microsoft are now competitors (nothing new), a spread on how AdWords works (again nothing new), a two-page spread with the Google interface re-imagined by various au courant designers (ranging from silly to simply masturbatory), and some other random stuff, including a bunch of "Google is super-bitchin" quotes from luminaries. Sigh. It's all so...2002.

The best stuff was an essay on comment spam from the wonderful Steven Johnson, and a page on "four scenarios for the future," the only place I found any thinking on what might come next (and not that original - Google becomes either Microsoft, Yahoo, Netscape, or eBay). To my mind, the whole thing should have been about where things are going and what it all means (Wired's mission is usually to scout the future and report back...). But instead, just four paragraphs, four boxes of text, and none of them in any way thinking about the larger issues Google represents.

So why am I so on about this? Because Wired has been getting better and better lately, and I'm disappointed by this effort. The magazine should be moving this story forward, like it did a year ago January. Instead, the package they put together was so cursory, so void of deeper thinking, so clearly positioned to time a potential news event, that the whole damn thing could have run in Cosmo. Or, put another way, while reading, I had an odd sense I had already seen just about everything in the package somewhere else before in the past few months. But where? Ah yes...I think it was the New York Times.

(caveat: I was a founding editor of Wired).

Signs of Marketing Prowess To Come...

Via Wonk...Toyota sponsors section of eBay....this exclusive arrangement points to where online marketing is going. Why? Because major advertisers are looking for traction in the medium where the customers are...and that's this one. I smell a significant uptick in online advertising this year, far larger than what is predicted...

Proof of Search's Powers...

Look no further than this. BBC reports that via internet research, a boy found out that his mother abducted him (when he was young), told his teacher, teacher told authorities, mom's in jail. Yow.

Posting Will Slow, Disneyland Ho...

I'm off to take my two older kids to Disneyland (it's their winter break week). So posting will slow. Lemme know if there's anything we can't miss down in Ahaheim...

A UI Designer at Google Rants...

About Yahoo Search. Interesting reading...

WSJ Does A Test

Beal points us to a WSJ article comparing the new Yahoo search with Google. The paper threads the needle and doesn't have an opinion on who's best, saying it depends. Sigh. We'll have to wait till the pros at SEWatch do it right.

Scraping Orkut

I'm late on this, but apparently someone has scraped data off orkut and developed an app that shows how close other orkut users are to a particular zip code or city. Corante has the goods here. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's against orkut's Terms of Service - it explicitly says you are not allowed to scrape data. Second, it's cool, and an example of what can be done when the web is viewed as an application. It points to something worth paying attention to.

Cool.

Search for Wi Fi in Google Location, with a zip, and find your hotspots...

Industry Brains: Context and Quality Matters, Slashdot Added

I've found this company popping up a lot lately. Their model is interesting and they seem to address an evolutionary problem in the paid search field. Industry Brains is essentially a pay-per-click network, like Overture or AdSense, but one that offers advertisers the ability to insure their ad is placed in specific vertical content areas, such as IT. The model basically asserts that there is value (and profit) in the voice and focus of an editorial site, as opposed to the unvariegated sweep of Overture and AdSense. This approach promises to raise the advertising revenues of niche sites which draw influential but smaller audiences. Such sites to date have not been able to make much of a go at it with AdSense alone.

The problem IndustryBrains solves sets up this way: Say you're an advertiser interested in selling laptops to IT professionals. if you were to buy laptop-related keywords on AdSense or Overture's Content Match, your ad could be placed anywhere on their vast networks, as long as a site on that network has the keywords which trigger your ad. This leads to your laptop ads being attached to general interest news sites, or blogs, or literary sites which might mention laptops in a totally unrelated context (funny example here). When you buy IndustryBrains' network, your ad will only be shown on sites like ComputerWorld, CNET, and, in a move that is bound to give them some serious geek cred, Slashdot. (I heard this through a reader and industry colleague who passed along an IndustryBrains announcement, I can't find anything about it on their site or on Slashdot.)

This is a natural evolution in the paid search market. I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for Google and Yahoo to develop these kind of vertical buys (if they haven't already). As soon as it's proven that there's money to made, they will. I certainly hope there is. IndustryBrain's PPC pricing is above typical AdSense pricing, for good reason. They are delivering more qualified audience, which is the essence of what good publishing is about. The site even has a search tool that let's you see the cost per click in real time for any search term.

If any of you out there have tried this, let us know how it went!

(thanks to Hylton and Gary and Jeff for forcing thought on this)

Google's Brin on AdSense; Watch DCLK

Editor&Publisher interviews Sergey Brin via email, and while his responses have clearly been given a once-over by Google's professional PR staff, this response struck me as a bad omen for the DoubleClicks of the world:

2. Many newspapers are publishing display ads on the Web, with photos and graphics. Will AdSense evolve beyond text-based advertising? Or is text the best medium for these types of ads?

SB: At this point, text ads are the best solution for our users, advertisers and partners. However, online advertising, especially contextual advertising, is evolving rapidly. Google is committed to a leadership position in online advertising technology and we continue to explore new technologies in every aspect of targeting, delivery and display.

In other words, it won't be long before Google combines the contextual relevance of AdSense text links with more brand-driven, rich media ad units. And that means they start becoming a major ad serving service in the vein of Doubleclick and its kin. Perhaps Google simply buys DCLK, which Safa recently claimed is undervalued. It could make a lot of sense...if Yahoo/Overture doesn't get there first. I'm not a stock picker, nor a seer, so don't hold me to this. Just noting an interesting trend.

Ink Stained Google Hacks

A fun piece that ridicules an increasingly common habit: many reporters lean on Google to prove their point, instead of doing real research...

The Switch Is On

Seems Yahoo's switch is now upon us, as most news outlets had been given an embargo of midnight EST last night (a reporter called me and told me as much), and Search Engine Watch is one of the first with a deeper take on the meaning of it all - the story is called "Birth of a New Machine". In an email to me last night, Chris disagrees with my earlier post that "size matters" and I agree that in the end what matters most is relevance, but...perhaps I should have said "perception matters". Expect the mainstream media to weigh in soon...

Chris's take in one line:
Bottom line: I'm impressed with the quality of results that Yahoo is delivering. It's a very viable alternative to Google and the other "last engine standing," Ask Jeeves/Teoma.

Yahoo's press release, issued 4 hours ago, is here.

Highlights:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that it has created a more comprehensive and relevant search experience for users through the deployment of its own algorithmic search technology on Yahoo!(R) Search (http://search.yahoo.com). Starting today, the company will begin rolling out the new Yahoo! Search Technology (YST) and expects to continue the process on a worldwide basis over the next several weeks. With the completion of the deployment, Yahoo! Search Technology will power nearly half of all online searches in the U.S....

As part of the company's next steps in customization and personalization, Yahoo! is introducing a new search service that integrates Yahoo! Search with My Yahoo! by adding links to XML/RSS site syndication content in search results. This service enables users to search for millions of sites that support this format and easily add them to their My Yahoo! personal homepage. Once added to their page, users will see instantly updated headlines and links from these sites, keeping them in touch with all of their important information from the Internet in a single place.

Additionally, Yahoo! Search has combined its own proprietary anti-spam technology with the talents of its team of editorial experts and Yahoo! Mail's leading SpamGuard technology to help filter out irrelevant, redundant or low-quality URLs and links. Taking advantage of the synergies between Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail, these two services will share data to reduce spam and further improve the user experience across Yahoo!.

Yahoo: New Index "Highly Competitive"

In response to Google's release today, SVP/Search Jeff Weiner told me: "We are extremely confident our index size is highly competitive." My read on that statement is that when Yahoo unwraps its new search technology, the index will be at least 6 billion strong, if not larger. Weiner took pains to add that "comprehensiveness" - ie big indexes - is only one piece of the total search quality puzzle. While the arms race to the largest index is something of a perception game, it's an important one nevertheless. It's inescapable: size does matter.

Resourceshelf Interviews Dipsie Founder

Gary interviews Jason Wiener, the CEO of Dipsie. I've spoken with Jason a few times, but I'm still waiting to hear confirmation on various aspects of the story before I post. Meantime, Gary's post is a good overview of the company's intentions....

Safa Says: No Bubble in 2005

Piper's Safa Rashtchy, who gets credit for being an early and avid Wall St. supporter of the paid search market, today released his firm's outlook for what might be called the "internet economy" sector, and it's pretty rosy. Note in particular "In our opinion, all of this clearly indicates that fears of a bubble-type valuation are unfounded."

:
1. We expect average revenue growth of more than 23% and an EBITDA growth of at least 37%, resulting from margin expansion in nearly all of the companies under our coverage. We also believe that these estimates are mostly on the conservative side and have strong probability of upward revision.
2. With a 37% average EBITDA growth, the coverage companies are trading on an average enterprise value to EBITDA multiple of just over 18x, suggesting a growth multiple of less than 0.5. Similarly, the GAAP ESP, while not as a good and clean a measure of valuation as EBITDA, is still at PEG of 1.0. In our opinion, all of this clearly indicates that fears of a bubble-type valuation are unfounded. The stocks are not heavily undervalued but there is room for multiple expansion and, of course, estimate revisions that can support higher prices.
3. The universe-wide look at the 2005 growth projections underscore the value of our top picks, in particular United Online, trading at 6.8x '05 EBITDA, a 60% discount to the universe and DoubleClick, trading at 10.3x '05 EBITDA, a 44% discount to the universe. While the EBITDA growth rates for these two are slower than the 37% average, even growth adjusted multiple for these two companies will be substantially higher than their current valuation. We also believe that our estimates for our other top picks, Yahoo and SINA, are very conservative with a strong upside potential justifying a much higher multiple than current valuation.

Yeah, But The Catch Is...

The entire publication archive of Time Magazine (1923 onwards) will be soon online, thanks to a partnership with HP. However, archives will only be available to Time subscribers. I wonder how they are going to deal with SERPs - will the archive be crawled? Will searchers find old issues and then be compelled to pay? We'll see...

Germane to the Last Post...

Stefanie's piece on CNET this morning: Search wars are about to get personal. In it she notes that new comScore research points to a lack of loyalty toward search brands, even Google.

Google Index Swells, Yahoo Switch Imminent

Google put out a press release today noting that its index has swelled to 4.28 billion images, and combined with images and usenet, total pages indexed now reaches past 6 billion. Full text of release is in the extended entry below. Gary's Resourceshelf has commentary here.

My question: why now? It's generally considered true that Google can raise its index number pretty much when it feels like it (this isn't some technical breakthrough or new achievement, a lot of folks claim Google has been underreporting its number to date), so what provoked this timing? Could be the pressure to keep appearance of innovation up, and/or the pressure of new competitors, recently feted in various articles, who promise larger indexes, such as Dipsie, or a response to Yahoo's new search solution, which is rolling out...well now it seems... as Andy Beal sends word that Yahoo's switching over to its own technology, even though the announcement has not been made. Here's Yahoo's Search page - go check it out. Andy also points to a survey on Yahoo that Webmasterworld folks found about the search experience.

UPDATE: As to the company's timing, Google PRmeister Nate Tyler says: "We hit the milestone and thought it might be nice to let our users know." In other words, this is not a reaction to anything...

As for the Yahoo news, I spoke again with Jeff Weiner today, and he is really on fire. He acknowledged that the new Yahoo crawler, Slurp, is out and about, and that changes are afoot....more when I can tell you more...

GOOGLE ACHIEVES SEARCH MILESTONE WITH IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO MORE THAN 6
BILLION ITEMS

Google Connects Searchers to World's Most Comprehensive Index; Increases Web
Page and Image Collections

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Feb. 17, 2004 - Google Inc. today announced it
expanded the breadth of its web index to more than 6 billion items. This
innovation represents a milestone for Internet users, enabling quick and
easy access to the world's largest collection of online information.

"People worldwide can find more information with Google than with any other
search engine," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of
Products.

Google's collection of 6 billion items comprises 4.28 billion web pages, 880
million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of
book-related information pages. Web surfers worldwide can now search across
Google's collection of items using the following services:

- Google Web Search: The company's flagship search service now offers 4.28
billion web pages. Google's powerful and scalable technology searches this
information and delivers a list of relevant results in an instant. Google
Web Search also enables users to search for numerous non-HTML files,
including PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel documents.

- Google Image Search: Comprising more than 880 million images, Google Image
Search enables users to find electronic images relevant to a wide variety of
topics.
Advanced features include search by image size, format (JPEG and/or GIF),
coloration, and the ability to restrict searches to specific sites or
domains.

- Google Groups: This 20-year archive of Usenet conversations is the largest
of its kind and serves as a powerful reference tool, while offering insight
into the history and culture of the Internet. Google Groups offers more than
845 million postings in more than 35,000 topical categories.

- Google Print: A test service that enables Google users to immediately
access a range of book related information, such as first chapters, reviews,
and bibliographic information. These pages also offer users links to
directly purchase titles.

"Google Image Search has been significantly updated," said Sergey Brin,
Google co-founder and president of Technology. "We've doubled the index to
more than 880 million images, enhanced search quality, and improved the user
interface."

Today's news follows the announcement last week that Google received eight
awards in the 4th Annual Search Engine Watch Awards, which recognize
outstanding achievements in web searching. Google was recognized as the
"Outstanding Search Service," for helping internet users locate information
from across the Web. Google has received this distinction every year since
the awards were initiated in 2000. Google AdWords was also given top honors
for value, targeting, tools and overall advertiser satisfaction.

About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around
the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D.
students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in
all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is
the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all
sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience
for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout
North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

PS - Akimbo

Just when I'm going off about TiVo integrating broadband and broadcast, Akimbo launches. (thanks Tim).

Scoble Says: Watch This Space

Feedster and Technorati: Scoble says they might be the ones to "steamroll Google."

Jeremy On Yahoo's New Search

Jeremy posts a few insights and such on Yahoo's forthcoming new search...

More Demo hacks

Dave Sifry, who is also at Demo, has posted a Demo conference conversation page on Technorati...looks like there's some healthy competition going between Feedster and Technorati! This page is a combination of keyword search (which Technorati recently added), and link cosmos around Demo-related URLs... (thanks for the pointer Dave)

Times on Local Search

This Times piece explores the Yellow Pages market of small businesses (plumbers, etc) who don't have websites but increasingly feel the pressure to have an online advertising presence. Why? Because the customers are increasingly using search instead of the Yellow Pages (the Times based that conclusion on research from the Kelsey Group and Bizrate.) The article provides an overview of the current state of Overture and Google's local search solutions.

Neat Feedster Hack

Feedster is demo'ing at the Demo conference today, and Scott sent along news of their latest feature: Feedpapers. They've got proof of concept here: Political Feedpapers for each candidate. In essence a Feedpaper is a search of the blogophere for posts on a particular topic, which are then organized and presented for you. It's well done.

Feedster has a page with more on Feedpapers:

When you think about what Feedster really does, it lets you listen to the web. A Feedpaper is a sophisticated daily newspaper, a "Feedpaper", automatically constructed from what people are saying about a subject. We offer a handful of general interest Feedpapers and you or your organization can sign up for a personal Feedpaper (not yet available; coming soon).

I'm looking forward to creating Feedpapers on topics like search, TiVo, etc.

Another example of how Feedster feeds the political sphere is on this Kerry site, which uses Feedster to search the blogosphere for Kerry news.

UPDATE: I should have noted the public "builder" they've got as well, it's a tool for rolling your own feed or Feedpaper...

The World Post-Google

The Washington Post prints something of a Sunday rumination on how search engines might evolve, a rather flippant piece of magazine writing that reads like a poorly edited Wired rant from the early days (I should know). Overall the piece bothers me - it takes search seriously in word, but the tone finds a way to be dismissive at the same time, and only gives a cursory answer to the question it sets up (what might search look like in the future). The set up illustrates what I mean:

Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages.

Well, in fact, I'll warrant that when historians look back at this era, they'll disagree. But enough about that. The piece does provide an interesting signpost of popular culture: our most respected institutions of journalism are trying to make sense of this phenomenon as more than just a business story. Thank God.

Mike Ramsay: TiVo As Web Platform

Well I was not expecting this one: I head into a conversation with the CEO of TiVo, fully expecting him to look at me cross-eyed when I suggest that TiVo might be understood to be a search-driven application. Instead, he wholeheartedly agrees. In fact, Ramsay was adamant about the role search plays, and how much innovation can come from understanding video through the lens of the internet.

As usual I must save stuff for my book (and column), but here's one of the coolest things he mentioned: the idea of folks building video content websites that TiVo could search and download - using exactly the same search interface TiVo already has. Ramsay pointed out that with television search, you often don't know what you want till you see it ("I feel like a foreign film tonight - hey...there's an old Seinfeld episode on!"), but on the net, you often you know what you want, but not where it is ("I'm looking for a 1965 Ford Mustang in perfect condition"). What would happen if the two merged?

Ramsay gave an example of a typical TiVo wishlist (an ongoing set of instructions you give your TiVo) that includes, say, anything from Martin Scorcese. As it stands today, TiVo offers up all the films he's directed which happen to be showing in the next few days, and possibly documentaries featuring the director. But that's it. What if there were a great Scorcese interview available on a fan website, and that website was built to work with a hypothetical TiVo search API? TiVo would present that piece of content as an option as well, and you could simply "record" it, just like you do any other show. TiVo would then send a request over the net to the site, and download the content for viewing (TiVo might employ "drizzle" like technology to download the massive files overnight). Imagine the possibilities, both for non-commercial content as well as for advertising. It makes my head spin. I am sure the cable companies (and networks) simply loathe the idea - it takes distribution completely out of their hands. One can imagine any number of scenarios: a "hit" show that lives solely on a website, for one. Advertising-only websites providing paid search-like content for which TiVo becomes a market maker. Crippled Comcast PVRs which refuse to cross-pollinate with the net (I am sure Mike would love this, as it would provide a major differentiator for TiVo, were they to implement this kind of feature).

What this heralds is the long-promised melding of broadband and broadcast. I asked Ramsay about TiVo's recent acquisition of Strangeberry, and he was not very forthcoming, but he did say "they are doing some cool stuff in this space."

Our conversation ranged across many subjects, from business models to collaborative filtering to his relationship with Hollywood and the IP cabal ("improving"). I'll be writing up the whole conversation for my column in Business 2.0, so stay tuned for that.

Tech Review: Search Beyond Google

A good overview of various approaches to search, with sections on Mooter, Dipsie, and Microsoft, as well as an interview with Google employee #1, Craig Silverstein. A minor but interesting piece of infoporn: Craig tells the reporter that Google engineers spend 10 percent of their time on outside projects. That's down from 20 percent. Or maybe it was a mistake. Thanks to Gary for the pointer....

The Reshuffle Button

The last entry on Yahoo's new search got me thinking about search results, and in particular Google's, which nearly everyone imitates in one form or another. We all know about the endless list of results, 10 to a page, stretching past what Tim Bray calls "the Google event horizon." I used to think that horizon was 100 or so entries - no one will ever look further than that. But the truth is, it's usually one page of listings, if not less.

I've gotten to thinking - what's the use of having all those results? I mean, really, from a user interface point of view, the only information we gain from "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,950,000" is the rather attenuated sense that the search engine is, in fact, pretty darn thorough. That used to be a big deal, back when engines were really crappy. But these days we expect engines to be thorough. What's the point of giving me a list of more than 3 million results when I am never, ever, ever going to go through them?

Seems to me it's time to change the interface. Clearly many others have thought about this, from Grokker to Mooter to Vivisimo and beyond. But it's the big guys, Google and Yahoo, that make the standards, and I think we're getting close to the point where a new user interface paradigm is needed for search. Danny talks about invisible tabs, and that's a good idea. But I'm not talking about intuiting what the user wants - that's the hard stuff, and I know there are plenty of PhDs working on that. I'm talking about something much less difficult - changing the way results we get are presented.

Here's what I'd like to see, as a small step in a new direction: A button that I can hit when the results come up which reshuffles the search in an intelligent way. In a fit of originality, I'll call it the "reshuffle" button. Show me the first ten pages, and only those first ten. Just as I do now, I'll scan them. If there's nothing there, I'll hit "Reshuffle", and the engine shows me another 10 results, only this time, it eliminates pages that are similar to the ones it showed me before. This way, you can quickly and intuitively sift through all those results, grokking and pruning your search as you go. This is not some massively new visual approach, it's just a quick hack that allows me to drill down. It's this kind of stuff, I think, the simple stuff, which ends up being the most elegant and useful. I know there's much work to be done, there are plenty of NP-hard problems to solve in search (I know because I'm trying to grok them and write them up in plain english for my book). But solving those problems will take years.

In my discussions with folks at Google and elsewhere, I often hear a resistance to changing search approaches due to technical reasons - clustering, for example, is not used at Google because the results are not considered relevant enough. But what about the user interface for results? The most frustrating thing in the world is seeing "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,950,000" and knowing that somewhere in that haystack is your needle. But why sift blindly through the event horizon? Maybe some UI innovation on top of the current results can help.

(While I'm ranting, I'd like the engine to suggest better query terms for me. It can't be that hard to store user queries and cluster those which have similar constructions, query words, or results/paths taken. I'd like to hit a button that says "show me similar searches." I think this exists somewhere, but I can't remember where (yeah, I know about Direct Hit, that's not what I mean exactly). It's not quite collaborative filtering, but it points that way.)

Any readers out there know about tools or research that does some of what I'm on about, or a response as to why UI innovation is a bad/too difficult idea?

A Talk With Weiner

Met with Jeff yesterday, and we didn't have nearly enough time, so we're going to meet again next week. But the time we did get was quite interesting. This against the backdrop, of course, of Yahoo's stated intent to shift from Google results to its own native technology. Jeff was coy on when the switch would occur, but extremely enthusiastic about the end result (Yahoo CEO Semel has announced the switch will occur by the end of the first quarter, and that's not too far away).

I think Yahoo search will be new from the ground up. It's not just Inktomi in place of Google, it will be an entirely new product. Jeff wouldn't give me details on what to expect, but he is a man clearly sitting on his hands - he's proud of the work his team has done. "People don't realize how scarce search engineering talent is," he told me. "And we've got critical mass."

On more general topics, we had a robust discussion around the issue of paid inclusion. This issue is almost always painted in black and white - Paid Inclusion Bad, "Pure" Search Good. But Weiner defended the practice against the metric of user value - when sites pay to insure their content is indexed, they also insure it will be available as potentially relevant results to the user. If Yahoo fails to give the user relevant, quality results, and instead spams the user with commercial fare, Yahoo will lose that user. In other words, it's not in Yahoo's best interest to value the advertiser over the user's needs. In fact, it's in the advertiser's interest for Yahoo to value the user over the advertiser. This, of course, is Publishing 101.

What Weiner seemed to be saying was: don't judge us by the past practices of Inktomi, and certainly not by how MSN implements Inktomi. We're going to do it in a way that delivers value to the searcher.

I get the sense (and it's just that, a guess, as I have no direct facts yet on what the next rev of Yahoo Search will look like) that in many cases, Yahoo search won't initially show a list of algorithmic results to the user, but will instead show what the site *thinks* the user is trying to get at, and go from there. This raises a larger question about basic approaches to search results. Yahoo seems far more comfortable making explicit editorial decisions in its approach - intuiting the intent behind a particular search, and delivering results from any number of sources - its commercial deals, its directory, its algorithmic web results, etc. Google, on the other hand, continues, for the most part, to maintain a "purist" approach to search, claiming that its secret algorithmic sauce will deliver the most relevant results regardless of editorial judgment.

I asked Weiner about this idea of "purity" - a concept which is a clear differentiator for Google. Staying on message, Weiner said that the issue is not "purity," but rather "value." As in, which site will give the user the most value for the search query. He clearly believes Yahoo can play on that metric. By the end of March or even sooner, we'll all have a chance to find out.

The Ad Bubble Has Been Topped

Adweek reports that Q4 2003 internet advertising hit $2.2 billion. As Wonk points out, this tops the previous quarterly record set during the bubble, $2.162 billion in the fourth quarter of 2000. And online advertising is really only starting to get traction....

Advocacy: Not At Google, Either

We all got peeved when CBS said no to MoveOn, but this kind of policy is quite widespread. Google also does not allow advocacy ads, in particular ads that criticize other people or companies (their terms are here). Latest news on this front: An environmental organization that had purchased AdWords like "cruise ship" has been bounced from Google. Why? It ran ads next to the results which pointed out that cruise ships pollute the ocean (which they do, often spewing out raw sewage near coastlines. Not that the couple at left seem to mind...).

Google (and Overture) have to tread a thin line here between free speech, the law, and protecting its more lucrative clients (travel sites are huge paid search customers). Clearly this action is well within Google's rights as per its contract. But shouldn't Google be a bit more like the New York Times, which accepts these kind of issue ads, and a bit less like CBS? I certainly hope so.

(thanks, Dave)

Update: I've been pointed, by the author, to this site, which defends Google's approach and slams Oceana. Every story has more than one side...and it seems to me that Google may well have been in the right here, at least arguably so. I do believe, however, that in the longer term, search engines will have to figure out how to deal with an advocay group's need (but not right?) to use that medium as a public forum.

Ramsay, Weiner, Kapor

Today I'll not be posting much till later, as I have book-related interviews with Jeff Weiner (SVP/Search at Yahoo), Mike Ramsay (CEO TiVo) and Mitch Kapor (Open Source Applications Foundation, Lotus, Nutch board, et al).

What do you want to know from these folks?

Vivisimo Targets eBay Listings

AP reports Vivisimo has released a search application that uses eBay's API to search eBay's listings. Sort of like what Grokker does for Google, Vivisimo does for eBay listings. Interesting. Wonder if eBay will respond...

Lycos: Can't Win in Search, Turns to Social Networking

Lycos is refocusing its efforts toward social networking services such as dating, finance, and the like, and away from search. Should be interesting to watch. I've come to the conclusion that social networks (orkut, friendster) can't make it alone, they have to be a feature of a larger platform. Not rocket science, I know, but it's interesting to see Lycos lurch in that direction as well. IAR reports.

Paid Search >$2 billion in 2003, Local Next

On Weds, eMarketer released a report claiming that paid search crossed the $2 billion mark in 2003, and that local paid search will be the critical next step for the industry. MediaNews also reports.

Google Takes AdWords to China

AdHanzi...

The Atom/RSS Fracas

Can anybody tell me why this is a big deal? This CNET piece makes it seem like there's a real war between RSS and Atom, but it reads to me like competition, which is good as far as I can tell. I mean in the long run, won't my aggregators and blogging tools just support both? As a non-technical guy, can someone give me the shorthand on why this matters that much? I'm not being flip (it may sound that way), I just don't get it.

P&G Ad Chief: Permission Marketing Or Bust

In a speech at an advertising conference today, Jim Stengel, P&G marketing chief (and therefore Most Important Guy in the Room) laid down the gauntlet.

"All marketing should be permission marketing. When we think of permission-based marketing, most of us think about opt-in online newsletters. We really need to expand this mentality to all aspects of marketing. ... For each element of the marketing mix, we should ask ourselves, 'Would consumers choose to look at or listen to this,' and let that be the benchmark."

Stengel had stinging words for traditional advertising: "This is a $450 billion dollar global industry and we're all making decisions with less data and discipline than we apply to $100,000 decisions in other aspects of our businesses."

Ad Age reports.

Neat Tool

Queryster lets you toggle between a bunch of different search engines on one search. Really cool. Here's "searchblog" results. (via Beal)

Forrester on Google

George Colony, CEO of Forrester, opines on Google in a registration-required brief released last week. Readers (thank you!) alerted me to this immediately, but the etech conference meant my posting has been and will be slower this week.

Colony begins by effusively praising the company. "The Web has gone through two major phases in its short history: pre-Google and post-Google...Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google's founders, may go down in history as the guys who saved the Internet."" A bit sweeping, IMHO.

But Colony is setting up a straw man, and he goes on to knock it down. "Is Google's search good? Yes. Is the company worth tens of billions? No."

Colony is reacting to the (now rather attenuated) Google-Will-Save-The-Valley-Through-A-Huge-IPO meme. He lists three factors that he says proves Google is not worth what the Wall Street crowd is whispering. First, competition - Yahoo, MSFT, etc. Second, low barrier to switching (ie, a better search engine can come along, and folks will simply switch to it). Third, it's still early in the web ecology, and there will be a lot of change, including a waning of the core value upon which Google is based - the economy of links (Colony argues that XML etc. will change the basic shape of how the web works).

Colony concludes that a Google IPO in the $6 billion range would be defensible, but a $15 billion+ IPO would suck the capital out of the market and be very bad for the tech world. "The company's primary strategy should be a diversification beyond search and the "we've got the best technology" syndrome into a defendable market position," he says in summary.

There's really not a lot of new thinking in here, but the response to the piece so far indicates the world was ready to hear this - it's another course correction in the media's ongoing love affair with search in general, and Google in particular. It's also a fine way for Forrester to get some contrarian-tinged PR. The comments section on the piece, again available only if you register, points out some of the weaknesses in Colony's analysis, in particular the idea that there are no barriers to entry, and that Google is too search focused (orkut, anyone?).

Diller: Bubble Ho!

The NY Post reports that Barry Diller, who built his company on cheap acquisitions during the Great Internet Nuclear Winter of 2001-2002, warns of a new internet bubble, based largely on valuations he's seeing today. Diller really held back:
"We are on our way into a new bubble, and bubbles eventually get pricked," Diller said. "This growth will also produce an endless number of brainless ideas, short-term greed, ridiculous valuations, investor speculation and all the other lovely horrors we've so quickly forgotten."
(via Bloomberg)

Mid-Talk, A Technorati hack..

Dave Sifry is issuing a challenge to bloggers in the etech audience to blog his new "products discussed in the past 24 hours," a neat hack that combines the Cosmos and Amazon APIs....so I bit...

Search Your Mother Could Use...

Dan Gillmor points us to Soople, a search tool which seems destined to wear out its 1000-search-a-day API limit over at Google. The engine rides on top of Google and makes that engine's advanced features easier to use.

From the About page: (Soople is) a site that softens all the fantastic (advanced) functions Google offers. Initially I made this site for my mother, who, though computer-savvy, still didn't know about all the possibilities Google offers.

MSFT: A Good Actor in the Search Wars

John Carroll writes a guest editorial in ZDNet. It's an interesting and thought-provoking argument that MSFT should not be seen as the bad guy in the MSFT v. Google story, and includes some good suggestions on how MSFT might integrate search in a fair and open manner. Whaddya think, Scoble?

New York City: Not In Our Name

Extraordinary: The city most wounded by the Sept. 11 attacks makes a powerful statement about the Patriot Act: No thanks. The City Council has passed a resolution affirming the US Constitution and rejecting the bill, which was run through Congress in the wake of 9/11 with little debate. Some excerpts:

  Whereas, The City of New York has a diverse population, including immigrants and students, whose contributions to the city are vital to its economy, culture and civic character; and

    Whereas, The members of the Council of the City of New York believe that there is no inherent conflict between national security and the preservation of liberty -- Americans can be both safe and free; and

    Whereas, Government security measures that undermine fundamental rights do damage to the American institutions and values that the residents of the City of New York hold dear; and

    Whereas, Federal, state and local governments should protect the public from terrorist attacks, such as those that occurred on September 11, 2001, but should do so in a rational and deliberative fashion in order to ensure that security measures enhance the public safety without impairing constitutional rights or infringing on civil liberties....

....Resolved, That the Council of the City of New York opposes requests by federal authorities that, if granted, would cause agencies of the City of New York to exercise powers or cooperate in the exercise of powers in apparent violation of any city ordinance or the laws or Constitution of this State or the United States; and be it further

    Resolved, That the Council of the City of New York urges each of the City’s public libraries to inform library patrons that Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act gives the government new authority to monitor book-borrowing and Internet activities without patrons’ knowledge or consent and that this law prohibits library staff from informing patrons if federal agents have requested patrons’ library records....

The resolution makes for great reading, and a powerful statement. It goes on to demand that Federal officials who make information requests under the Patriot Act's veil of secrecy be held accountable, and that citizens who have been investigated without their knowledge be informed. (One of the Patriot Act's most frightening aspects is the government's ability to demand the records of businesses and libraries, and force those who give up those records to remain silent about it). Bravo, New York City. If only the private sector had the same courage ...

(via IP)

Semantic Web Standards Released

CNET reports on OWL and RDF standards, published today by the W3C. "The Semantic Web is no longer a research project," said a W3C spokesperson.

Saving the World From Television

A UCLA study released this week concludes that the average Internet user spends 12 hours a week on the net, and half of those hours are taken directly from television viewing. in other words, regular net users have swapped TV time for internet time, kids in particular. This is an important trend. AdAge reports.

Excerpt: The Internet caused the number of hours children 14 and under spend watching TV to decline for the first time in 1998, a trend that has continued in recent years.

POMO Conference Scene

So I'm here at etech, and everyone in the audience has their laptop open (self included), and they're tapping away (all these keyboards sound like waves of rain across a forest floor). But that's pretty normal for most tech conferences these days. As one would expect, the alpha blogging O'Reilly community is pushing the envelope: as Joi sits up on stage discussing emerging democracy in Asia and Africa he is dwarfed by a live display, 10 feet wide by 6 feet tall. The massive screen is populated with IRC dialogue from members of the audience, Justin, Xeni, Howard, etc...all commenting on what Joi is saying on stage (as well as figuring out in real time where to go for dinner). Really something of a trip, for an old school conference dude like me. I remember doing something like this with IM at a conference in 1998 with Michael Schrage handling live input from the audience. It was a miserable failure, as I recall. This is...well, it points to some interesting things. And it's quite fascinating and disconcerting at the same time as an audience member. Side note: two women here are in fact not online, they are instead ... knitting. Somehow, it fits.

WashPost: Search Is Scary

From the WashPost, via the Straits Times, comes this instance of scaremongering: "Your secrets aren't safe - from the search engines." A casual reader might conclude that somehow search engines can scan your hard drive and tender your private information to anyone. But in fact, the point is, some people (and more often, companies/universities) are dumb enough to put the wrong thing online, and there is a subculture of folks who make a sport (or a business) of finding these documents (ie excel spreadsheets with credit card numbers). "It is all legal" the paper warns omminously, "using the world's most powerful Internet search engine." Sigh. Reminds me of early coverage of the net itself.

Perception: Open Society, Transparent Government. Reality: Florida

Boing Boing points us to this amazing piece of enterprise reporting: A group of journalists posed as regular citizens making perfectly legal information requests of Florida government officials. Result: nearly half of them tried to get out of providing information to citizens. Yikes. Story here.

Excerpt: Public officials lied to, harassed and even threatened volunteers who were using a law designed to give citizens the power to watch over their government. In six counties, volunteers were erroneously told that the documents they wanted didn't exist.

Seekscan

Via ResearchBuzz, a meta-search engine with reference, shopping, and weblogs tabs...Seekscan.

NYT on Friendster et al..

How this piece missed orkut entirely, I'll never know, but it shows the shallowness common to these kinds of easy articles. It asks the facile question: "where's the business model," but then refuses to answer it - it's in the data, it's in the portal strategy, it's in the user lockdown. I hate it when reporters don't do the math.

Norway Gets a Netscape IPO?

OK, not quite, but Opera is planning to go public. The company recently posted a slight profit, and intends to raise money to compete with MSFT in the mobile arena. The lede in this Reuters piece brought on some odd deja vu...

Norway's Opera Software said on Monday it plans an initial public offering in March to aid its race against giant rival Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news- people) to win customers for its Internet browsers in the growing mobile phone market.

Let's hope Opera execs don't dismiss MSFT Windows as a pile of "poorly debugged device drivers"....

Technorati Got Search

In true Pull-An-Allnighter style, I get an email from David at around 3 am, letting the world know that Technorati (which is hiring) now has search, which was one of my big beefs with the site. I haven't had a chance to check it out much yet (traveling this morning to ETech), but this is a cool development. The site now searches at the post-level - not just URLs, which means they can add feeds should they wish to. Should be cool to watch...

SEW Awards Are Up, Google Cleans Up

With little fanfare, the most influential publication in the Search space has posted its 4th annual SEW awards.

Big Winner: Google, for Outstanding Search Service, Best News Search Engine, Best Image Search Engine, Beste Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Provider (interesting!), Best Search Toolbar, Best Paid Placement Service, Best Search Feature....

It was nearly a sweep for the Googleplex. Yahoo won a number of honorable mentions and the Shopping category. Voting was done as a combination of subscribers to SEW and final review by Danny and Chris at SEW.

Heading to eTech...

Looking forward to meeting some of you in realspace at eTech this week. Ping me here or jbat at battellemedia dot com to meet up.

Can't We Be Friends?

MSFT's uber blogger Robert Scoble, after a week off, gets warmed up again with 26 (and counting) posts this weekend, the best for my money being this one. In it he suggests, after noting how sick he is of filing in the same profile information for orkut as he did for his first IM app in 1996, that MSFT and Google have a few beers and figure out how to play nice by creating social software apps that work with one another. Excerpt:

Why doesn't Google and Microsoft sit down at a table. Yes, I know, we're supposed to be bitter enemies. Let's get over that. Let's sit down. Have a few beers. And come up with social software that can share contacts with each other. Let's announce it in a joint press conference. Let's get over our own lock-in strategies. Let's work together on social software so that our customers can go back and forth between our systems.

Can we do that? I'd love to help if possible. I know the social software folks at Microsoft. They are listening to me. How about Google?

What do you think? Should we sit down and have some beers and see if we can work together to make the social software thing better? Or, are our customers going to be locked in 1996 forever?

Untangling the incompatibility mess would open up the possibility that social software becomes more like web services, as Soble points out. That might actually make them useful!

Neat idea. But I don't see it happening. First off, MSFT and Google, as I pointed out earlier, have totally different kharma profiles. Folks probably won't want to share their data across the divide. And second, well, corporations don't change their DNA midstream. And I think both Google and MSFT's DNA are too hardcoded for them to want to play nice with each other. But you never know...

Cool Recommendation Service

Based on tech from a company called Choicestream, mybestbets.com is a free online service that uses a melange of approaches to grok what entertainment you might like and make recommendations. AOL has incorporated this into its 9.0 service; it's informing to the concept of personalized search in general. I've signed up and plan to compare its recommendations to TiVo's.

The Register On Orkut's TOS

Andrew Orlowski, whose disdain for all things Google is never veiled, takes apart orkut's privacy/TOS policy in this Register piece. Andrew points out that orkut's policies are an awful lot like MSFT's were in the first version of Passport, policies which caused an outrage not too long ago. MSFT changed its TOS as a result, but Passport has yet to become a web-wide standard.

This is and interesting case study. So far, there has been little outrage about orkut's policies. I'll posit an obvious theory: Folks generally trust Google more than they trust MSFT. (Well, most folks do. Not Andrew.) They're willing to give Google more rope....and see if anyone's hanging at the end of the day.

It Had To Happen...

Bad news in the online advertising world: Doubleclick's recent numbers show folks are learning to ignore the ads ...it also showed, however, that the web is becoming a branding medium, as "view through" - folks taking action within 30 days of seeing the ads - is on the rise. (via DMNews)

Jeremy, Yahoo, RSS

Jeremy can't heat up his lunch at work without someone asking him about RSS. Certainly the meme is spreading. Read his comments if you want good dialog/intro on why RSS matters.

Call A Librarian...

Gary points to this article, which I missed this morning...the NYT does a nice piece on why humans in fact can do stuff computers can't...

"Maybe they could have found the answer faster on Google, but who knows if it would be right?" Ms. Tuckerman (a librarian) said. "It's not that I don't like Google, but we're the information experts."

WebFountain Gets Serious

WebFountain, which I posted about here, and which started as Clever, Jon Kleinberg's project, is getting more buzz, this time from the Merc.

It's interesting to note IBM's strategy here. They are not opening it up to the world and creating another Alta Vista/Google moment, though I believe they clearly could. They are keeping this as a behind the scenes, OEM/consulting play. Their bread is not buttered in consumerland. It's all about the enterprise, and marketing support, or "buzz reports" as the Merc calls them.

Buzz...or buzzkill? Check this passage from the Merc's rather short piece:

Gruhl says another client, a security company, wanted to be able to predict for banks whether customers depositing large amounts of cash are connected to money launderers. WebFountain gathered publicly available information, as well as a corporate client's own internal files, about known money launderers. It then searched through Web data -- from newspaper wedding announcements to high school reunion Web sites -- to draw any association between bank customers and known criminals. If the links show that someone's wife has a best friend who is a money launderer, then the bank may have reason to refuse the customer's money.

In contrast to standard search engines that just match patterns, WebFountain takes a subject and analyzes it in 50 different ways, noting how often someone's name is associated with someone else's, all in an effort to get a more precise answer to a query.

I'm sure the intelligence community hasn't been paying attention....

Longer piece on WebFountain via ZDNet here.

Search The Earth

Over at Joho, David Weinberger gives us a tantalizing glimpse of his full length essay in Esther's Release 1.0:
The Semantic Earth

Every business in the world is headquartered on earth. Every employee works somewhere. Every customer is at some location at every moment. Every product is delivered to some spot and every service is performed at some coordinates. Every transaction involves at least one place and usually more than one. And yet, until recently, businesses have systematically managed location information only for processes directly concerned with moving people and goods. Why has the literal common ground of business been largely absent from business applications?......

Finding Sounds

SEW writes up FindSounds, a search engine for audio. Cool.

Search, Your Data, and Social Networks

Boing Boing points to this paper, in draft form, which discusses the implications of all this data we happily upload to private companies on the web. I am pretty sure I know how Scott McNealy feels about all this, but when you think about it in aggregate, all that data we are giving to orkut, Amazon, Plaxo, et al, without any functional controls on how it gets used, it does start to feel a bit creepy.

The paper is clearly biased against corporations that gather personal data, but... under the present administration, paranoia doesn't feel like an option. The paper focuses on Plaxo, and delivers a pretty through thrashing to that company's privacy policy. Excerpts:

Social networks are a primary way in which suspicion is generated about individuals. Acquaintances of terrorists, terrorism suspects, terrorism financiers, terrorist supporters and terrorist sympathisers are at risk of being allocated into a grey zone of terrorist associates. A tag of that kind is potentially as harmful to a person as have been negative categorisations made in previous contexts, such as 'etranger', 'subversive' and 'unamerican'......

...Several of the sites display the Trust-e 'meta-brand'. Meta-brands were examined in an earlier article in this series (Clarke 2001), and their value was shown to be very close to zero.

(w/r/t Plaxo)...
The user's personal data is protected by only the flimsiest of contractual terms, and hence the user is forced to rely on such protections as may be provided by the law. But whether any legal protections at all apply is a wide open question. Plaxo appears to be a U.S. corporation operating in Silicon Valley. Neither the U.S.A. nor California have generic data protection laws, and quite possibly no specific laws that apply to these circumstances.....

...it is feasible to design a privacy-sensitive address-book service or social networking service. Unfortunately, none of the services referred to in this paper have demonstrated sufficient understanding of the issues to suggest that they could mature in that direction.

Nielsen and TiVo Unite on Ratings

MediaPost reports that TiVo and Neilsen are now working together to create a ratings report for the TiVo environment. This feels rather oxymoronic - TiVo has perfect information on its users, why does it need Nielsen? - but then again, Nielsen has a validating brand and distribution to the major advertisers. I can't help but wonder if the service wil lbe entirely honest about how destructive TiVo is to the 30 second spot, but we'll see. Note this quote, from the Nielsen guy: "The first step right now will be program content. We hope to get to commercial avoidance data later." Yeah...as later as possible.

On the note of TiVo, I'm going down to see their CEO Mike Ramsay next week for the book and my column. What do you want to know about TiVo that I can ask him?

RSS Tools

Since my column came out a lot of folks asking me which aggregators to use and the like. I'm not an RSS expert and to make matters worse, I use a Mac (hence I suffer PC blindness), but here's a link to a list of RSS tools, thanks to the RSS Winterfest online conference and Socialtext.

More on Trademarks

Dana Blankenhorn continues the discussion on Corante w/r/t the trademark issue and paid search. This one is not going away, though I think this will come down to shades of gray, not black and white legal rulings. If a legal precedent is set that is too restrictive, many will cry foul and claim the suffocation of an entire industry (ie, the $6 billion paid search market). If there is no precedent, trademark law is weakened and those who depend on their trademarks will suffer. It will take time for the standards to emerge from case law.

Dana points to an email from BizWeek's Alex Salkever, in which Alex notes that Google has already given in to Dell and eBay and disallowed others from advertising using those trademarks. But it's worth noting that there is something of a quid pro quo - Dell and eBay buy massive amounts of keywords related to their trademarks, to cover searches which use the trademarks in the first place. Interesting - with no competition for those keywords, I wonder how the price is set? (thanks for the pointer, Hylton!)

Talking With Gary Price

Had a nice chat with Gary Price yesterday. Here's a librarian who's written the book on the Invisible Web, and who has a mission to educate us about the resources - beyond the open web of Google et al - that are freely available to the public. Price took me on a tour of the databases that are available to anyone with a public library card. Among them, the Arlington library, which has the same Thompson/Gale databases for free as Highbeam has for $20 a month. Others, like the SF library, have huge databases of magazines and other business resources available. All you need is a library card (and access to the web - many resources are available over the net). This it does kind of make you wonder how Keepmedia and Highbeam intend to make money in the long run. Wait a minute...they intend to make money by intermediating libraries, who are notoriously terrible at marketing themselves. As I've pointed out in a few other posts, Price maintains Resourceshelf and writes and lectures prolifically about search and research.

Being Jon Kleinberg

Had a good talk today with Jon Kleinberg, professor at Cornell who some credit with work that inspired PageRank, though he's far too modest to accept that mantle. He says he's proud that in academic citations, his work on hubs and authorities is cited alongside PageRank as seminal to the current state of web search. While talking to Kleinberg was great for the historical perspective of my book (he was at IBM Almaden in the 96/97 timeframe, near Stanford, working on very similar stuff) it was also very interesting to hear his views on where search might be going.

He agrees with the consensus view that search is in its early days. The really hard problems - natural language queries, for example, have yet to be solved. "It's kind of interesting to see how far search has gotten without actually understanding what's in the document," he noted. In other words, search has gotten pretty sophisticated using keyword matching, and link/pattern analysis. But search technology still has no idea what a document actually *means* - in the human sense.

Kleinberg outlined one of his core frustrations with search engines, one I am sure all readers have experienced: the inverse search. In this scenario, you know there is a core term or phrase that, if typed into Google, would yield exactly the set of pages you're looking for. But you don't know the term, and your attempts to divine it continually bring up frustrating and non-relevant results. Say, for example, you want to know more about that regulation that you've heard about, the one that says you have the right to fly - with no additional charge - on a different airline if the one you are on cancels your flight. You want to find out the specifics of that regulation, but how?

You might Google "regulation airline overbooked" or somesuch. That takes you to a few pages that are relevant - if you're in Europe. So maybe try it again, this time with a "-Europe" (we're already way over the heads of normal searchers' syntax, but never mind that). Nope - at least not in the first few pages. Maybe take out all the EC and EU references? Nope, but now you're a little smarter on airline policies as interpreted by CATO. You get my point.

But if you knew that the regulation was in fact called the FAA Rule 240, you'd be in like Flynn. This is the "knowing the definition but not the term" problem, and it's an area Kleinberg thinks could use some improvement. After doing that exercise, and realizing how often I in fact do run headlong into this very cul de sac, I must agree (I bet Tara has some useful hacks to get around this?).

Other areas where Kleinberg sees improvement in the next five to ten years: The addition of a time axis in search results, Local/Personalized/social networking search, "wordbursting"-based search and analytics (a la Feedster/Technorati, he has a paper on this, run through the Not Born A Total Geek filter in Scientific American).

In any case, Kleinberg had a lot to say about a lot, and I wish I could put it all down here, but...gotta save it for the book, and all that. I have to say, I got the sense that Kleinberg is really just getting started in his work. He's been prodigious, and has a long career ahead of him.

Queries Getting Denser

Via DMNews, saw this study from OneStat (a web analytics company) on query trends. It basically said that folks are starting to use more words in their queries. Why? They're not getting the results they want? They know more words will mean a better result? Little of both? Not much here on that piece of the story.

Next Stop, Cover of Time Magazine...

Google was once again crowned top global brand by Interbrand. CNET reports.

Slowly, The Battleship Comes About

Verizon's Yellow Pages is finally getting into the pay-per-click game, Wonk reports via MediaPost. The massive phone co. plans to revamp its Superpages.com website to focus on the local advertising market. Funniest quote: the Verizon guy claiming this is not in response to Yahoo/Google handing them their ass. He does have a pretty funny slap at the leader: "If you want to find out about the history of plumbing, you go to Google. But if your sink's backed up at 2 a.m., we get you right to what you want to know." I dunno, but if my plumbing is backed up at midnight, something tells me turning on the computer is not first on my mind.

Gigablast: One Man, 8 Machines, And Now Related Concepts

Gigablast now has related concepts at the top. In his blog, Matt Wells points out that his engine runs on eight desktop machines. Check it out. It's damn fast (and good) for eight machines.

This Search Blows

Blowsearch aggregates 20 different engines and claims to be "fast as the wind." The site also has a toolbar that's got some buzz round the search community (link via Search Engine Lowdown).

Winer: Orkut Is Google's Identity System

Dave says with Orkut, Google is one step closer to being our trusted agent for ecommerce transactions, comment aggregation, and much more. He likens it to the Liberty Alliance, or MSFT Passport...

Udell on Scylla and Charybdis

Over at Infoworld (thanks Matt) Jon Udell is working out what might be a neat hack between the full text approach to search found at most search engines, and the rather utopian approach of the fully structured semantic web. It involves, among other things, converting RSS feeds into XHMTL. Not for the faint of heart, but an interesting angle in terms of grokking how useful search may evolve from the feed-o-sphere....

When Gary Price Writes...

...many folks listen. Gary is the Editor of Resourceshelf and a strong voice in cutting edge librarian/geek culture. In this piece, guest written for Pandia.com, Gary lists his top ten grips about Google. Many of them run along a theme which might best be summed up as failures to nurture the open, geek culture from which Google sprang.

Highlights:

1) Google needs to fix several advanced search problems. Many of them have been known for several months. These are things that should work....

2) Google's page estimates haven't been close to accurate for many months. I've been told that they're, "just estimates." However, can't estimates be more accurate?

4) The company should clearly state that they don't show all backlinks when running a link: search.

9) In late August IEEE announced that Google was crawling abstracts of their publication database. According to the news release, the project was to be completed by September. That was five months ago and a very small percentage of IEEE material appears in Google. What happened?

10) In 2001 Google spokesperson David Krane told News.Com, "...we've firmly established ourselves as the No. 1 search service on the Internet, and this can be attributed to our laser-like focus on a search-only business model." It's obvious that this business model is gone.

His conclusion:

The company now has many constituencies to please and will have even more once they go public. Is Google doing what AltaVista, Excite, and so many others did by trying to become all things to all people?

Sick of Orkut? Try Urkel

In his new book Steven Johnson points out how unusual it is for folks to laugh out loud when they are alone. This orkut parody did the job for me...thanks to Weinberger...

Why Do You Suppose It's Taught In Seattle?

Hylton Jolliffe of Corante pointed me to this Seattle Times article on a graduate course at UW which focuses on understanding Google. The first portion of the syllabus is pretty complete for a one unit class, and a fine lens for the curious.

NYT: The Valley v. MSFT, Round 2

Markoff gets ahold of an internal Google memo, throws in some Davos scenery and a few very interesting and fresh facts, and voila, the Times has a piece on The Coming Search Wars.

The Google Might Be The Next Netscape meme is warmed over, as is the MSFT Might Integrate Search Into Longhorn concept. Might? Will....The IPO As Disruptor idea is also given a curtain call. This piece proves once again that the Times can't get enough of Google stories. Or, more to the point, we as readers can't get enough.

Regardless of whether the typical outside-the-Valley reader cares, Markoff has some really good stuff in here. Eric Schmidt on MSFT's open source views:

"Based on their visceral reactions to any discussions about 'open source,' '' Mr. Schmidt wrote in his e-mail message, "they are obsessed with open source as a business model.''

Good anecdote about keeping people:

For the moment, though, Google's lead seems formidable. Last year, Rick Rashid, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the company's research division, came to its outpost in Silicon Valley to give a demonstration of an experimental Microsoft Research search engine. Shortly afterward, however, Mike Burrows, one of the original pioneers of Internet search at Digital Equipment who later helped design Microsoft's experimental search engine, quietly defected. He joined Google.....

...Microsoft has already begun a recruitment campaign aimed at demoralizing Google employees, several Google executives said. Microsoft recruiters have been calling Google employees at home, urging them to join Microsoft and suggesting that their stock options will lose value once Microsoft enters the search market in a serious way.

Alsop (who backed TiVO) claiming victory over MSFT (just watch out for Comcast...):

In other words, rivals have fought Microsoft and lived to tell about it. "At TiVo, we managed to stare down that $40 billion barrel,'' said Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist who helped finance the creation of TiVo's digital video recorder, which allows TV viewers to easily record hours of video programming for viewing at other times. "We dodged that particular bullet,'' Mr. Alsop said, when Microsoft "shut down Ultimate TV and got out of the business."

An interesting new project I had not heard of:

Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

And new information on how many computers Google has, a stunning increase from the 10,000 CPU estimate bandied about (I find that nearly all of Google's statistics are one to two years old, from how many folks work there to how many searches they do each day. It's way more than 200 million, which is what the article is saying still).

Google has been quietly developing what industry experts consider to be the world's largest computing facility. Last spring, Google had more than 50,000 computers distributed in over a dozen computer centers around the world. The number topped 100,000 by Thanksgiving, according to a person who has detailed knowledge of the Google computing data center.

That's 10x what has been reported in the past.