NEWS: A9, Amazon's Search Portal, Goes Live: Reverberations Felt in Valley

A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news - I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here's why: On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?

My gut tells me the public face will be one of partnership: After all, A9 uses Google' search results and displays at least two paid AdWord listings per result (I've requested comment from Google, you can imagine I'm not the only one...). But I have to wonder: What business is Google in, after all? Is it still in the business of just search - as it was back when it was cutting search provisioning deals right and left, with Yahoo (already ended), AOL (arguable imperiled due to Gmail and other trends), Ask, and Amazon? Is it really still in the business of being an OEM to others, a strategy which allowed it to steal those portals' customers? Or...has it evolved, to a business where it owns a large customer base, one it must now position itself to defend?

It seems to me, Google's position in Amazon's A9 implementation is at best a step backwards. If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer. (The service incorporates a personal search history and many other really neat tweaks, including a wicked good Toolbar.) In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers. Or it seems that way to me, anyway. Sure, Amazon isn't in the AdWords business. It's happy to outsource that to Google and focus on the entire US retail GDP instead...

Udi Manber, the head of A9 and one of the leading lights of the search community, is understandably evasive when asked about this subject. Google and Amazon have always been friends and partners (despite the fact that "Work at Google" is the top paid link when you search on his name on Google). But as I point out in the introduction to my Business 2.0 interview, to be posted any moment now, one-time partners can quickly become serious competitors in the Search Find Obtain market. And judging from the look of it, A9 is a very direct statement from Amazon: We are now officially in the search business, so get used to it.

One could argue that A9 is a pure commerce play, not a search portal. After all, that's what the folks at Amazon insisted when they founded the company and located it in the heart of Google/YahooLand (ie, Palo Alto). But that argument is disingenuous. First off, take a look at the A9 interface. Where's the commerce? (Answer, it's there, but it's hidden, more on that later when I post on the service itself). And second, I'd argue that you can't really be in the commerce business without having at least a strategy for owning search. The reverse also hold true. It's two ends toward the middle, and by the way, that middle ground is getting damn crowded - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, eBay, IAC, Amazon, Google...

Of course anyone who’s been in this game for a while will tell you that the internet industry is rife with cat and mouse games of cooperation turned to competition. Netscape’s outsourced its early search traffic to Yahoo, thereby insuring Yahoo’s success. Yahoo paid the favor forward by outsourcing its search to Google, a practice it ended only last quarter. Microsoft built Overture, and crushed Looksmart. And AOL’s advertising business is on the rise again, due in large part to a deal with Google, which just announced a stunning new email service that pretty much decapitates one of AOL’s core differentiators (oh, Yahoo and MSN as well...).

What makes this particularly noteworthy is that A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better. Sound familiar? Yup, it's what Google did to Yahoo, Yahoo to Netscape...you get the picture.

It all reminds me of a quote in a recent AP story from Google employee #1:

(The ongoing threat of competition) has helped keep Google from becoming complacent, said Craig Silverstein, the company's director of technology. "If someone should come along and do a better job than us, we know people will switch in a heartbeat."

Something tells me the hearts are beating a bit faster at Yahoo and Google HQs today. Will Google renew its deal with Amazon? Will Bezos and Schmidt put a good face on it and call this a partnership? I have no idea, but man, things are certainly getting interesting in this neck of the woods. More after I talk with folks and get a second order view of the landscape.

(I'll also have a much more complete posting on A9, including a tour of its features and a discussion of its strategic implications later tonight.)

PS- for a tour of what's cool in A9: Click here.

F*cking Spam

Spam. F*cking spam. Last night I got hit with about 150 or so comment spams from "http://www.emmss.com", some Chinese site I can't even read. I'm on it, but I don't have the time to hand-delete all these spams, and my mail is down to boot, meaning my Blacklist ain't functional. Even if it were, that's hundreds of clicks. Anyone know a way to batch delete comments in the MT backend?

The Web Time Axis

One of my largest gripes about the web is that it has no memory. But I think this will soon change - at some point in the not too distant future we'll have live and continuous historical copies of the web that will be searchable - creating, if you will, a time axis for the web, a real-time Wayback Machine (only there'll be no broken links). In other words, in our lifetimes we'll see our cultural digital memory - as we understand it through the web and engines like Google - become contiguous, available, always there. And barring a revival of the Luddites or total nuclear war, this chain will most likely be unbroken, forever, into the future. Historians looking back to this era will mark it as a watershed. At some definable point in the early 21st century, the web will gain a memory of itself, one that will never be lost again. Most likely, this will start as a feature of a massively scaled company like Yahoo or Google, much like Gmail or search itself is now. But it's coming, and the implications are rather expansive.

If the web had a time axis, you could search constrained by webdate. You could ask questions like "show me all results for my query from this time period..." or "Tell me what was the most popular results for XYZ during the 3rd of May in 20XX." How about "show me every reference to my great grandfather, born in 2050," asked by a great grandson in 2150? Impossible? Yeah, seems that way, but...so did a free gig of mail and the concept of the entire Internet in RAM. Thanks to the dramatic decrease in the cost of storage, 64-bit computing, abundant memory (jesus, there's an entendre), and the scalable business model of paid search, I think this day is not far off. The web is just ten years old, for the most part, but think what it might be like when it's 100 years old. That's a lot of data to search.

I was reminded of this idea (I had written it down a while back while musing for the book) when Gary sent word that Daypop is archiving its Top 40 back to 2002. It's fascinating to see what was the buzz, say, two years ago today.

Gmail update: CA Legislation, Timeline, et al

Hard to keep up with all the Gmail news, CNet rounds it up here. Upshot: CA legislator is threatening to introduce legislation outlawing the product, Google announced it was in a 3-6 month test phase and might make changes to the product based on response (opening the door to possible changes to protect or enhance or at least address privacy issues).

The Politics of SERPs

NYT today has an overview of the ongoing JewWatch.com case. The case reveals the bind Google faces when asked to remove offensive search results, in this case, the first result for the word "Jew" is an anti-semitic site. I am sure that does not leave many "feeling lucky."

The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., said it had no plans to remove the site from the search results list because it trusts its automated program to rank Web sites accurately. The search engine has been listing "Jewwatch.com" as the first-ranked site for three years.

"We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes," said David Krane, a spokesman for Google, adding that an exception is made only in cases where a site is illegal. Mr. Krane said the company has, for example, removed sites from its rankings that promote pedophilia, which is illegal.

The issue here, it seems to me, is the fact that Google is taken as the first and last word on what our culture believes to be important w/r/t any given term. That jewwatch.org is the first result for "jew" seems counterintuitive to nearly everyone, and clearly offensive. But somehow it has gained the highest ranking - it is a directory, with hundreds of links. Perhaps that is one reason why...and this controversy is only giving it more links...an interesting phenomenon. (I've not linked to it in this post for this reason).

Links into Jewwatch.com, according to Google.

According to Technorati.

Apparently, some folks are organizing a counter Google bomb, by linking to the wikipedia entry, which currently ranks at #2. There you go, I just added my pagerank to the cause...

Update: Google has posted an explanation of why this occurs here...that they responded so quickly is cool, I think.

What Does Google Know Trademark Lawyers Don't?

They must know something, because late last week they notified their advertisers that it was open season on trademark keyword buys (CNET story here). Yes, this is the long simmering issue that is still in the courts - trademark owners don't want third parties bidding on their trademarked terms (the most well-known case is Playboy).

In any case, this is a bold move, akin to "waving a red flag at the bull" as one source told CNET. But is it? At the end of the day, the law favors clarity and consistency, if it can. Seems to me this move forces clarity: It's all or nothing. Google is, by its action, declaring what it thinks is the appropriate approach - let the market decide. LImiting *some* keywords forces the courts into a never ending cycle of litigation around where the boundaries w/r/t fair trademark use are.In the current political climate, such an approach will probably prove futile in the long run. Google is playing this move against what they believe is the end game, and they may not be far off in their estimation of the courts.

More Open Source Search: Mozdex

Mozdex launched recently, it's an open source search engine that uses DMOZ as its seed corn.

Cool: Every result has an "explain" button that shows the ranking code. Now that's interesting.

It's a tad slow, and new so it's incomplete, but I hope takes off...and I hope Nutch will as well. (My 2.0 column on Nutch here...)

UPDATE: Gary, ever alert, notices this:

A quick check shows that the owner of GetHitsfromUS.com owns the
Mozdex.com domain.
http://www.whois.sc/mozdex.com

This may be a pure ad play, in other words. More when I know for sure.

Cramer: Google IPO Proves System Is Corrupt

A great Cramerian rant on why the Google IPO could be a "train wreck."

Excerpts:

And Google could be worth every penny, at least the pennies that the investment bankers are pitching it for, although it may not be worth what it ultimately ends up trading for. That’s because the disparity between where the bankers price the IPO and where it opens could be the largest gulf in the history of IPOs, in part because neither the government nor the industry has done a thing to fix a system that broke down and descended into corruption and stupidity during the dot-com heyday. Put simply, Google could end up being the biggest IPO, and the biggest IPO train wreck, in history....

Google, the company, may be the real deal, but Google the stock may just show us a return to the bubble days that we all thought had mercifully been put behind us. Or, to put it another way, Google, now synonymous with “to search,” could, the moment it opens for trading, become synonymous with “to fleece.”

Findory Featured...

Newsearch engine Findory is profiled in this Seattle Times article. Like Topix, this engine creates personalized news pages based on your interests. Findory watches what your read and presents related stories. The founder, Greg Linden, cut his teeth in Amazon's personalization foundry...

Search Radio

Many have pointed me to this NPR series on search...I was interviewed for it but have no idea if my ramblings made the cut...

Microsoft: Fat around the Middle?

This BusinessWeek article, which I missed but an alert reader pointed me to, takes the thesis that MSFT is facing middle age with uncertainty.

The piece runs down the threats: Linux, slow growth, bloated core product that hasn't had an update in years, anti-trust suits....then runs down how they are reacting.

So check this out: They keep a list.

While Ballmer drives day-to-day operations, the 48-year-old founder is taking personal control of the technology charge. He has put together what is now called "The List" around Microsoft's Redmond (Wash.) campus. It's a priority ranking of 50 or so initiatives that cut across product lines and are critical to making the next generation of products successful -- everything from security software and the user interface to Web search and telephony. The List is so important that each item has been assigned to one top executive, who is responsible for driving it throughout the company. "We're using a lot of IQ to go after these things," says Gates.

Sound familiar? Yup, that's how Google has been doing it for years.

Also interesting, BizWeek seems to have a scoop on what's going on with Longhorn and the integrated search/file system:

The most important change (to Longhorn) is to the file system -- the way information is stored on the PC. Microsoft is creating a new design not just for Windows but for all of its products that makes it easier to retrieve photos, documents, songs, and e-mail. That's important as users stash more and more files on their computers. If Microsoft gets it right, it will be simple, for example, for users to zip through thousands of pictures and sort them by date or by the people in them.

But Longhorn won't do everything Gates first envisioned. BusinessWeek has obtained copies of two internal e-mails showing that Microsoft is cutting some of the most ambitious technologies to get the product out the door. For example, Longhorn will now ship with a scaled-back version of the file system. The current plan, in practical terms, means people will be able to search their PCs for documents and information related to each other, but they won't be able to reach into corporate servers for similar files.

I wonder, does this mean web-wide search integrated into Longhorn will be delayed?

And on the mid life crisis meme - Google may not be worried, but beware a company in midlife crisis - it might just try to buy the equivalent of a $100,000 sports car. And MSFT can afford some very nice cars....

(Thanks, Rohit)

Good Morning, Your New Net IPO Today Is....

Greenfield Online. They filed before, have filed again. They do online surveys.

The Font of Tragedy

Our culture often counters success with the rebuke of pridefulness, the font of tragedy. News.com reports from a Stanford MBA panel, where a Google exec (Salar Kamangar) gave the reporter, search beat veteran Stefanie Olsen, the sense that he was "downplaying the looming threat of search competition from Microsoft, saying his company doesn't expect to see a credible product from the software giant for years."

I dunno if this was a misinterpretation, but...this reminds me of what Marc Andreesseen said lo so many years ago (the famous quote where Windows was dismissed as buggy device drivers...). Also, new Google recruit Anna Patterson dismissed MSFT's search in this story a month ago. A trend? Probably not. But it's not beyond many to call it so.

I'll Take Mesothelioma for $100

Lawyers lick their chops at the chance to prosecute a mesothelioma case. That's why the rare form of cancer caused by asbestos is a high-value keyword. Apparently the term has hit $100 a click, according to this UPI report.

The Web As Platform

I've decided to add a new category to Searchblog, and with it a new facet of coverage, which I'm calling The Web As Platform. For reasons I hope to make clear over time, I think search represents critical binding for this particular erector set. This meme has been around for a very long time, in various flavors, but any number of circumstances are gathering which have given it significant traction and I find it important and fascinating. I've been doing a fair amount of work in this space, work I'll be announcing later in the year, but for now, I hope you agree this is a space worth watching.

IntelliTXT: Your Advertising Peanut Butter Is In My Editorial Chocolate....

Back in 1998, February to be exact, I shared a stage at the TED conference with Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab. Richard Saul Wurman, TED's founder and impressario, introduced us both. I went first. I gave a short overview of my new magazine to a polite and curious reception. Gross then got up and in ritalin-starved fashion began a manic pitch. Imagine, he told the incredulous audience of tech and entertainment influencers, an entirely new search engine model, one driven not by editorial results, but by the raw metrics of the market itself - a pay-for-placement search engine, where the highest bidder wins top spot.

Afterwards a number of folks gathered around to congratulate me, and at the same time to ridicule Gross's vision. After all, I was starting a magazine predicated on principles pretty much diametrically opposed to Gross: objective and high-integrity journalism. Pay for placement? Bah! It will never work. Keep up the good work, Battelle.

Well, what Gross presented six years ago was GoTo, nee Overture, nee AdWords. What I was pitching was The Standard. Enough said.

This was on my mind earlier this week as I chatted with Doug Stevenson, CEO of Vibrant Media, the company behind IntelliTXT. This is the service that has been much maligned by journalists for its inline advertising solution, ads which pop up from inside editorial content when you click on a word or phrase which is double underlined in green. (An example of the ads in action is here (doesn't work on OSX).)

While the knee-jerk reaction of the press to this invasion of their hallowed editorial space is understandable, it's hardly nuanced. And some nuance is required to grok this particular beast.

That the IntelliTXT approach violates one of journalism's most sacred conventions cannot be denied. The ASME guidelines covering new media, in which I played a minor role as an ASME judge, do not specifically prohibit an IntelliTXT scenario. But that very fact belies how deep the nerve IntelliTXT has touched truly is: No one ever imagined that advertisers and publishers would have the temerity to turn a journalist's very words into an advertising opportunity. The section covering this territory reads as follows:

Hypertext links that appear within the editorial content of a site, including those within graphics, should be at the discretion of the editors. If links are paid for by advertisers, that should be disclosed to users.

It's almost as if we knew that IntelliTXT was coming, but in fact, we did not. What we meant by "hypertext links" were the ad units already extant at the time - in particular, paid text links at the bottom of the page or to the right, which were proliferating when these guidelines were created (circa 2001). We presumed they'd be discrete, we did not imagine they'd be the actual content itself.

The guidelines also state:

All online pages should clearly distinguish between editorial and advertising or sponsored content. If any content comes from a source other than the editors, it should be clearly labeled.

A case could be made that the green double-underline format is sufficiently distinguishing, and one could argue back that the opposite is also true. I'd like to move past that. If this approach can in fact make money for publishers, some version of it will be adopted. So now what?

Stevenson, the Vibrant CEO, was quite flummoxed by the negative press IntelliTXT has garnered. He said that Vibrant has been around quite a long time, had built a strong online advertising business with tens of millions in revenues, and was very deliberate in its approach to rolling out IntelliTXT - he had solicited the input of publishers and journalists, and built the product in a way that he thought was both appropriate and cutting edge. He argued that the system was created to be unobtrusive - the only way the ads show is if the user actively rolls the cursor over the keyword, then clicks. In a sense, he argues, he's giving control back to the user, they can ignore the ad if they'd like; the double green underline is far less intrusive than pop ups, and far more relevant than contextual paid links. If you're reading a travel story on Paris, for example, and the words "Paris hotel" are underlined, you just might choose to click on that link, and be offered an advertisement for a Paris hotel booking service. (Note I did not choose the Paris Hilton....) If you do choose that link, the ad is a service, not an intrusion, Stevenson points out.

Stevenson's other point is even more direct: It's the publishers who decide which keywords are linked to, and when. The entire system is controlled by the publishers, so if anyone should take the heat, it's the publishers, and not the IntelliTXT system. While this argument ranks up there with insoluble polemics such as "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Stevenson does have a point. So why might a publisher want to employ such a system?

I can think of many reasons. One, the publisher has no ostensible editorial boundaries. Cargo - one of a raft of new magazines that are essentially cataglog magazines ("magalogs"), or most of the Seven Sisters (Glamour, Vogue, etc) come to mind. These magazines pretty much exist to move product, and they don't pretend otherwise. A system like this would work quite well for the online kin to these kind of publications.

Second, there are an entire classes of content-driven sites which claim absolutely no pretense of editorial objectivity. Whether they are fan sites, directories, blogs, corporate advertorials, for-profit domain-specific portals, you name it, the tradition of sites which carry their biases proudly or are baldly commercial in nature is rich and growing, and IntelliTXT may well give these kind of sites a new monetization model.

When it comes to true editorial sites, I think IntelliTXT portends an important opportunity for publishers to control and manage relevance, service, and context for their readers. But I think both readers and journalists are not ready for the context-jarring concept of ads directly in editorial text. It crosses a line that should be respected. But what if it were possible to break out keywords for a given article in a separate box, for example, and run that box at the end or to the side of the article? This addresses the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup problem (your advertising peanut butter is in my editorial chocolate....) but retains the power and reader service of the system. Stevenson replied that in fact such a hack would be possible. Should IntelliTXT prove a viable advertising medium, I'd expect publishers to try this approach almost immediately.

Now, I won't get into other issues this service raises - that editors might start writing to high-value keyphrases, for example - but they exist, as they do for anyone working with AdSense or even standard print advertising, for that matter.

To conclude, I think journalists jumped all over IntelliTXT because it was easy to leap, just like we did with GoTo back in 1998. But we'd be wise to not dismiss so quickly ideas which might portend new approaches to monetizing our work. In this marketplace, a few minor tweaks can yield historic shifts. Witness Overture: Gross and his team ended up adopting an OEM model and outsourcing their pay for placement engine to others, who put the ads on the right of editorial results, clearly marked for readers (well, in most cases). The rest is history.

IntelliTXT backgrounder is here.

Re-Find

A reminder to sign up for Re-Find, the email summary of the week that was on Searchblog, in the upper left hand corner. If you're into that kind of thing, that is.

Claria Clarified

Perhaps I was being a bit too off the cuff in my last post on Claria. Full disclosure: A good friend went to work for them recently. This person admitted the company's past, but said that in fact it was mending its ways. New management has come in, folks with a good track record at Excite, pre-bust. I'm looking forward to learning more soon. On that note, look for my post on IntelliTXT shortly.

Claria Files For IPO

Change your name from Gator, get the books in order, put happy smiling people on your website, and file. OK, Marchex, Advertising.com, BrightMail, Shopping.com, Salesforce, Claria. Do we have a trend yet? Do we have a problem yet?

Bankers: Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, and Thomas Weisel Partners.

The S-1 is here.

Google and Online Currency?

Not sure entirely what they're on about in this eMarketer report, as it's an excerpt, but the suggestion is made, after lengthy throat clearing, that Google create its own online currency so as to compete in the SFO (Search Find Obtain) space. The article correctly points out that Google lacks muscle in the Obtain part of the equation, compared to Amazon and EBay. But then it says Google should get its own currency. I don't think so. But, what do you think?

Yahoo Earnings Jump, Stock Does the Splits

Yahoo announced earnings (PDF) just now, and the numbers were stronger than expected. The company earned $132 million on revenues of $758 million ($550 excluding TAC), up from $55 million on $283 million a year ago. EPS came in at .14, the street was expecting .11. The stock is up more than 10% in after hours trading. If you want to download their presentation on their earnings, click this link. The company posted strong gains across nearly all the core metrics - uniques, active users, cash flow, international revenue ...etc.

To add to the euphoria, Yahoo announced a 2 for 1 stock split, and boosted guidance. The conference call is slated for a half hour from now.

(Thanks for SEC nod, Gary)