In Yahoo Using Google: I Am Not Sure This is A Good Idea, John Battelle suggests Yahoo and MSN can take on Google and might win.  It won't work, the war is already over about Search Dominance and both have lost.  Also, John Battelle brings up an analyst's report that says Yahoo ought to drop it's own search engine and go back to using Google's Search while laying off 25% of it's employees, thereby becoming profitable again.

"…Lindsay’s advice: outsource search to Google, and cut staff by as much as 25%. He thinks the company could boost 2008 operating income by $565 million, and EPS by 24 cents, by outsourcing search; cutting a quarter of the staff could add another $658 million in operating income, and another 28 cents in EPS, he figures. He also contends Yahoo needs to restructure its display advertising business to boost growth to the industry average; if they can do that, he writes, the company can add another $376 million in revenue and 15 cents in EPS. "

It's a mute point, but financial analysts tend to look at everything in terms of what will make/lose the most money and are pretty much blind to everything else - like the rest of Wall Street (some who would sell almost anything if it would make enough of a profit for their portfolios).

I don't see Yahoo or Microsoft leading in Search again, ever - the time for that has passed; the only areas they can dominate is in niches.  For example, I hear alot of people raving lately about Ask.com's map search, people search …. etc.  Clearly, Ask may have a better product than Google - but it's still going to get next to no usage compared to Google - because most people don't care about those features enough to change over to Ask.com; same with Yahoo and Microsoft, except for certain features, which may appeal to some over others (but it will never be enough people to make any real difference).

I don't know about abandoning Yahoo's Search Engine and using Google while cutting 25% of Yahoo's employees .. I think, again, it's besides the point - and it's also a pretty nasty policy may prop up Yahoo's stock temporarily - but will probably hurt it in the long term.  But that's just what you expect from a Financial Analysts who are probably using Hedge Funds to gain when Yahoo goes up and profit again when Yahoo goes down.

I tend to not want to listen to Financial Analysts…can't you tell?

John Battelle found out about research being done to identify users online by the unique way each user interacts with their keyboards.  I briefly looked at the report using Pertinence Summarizer (because it’s not easy to read a 34 page scientific paper on a Sunday evening) and what I got out of it was online behavior could be broken down to 800 unique datasets that, with sufficient input, could identify most users by their online behavior.  Battelle’s comments were focused on the lack of privacy this method, if employed, would entail.

"The paper is reviewed in Wharton’s online publication. What I find rather irritating in the coverage (I have not read the paper yet) is there is precious little discussion of privacy issues, and none of government abuse. It strikes me that at the end of the day, these are the two most important issues facing the deployment of such a technology. Who knew your keyboard and mouse, in essence, are transferring your fingerprints across the web?"

While it’s possible for users to be identified by their online behavior, it’s not likely, at this time, to be done without a users consent (which will limit the effectiveness since not too many people will agree to this).   ON the other hand there may be more in the paper where I might change my opinion were I to read it more closely.

John Battelle started something new - different on his blog today - news stories that are voted on (much like Digg) and ranked by visitors - it’s called "SearchMob".

"Inspired by Piers Fawkes, an FM author, who used Pligg to do Marktd, I’ve been working on a new feature at Searchblog I’ve come to call SearchMob. Ok, maybe not the best name, but at least there’s alliteration. The idea is simple - you can register and submit stories to the site. Then readers vote the stories up the ranks, similar to Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine (yes, all FM sites)."

"I’ve already learned a lot from this experiment, and will be working to improve the service over the week. Keep on posting, thanks!"

So far I have been looking at the stories, have not submitted or voted on any yet but I probably will submit a story soon.

John Battelle points out that Google is ramping up to collect personalized search profiles of searchers and is already doing so, in some cases - according to Greg Linden .

"I would guess it works by determining subject interests (e.g. sports, computers) and biasing all search results toward those categories. That would be similar to the old personalized search in Google Labs (which was based on Kaltix technology) where you had to explicitly specify that profile, but now the profile is generated implicitly using your search history."

What makes such a massive undertaking possible is inexpensive distributed storage that can categorize, update, store, retrieve and re-rank search results in real time (or else this personalized profiles would not be that useful); this system is called BigTable.

"Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable."

As Greg Linden points out, aka John Battelle, the collection of personalized profiles may be also invasion of your privacy:

"….. worries this approach will not work so well for the task at hand, and I agree with him, but that’s not my topic for this post. What I want to point out is simply this: what rights do you, I, or anyone else have to edit, delete, or own these profiles?

Anyone from Google care to answer that one?"

 

Yes, I’ll answer.

It may be an invasion of privacy if carried to as far as it could go- but I don’t think Google is the kind of company to carry it that far.   There are issues here that have not fully been explored and maybe that needs to happen before or during the development of the technology to personalize search results.

It’s been known that standard SEO goes down the tubes if you personalize everyone’s search result…what do you optimize for then?  You have to optimize your content for the category that it’s in - so when Google gets to the point where it can personalize everyone’s search results on the fly (if that ever really happens) your category optimized content comes to the top).  It’s the same game, just new variables to take care of…

Also, the audience becomes a lot more important - as you’ll be optimizing for an audience - not so much for the search engine.

I think John Battelle brings up an important point - right now Google owns the profiles and while you don’t have to use personalized search - Google can still collect data.  I’d like to see Google clean the data, de-personalize it, and then sell it as Market Intelligence.  I know they dabble with that from time to time - but I’d like to see them go all the way….but only with data that can not be tied back to individuals.

 

 

Just found out that Google is going to be running the MySpace.com Search Engine and is paying MySpace 900 million dollars to be allowed to do that.

Yow. From the Journal, more as I get it.

Google will pay News Corp. at least $900 million to be the search provider on MySpace and other sites. The move — a blow to rival Yahoo — gives Google exclusive access to one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and follows Google’s $1 billion deal to provide searches on AOL.

Google has guaranteed minimum payments based on expected revenues from search placements on MySpace.

The deal is all cash, there are traffic assumptions that they feel "comfortable" with, the deal feathers back if traffic goals are not met. "Our history is that we agree to these structures, and then we do better because of our synergies," says Schmidt.

It’s been the subject of speculation for several months that MySpace.com wanted to Search Partner and I something about that in last June - but I’m not finding the exact details.

Interesting Site Search Metric - The Propensity to Search

 

John Battelle is going to be a Keynote Speaker at Webmasterworld Pubcon in LV later this year (November).  Webmetricsguru will be there (me) hopefully covering it with a Press Pass.

Small world!  I met John Battelle at Webmasterworld Pubcon in New Orleans over a year ago, in June 2005; he walked into the bar at the hotel where most of the conference was housed and had a drink.  Sometime, it’s easier to connect with someone that way - then when they are in front of a 1000 people, giving a keynote address.  After the Keynote - there’s 50 people waiting on line and it’s difficult to get a word in.

Recently, just yesterday, Boing Boing, linked to my article on Amy Crehore in ArtNYC. 

John talked about how he started Boing Boing for next to no money and spent, maybe 800 dollars a month in bandwidth and server changes to maintain the blog - which has become immensely popular.  

John Battelle has a writeup about why some AdWords ads work while others don’t (and it extends past AdWords and into PointRoll and other ad technologies).

When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:

• Heavy use of large, clear text
• A color scheme that matches the site’s style
• Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as "free" and interactive (UI) elements.

I saw stats on one of my clients recently that suggested PointRoll ads don’t do that well for conversions.   I’m sure PointRoll could show me stats that prove their ads do well.  The point is - finding what works for each client and overall. 

According to John Battelle, Google is testing a Cost Per Action service (CPA) - the original source is SeekingAlpha.  Here’s some excerpts from SearchAlpha

"How do I get paid?

You get paid whenever a site visitor clicks on the ad on your site AND performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product.

Do these compete with regular content ads?

These ads will not compete with contextually targeted ads. Instead, they will show across a separate network, the Content Referral network. To place one of these ads on your site, you can set up a new ad unit that supports any of our current ad unit sizes.

How much could publishers expect to earn with this CPA test?

How much a publisher will earn will depend on a number of factors about the publisher and advertiser, including whether the ads match the topic of the site, and level of interest of their site visitors. We have tried to match the appropriate publishers with advertisers for this test.

Will CPA offerings compete with my current AdSense revenue?

We expect that the CPA test will offer ad units that will expand publishers AFC revenue because the ad units are separate and appeal to different types of users. These CPA ads are also additional inventory to your existing AFC ad units.

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?

Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like “I recommend this product” or “Try JetBlue today” next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying “Click Here” is not ok.

Where do these CPA ads comes from?

The CPA ads come from a limited group of high quality advertisers that are interested in displaying ads on a CPA basis. They pay you whenever a site visitor performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product.

Will I be able to see reports within my account?

When the test begins, you will receive weekly email reports of conversions you have accrued and your total revenue within the CPA test.

That’s going to work much more effectively on Google’s Network than SNAP - it’s the Google’s size and mainstream use of it’s search engine that is going to drive this.

John Battelle released an interesting post about Google’s future direction over the next  year as discussed in a Financial Analysts meeting yesterday.

• 1) Breakthroughs Likely in Branded Advertising Over the Next Year;
• 2) No Plans to Introduce a Browser at the Moment;
• 3) Google Base Won’t Be A Large Separate Site;
• 4) Wi-fi Deployment Effort To Increase Usage of Google;
• 5) Behavioral Targeting Holds More Promise Than Demographic Targeting;
• 6) Rising Competition Should Benefit Google and Yahoo / Keyword Prices Should Continue to Rise;
• 7) Quality Scores Are Keyword Based Only / Testing Improvements to Current Model;
• Dell Deal to Be Cash Positive to Google Over the Term of the Contract;
• 9) Local Search is a Significant Portion of Their Business;
• 10) Traction in China and Korea Will Take Time.
  

A couple of interesting points:  Google had been rumored to be developing it’s own browser to defeat Microsoft’s IE; but it’s probably not going to happen this year.  

Wi-Fi is probably going to become a much bigger part of Google’s revenues once it’s patents to use use AdWords in a local, geotargeted fashion across WiFi networks (and from that point of view - buying a lot of bandwidth and wiring up cities for free WiFi makes a lot of sense - for Google will use this bandwidth to stream their own advertising - it’s coming ….maybe this year.

Behavioral Targeting vs. Demographic Targeting - it seems that Google is saying that it places more stock on Behavioral targeting (show ads based on how people react vs who they are and what audience they are part of).  In a way, Microsoft is betting all it’s cards (i think) on the Demographics side with AdCenter while Google, clearly does not want to put so much in Demographics and would find it easier to go with Behavioral targeting as it’s just more code for their programmers to produce and … boom…you now have Behavioral Targeting.

Keyword prices continue to rise - no surprise here - they will rise for some time yet.

Quality Scores for Keywords - that’s interesting but I don’t know much about it - Honestly, I’d like to know more and if anyone who reads Webmetricsguru.com knows more, please comment on what they thing the Quality Scores are and how they’re derived.

Dilbert does a satire on Google care of John Battelle

Dilbert Does Google

"Their company motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ It’s not as if they have a death ray or something." Thanks KK.

Hmm.   Not much of comics reader (except Marvel comics, on occasion) but I do like Dilbert.