Amazon UK DVD rentals

Amazon UK launches DVD rentals.

"Amazon is determined to be the best place to rent DVDs -- online or off," CEO Jeff Bezos said.

See also "Is Amazon the new Netflix?"

A dime per search

John Battelle posts incredible numbers on the performance of Google AdWords:

• Average payment per click on a Google ad is $.54.
• Nearly 17% of searches end in a click on an ad.

Combining these two pieces of data, it appears Google makes $.09 per search.

That's right. Every search you do on Google generates nearly a dime of revenue for the company.

Impressive numbers. And they're only expected to go higher as demand for internet advertising increases.

Google has firmly established that relevant, useful, and unobnoxious advertising can be stunningly lucrative.

Update: John Battelle reports that the latest numbers (Oct 2005) from Google show a 33% increase, now $0.12 per search. Impressive.

MSN vs. eBay

Neowin reports that MSN will be launching a new e-commerce service called Messenger Marketplace:

Buy and Sell within social network, also list wants and share recommendations. List items you want to sell, things you are looking for, and your recommendations. Your buddies notice new items you’ve listed when they login. They can either buy, sell or refer you to one of their buddies.

It is like eBay except with people that you already know and trust directly (or a few degrees out).

Clever idea. Hard to do this without already having a good social network built, but MSN does have that for MSN Messenger users.

It's starting to look like eBay will have some new competition.

[via Todd Bishop]

Human editors and web search

Danny Sullivan (Founder of Search Engine Watch) says the solution to manipulation of search result rankings is to:

... involve human editors as part of the search equation. At one time, several search engines allowed human beings to make editorial choices about what would be shown in response to a query, to complement technological selections. Today, all the major services have sadly followed Google's lead in assuming all things can be solved through automation and search algorithms.

I assume Danny doesn't literally mean human editors hardcoding which results are returned for queries. How do human editors scale to billions of web pages? How do you do this efficiently and effectively, at low cost with high quality?

You might imagine that humans could provide canned responses to the most frequent queries. But this would only apply to a small subset of queries, and even this would be prohibitively expensive to maintain.

A more scalable and more common form of this is shortcuts where a search engine will detect particular categories of queries and return some results from a specialized data source. This is automated, of course, but humans are involved in identifying and creating the shortcuts.

I do wonder how much this debate of human vs. robots is a real issue. Truth be told, search engines have teams of good ol' humans analyzing data behind the scenes. These humans discover patterns in the data that are lowering the quality of the relevance rank, such as search engine spam, and change the algorithms to adapt.

Is this different than using "human editors as part of the search equation"?

Thunderbird launches

Thunderbird 1.0, the Mozilla e-mail client, is out. Excellent.

Interesting that it includes an RSS reader. It's increasingly common to see RSS readers integrated in e-mail clients (Thunderbird), web browsers (Firefox, Safari soon), and portals (My Yahoo).

[via Steve Rubel and Eric Bangeman]

Blocking RSS advertising?

Kottke discusses blocking or filtering advertising in RSS feeds.

[via therssweblog and Jeremy Zawodny]

Most hated advertising

Jakob Nielsen summarizes research on user's perceptions of online advertising and which advertising practices (popups, playing sound, blinking) are most annoying.

Jakob ends with some "Lessons for Websites":

Sites that accept advertising should think twice before accepting ads that 80 to 90% of users strongly dislike. The resulting drop in customer satisfaction will damage your long-term prospects.

Advertisers themselves might be tempted to continue with these nasty design techniques as long as they can find sites that will run them. After all, they typically yield higher clickthrough rates. But clickthrough is not the only goal. Users who are deceived into clicking on a misleading ad might drive up your CTR, but they're unlikely to convert into paying customers. And your brand suffers a distinct negative impact when you antagonize customers.

See also my earlier post, "Bringing sense to web advertising".

[via Alex Edelman]

Update: Jeff Boulter slams Yahoo for their annoying advertising.

Affiliate tags in search engines

Rayg (from Feedster) asks, "If search engines are so willing to pimp their space to sponsored links, why ... [not add] an affiliate ID in the [search result] links?" Ray goes on to argue that the move would largely go unnoticed and wouldn't damage credibility.

Jeremy Zawodny (from Yahoo) disagrees, saying that this would blur the lines between sponsored and non-sponsored results too badly. Even if the relevance rank is unbiased by the affiliates revenue, the perception that some links are paid would damage the credibility of the search engine.

I have wondered if Yahoo and Google have considered adding affiliate links, not to their search engine, but to their metashopping searches (Yahoo Shopping and Froogle).

But Jeremy's point that probably applies to shopping search as well. It would look like a conflict of interest and potentially damage credibility, even if the affiliates revenue did not influence their relevance rank.

Google Reviews?

Gary Price reports that Google recently registered a few new domains, including googlereviews.com.

As Nathan Weinberg points out, there isn't really a Google Reviews product out there yet. Closest to it is the merchant reviews spidered into Froogle.

I'm curious to see if Google will be releasing a review service that is more of a competitor with Epinions, CitySearch, Zagat, and Amazon.com's customer reviews. What would this look like?

One version of this could be a combination of product reviews spidered from the web and reviews entered by Google users. I imagine these product reviews would be integrated into Froogle, supplementing the store reviews. Currently, Froogle is a price comparison engine, helping users find a specific product at a low price. With product reviews, Froogle gives users the information they need to differentiate between products, helping them find the right product at the right price. It's a much more useful service.

Or perhaps we'll see small business merchant reviews integrated into Google Local, as Yahoo Local already has done. Currently, Google Local is essentially the Yellow Pages, helping users find a local merchant. With merchant reviews, Google Local would help users differentiate between merchants and find the right merchant for the task. Another much more useful service.

I'd expect to see both of these from Google soon.

Le Monde offers weblogs

Cyberjournalist.net reports that Le Monde is now offering weblogs, "the largest newspaper in the world to do so."

Robert Andrews says, "Sacre bleu! C'est magnifique! Because Le Monde now provides weblogs to its readers under the brand of the newspaper."

Susan Mernit praises the move and then slams the rest of the news media, saying, "US newspapers, how about having some courage yourselves?"

Google, small businesses, and eBay

Fortune has an interview with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google). It's interesting and worth reading.

One particular quote on helping small businesses caught my eye:

The longer term goal is to have businesses give us very timely local information. So, for example, they'll say we have too much of this or too much of that product, and we want to have a sale. The goal is to have the computers arrange that real time and send out targeted advertising to interested parties nearby.

Eric is saying that they want to help small businesses tell interested people about individual products.

Is this more than just targeted advertising? To me, it's starting to look like allowing merchants to use Google to sell their products.

What do I mean? Consider eBay for a moment. What is eBay really? It's classified advertising. Small merchants post advertisements for their products on eBay. Buyers come to eBay, find what they need, and close the sale, often using a non-eBay site for payment. eBay's business is essentially classified advertising.

Now, look back at what Eric Schmidt said. Google will help merchants target individual products to interested people. Advertising at this level of granularity is very similar to eBay's product. Using Froogle, AdWords, and AdSense, small merchants could sell their products through Google instead of eBay.

[via John Battelle and Gary Price]

Update: Three years later, a BusinessWeek article reports the eBay "magic is gone ... Shoppers are simply not buying all the inventory anymore. Some items languish without a single bidder. Many shoppers opt for other sites including Amazon.com, use sophisticated search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, or head to store sites directly."

eBay and Craigslist vs. traditional media

Steve Rubel predicts eBay and Craigslist will merge in 2005 and "usher in a new era where citizen journalism is directly funded by person-to-person commerce."

Steve also notes that eBay and Craigslist "have already eaten away at one of the core underpinnings of big media - the classified advertising dollar" and quotes Dan Gillmor as saying:

The real threat to traditional journalism isn't blogging. It's eBay, the largest classified ads publisher.

See also my earlier posts ([1] [2]) on Craigslist.

Data-driven headlines

Eric Peterson is one of many to look at what's going on at Las Ultimas Noticias. The Chilean newspaper is using click data to see what stories are popular and picking headlines for the next day's paper based on that data. Clever to use of online data (clicks on their website) to change an offline publication (their print newspaper).

As Danna Harman describes, the technique has been part of turning the paper from "a middle-of-the-road piece of nothing" into "Chile's most widely read newspaper today."

But some are concerned that newspapers "just cater to the lowest common denominator" if they use this kind of data without exercising good judgment.

We're on a roll!

Findory has grown tremendously in the last month:

Personalized Search: We're the first commercial search engine to modify web search results in real-time based on the searcher's behavior. Our changes are modest for now, but will increase over the coming months. Our News and Blogs search engine is also personalized.

New Look: Our redesigned website combines Findory News and Blogory, making it easy for you to keep up with current events.

Source Pages: Now every news source and blog has its own page. This makes it easy to find recently published articles. Our readers are also using it to discover related articles and explore related sources.

Search History: Findory keeps track of all your web, news, and blog searches in one convenient place, so you can easily retrace your steps.

Fountains of Feeds: Findory content, both personalized and unpersonalized, is now accessible from 44 categorized RSS feeds.

Findory Blogs by E-mail: Weblog headlines are now available as a daily e-mail delivery, alongside Findory News daily e-mails.

Last but not least, just today we launched My Recent Sources, a new feature which makes it easy for you to keep track of what news and blog sources you've been reading.

We're so pleased by the positive reaction to all our hard work. In the last month, traffic to Findory more than doubled! Thanks to all our readers for using our service and providing valuable feedback.

The magic behind Google

Matt Loney at ZDNet UK has a fantastic article that describes Google's infrastructure and their scalability and reliability challenges. Very much worth reading.

If you want more, much of this is covered in more detail in the Google Cluster Architecture and Google File System papers.

[via Andy Beal]

MSN Spaces

Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft will launch a new weblog service this week called MSN Spaces.

MSN Spaces is "a direct competitor to blog creation and hosting tools such as [Google's] Blogger [and] Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad."

I'm curious where Yahoo is in all of this. Given all their other community and content creation features, you'd expect Yahoo to be faster out of the gate on a Blogger knockoff than Microsoft. But not this time.

Update: MSN Spaces has launched.

Update: Charlene Li lauds MSN Spaces' integration with MSN Photos, MSN Music, and MSN Messenger and lists it as an advantage over the competition. Yahoo? Are you paying attention to this?

Amazon's citation links

Rageboy apparently saw Amazon.com doing an A/B test of citation links between books. It seems to be gone now, but Rageboy's post includes lengthy descriptions of the new feature.

Paul Bausch also noticed the new feature and has a link to a still-active Amazon help page with a little more information about it.

Interesting. And very useful for technical books. I hope they launch it soon.

Google Scholar offers similar functionality for academic papers and books. Seems that Amazon and Google are butting heads more and more frequently lately.

[Rageboy link was via Traffick]

Update: Gary Price points to some interesting work on citation analysis.

Bloggers talking about Findory

We at Findory have been thrilled by the reaction we've gotten from the blogging community to our site. I wanted to highlight some of the blog postings we've noticed lately:

Brian Dennis at New Media Hack proclaimed the "Daily Me is here" and that "people will lock onto sources out in the long tail."

John Battelle at Searchblog praised our pace of innovation, saying that Findory "keeps on truckin'" by "very often" announcing "cool new features".

Gary Price at Search Engine Watch writes about Findory frequently ([1] [2] [3]), most recently saying, "It seems like every week or so Findory launches a new service."

On seeing Findory's related sources, Steve Rubel said, "Looks like Rex Hammock and I are separated at birth."

Rex Hammock responded: "Someone much smarter than I can speculate what algorithm causes that to happen. Whatever it is, it makes perfect sense to me as we discovered each other through our blogs and have since become friends and even got together for lunch recently when I was in New York."

Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle called Findory "a powerful, smart news site". Nathan even went as far as to say, "I think I can now replace Google with Findory for [some] searches." since Findory "'just works', and works far better than anything out there."

Cindy Chick at Law Lib Tech said: "Personalization obviously has a lot of advantages in a many different areas. Personalization is what Amazon uses to display other items that might interest you, and it's what Findory uses to give you the news that you want to read."

Thanks, everyone! We're glad you're enjoying Findory!

Google desktop search security

Bruce Schneier responds to some of the hype ([1] [2] [3]) over so-called security flaws in Google Desktop Search:

Google's desktop search software is so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about.

Some people blame Google for these problems and suggest, wrongly, that Google fix them. What if Google were to bow to public pressure and modify GDS to avoid showing confidential information? The underlying problems would remain: The private Web pages would still be in the browser's cache; the encryption program would still be leaving copies of the plain-text files in the operating system's cache; and the administrator could still eavesdrop on anyone's computer to which he or she has access. The only thing that would have changed is that these vulnerabilities once again would be hidden from the average computer user.

GDS is very good at searching. It's so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about. And now that you know about them, pressure your software vendors to fix them. Don't shoot the messenger.

Exactly right. These security issues exist whether you have Google Desktop Search installed or not.

Personalized news and blog search

Less than two weeks ago, Findory launched personalized web search.

Today, Findory launched personalized news and blog search.

Want to try it? Read a few news or blog articles on Findory, then do a news or blog search for something related to some of the articles you read.

For example, if you read the Wired article "Google Treads on Microsoft's Turf" through Findory, then do a news search for "desktop search", you'll see some of the articles will be marked with our orange personalized icon. Clicking on the icon will explain why the article was recommended.

As with our personalized web search, our personalized news and blogs search is a first step. As we learn more about how to help people find what they need, we'll begin to make more dramatic changes to the search results.

Personalized search is the future. We at Findory are excited to be part of it.