Google analyst day

Google had their analyst day today. Long but worthwhile.

It's interesting to see how Google describes themselves (slide #6) and their competitive advantages (slide #7). Eric Schmidt (CEO) and Sergey Brin (co-founder) see continued innovation at Google as being critical to their success, talking at length about their people, how much time they devote to experimentation (slide #12), and how they set up their environment to encourage creativity.

Eric talked about their model for advertising, how auctioning the ad space ensures a fair and competitive price for advertisers, that their advertising engine gets its success from showing fewer but higher quality and more relevant ads, and how Google seeks the long tail (slide #10) of small businesses as advertisers.

Larry Page (co-founder) did a demo of some of Google's new products, including Google Maps (which really is amazing) and Keyhole.

Eric mentioned "end-user personalization" briefly which he described as "a Google that, sort of, knows you, knows more about you." In response to a question, he elaborated by saying:

There are many things we can learn about a person without having them give us a name and a password. And we can use those to provide better results.

It is clear that Google sees personalization as critical to future improvements in relevance.

Feeds drive traffic

Christine Mohan (Director, NYTimes.com) talks about how RSS drives traffic to the newspaper's website

NYTimes.com's RSS feeds generated 4.5 million page-views on the site in January. RSS is an efficient traffic driver that complements other distribution deals we have with top portals, ISPs, and aggregators like Moreover Technologies. RSS users also represent a news-hungry, influential audience for NYTimes.com.

RSS feed are essentially advertisements for the newspaper's content. Newspapers that fail to publish feeds are dropping valuable traffic on the floor.

The RSS explosion

Kevin Laws at VentureBlog posts an excellent article on the future of RSS. A great overview.

Kevin also talks a bit about personalized news and feed readers:

Now that a wider variety of web sites are available in machine readable format, it should be possible to tell your computer things like "tell me when an article about gnosticism appears".

RSS is more evolution than revolution ... [It] has finally pushed machine-to-machine content communication over the tipping point. That certainly allows some interesting and very large opportunities, particularly in search and collaborative filtering.

What makes RSS interesting is that machines can easily read and process news feeds. This is where the future of RSS lies.

Current feed readers merely reformat RSS feeds for display. Future feed readers will rip apart the content, analyze the data, and help you find the information you need.

Home page of the 21st century

Jim Lanzone (SVP, Ask Jeeves) quotes Mark Fletcher (CEO, Bloglines) as saying he wants to build the "homepage of the 21st century."

What is the home page of the 21st century? What do you want from a home page?

I think it should be your view on the world. It should tell you about events that matter to you. It should tell you, this what happened that you need to know about today.

I think it should focus your attention. It should prioritize. It should learn what you want, what you need, and how to best help you find it.

What do you think? What would be your ideal home page?

Google and eBay pursue sellers

Bambi Francisco at CBS Marketwatch looks at competition between Google and eBay:

Will search advertising ultimately become a better mousetrap for sellers? Or to what extent will search advertising take away the potential dollars that were once expected to flow onto eBay's marketplace?

As one eBay seller said to me via e-mail: "Most sellers are like me and didn't really think there was life outside of eBay, but we are getting educated fast." Another seller said he's decided to put up his own Web site for $19.95 per month and buy keywords on Google and Yahoo's Overture.

"Products on Google are not under as much pressure as eBay so you can typically get 5 to 10 percent more for your products on Google," said Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor.

See also my earlier post, "Google, small businesses, and eBay".

Update: John Battelle says:

It seems that eBay, which got hammered after its last earnings for not living up to its reputation as a growth machine, is blaming Google for increasing its cost of goods sold. Now that's interesting.

Update: Two 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."

Google Maps

Chris DiBona posts about Google Maps, a new competitor to Mapquest and Yahoo Maps.

The maps are gorgeous and easy to read, the interface simple and uncluttered. There are no advertisements whatsoever. Hard to imagine using Yahoo Maps and Mapquest after seeing Google's offering.

Google Maps is still in the labs. Address searches on Google.com still point to Yahoo Maps and Mapquest. I'm sure that will change soon.

The search war and the browser war

Looking at MSN's revenue numbers, Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor argues that the search war is deeply intertwined with the browser war:

I don't believe the browser as giveaway technology holds true anymore. Paid search creates real revenue opportunity around the browser.

MSN Search ... is ... Internet Explorer's default search engine. I would consider any dip in IE browser market share as a threat to MSN Search -- and one Microsoft shouldn't ignore.

It's a good point. By default, anyone powering up a new computer will use IE. Their web search will be MSN Search. The first web page they see every day will be MSN.com. This guarantees MSN a large customer base. If some computers come with another browser installed or enough people are motivated to install a new browser themselves, then that is a threat to MSN's revenue stream.

But I think Joe understates the importance to Microsoft of the continued dominance of IE. IE was created because Netscape was a threat to the Windows desktop. Networked applications running through a browser reduce the importance of the OS and desktop applications. Loss of IE market share threatens not just MSN but all of Microsoft.

Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines?

Mary Hodder claims Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines, official announcement apparently coming on Monday Tuesday.

Bloglines is one of the most popular and highly reviewed feed readers. However, there was some question about whether Bloglines could survive independently in an increasingly crowded space, especially as Yahoo, MSN, Mozilla, Apple, and others start integrating feed readers into their products.

[via Steve Rubel]

Update: It's true. The announcement on the official Bloglines weblog, the press release, and press coverage. Kudos and congratulations to Mark Fletcher!

Update: Jim Lanzone (SVP, Ask Jeeves) gives some details. Mark Fletcher (CEO, Bloglines) promises to keep building Bloglines, including integrating the Teoma search engine into Bloglines blog search.

Busy, busy Findory

Findory keeps growing and growing! In the last month, we added:

Findory Neighbors: A new visualization tool for discovering related blogs. Check out the neighborhood for Geeking with Greg or for your blog!

Related articles feeds: Find articles related to your favorite weblogs and news sources using our RSS feeds and inline widget. For example, for Wired magazine, here's the related articles feed and inline widget. I subscribe to the related articles feed for my own blog and use it to discover blog posts I might otherwise have missed.

Personalized search feeds: Another first from Findory! We have personalized feeds for news and blog keyword searches. We highlight the search results that are recommended for you based on your reading history.

Got blogs?: We doubled the size of our weblog crawl. Not on Findory yet? Add your Blog to Findory.

Get big fast: To handle our rapid growth, we brought two new servers online, including a new database server. As usual, we did it without anyone noticing, just as it should be.

Findory's personalization depends on the strength of our community. Thank you, readers of Findory. Together we are building an exciting new way of reading news.

Advertising and the internet

John Markoff and Nat Ives at the New York Times provide some interesting insights into web advertising programs like Google's AdWords and Yahoo's Overture:

"In the past, advertising has been hard to track and hard to make accountable," said [Google VP] Tim Armstrong ... Now, he said, advertising has become a dialogue with the consumer.

Individually focused Internet ads are already siphoning business away from locally oriented classified advertising and yellow pages directories.

"You're seeing advertising move into advertising that people can seek out, and moving away from mass advertising," said [UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor] Peter Sealey.

What is particularly remarkable about the success of AdWords is that it is all done with simple, unobtrusive, text-only ads. The ads are so well targeted that they become useful and informative. Rather than trying to grab your attention with flashy popups or graphics, these ads just try to be relevant and helpful.

See also "Bringing sense to web advertising".

Y!Q contextual search

Yahoo just launched Y!Q, a "contextual search technology that analyzes the contents of the Web page you're viewing and then gives you a list of search results directly related to what you're reading."

From Jeremy Zawodny's post on the Yahoo Search blog:

The fundamental idea was to supplement search queries with context. So instead of having to spend a lot of time searching and assembling all the information you're after, this contextual search technology could incorporate that context (the stuff you were reading at you moment you decided that you wanted to know more) to find the most relevant results.

It appears that Y!Q does keyword extraction from a web page, then runs a search using the extracted keywords. Not a new idea, but interesting to see it launched by Yahoo. If the quality of the search results is high, it can easy way to discover related web pages. But it's quite a challenge to get high quality related pages with this technique.

Jeremy points to Reiner Kraft as the primary researcher behind Y!Q. And Reiner has a recent paper, "Mining Anchor Text for Query Refinement" (PDF), that seems related to the techniques behind Y!Q. The paper describes one of several approaches for doing this kind of keyword extraction.

Social networks vs. personalization

Chris Anderson explains why social networks don't work well for recommendations:

No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff.

The sad reality is that most of my friends have rotten taste in music (I don't hold it against them), while the music recommendations I actually follow are mostly from people I've never met.

The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.

Friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations. Your friends aren't clones of you.

For recommendations, reach out to the entire community, including total strangers, to find people with shared interests. There is wisdom in that crowd. All you need to do is find it.

Google and personalized search

Saul Hansell at the IHT has an interesting tidbit buried in his article about Google's Q4 2004 numbers:

[Google CEO Eric] Schmidt said one priority for Google would be the personalization of a search, taking advantage of information about the interests and attributes of each user to present better results.

Google hasn't done much with their personalized search demo since they launched it back in March 2004. I wonder what they're planning?

See also "A real personalized search from Google?"

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Alex Edelman has the scoop on Findory's nifty new visualization tool, Findory Neighbors. It allows readers to quickly and easily discover related weblogs and news sources.

Here's the neighborhoods for Geeking with Greg, Micro Persuasion, ResourceShelf, and Daily Kos. Try clicking around!

Much thanks to John Battelle for the inspiration for Findory Neighbors.

Update: Comments on Findory Neighbors by Gary Price, John Battelle, Nathan Weinberg, Rob Schluter, Rex Hammock, Niall Kennedy, and Carrick Mundell. Thanks, everyone, for the kind words and great feedback.

Personalizing print newspapers

Aaron Berman at Presstime writes about personalized news in print:

The difference in logistical complexity between producing a customized monthly and a similarly personalized newspaper certainly is enormous, says Douglas Karr, database marketing manager at The Indianapolis Star. But, he adds, the industry will have to embrace some level of personalization if it wants to meet consumer expectations.

"We're still trying to please everybody with one product," Karr says. "I think the day is coming when we'll have to please everybody with their own product."

Given that newspapers haven't even started doing personalization for their online sites -- where personalization is relatively inexpensive -- personalizing individual print newspapers seems unlikely to happen soon. But it's great to see people like Douglas Karr thinking ahead about how to best serve readers.

[via John Burke]

MSN Search officially launches

It's being widely reported that MSN switched to its new, home-grown web search engine. Congratulations to Brady, Erik, Mez, Chris, and the rest of the MSN Search team.

MSN promises their search will offer a "more personalized search experience" than the competition. Interesting that MSN sees personalization as their differentiator.

Chris Payne (VP at MSN Search, ex-Amazon.com) posts about the launch on the MSN Search weblog.

Personalization and the future of search

Richard Waters at the Financial Times wrote an excellent article on the future of search.

Craig Silverstein (data mining researcher, now a Director at Google) has a quote that leads into a discussion of personalized search:

"It's clear that a list of links, though very useful, doesn't match the way people give information to each other ... How can the computer become more like your friend when answering your questions?"

That means giving direct answers to questions, extracting data from online sources rather than giving links to web pages. It also means doing a better job of divining what the searcher is looking for, tailoring results more closely to what, based on past experience, appear to be the user's particular interests.

How can the computer be more like your friend? It has to know you. Like a friend would.

Your friend will give you and someone else different answers to the same question. Why? Because your friend knows you and what you want without you having to say everything explicitly. Information is implied in the long history of your interactions. Not everything has to be stated. Your friend knows what you mean.

So, why does your search engine give the same search results to you as it does to everyone else? Shouldn't it know you? Shouldn't it help you? Like a friend would?

[FT article via John Battelle]

For feeds, one-click is one click too many

Tim Bray writes about how to make RSS easier for mainstream users. The problem, he says, is:

All over the web, you see these ugly little orange "XML" stickers, but to subscribe you have to get the URI they're pointing at and paste it into your feed-reader somehow, which is awkward and maybe a little too geeky for non-geeky ordinary people.

Tim proposes a solution, a one-click button that works by sending an "application/atom+xml" data stream that your feed reader uses to subscribe to the feed.

Unfortunately, this only works for client-side readers. Web-based readers like Bloglines, My Yahoo, and My MSN are stuck with the current solution, scattering their little "subscribe on X" buttons across blogs everywhere.

But, stepping back for a second, is Tim solving the right problem? Is the problem that it's too hard to cut-and-paste a URL? Sure, that's awkward, but it's not the core problem.

The problem with RSS is that it's too difficult to find interesting feeds.

Right now, feed readers are used by early adopters. Early adopters love to tinker. They love pain. They'll spend hours fiddling with their feed reader, hunting down and adding new feeds. They'll deal with the hassle of manually skimming through thousands of articles to ferret out the few gems that interest them. Mainstream readers won't.

A one-click button makes it easier to add a good feed one you've discovered it, but it does nothing to help you discover good feeds in the first place.

Next-generation feed readers, feed readers built for the mainstream, will solve this problem by abstracting away the cryptic and unimportant details of the data feed. Next-generation feed readers will help readers discover interesting news and weblog articles without caring where the data comes from.

What will these next-generation feed readers look like? Our vision of it is at Findory.

See also "XML is for geeks" and "Getting your grandmother to use RSS".

Google chasing digital identities

Niall Kennedy posted recordings of a few talks at Future Salon, including one by Eric Sachs (PM at Google).

Eric made some intriguing comments about your digital identity, the information online about who you are and what you do. He started by motivating the problem:

We [at Google] quite frequently hear that what doesn't work well is doing a Google search about someone else.

So, just searching for someone by first and last name often doesn't work very well. And that's a very common search; it needs to work well.

The problem isn't trivial to solve. For example, a home page by itself isn't enough if you can't find it. Even when you can find data, the information is often stale and incomplete. Finally, there's nasty issues with separating identities, differentiating between people with the same or similar names.

Eric even went as far at one point as to claim that the "primary purpose" of both Orkut and Blogger is to solve this problem, to help people "define some type of digital identity on the internet."

One interesting approach to this problem is Eliyon People Search. They try to extract information about people from web pages. "Try" is the key word here -- it's far from perfect -- but the idea of summarizing web pages to do people search has some promise. I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar from Google at some point.

Findory helps bloggers

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Want even more news? Subscribe to your related articles feed and get a constant stream of weblog posts related to what you've been talking about on your blog. Nothing else like it out there. You can even put your related articles up on your blog using Inline.

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