3D Google Maps

Tom Foremski reports that:

Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities.

The move would trump Amazon's A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets.

[via Matt Marshall]

Update: Brad Hill has a post with links to details of how all this works, including pictures and a technical paper (PDF).

Update: Danny Sullivan points out that Google's Keyhole software already does 3D city maps.

Yahoo Auctions is now free

Yahoo Auctions is free as of today, no listing or closing fees.

Both Amazon and Yahoo should make their auctions free or near free. Auctions are not that much different than newspaper classifieds. As Craigslist has shown, the classified advertising market is ripe for disruption. Amazon and Yahoo have a similar opportunity in online auctions.

The only quibble I have with Yahoo's move is with eliminating the listing fee. I think you want the pricing structure to encourage sellers to list quality goods at reasonable prices. If the listing fee is zero, that might encourage people to list huge piles of crap at absurd prices. If the listing fee is small but not zero (and, perhaps, refunded if the item sells), it discourages sellers from listing items that won't sell.

[via TechDirt]

Update: About two years later, Yahoo gives up and shuts down Yahoo Auctions.

Unfortunate. I still think eBay could have been defeated, but just making the auctions free isn't enough. All that does is guarantee that the listings will be filled with crap.

I suspect a more successful strategy might have been closer to what I suggested in my post "Kill eBay, Vol. 1". Focus on dominating specific verticals like music or electronics. Make deals with liquidators to ensure that there always are good deals on the site.

See also my April 2006 post, "Early Amazon: Auctions".

MSN's start.com/3 is out

MSN's next experiment with a customizable home page, start.com/3, is out.

This latest version looks like a combination of My Google and My Yahoo. It has the simplicity and drag-and-drop of My Google (in IE, at least) and some of the additional functionality of My Yahoo (such as including any RSS feed).

It's a nice effort, on the same level as the new My Google or the venerable My Yahoo. But, as Mark Fletcher said, imitating My Yahoo might not be the best strategy given the problems My Yahoo has with information overload.

Bizarrely, when you first go to start.com/3, they throw up an annoying list of questions you have to answer before you get access. What were they thinking? "Gee, this product is too easy to use. What can we do to make it more painful?"

Update: Steve Rider at MSN talks a little about Start.com and where they want to go with it. [Found on Findory]

Make advertising useful

Jack Schofield at The Guardian writes about Google and gives us a perfect description of why Google AdWords is so successful:

Instead of selling mass-market ad banners that were boring and slowed pages, it created AdWords. These small text ads were targeted to the search each user was making, and could be as useful as the search results. Instead of reaching thousands of people who were not interested, AdWords reached the handful who were.

This reminds me of some similar comments Google CEO Eric Schmidt made around the time of the Google IPO:

Unlike the earlier Internet advertising efforts, we didn't just show any ad along with the search. We ... take a search term and figure out which ads were most likely to be relevant. Whereas people tend to ignore untargeted ads, we found that people actually like these ads because they provide additional, relevant information ... That's really the secret of why the model has worked so well for us. We found a way to make advertising useful, not annoying.

Make advertising useful, not annoying. That is the secret.

See also my earlier posts, "Behavioral targeted advertising" and "Bringing sense to web advertising".

Research papers @ Google

Gary Price points to a new list at Google Labs of research papers on Google's technology.

The list is new, but most of the papers have been out for a while. The Google File System, Google Cluster Architecture, and MapReduce papers are particularly interesting. If you're a geek interested in large scale search, those papers are required reading.

The content should find you

David Beisel groks Findory:

I not only want to listen/read/view media that I know I want, but also want have media served up to me that I don't even know that I want.

Findory ... is pushing forward with a vision of delivering content that is both personalized and predictive ... For both news and blogs, the company's service recommends content based on what I've read in the past ... Findory allows the right article to find me, as opposed to me looking for the article.

Interestingly, earlier this week Findory launched its personalized advertising engine. So not only is the company serving up content that's personalized and predictive, but it's attempting to do the same with advertisements as well ... When advertising becomes both personalized and predictive, it actually becomes content -- advertorial content.

Five years ago ... we were making only the first steps towards a vision of personalized predictive advertising. Findory, however, is now making much longer strides towards both personalized predictive content and advertising. And I believe that is the future.

Personalized advertising on Findory

Findory launched our personalized advertising engine today.

This early version is built on top of Google AdSense, but these are not normal AdSense ads. They are not targeted merely to the content of the page, but to the individual behavior of each reader.

For example, my personalized Findory front page right now is showing me ads for load balancers and networking equipment. If I load the home page again, it then shows me ads for help with filing patent applications. These ads are unusually relevant and useful for AdSense ads, a good match to my specific interests in business and technology.

Other examples across Findory are also interesting. The top ad when I looked at Findory's page for the popular weblog InsideGoogle was an ad for Google Enterprise Solutions. The ads for a news search on "Star Wars" were appropriately related to Star Wars. The advertising on our science news page included products for science teachers.

Just as Findory's personalization engine matches content to interested audiences, our personalized advertising matches advertisements to interested people. After all, at its best, advertising is a form of content. It is useful when it is relevant. When it is not relevant, it is annoying. We firmly believe advertising should be useful, not annoying.

At Findory, we launch early and often. Our advertising is no different. This release is an early, first step for our personalized advertising engine. As we learn more, we will refine our algorithms, enhance the personalization, and improve the relevance. We will make advertisements helpful and useful to our readers.

Bloglines vs. My Yahoo

SearchViews has a brief interview with Jim Lanzone (SVP of Search at Ask Jeeves). Jim talks about how Bloglines is going to try to grab market share from My Yahoo:

We envision Bloglines as the homepage of the 21st century: 'the Universal Inbox'. With recent rollouts like Weather and Package Tracking, you see it beginning to move beyond news and blogs. We're going to follow this to its logical conclusion. Watch out, My Yahoo!

Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher also has said some interesting things about My Yahoo. See my earlier post, "Bloglines, My Yahoogle, and information overload".

[via Danny Sullivan]

Yahoo MindSet from Yahoo Research

Bernard Mangold has the announcement on the Yahoo Search blog about Yahoo MindSet, a prototype that reorders search results "according to whether they are more commercial or more informational" as you move a little slider around.

It's pretty similar to but more limited than Google Labs Personalized Search, which allows searchers to check boxes for their high level subject interests and then gives you a slider to reorder search results.

MSN Search also has some similar sliders (though they don't reorder dynamically) on their main search site inside their Search Builder advanced interface.

I'm surprised to see this focus on sliders. They aren't particularly useful. They fail the grandma test. Most novice users will not use or understand the slider; they just want the top result to be useful. It's not even that useful to power users since sliders fail to provide the level of granularity they need.

More knobs, more buttons, more complexity. With less than 1% of users even bothering with the existing advanced search options on search engines, are more controls really what people need? Most searchers just want the right thing to happen. They want it to just work.

See also my earlier posts, "Personalized search at PC Forum" and "Peeking at the future of MSN Search".

Ask Jeeves Web Answers

Ask Jeeves just launched Web Answers, a service similar to Google Q&A that tries to isolate the direct answer to a query from the other text in the page. For example, the first search result on Ask for "Who is the CEO of Amazon.com?" is a Web Answer.

Like Google Q&A, coverage is poor, but I would expect this to improve with time.

I find these attempts to extract answers from web pages fascinating. It's an early step on the long road toward understanding the vastness of knowledge stored in the Web.

[via Chris Sherman & Gary Price, John Battelle, and Nathan Weinberg]

Eric Schmidt talk at UW

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is giving a talk titled "Perspectives on the Information Industry" this Thursday (May 26) at University of Washington.

If you're not lucky enough to be living in Seattle, it will be broadcast live on the internet.

Update: The talk was similar to many of Eric's past talks. Same slides, even the same jokes. The most interesting part was the Q&A.

Eric answered several questions about Google's 20% time and what they do to promote innovation. He talked about small teams and the value of controlled chaos. The comments were similar to the quote I have in my earlier post, "Making innovation run rampant".

He received several questions about A9. Eric responded by praising A9's effort and saying that Google and Amazon cooperated in many more ways than they compete.

In response to my question about personalized search, Eric said that Google definitely intends to show different people different search results using information about their behavior, but also said that it would be optional and respectful of privacy. That's as clear a statement as I've even heard from Google that they will pursue personalized search.

Update: MP3 audio of the talk is already available. On-demand video usually takes a few days.

Update: On-demand video of the talk is now available.

Bloglines, My Yahoogle, and information overload

Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher comments on Google's launch of a customizable version of its home page:

The surprising thing ... is that they're trying to copy My Yahoo.

As many people have found out, the My Yahoo metaphor of a customizable page displaying static information doesn't scale ... With millions of blogs and other sites of interest, you need a different interface paradigm to deal with all that information.

Each time you visit your My Yahoogle page, it takes time to scan the page to see if there's new information. This is a complete waste. If you only show new things, the amount of information that needs to be displayed decreases greatly. There's less information, and it's all new.

Even better, Mark, is if there's less information, it's all new, and it's all relevant.

Most people don't have the time to read 200+ feeds every day. At some point, you're going to have to give up on ordering the articles by date or feed and start ordering by relevance.

Doing better than Google

In the New York Times today, Bob Tedeschi quotes Google Director Marissa Mayer as saying:

"Thinking long term, my gut sense is that, yes, there will be a search engine that knows more about me and as a result does a better job than Google does today. It's my hope that that search engine is us, but it's a further-reaching thing."

Personalized search is the future. What is and is not relevant varies from person to person. At some point, to get further improvements in relevance rank, search engines will have learn each searcher's needs and show different results to different people.

Findory has taken some first steps ([1] [2]) toward personalized search. Findory is alone in field. No other commercial search engine learns individual searcher's interests and changes the order of search results depending on who you are and what you have done.

If you want to see the future, take a look at what the innovative little startups are doing.

Google Factory Tour slides

Google has a long webcast of their "Factory Tour" meeting today.

If you're short of time like me, you might just skim the slides. Like I did for the recent shareholders meeting, I put the slides all together for quick consumption here.

It's a long presentation, 165 slides. Whew. I like slide #131, the ultimate search engine.

Starting on slide 156, it appears Marissa Mayer will be announcing a new product in Google Labs, a customizable version of the Google.com home page.

The product doesn't appear to have launched yet, though I assume it will later this afternoon. It appears to be similar to My Yahoo in that you can stick little widgets on your Google home page for news and other Google content.

Update: The customizable Google home page has launched at http://www.google.com/ig. Pretty simple. A few checkboxes for plopping a small selection of content like headlines from BBC and Google News underneath the Google search box. Useful, but limited. I assume they will be expanding this over time.

Update: John Battelle gives a little more context and says, "This is an all out response to the success of Yahoo and others in the personalized/RSS space." I see it more as Google dipping a toe in the water, but it's true that My Yahoo and others should be concerned and looking for new ways to keep ahead of Google.

Making innovation run rampant

An InfoWorld article quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how to encourage innovation:

"We prefer [our engineers] to run rampant," said Schmidt. "The most clever ideas don't come from the leaders, but rather from the leaders listening and encouraging and kind of creating a discussion."

Focusing resources on activities that are not directly related to the company's core business will ultimately lead to new discoveries, Schmidt said.

"You want to see every conceivable demo, no matter how wacky it is. People love that. ... They get a chance to present to someone important like yourselves. All of a sudden the whole (corporate culture) becomes about leadership and innovation."

The people closest to the problem are in the best position to innovate. Let them go. Help them create. And watch as they amaze you.

Microsoft takes on the information glut

Jay Greene at BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is about to give a speech where he "will talk about how businesses can help workers wade through the information glut" and "will unveil a whole new vision for Microsoft about the way people use information."

Workers are increasingly deluged with e-mail and instant messages. They can troll through scads of information on the Web and in corporate databases. But finding just what they need when they need it is tough.

"The software challenges that lie ahead are less about getting access to the information people need, and more about making sense of the information they have," Gates writes.

We are overwhelmed by all the information coming at us in our daily lives. We need something that makes sense of the chaos, that orders and filters the information streams.

Personalization must be part of this vision. Search can help you find things when you already know what you want; personalization helps surface useful information when you don't already know what you want.

Personalization offers a way to find focus. It learns what you like, shows you what you want to see, and filters out the rest. It extracts knowledge from the information chaos and helps you get the information you need.

[Found on Findory]

Findory's Mac OS X Dashboard widget

Findory just launched a cute little Dashboard widget for Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. Your personalized news and blogs, right on your Mac desktop.

AdSense for RSS and Atom feeds

Shuman Ghosemajumder announces on the Google Blog that AdSense now is supporting advertising in RSS and Atom feeds.

The idea is simple: advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising - and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from.

The key here is relevance. Advertising needs to be useful, interesting, and relevant to the reader. It's a challenging problem to match advertising to interested audiences using only the content of the feeds.

As I've said before, advertising in feeds isn't an obvious win. Excerpt-only feeds are already advertisements, advertisements of the full content of the article at the website. Layering ads on the ads will drive traffic away.

Those that do include the full-text of your articles in their feeds may find the feeds become the primary channel to some of their readers. In that case, advertising in that channel makes more sense.

NewsGator eats FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury, creator of RSS reader FeedDemon, has announced that his one-person company has been acquired by NewsGator.

FeedDemon is a fairly popular feed reader with a good number of subscribers, so an acquisition to try to move those subscribers over to NewsGator might make sense.

For the remaining hundreds of small, undifferentiated feed readers, I suspect we'll mostly see them stall or fade away in the next year or two as Yahoo, MSN, IAC/Ask/Bloglines, and other giants gobble up the market. Simple products that merely reformat feeds for display are sitting in a saturated market.

But so much more can be done with RSS and Atom feeds. Feeds are data. They can be sliced and diced, reorganized, analyzed, and filtered. Sorting articles by feed or by date is trivial. Sorting articles by relevance is the future.

Every day, people face an overwhelming flood of information. Products that help users find focus and discover the information they need are entering a wide open field with massive consumer demand. The opportunity is huge for those willing to take it.

See also Chris Pirillo's interview with Nick and NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker that includes some discussion of competition with Bloglines. Tony Gentile has some useful comments on the acquisition. Om Malik deserves credit for breaking the news.

Google shareholders meeting

Nathan Weinberg posts some comments on the recent Google shareholders meeting and links to the webcast.

If, like me, you don't really want to plow through the entire webcast, you might just take a peek at the slides from Eric Schmidt's talk. I threw a quick page together with all the slides for easy consumption.

The talk looks pretty similar to the analysts day talk a few months ago. New tidbits included elaborating on serving the long tail, mention of integration of Keyhole's nifty satellite data into Google Maps, and showing off Google Search History.