April 25, 2008 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Search, Web2.0
Yahoo’s new CTO, Ari Balogh, presented the new kind of Yahoo! at the Web2.0 expo in San Francisco. And I must say, I like it! In a nutshell, Yahoo is going to:
1) Open up their platform, enabling developers to build their own applications for various Yahoo! products like mail, my yahoo, search and even Yahoo’s frontpage on yahoo.com.
2) Unlock the social data that lives within Yahoo’s databases (like mail contacts, messenger contacts).
I think Yahoo gets it. They could have also kept all the data for themselves in an attempt to build a new social app. Instead, they completely open up which enables the developer community to build some brilliant applications on top of Yahoo’s platform and data. And, eventually, chances are good that Yahoo’s platform ends up as the place to be.
More on these developments on Yahoo’s blog and in the video below:
Yahoo is exploring several options for the company’s future, mainly in order to maximize the stock value now that Microsoft wants to acquire them. A merge with AOL/Time Warner is mentioned as one of the alternatives. However, a couple of days ago Yahoo announced that they will start a test of Google’s AdSense for Search Service. I hope this is just a way to demonstrate to the shareholders that they can make more money per user if they have a better ad-network, and not a serious consideration to join Google’s. I’m afraid that the latter is the case however. I mean, they already know that Google’s ad network has a better coverage and relevancy, so why do this test if you’re not seriously considering to outsource the search engine advertising to Google?
So why do I say I’m afraid that Yahoo will join Google’s Ad platform? Simple. That step would give Google a near-total monopoly over the search market. That’s not good for publishers and for the advertisers. It might even be dangerous since Google’s Adwords will then be the only place to go for search engine advertising. Given the fact that the pricing of Adwords is based on an auction-model, I think Google is the only party who will benefit. But, apart from the danger for the online advertising industry, this step would make Yahoo extremely dependent on Google.
“Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.”
It’s clearly bothering Microsoft that they are still such a tiny player in the web search business. Despite the huge investments they made in search technology in the last few years, their US marketshare has decreased from 16.3% in 2005 to 11.2% by August 2007. That’s not very promising. In my opinion they seriously screwed up by renaming all of their online services to ’something’ Live. Their branding strategy is a mess, and now they want to add Yahoo! to their portfolio as well. I think the Yahoo management understands that a merge with Microsoft would kill the company culture, but, it might be difficult to explain that to the shareholders who will receive $$$ when MS acquires Yahoo.
It’s a tough one, but I would definitely stay away from both Google and Microsoft. A merge with AOL or News Corp. might be an interesting alternative. To be continued (I guess)…
Google has made a radical change to their search results last week. They announced a new way to present search results from the web, images, books, local and news verticals on one page: the universal search. My first thought: yeah, makes sense to do that. Second thought: does sound very similar to what other search engines have already done. And, after testing the universal search: but what if I just want webpages?
Let’s start with my first thought. The enormous amount of search verticals that Google currently offers (listed here) indeed requires a new method to return the most relevant results from different verticals. Average Google-searchers will not be aware of the verticals and need to be assisted in their search. Integrating the vertical-results on the web search sounds like a good plan.
It often surprises me how extensively new Google features are covered in the press and blogosphere. This universal search for example, is very similar to Yahoo’s Alpha, Ask’s X and Microsoft’s Imagine-Live. Even the dutch search engine ilse.nl (where I work for) already merges news, local and image results with the webresults. It’s interesting to see that it’s only big news when Google launches a new feature:
Thirth, when I perform a search I usually know where the answer can most likely be found. When I’m looking for an image, I will directly go to an image search engine. Answers for technical questions can most likely be found in a forum or discussion group, so I would perform a search for webpages. For these specific queries, I don’t want Google to merge video’s and local results through the webresults. Unfortunately, there is no option to turn this off. Google has actually replaced the websearch with universal search (they only forgot to rename the tab from ‘web’ to ‘universe’). The average user will probably only benefit from this, but advanced users like to be in control. So Google, please give me back my websearch!
I’m not sure if Google appreciates this, but their turns out to be a way to use google without advertisements.
How? Very simple, just start your search at http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout and you will see a nice and clean google.
Now, let’s see what happens when the blogosphere starts encouraging everybody to use this url. I think Google will disable this feature very soon…
Just noticed that Google has a new layout for the webresults, they moved the links to the search verticals (images, news etc.) and added a ‘more’ link which directs you to all other verticals of Google. Furthermore, the related searches seem to have a new location (click for larger image):
Personally, I don’t like both changes. The links to the various verticals used to be right on top of the searchbox. Right where you need them. I don’t really see the advantage of the new location. The related searches are moved to a location which I usually ignore (advertisements). I would suggest to display these just before the first result.
As a part of Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL), Ask will launch a new contextual advertising platform in the week of May 21st. This was confirmed by Paul Vallez, Director of Product Management. This looks like a serious attempt to compete with Google Adsense.
I think Ask perfectly understands the weak point of the adsense platform: transparancy. Many adsense publishers (like myself) will agree that Google is providing minimal information. Publishers have no insight in the revenue share, the performance of individual ads and the type of advertisers. Advertisers have to deal with pretty poor statistics regarding contextual advertising. Ask may have a strong selling point by providing better and transparent tools.
The ‘problem’ remains that publishers will not exchange adsense for ASL when that will decrease their revenue. Transparancy or not, it’s the $$ that count. It will be a challenge for Ask to achieve the same coverage and CPC as Google currently has. I certainly hope they will.
Wow, that’s what I call a major acquisition in advertising world: Google has bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion (in cash). That’s 10x the yearly revenue of DoubleClick! This has just been confirmed on the Google blog.
This is immediatly the biggest acquisition of Google (almost twice as much as they paid for YouTube). What could be the reason? I quote from the Google Blog:
This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for our users.
Personally, I think the acquistion mainly comes from a strategic point of view. Google must have been really frightened that Microsoft would gain a big marketshare by buying DoubleClick (they obviously outbidded MS).
I wonder how this will influence the current adsense / adwords platform. Google will now also have access to DoubleClicks customers, will we see higher or lower CPC’s?
Wow, Google seems to understand that the opinion of webmasters does matter! As of today, it is finally possible to retrieve a nice list of urls that are linking to your site.
Many of you will probably know that the ‘link:www.website.com’ command in Google doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do. According to Matt Cutts this is mainly caused by technical limitations. Personally, I think that it might have some other reasons as well. Well, it’s still broken, but now Google allows you to see a much larger spectrum of backlinks to your site when you use their Webmaster Tools.
I’ve just checked out this new feature, must say that I like it! My first observations:
- Google apparently indexes links within PDF-files, these are reported as inlinks
- Webmaster Tools offers the possibility to export your inlinks as a spreadsheet, nice!
- The new tool also lists nofollow links, what does that tell us about the Google-interpretation of rel=’nofollow’?
January 14, 2007 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Software, Search
In this post of Andy Beal, Yahoo is being accused of dirty tactics to switch the default search provider when people install a new version of Yahoo Messenger. I totally agree that Yahoo is not behaving very well here, but hey… all the big search engines do exactly the same! So why would we point the finger at Yahoo?
Don’t get me wrong here, I absolute hate the software installers that are messing up my preferences in their own advantage (it should be forbidden). But ever looked at the installer of MSN messenger? It tries to modify your default homepage, seachprovider etc. And Google Desktop? Exactly the same. A recent version of the Java Runtime Environment even comes accompanied with the Google Toolbar.
I think that we can conclude that the big battle has started. It’s commenly known that most internet-users are not very loyal to a brand or product. When something better shows up, the switch is easily made. That’s exactly why the big players are now trying to be present in your every-day-live (since that’s something you won’t put away that easy). Messengers, Desktop search, toolbars and free email accounts are perfect examples. I think that most people don’t even realise that the above is happening, which is good.
There is however only one place where the big money is made: on the resultpage of the search engines. If you are a search engine, you want as much people as possible searching with you. In my opinion, there is only one good way to achieve this: just be the best and become even better. People will continue searching with the search engine that made them find what they were looking for. The big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) however think that it is necessary to push people in the ‘right direction’ by changing some of their preferences. Wrong. If I did not explicitly asked Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to be my default search engine, then I don’t want them to suddenly show up when I perform my next search. And if they do, I get annoyed. You know what happens when I get annoyed about a particular product? I throw it away a get another one.
Keeping the above in mind, Google and Microsoft must be absolutely delighted about the rumor that the Yahoo installer caused. It made Yahoo look unreliable. I’m not really feeling sorry for Yahoo but I don’t think it’s fare to only point our fingers at them. It’s a good development that people are made aware of the tactics that these companies use, hopefully the next Google installer will cause an evenly amount of discussion.
It often surprises me how much excitement a pagerank update still causes. The start of an update is always directly followed by an enormous amount of blog and forum posts. Not to speak about the number of people who are immediatly stress-testing the online Pagerank tools. So, I think it is about time to clear some things up. To start with, Google has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years:
Previously Google updated the index on a monthly basis. This caused fluctuating results as Google was updating the various servers one by one. The updates where soon called the Google Dance by the webmaster community. Currently Google continuously updates its index while crawling the web. In other words, there is no monthly Google Dance anymore.
Every two to three months people start talking about a pagerank update which should be taking place. Well, in fact pagerank is updated continuously as well. Google only exports the pagerank values to the datacenters which are used by the Google toolbar every couple of months. That’s when you see new pagerank values in the toolbar. This will however not influence the ranking, not even a tiny bit.
As a part of Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL), Ask will launch a new contextual advertising platform in the week of May 21st. This was 
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