Yahoo searches for a new start

At long last, Microsoft and Yahoo have joined forces. The partnership, designed to fortify both struggling companies against Google, marks the end of an era for both Yahoo and Silicon Valley. And once again, it looks like the wily Microsoft is coming out on top.

 

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The 10-year deal shifts control of Yahoo search results and ads to Microsoft, which will use Yahoo’s better-trafficked site as a platform for its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft will pay for the expensive infrastructure it requires to run search technology, freeing up Yahoo’s cash for that company’s other operations. Microsoft paid no cash up front, and investors think Yahoo got the bum end of the deal – that company’s stock plunged 12 percent the day it was announced.

The investors are probably right: Unless Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, can work miracles on Yahoo’s other products, the company might regret getting out of the search business. In the long term, Microsoft and Yahoo probably had no choice but to band together against Google, which controls a monstrous share of the search market (nearly 70 percent). But in the short term, it could mean a tough restructuring that affects morale all over Silicon Valley.

Many Yahoo employees will lose their jobs or have to move over to Microsoft. In a conference call this week, Bartz acknowledged the impact: “Yes, there are certainly many Yahoo search employees that will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft as they integrate the technology. … And then unfortunately there will be some redundancies in Yahoo. … There will be redundancies; it just is in the future.” She added that nothing will change until the two companies get regulatory approval for the partnership, which won’t happen until 2010 at the earliest. Then there’s a “transition” period, which will last for two years after that. But if we were Yahoo search employees, we’d start polishing those resumes now.

There should still be a place for them in Silicon Valley. Yahoo’s always had a fraught relationship with search – even in the early days, company founders Jerry Yang and David Filo never wanted to spend too much of Yahoo’s money building infrastructure – but it was healthy for Silicon Valley to have the two major search companies in competition right here. What would be healthiest would be for someone – perhaps one of those spurned Yahoo search employees – to launch a new company, perhaps to compete with Google. There should be room for all.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/31/EDQR191T6C.DTL#ixzz0N8z2hFSe

Filed under: Google, Microsoft , Bing, Google, Microsoft, msn, Yahoo

Microsoft, Yahoo Alliance Would Target Google

About a year after Microsoft Corp.’s hostile, contentious and unsuccessful bid to buy Yahoo Inc., the two companies appear set to join forces to take on a common rival – Google Inc.

The Wall Street Journal reported tonight that Microsoft and Yahoo are hours away from announcing a search and online advertising deal. According to Kara Swisher, a blogger for The Wall Street Journal, negotiations have been successfully wrapped up on a deal that is expected to have Microsoft’s search technology used on Yahoo sites.

This new Microsoft-Yahoo partnership could give the two companies some much-needed leverage in their ongoing – and until now, separate – battles to chip away at Google’s stranglehold on the search market. With Carol Bartz still new at the helm of Yahoo and focused on making the once-online-pioneer hip and fresh again, and Microsoft’s Bing search service only a few months old, neither company has been able to make a noticeable dent in Google’s well-polished, and well-funded, armor.

So a strategy that has them pooling their resources and industry might makes a lot of sense, says Dan Olds, an analyst at The Gabriel Consulting Group.

“Both Microsoft and Yahoo need this deal if they harbor any hopes of getting back into the lucrative search game,” said Olds. “Search has become the most reliable way of capturing eyeballs on the Internet and having a popular search engine is the basis for all of Google’s success. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have invested billions of dollars in trying to build search and content portals that would be able to command Google-like ad revenues. But both have failed to blunt Google’s revenue growth individually. Together they might have a better chance.”

Both companies have also been making separate moves in recent months.

In June, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, an update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. And with Microsoft’s advertising power and a lot of media attention behind it, Bing has shown strong numbers just out of the gate. Early this month, Web analytics firm StatCounter reported that Bing may have nibbled away at Google’s commanding lead in the search arena, but it definitely hasn’t taken a big bite. While Google Inc.’s share dipped from 79.07% to 78.48% in June, Microsoft’s search site share grew from 7.21% to 8.23%.

Yahoo is hanging in at a distant second place to Google with 11.04% of the market.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen described Bing’s progress in the market as “steady, if not spectacular.”

And on its own front, Yahoo last week unveiled the beta of a newly overhauled homepage, whose promised features include the ability to integrate with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. The changes are an apparent attempt to recapture some of the hip cache the site had during its heyday.

The problem for Microsoft and Yahoo is that despite their efforts, Google still looms far ahead of both. Olds, however, said they have a much better shot at their shared opponent if they work it together.

“Separately, they have small fractions of Google’s viewership, but together, with a well executed plan and solid cooperation, they have a shot of at least giving Google a run for its money,” he added. “Google needs to take this seriously, which I think they will. Microsoft and Yahoo have a lot of resources to throw at this and they now have a partnership and a plan.”

Source  – wall Mart Journal

Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo , google and microsoft, google va yahoo, googlr, goolge, live, Microsoft, msn, search engine, Yahoo

After open sourcing Page Speed a few weeks ago, Google has launched a web site in an attempt to find ways and push the speed up process of the entire Internet. Google shares research data, web site speed optimization tutorials, recorded presentations on performance, links to lots of performance optimization tools, and a discussion group inviting everyone to share ideas on how to make the web faster.

After open sourcing Page Speed a few weeks ago, Google has launched a web site in an attempt to find ways and push the speed up process of the entire Internet. Google shares research data, web site speed optimization tutorials, recorded presentations on performance, links to lots of performance optimization tools, and a discussion group inviting everyone to share ideas on how to make the web faster.

Google Research has conducted a study on how page loading speed affects the number of searches (PDF) users perform over time. They introduced several controlled delays into the response:

After introducing the delays and monitoring the users for 4-6 weeks, they noticed the following drops in the number of searches:

While a 0.5% drop might not mean much for others, Google assures us that such a drop means a lot to them because there is a direct connection between the number of searches performed by users, the number of Ad Clicks displayed and the revenue. Beside speeding up its own web servers, Google wants the entire Internet to speed up considering that this process will have a positive outcome for them.

Google considers that besides bandwidth limitations there are several factors contributing to a relatively slow Internet:

• Websites that do not follow best practices in web development and are unnecessary slow
• Web servers are often not optimized for speed
• Several internet protocols were designed 10/15 years ago, when websites and web applications were different
• Browsers only recently started focusing on speed. Many Internet users are using slow browsers

How fast should the Internet be for Google? Move from one page to another as fast as turning pages in a glossy magazine. Allow video and graphical content flow as fast as necessary. Live collaboration between users not being hindered by the connection, including mobile ones. For that, Google wants to see HTML improved, and it is already being done with HTML 5, but they also would like to improve or even change HTTP and TCP with something better, a change that is quite difficult to implement considering the huge investments done so far in current infrastructure.

In an attempt to teach others how to speed up their sites, Google provides a number of tutorials:

Filed under: Google , Google, google inc, google search engine, Google speed page, Google Speed web site, web faster

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“Enterprise-class” shouldn’t mean “experts only.” Google Analytics has made it easy for non-specialists and specialists alike, across your organization, to practice performance focused marketing.

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Google Analytics has always exclusively used 1st party cookies to ensure reliable tracking and protect visitor privacy.

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Google Analytics runs on the same globally renowned infrastructure that powers Google, maximizing data integrity and privacy.

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Filed under: Google , Enterprise-class, Enterprise-class google, google analytic, Google's

Google Launches Real Time search, Time to say goodbye to Twitter Search

I guess we all saw it coming, it was really only a matter of time before Google invests in having real time search results at a click of a button like Twitter. Ofcourse, the difference between Twitter search and Google is that Twitter only shows tweets where as Google shows actual quality results (including tweets). Come on, we all know Twitter is dead, its really only a matter of months before people realises this.

This blog posts probably sounds like an “I hate twitter” post but don’t get me wrong, I use twitter on a daily basis and love it for certain things however I am still struggling to understand how useful it really is to an average online user. I mean I use it to communicate with fellow search marketers but would not use it to have a conversation with my friends (like why would anyone seriuosly?). But I digress, this is a post about Google’s real time search…

For thoes who are looking for iPhone 3.0 updates or Android Cupcake updates, you’ll understand when I say that ordering the search results by freshness is definitely important. I previously had to troll through Google News results to find the Cupcake 1.5 update which didn’t really give me much information as its all from “quality” new sources and not from common users like me. Google News obviously didn’t cut it but Google search give me results that were relevant in terms of content but “old”, some even dating back to 2007.

Trust me when I say that having the choice to choose “fresh” content is a very welcomed feature. Anyways, now that Google can display fresh search results, whats the point of having Twitter search? The number of reasons for having a Twitter account just drops on a daily basis doesn’t it?

Filed under: Google , Google, google & twitter, Google Launches Real Time search, Real Time search, Twitter, Twitter Search

Google Wave: The instant wiki communicator

At its I/O conference Google gave developers a preview of a new communication and collaboration product called Google Wave. Google will invite selected programmers to contribute to this project even before the software is released and plans to make Wave freely available as open source software in a few months.

Wave is server based and combines the features of a whole range of other communication and collaboration services. Users access it via a web interface. They can use it for conversations which may be held asynchronously, like e-mails, or synchronously, like chats. Shared document editing can be seamlessly incorporated into these communications, and participating users are shown their fellow participants’ changes almost instantly. Google treats such communications/documents as continuous objects it calls “waves”. The software presents the current status of a wave to users, but can also reproduce every previous editing step – individually or as replay of the edits over time.

Image galleries can be edited almost simultaneously in a similar way, allowing users to embed, for example, Google maps or Google search results with only a few mouse clicks. Further content is to be integrated via plug-ins. To demonstrate, Google presented an online chess game. The vendor intends to release the necessary APIs and also plans to make Wave available for integration into other websites.

Google Wave servers can be federated, allowing the real time collaboration tools to work together, even if the users are working with different Wave providers. The team demonstrated the federation, with a slightly modified Wave server and a character based Wave server.

Google initially intends to continue the development of Wave in co-operation with select programmers. Then, the program will be presented to the public as a service on Google’s servers. Later on, Google plans to release the “lions share” of the source code, enabling anyone to offer a Wave service on their servers. While a release date has been suggested as “later this year”, Google has not given any details about what hardware and software would be required to run a Wave server.

A video of the complete presentation is available to watch on YouTube. (jk/c’t)

Filed under: Google, Uncategorized , Google, Google Wave, Google Wave instant wiki communicator, The instant wiki communicator, wave wiki communicator

What was new at Searchology? 2009

Google launched 3-4 new features at Searchology today. You can read about Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, or Sky Map in my previous post. But I also pay attention to the small things that Google said. I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve said in public before.

- Pat Riley mentioned a couple internal code names for spell-check features. There’s the normal “Did you mean:” spellcheck link in red at the top of the search results. Then there’s a more aggressive feature (internal Google codename: “Chameleon”) that does mid-page suggestions:

2 - 

Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things:

Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such as [cfl light bulb] and look above the search results for a “Show options…” link. Click on that to get a ton of useful ways to power search. You can see web results with images, like this:

for moe informations visit – http://www.dullest.com/blog/2009/05/

Filed under: Google , 2009, Google, google 2009, google search options

We can’t let Google steal the show

Google boss Eric Schmidt deserves a kind of respect, the kind a sparrow gives a cat. For the chairman of a company that uses expensive journalism for free to address the Newspaper Association of America takes cheek as well as guts. And Schmidt’s manner combines insolence with chutzpah. His support for the economic model whereby newspapers pay for content and Google milks the profits provoked Robert Thomson, the editor of the Times, to describe content aggregators as “tapeworms in the intestines of the internet”. But tapeworms are rarely fatal. Google’s conduct is the sort of favour crystal meth does for an addict: it feeds immediate appetite to the detriment of health.

Google uses the work of journalists to sell advertising. Then it takes Daddy Bear’s share of the profits and justifies its gluttony on the basis that it drives traffic back to the newspaper’s own site. This is like a musician stealing a song, recording it, and excusing their crime on the basis that the illegal cover version may draw attention to the original.

The immediate effects of Google’s relationship with journalism are newsroom redundancies, newspaper closures and declining profits among the survivors. These are among the reasons why hardly anybody seems to care. With journalists as popular as syphilis and their proprietors even less loved, it falls to a group with approximately comparable public status to fight our corner. I am grateful to members of parliament, but reporting needs their help like an innocent neck needs a guillotine. What journalism requires is for Google users to understand why news matters and why it cannot be supplied for free.

I do not care whether Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers continue to make profits. Newspaper owners have come and gone throughout the era of representative democracy and these guys are no less disposable than Max Beaverbrook or the Kemsley brothers. It does not matter greatly if printed newspapers are replaced entirely by web-based products. The only thing that is crucial is that fact-gathering, revelatory journalism must survive and that it must be published by organisations entirely independent of government. Google’s business model is incompatible with this goal.

Google does not understand journalism. It just wants content that drives traffic. The cheapest, most derivative churnalism will do this, but original reporting does it better. So Google aggregates stories written by expensive, professional reporters and blithely overlooks how much these people cost to train, hire and deploy. The tiny pittances it remits to news organisations will not pay for a fraction of the political, business, foreign and investigative reporting we are accustomed to. But Google does not care. It imagines the fourth estate is a derelict development somewhere in fantasy land and that journalism is just another tradeable commodity.

There is a depressing irony here. At the dawn of the internet era, pioneers such as Matt Drudge predicted the net would liberate citizens to produce and consume their own news without recourse to the gatekeepers of old-fashioned Big Media. Instead millions of dupes take news free from Google, the biggest gatekeeper of all, while unconsciously collaborating in the destruction of independent newsrooms with the courage and skill to hold power to account.

Google’s technology is modern, but its rapacious conduct is as old as unfettered market capitalism. It wants to fill its coffers at minimum cost just as Victorian factory owners wanted to manufacture without trade unions and statutory working hours. It must not be allowed to get away with a ruthless economic model that will destroy ethical, fact-based journalism.

Representative democracy in the absence of free, diverse and well-funded news reporting has not yet been attempted. It would have calamitous consequences for freedom and accountability.

A healthy democracy needs professional journalists to report accurately on public affairs, to find out things the powerful want to hide and to expose wrongdoing. These duties have been performed by journalists throughout the era of universal suffrage and in every country in which liberty flourishes. People who deride this claim as idealistic naïvety are enemies of parliamentary democracy. Its supporters must learn to appreciate that good journalism is worth paying for.

Nothing Schmidt says on behalf of his colossal multinational should fool any democrat into imagining Google has devised a plausible alternative

Filed under: Google , Google, google steal, We can't let Google steal the show

Google Acquisition Rumors Reflect Twitter’s Importance

While rumors of an imminent Google acquisition of Twitter were apparently offbase, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the companies strike up a formal collaboration or partnership.

Twitter, a microblogging service in which millions of people post brief text messages, has emerged as the custodian of a valuable online index of real-time facts, comments, musings and announcements, information that is clearly valuable for Google’s search engine index.

Google routinely collaborates with major Web sites to determine the best way to crawl and index their content for its search engine, so sitting down with Twitter for that purpose would be consistent with its modus operandi.

“Twitter is clearly hot. The phenomenon of real time search and the ability to capture this stream of ‘tweet’ discussions is an important development in social media and search because people are trying to mine data for information that might otherwise be sought in a search engine,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence in a phone interview. “This whole phenomenon Twitter represents is here to stay and needs to be addressed by search engines.”

However, it’s much less clear why Google would want to spend major-acquisition money on Twitter at this time. After all, Twitter doesn’t represent anything close to a clear and present danger to Google in the search market. “Twitter exemplifies the category of real-time search, but it’s not a Google killer,” Sterling said.

In addition, Google, like most companies, is in cost-cutting mode and Twitter, while wildly popular, hasn’t figured out a way to generate much revenue yet.

“There’s a very interesting parallel between Twitter and YouTube. When Google bought YouTube, they did it because it was extremely popular, got tons of traffic and represented this new trend of video hosting and sharing. Now, Google still hasn’t found a way to effectively monetize YouTube in a big way,” said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst, in a phone interview. “Does Google really want to spend another huge amount of money on another extremely popular service that hasn’t figured out a way to make money? I don’t see it happening.”

Others aren’t so sure.

In an e-mail interview with IDG News Service, IDC analyst Karsten Weide said Google would gain “tremendous stickiness and traffic” from Twitter. “Microblogging is becoming an accepted new channel of online communications in addition to email and instant messaging, and it is here to stay,” he said.

But he agreed that Google needs to know that it’s highly likely Twitter will never make significant amounts of revenue. “That would mean — just as Web mail — it would be a loss leader that one cross-finances in order to have the indirect benefits,” Weide said.

While Google doesn’t need to boost its audience, the acquisition might keep Twitter out of the hands of competitors, namely Yahoo and Microsoft, he said. “I think an acquisition would make sense, and if they can get it for less than $1 billion, the better it is,” Weide said.

Others believe Twitter should actively entertain the option of getting acquired by Google and strike while the iron is hot.

“Other tie-ins short of an acquisition could make sense, but would be harder to sustain since Twitter already uses such open interfaces. It will be hard to do something that others can’t replicate. Now is the time for Twitter to sell. It is at the top of its hype range now. Monetizing on its own would be a long, hard slog,” wrote Gartner research vice president Jeff Mann in a note e-mailed to reporters.

The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog TechCrunch reported the companies were engaged in “late stage negotiations” for an acquisition, citing two anonymous sources. TechCrunch later tempered that report, saying a third source characterized the discussions as “early stage” and possibly revolving around a search engine collaboration. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital tech blog, also quoting anonymous sources, said no acquisition discussions were on the table, but rather talks about collaboration on real-time search and better crawling of Twitter’s content.

It would be interesting to see what emerges from a collaboration between the companies to fine-tune Twitter’s usefulness for search engine users, Sterling said.

“Right now, it’s problematic using Twitter as an alternative search engine. There’s a lot of noisy results you get on Twitter’s search,” Sterling said. “If you can remove some of the noise, it could be quite powerful.”

For example, Twitter could turn into the next evolution of question-and-answer search engines, especially for users tapping into it from mobile devices, Sterling said. “It becomes a word-of-mouth network that is kind of instantaneous,” he said.

That would complement all the different ways in which Twitter is already very useful, like for marketing, Sterling said.

There would be technical challenges in making Twitter into a more useful search engine, and it would involve Google coming up with a way to weigh the reliability and authority of different Twitter users, Weiner said.

While Google declined to comment, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted a note on the company’s official blog saying the company’s plans are to remain independent.

“It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects,” he wrote. “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.”

Stone also encouraged people to apply for jobs at the company, an interesting document to peruse for clues to Twitter’s current plans and business and technology strategies.

Interestingly, Stone appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Nation” on Thursday evening, and during the interview he also said the Twitter’s intention is to be a strong and independent company.

“We’re recognizing a difference right now between profit and value. Right now, we’re building value,” Stone told Colbert.

That means extending Twitter globally, tapping not only into Web-based users but also into mobile phone networks, as well as adding features and refining the service, Stone said.

“When we get to a certain point where we feel we’ve gotten there, we’ll begin experimenting with a revenue model. This isn’t unlike the way Google approached their revenue model,” he said. The revenue-model testing and experimentation will begin this year, but Twitter will take its time getting it right, Stone said.

Stone’s comments may signal a potential tension with Twitter’s financial backers, who have poured $55 million into the company. “Investors may agitate for an acquisition because the idea of an IPO is unlikely if not impossible,” Sterling said.

Another issue that might derail a Google acquisition is that several Twitter staffers, including Stone and co-founder Evan Williams, already went through the experience of working for Google, after Google acquired Pyra Labs and its Blogger blog publishing service in 2003.

At the time, Blogger was the undisputed leader in the blog publishing space, but as part of Google its rate of innovation slowed down and competitors like WordPress and Six Apart delivered more sophisticated services.

“Blogger was ahead of the curve when Google bought it and then it became the AOL of blogging platforms: an early leader that then lost ground,” Sterling said.

If Google bought Twitter, the Twitter service would see some immediate improvements, Sterling said. Twitter posts would be incorporated into Google search results. Twitter’s own search would be improved. Google would monetize Twitter with ads. But in the end, it could face Blogger’s destiny.

“You might see Twitter maintain its current leader status for a while, but maybe not see if evolve as dynamically as it would under the stewardship of its founders,” Sterling said.

It can’t be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided to port Jaiku to Google App Engine, and later to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license.

The Jaiku service is maintained by volunteer Google engineers. Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.

Other signs that would point against a Twitter acquisition are recent comments made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter “a poor man’s e-mail” and wondered whether it will remain a stand-alone service or become an e-mail feature. Schmidt has also said recently he doesn’t foresee Google making major acquisitions in the immediate future

Filed under: Google, Twitter , Google, Google Acquisition Rumors Reflect Twitter's Importance, Twitter

Google to venture into start-ups

Google Ventures will seek out “great companies” Google is searching for “the next big thing” in technology as it announces its latest effort, Google Ventures. Its new venture capitalist arm pledged to help find and develop “exceptional start-ups”, offering early stage investments to a range of new firms. Areas it will look at include consumer internet, software, clean tech, bio tech and healthcare. But it will also include “areas we haven’t thought of yet,” the partners of the new venture said. Tough times “This is Google’s effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies… we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses,” said Rich Minter and Bill Maris, managing partners of Google Ventures in a blog post. Google has not yet said how much money it plans to commit to the venture although the Wall Street Journal is reporting that it could be around $100m (£70m) over the next 12 months. Google Ventures will include entrepreneurs and investors who will work alongside the existing Google team. It is a good time to be investing and a good time to build companies Richard Anton, Amadeus Venture capitalism has not been recession-proof. According to the US National Venture Capital Association, investments stateside have dropped 71% since 2007. Google admitted that the timing of the venture may raise some eyebrows. “Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the ‘next big thing’ and we’ll be working hard to find them,” it said in its blog post. Room for all UK venture capitalists have welcomed the arrival of Google on the market. “It is a very smart move from Google. I hope that it will not just focus on US firms because it is in Europe that the greater shortfall is,” said Richard Anton, a partner at UK-based venture capitalist Amadeus. Before the recession, US venture capitalists were investing around $30bn (£21bn) per annum on start-ups compared to £5bn (£3.5bn) in Europe, according to Mr Anton. While initial rounds of VC funding in Europe were still relatively healthy, firms were struggling to find third-party investors as they expanded their nascent businesses, he said. Google has been increasingly accused of becoming too powerful but Mr Anton said he was not concerned that this would happen with its latest venture. “Entrepreneurism is the antithesis of monopoly. It is a case of a thousands flowers blooming. It is a good

Filed under: Google , Google, Google to venture into start-ups, venture