November 5, 2008

FCC Passed "White Space" What Does It Mean

The FCC agreed to open the "white space" - the broadcast spectrum used by over the air television - to use by others apart from the regulated television stations, by a vote of 5-0 yesterday. This is a major accomplishment that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Dell and Hewlitt-Packard have been lobbying for over the past couple of years.

As Larry Page noted in the Official Google blog, "This is a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications."

The WIA details:

"TV white spaces will increase accessibility to more reliable broadband networks, known as "mesh networks." Mesh networks are self forming networks created by consumer electronics devices. Devices will simply find each other in the same way they find Wi-Fi hot spots today and broadband traffic can be routed through devices based on consumer preferences. For example, mesh networks will allow users wireless connectivity in the business environment. Easily accessible connectivity to office networks will generate efficiency in routine business processes-from printing documents remotely to transferring data to a client during a meeting.

Mesh networks also help to create connectivity in dead zones. These networks make it possible for the most common electronic devices to communicate with each other to resourcefully locate and establish a connection in nontraditional scenarios—like in a tunnel, or while riding the subway. "

The opportunities have been called "wifi on steroids" - as this spectrum would provide cheaper and more powerful wifi broadband access. There is a good video explaining the white space oportunities offered by the Wireless Innovation Alliance.

There have been promises of services being available within 90 days of it being opened up for use so we will have to wait and see what develops, but given the penetration is better and the service is wider - the use of this broadband methodology could dramatically increase internet access to many at a lower cost and using less power to do so.

Microsoft's Bill Gates sees white space as helping WiFi "explode in terms of its usage, even out into some of these less dense areas where distance has been a big problem for Wi-Fi."

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 16, 2008

A message from Becky Ryan - Social Queen of SES San Jose

"Yayyy!! I will be covering the big Search Engine Strategy Conference 2008 in San Jose! Check back for the best of the best events and while you are in San Jose follow me on Twitter for the latest SES events info! Webmoxy email:webmoxy@gmail.com are now "Our Events"!

Quick Overview:

Monday, August 18: 1:30 – 2:30 pm Orion Keynote Panel and SES Awards 4:30 – 5:30 pm Orion Keynote Panel and SES Awards 8:00 - Midnight IMCharity Event! (limited tickets see info below)

Tuesday, August 19: 9:00 – 10:00 am Microsoft Keynote and SES Awards 1:30 – 2:30 pm Orion Keynote Panel and SES Awards 5:15 – 6:30 pm Networking Reception by Surehits in the Exhibit Hall 6:30 pm – the Google Coaches line up! 7:00 – 11:00 pm Google Dance 2008 The annual Mecca pilgrimage for SEM's

Wednesday, August 20: 9:00 – 10:00 am Keynote Roundtable and SES Awards 11:30-11:45 Women's Lunch at Grill on the Alley by Fairmont 5:30 - 7:00 pm First SES Live Domain Auction by Moniker 7:00 pm - until late: WebmastRadio.FM SearchBash 2008 http://www.searchbash.com

Thursday, August 21: 9:00 – 10:00 am Author, Chip Heath about "Made to Stick" Keynote and SES Awards. TBA – John Marshall's After-Party with Pizza and BBQ in Santa Cruz!

Now with SES San Jose only days away and the huge 4 day event contains break out sessions which are jam packed and always a firehouse of information overload! I have looked over the 4 day schedule numerous times and think SES has out done itself once again.

But the sessions only cover œ of what you need to leave SES with. Fill up on Red Bull you need to hit the events after the sessions, this is where you can elbow up and chill with the industry guru's. You name them they will be at one or all of the events. Such as Matt Cutts, Neil Patel, Greg and Barbara Boser, Rae Hoffman, Bruce Clay, Kevin Ryan, Vanessa Fox, Frank Watson, Lisa Barone, Shoemoney, Meg Walker, Lee Odden, Jenn Slegg, Li Evans, Tamar, Dave Naylor, Monte Cahn, Brandy and Daron Babin, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Mikkel deMib, Chris Boggs, John Battelle, Erica Schmidt, Chris Hooley, Jim Hedger Andrew Tompkins, Kendall Allen, Jeen Laycock, Matt Bailey, Dixon Jones, Todd Malicoat, Jim Boykin, Michael McDonald, Todd Friesen, and many more, including the one-and-only Danny Sullivan. etc.. check out Becky Ryan's SES 2007 Pictures.

You have a lot of parties, events and networking opportunities to share, so fill up on Redbull, keep the SES Parties link and/or follow me on Twitter (myevents)!!

THE LOW DOWN ON THE EVENTS:

SES Awards

SES Awards 2008 - deadline July 18, 2008 register now http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sanjose/awards/ winners will be announced during the Orion and keynote panels!

Women's Lunch at Grill on the Alley by Fairmont

With SES San Jose fast approaching it seems my day job work keeps piling up! But no fear, Li Evans (http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com) managed to pull together another nice luncheon for the women of the search marketing industry to come together and have some fun!

Here are the details.

* WHERE: The Grill on the Alley 172 S Market St San Jose, CA 95113 (This restaurant is inside the Fairmont Hotel about 2 blocks from the conference center) * WHEN: Monday August 20th, 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. * MENU: Right now I have three to choose from they range in price from $20 to $30 (each menu has more for the entrees). Tip of 20% is extra. * SPACE: We have space for about 40 people, so please RSVP as we filled up very fast at our last event. * RSVP: Send an email to smg -a-t- searchmarketinggurusDOTcom

IMCHARITY EVENT

Who: First 500 people! When: August 18th 8pm to MIDNIGHT Where: Agenda Lounge (1 block from the Marriott and Convention Center) What: IMCharity We are going to be raising money for 2 great causes - The Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation and the Childrens Hospital.

How much: Get tickets now! www.imcharityparty.com/

Details: $40 at the door (thanks to our sponsors,all of which is going to one of these great charities) will get you open bar from 8pm to MIDNIGHT! Space is limited to 500 people so I would suggest buying tickets in advance. You can do this by donating to the team in training page ( http://pages.teamintraining.org/sf/n...imcharityparty). When you donate at least $40, specify in the notes section that this is for the SES San Jose Charity Event

Google Dance 2008

Around the globe search marketers come to make their annual homage to the Google Plex. Get ready early around 6pm the Coach buses line up outside the convention center and thousands line up! The site of thousands give can give you that tingly feeling, but not when you at the end of the line

Last year, Google had the rock 'n roll theme, tattoo inspired artwork, mega buffet and drinks. Once you make it to the Google Plex immediately get a shirt!!! If you are early definitely go to "Meet the Engineers" last year, I think 25 Google engineers were on hand to answer many questions and discuss new products. On the campus you will have the opportunity to try dozens of activities and my favorites are making videos. Crazy Google Dance 2007 Video.

As the evening ends many SEM's have a Google high and you if you feel like partying later there's almost always something going on back in San Jose afterwards.

SES Live Domain Auction by Moniker!!

Is a proper domain name strategy part of your traffic acquisition plan? If not, it should be. In this Live Domain Auction presented by Moniker, you can acquire some of the best domain name real estate on the Internet, giving you an instant advantage in your SEO, SEM, and brand building initiatives. Investing in the right set of domain names can pay off in many ways, including increasing search relevancy, blocking the competition, protecting your brand and preserving your keyword budget. Stop by theMoniker booth to pick up the auction catalog and to ask for tips on how a complete domain name strategy can enhance your ability to acquire traffic and keep a step ahead of competitors. Plus, if you own domains you'd like to turn into cash, Moniker can provide an appraisal and help get them listed at auction. For general information about the auction, visit: http://marketplacepro.moniker.com/au...auction_id=195 To submit names for consideration, visit: http://www.moniker.com/pub/Login.sn?...kerEventId=195

WebmasterRadio.FM Presents: SEARCHBASH 2008

The ultimate networking and party event!! Anyone who has been in search, domains or affiliating knows WebmasterRadio.FM, their superstars and their legendary events! This year is going to be totally off the hook and will be taking SEARCHBASH to a whole new dimension!! SEARCHBASH is orchestrated and produced by the Brandy and Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM and their supreme cast of sponsors. Each year they put together special events to entertain tens of thousands! This is the ultimate party event! With refreshments, great surprises and music, SearchBash begins at 7:00 p.m. at San Jose's Vivid Nightclub (formerly Studio 8), just five minutes walk from the conference center.

Check out SearchBash for all updates and RSVP's

Posted by Frank Watson at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 5, 2007

Super Bowl Ads – Where's the URL?

There have been some good reviews of this year's always-anticipated Super Bowl ad crop, but this article will identify the “URL visibility factor” for the ads, based on the use of the Web address of their Web site within the commercial, spoken or displayed. For any that did not get to watch the commercials, a fairly good introduction and review can be found at Ad Age (Video Link). Also, CBS promised ads on a special Super Bowl Ads page at their Sportsline domain.

According to Reuters, a fair sample of this year's Super Bowl television advertisements actually caused fear or anxiety on the part of some test subjects at the University of California. This makes sense, as there was a lot of violence, and even field mice were being tortured at some point during the game.

Tomorrow's Search Day will provide an “SEO Review” for those ads that did provide URLs.

URL No-Shows There was a fairly surprising list of no-shows when it came to URLs. Coca-Cola was the most obvious, as they purchased quite a few spots which were entertaining, but never mentioned their domain. I guess they probably figured people are smart enough to find Cocacola.com…that subject will be further discussed in the Search Day SEO Review article. Overall, however, I think Coca-Cola did a good job counteracting what could have been Pepsi dominance, in a general marketing sense.

Other “no-domainers” included Bud Light, Schick and the “Drive” movie (?). It was surprising the movie ad didn't lead to a link, especially since a search this morning of Google Movies and a variety of news searches couldn't find a movie with the word “Drive” in it. It is possible that I missed the title, but now I can't even remember the movie name. A URL would have cured that problem, at least for me. Oh well, if they had a Super Bowl ad I'll probably see it again soon, unless they blew their whole budget.

The first PNC Bank commercial actually showed someone online doing their business banking, and failed to mention or show a URL at any point during the ad. Missed that one! However, in a subsequent ad either late in the game or just after, they showed the pnc.com/leadingtheway address. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette talks about the launch of the campaign and describes some of the commercials. Looks like they need some link building quickly, as that article ranks first for “PNC leading the way” currently at Google. Kudos to PNC, however, for hosting the page on their Web site instead of farming it off to a new domain which is an SEO-no-no if you want your main site to benefit from the buzz. Again, more SEO talk later.

The biggest URL omission, in my opinion, was Revlon's ad for the “Not fade Away” tour being performed by Cheryl Crowe, while her official colorist is supposed to be seething. I am seething because they have a decent idea that just begs for viral marketing of a Web site. It looks like notfadeaway.com is taken already and being used by a community that hopes to remember lost heroes and tragedies. I wouldn't go there and try to buy that away, however the community seems small and some money may help them decide to use another URL. I was actually surprised to not find a Grateful Dead fan site there.

So Revlon is launching this “Not Fade Away” tour and maybe people would remember to go to Revlon.com to look for information. Too bad for them, as the home page currently doesn't show any mention of it, let alone a link to a section of the Web site. So I assumed if I drilled down to the hair color page, I would be presented with more information? Wrong again. It is disappointing that Revlon would go this far to create am online buzz-worthy campaign with Cheryl Crowe and not release a Web site to go along with it. (added: looks like there is a page setup on a subdomain here. Might be nice to link to it from somewhere)

URL ... But No Call to Action For those that did display and/or mention URLs, not all actually encouraged the viewers to visit the site. A few ads were primarily designed for that purpose, such as Pepsi's contest, which sponsored the halftime show and was hosted at Superbowl.com/Pepsi, and the obvious GoDaddy.com, Geico.com, Careerbuilder.com. CBS did a decent job of promoting two primary domains, including Superbowl.com as well as CBS.sportsline.com. In fact, they utilized a nice method of placing the links directly above the score given to viewers just before going into commercial breaks. These were done on a rotating basis, and not all scoreboards included a URL above them.

Speaking of CBS, it seemed like they really “poured it on” for their shows. Either it was just me or there were a lot more commercials for CBS shows than I had seen in past Super Bowls. Perhaps they didn't get their entire inventory sold? It was very unfortunate not to see a wedding proposal in just one of those dozens of spots, which they could have shown and may have gained some new fans. For the full story on that see mysuperproposal.com.

URL ... But Unreadable Many of the ads that did show URLs displayed them in either a very small font or in an otherwise unmemorable manner. This may be because traditional advertisers have targeted those of us that look for domains as being likely to notice it. Or, if I was cynical, it could be that traditional agencies want to keep the focus on other marketing instead of driving interest to the Web site.

Either way, the following advertisers kept their domains small, and most of them did not have the announcer mention them: Honda, FedEx, Comcast (which should probably be driving as many links to as many pages as possible using the anchor text “Comcast customer service,” if the hope to ever get rid of the YouTube result for that search), Coca Cola (as mentioned), GM, and eTrade.

To me, eTrade made the cardinal sin of thinking everyone knew it was eTrade.com. They do pretty well at Google for the search eTrade, and the majority of their target market has probably heard of them or will assume, but if you are spending 2+ million dollars driving people to a Web site, you would think that you should at least mention the URL somewhere.

URL ... Done Right The big winner in my opinion from a URL visibility standpoint was King Pharmaceuticals which led people to beatyourrisk.com, literally with a thud as the heart figure is thrown into the wall. The longer version of the ad that aired first even had a double showing of the wall with the URL on it, although it was cut out in the shorter version. I would have kept it in both versions, since the goal is obviously to drive traffic to that site. I may also even throw a link to the commercial up on the Beat Your Risk domain.

The other URLs that did gain a mention will be analyzed in tomorrow's Search Day for SEO value. By the way, congratulations to Peyton Manning, Tony Dungy, and the Indianapolis Colts on winning Super Bowl 41, which was in fact quite entertaining for the most part. Of course had Vinatieri hit that field goal at the end of the first half I would have won that quarter's office pool. The good news is that Tony went for it and gave the ball back at the end of the game, preserving my 4th quarter pool victory.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 9:33 AM | Permalink

July 10, 2006

Eric Schmidt Claims The PPC Model is "Self-Correcting" In Terms Of Click Fraud

Donna Bogatin reports that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt claims that click fraud is "self-correcting." Meaning,

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

So the "let it happen" quote, in terms of Eric Schmidt saying let click fraud happen, has been buzzing through the blogging community. Schmidt writes off click-fraud as the "cost of doing business." Maybe he is just very confident of the new AdWords quality scoring?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:07 AM | Permalink

July 5, 2006

Report: Advertisers Lost $800 Million To Click Fraud Last Year

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a click fraud study that claims 14.6 percent of all clicks and $800 million worth of fraudulent clicks were charged to advertisers.

The study conducted by Outsell Inc., a market researcher in Burlingame, seems to have been a survey of "407 online advertisers representing a cross-section of U.S. business."

I do not know if this data is based exclusively on reports from these advertisers, or if advertisers were asked to guess the figures. The study claims that 75 percent of all advertisers say they are a victim of click fraud, 37 percent have or will reduce their PPC spend, $500 million was lost directly due to Google or Yahoo and of the 407, seven percent asked for refunds averaging $9,507 each. The full report is available for purchase at OutSell.

Postscript From Danny. I've now reviewed a copy of the report. Note that:

• The study involved 407 advertisers, all US-based, targeting mainly business and consumer markets, all working full-time. Together, they are said to control about $1 billion in ad spending.  
• Outsell says the cross section can be extrapolated. However, some degree of advertising is done by individuals who might be doing things like arbitrage (buying search traffic at low prices to send clicks to other contextual ads worth more). People like these and others probably aren't included in the report, yet they have an impact on any estimates.  
• 27 percent say click fraud has caused them to reduce online advertising spending (though whether this is search spending; dropping contextual campaigns or something else isn't covered, nor is it covered if they have dropped with particular search engines, such as second or third tier players). Another 10 percent say click fraud is such a concern that they intend to reduce spend. So click fraud is impacting spend on 37 percent of those surveyed.  
• In contrast, 31 percent said click fraud was a secondary issue or not an issue to them; 33 percent said it was a serious issue they felts providers are controlling. Combined, that's 64 percent who aren't saying they are impacted.  
• Of those 27 percent that have reduced funding, on average, it was cut by 33 percent. But again, whether that was to cut spending on contextual ads (often considered search by advertisers and others, even though it is not) or to cut with particular search engines isn't said other than "the results are relatively evenly split between Google, Yahoo and 'others,'" said the report.  
• Advertisers were asked themselves to estimate fraudulent clicks, meaning the amount billed for AFTER and refunds they've received. On average, this was a rate of 14.6 percent.  
• The $800 million cited in the San Francisco Chronicle article comes from the report taking that 14.6 percent average and applying it to the entire estimated $5.5 billion search ad spend from 2005. Some problems with this being an accurate stat are:  
  • Advertisers might be off in their estimates  
  • The average rate might not be applicable across the entire spend. In some industries, it might be much higher -- while spend in those industries might be a small percentage of overall search ads spend. Or it could be the reverse.  
• The $1.3 billion in the reports "Click Fraud Reaches $1.3 Billion, Dictates End Of 'Don?t Ask, Don?t Tell' Era" title comes from taking the $800 million figure and adding to it $500 billion, which comes from taking the $5.5 billion spend times 27 percent of advertisers who said they've reduced spending times the 33 percent average cut they've reported. Again, with all these averages, the actual amount reduced could be more or less. And while that additional $500 million is related to click fraud and thus part of the click fraud "problem," lumping it in makes it sound like $1.3 billion in click fraud is estimated, rather than the $800 million figure.  
• The report also reports on the rate people ask for refunds -- 5.4 percent have asked Google; 2.9 percent asked Yahoo and MSN comes next at 1.5 percent. The vast majority of advertisers -- 92.9 percent -- haven't ask for refunds. The report notes this big discrepancy between those who say they've cut budgets because of click fraud (27 percent) or those who have estimated click fraud to be 14.6 percent of spend. It's an important point, because if this much money really is believed to be fraudulently billed by advertisers, why aren't they pushing in larger numbers for repayment? And how come half of them report they do no systematic analysis of click logs. How can estimates of click fraud from this half even be included to make an industry stat, if they've done no analysis of their own?  
• As for refunds, Google by far had the best satisfaction rate, with 63 percent saying they were extremely or somewhat satisfied with actions.

Overall, there are some nice stats from the advertisers in this fee-based report. I found those about refund amounts paid and experiences with the search engines more interesting and probably much more accurate than the extrapolation of the overall click fraud rate of 14.6 percent or a figure of $800 million. The report doesn't leave me feeling those two figures are any more accurate than others that have been put out there.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:07 PM | Permalink

July 3, 2006

KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court?

News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case might proceed to court, based on this past Friday's hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site penalty that downgraded the site's rankings in the Google search results. Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com's lawyer said. The judge gave KinderStart.com's lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the complaint. The judge said, "You can't just file a blanket lawsuit and say, 'We think we're going to find some stuff.'" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:55 AM | Permalink

June 29, 2006

Not GBuy: Google Launches Checkout

The wait is over for Google's long-awaited payment service that's been the subject of so much speculation. Google Checkout is a new system that makes it easy for online merchants to process credit-card payments, and also streamlines the checkout process for consumers. The service also raises some thorny issues for AdWords advertisers, who may be reluctant to let Google capture customer transactions, and yet advertisers that use the system may benefit from improved rankings in search results. More on the new service and the issues it raises for search marketers in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Checkout, not the Rumored GBuy.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:01 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2006

Yahoo Settles Clickfraud Lawsuit

A California judge has approved Yahoo's proposed settlement of a class action click fraud case brought against the company by Checkmate Strategic Group in June 2005.

Yahoo believes the settlement will cover all click fraud claims that have been filed against Yahoo, including a suit filed by Lane's Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas last year against both Yahoo and Google.

The terms of the settlement include a cash payment of $4.95 million to plaintiffs' counsel and a provision that will allow advertisers to file a claim for Yahoo to investigate potentially fraudulent clicks back through January 2004. Yahoo will pay refunds to advertisers who file claims if it discovers evidence of fraudulent clicks.

"We're very pleased with the terms of the settlement," said Reggie Davis, associate general counsel for Yahoo. "We believe it's a reasonable and fair settlement."

What does it mean for Yahoo advertisers?

The cash payment is far less than the $90 million settlement Google agreed to last March to resolve the Lane's Gifts class action click fraud case. In that case, up to $60 million was allocated for credit to advertisers, while plaintiffs' council received $30 million.

The Yahoo settlement differs from the Google settlement in other ways, as well. Google is offering credit to advertisers, rather than cash refunds, with a cap of $60 million. Yahoo, by contrast, is offering cash refunds, and there is no ceiling on the amount it will refund if it finds evidence of click fraud, though the company is optimistic that the refund amounts won't be onerous due to the safeguards it has had in place.

Yahoo says it believes the favorable terms are due to the strong position it took maintaining that its proprietary system does a good job at protecting advertisers from click fraud. To bolster its position, Yahoo invited the plaintiffs' attorneys and their experts to meet with Yahoo's clickthrough protection team, examine its systems, ask questions and attend presentations to better understand the controls the company has in place to filter out questionable or fraudulent clicks.

Yahoo says that its clickthrough protection system has identified and not billed advertisers for billions of clicks during the past eight years, all the way back to the early days before Yahoo purchased Overture and its sponsored listing technologies. Clicks not billed for included obvious click fraud, but also other clicks that the company believed shouldn't be billed to advertisers (for example, blocked IP addresses, double-clicks, back browser clicks and so on).

Yahoo said that as part of the settlement it is taking five specific steps to combat click fraud:

1. The company is extending the claims period for advertisers suspecting fraudulent activity from sixty days to two and a half years, or back through January 2004. Yahoo will investigate all claims filed under this one-time extension and offer cash refunds to advertisers if it finds questionable activity.

Judge Taylor, a retired federal judge, will be overseeing the extended claims process. His role will be to ensure that Yahoo sticks to the agreed-upon process, and he will also be available to review advertiser appeals if they are not satisfied with the results of Yahoo's investigation.

2. The company plans to appoint a dedicated traffic quality advocate to act as ombudsman for advertisers. 3. Once a year Yahoo plans to host a panel of individual advertisers to tour the company's clickthrough protection headquarters, allowing them to ask questions and provide feedback. The company will also seek advice from this panel.

4. Yahoo plans to work with reputable third parties to develop an industry wide definition of click fraud, a list of recognized click bots, and take other measures to garner awareness of the issue and what's being done to combat the problem.

5. Yahoo plans to build a "traffic quality resource center" for advertisers, providing much more information about traffic quality, including extensive FAQs about the company's click-through protection methodology.

In addition, Yahoo said it is taking steps beyond the terms of the settlement to respond to advertiser needs.

"Advertisers are interested in understanding more about click through protection and click fraud," said John Slade, senior director, Yahoo! clickthrough protection. He said the company plans to provide advertisers with better visibility in turnaround time on complaints on click fraud, responding within a specified time frame.

He said Yahoo will also offer more clarity around refunds on click fraud, including additional detail describing more specifically what the company has found in refunds or credit notices—especially in better documenting the differences between click fraud and other traffic variances that might be misinterpreted as click fraud.

More information on the settlement in Yahoo's official press release, Yahoo! and Click Fraud: Our Commitment to Protecting Advertisers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:24 PM | Permalink

Google Book Search Wins Victory In German Challenge

I wrote earlier this month of a French lawsuit becoming the third one I knew about filed against Google over its book scanning project. Turns out, there was a fourth one -- based out of Germany. But now we're back to three, as Google has just announced that the German one has been withdrawn.

It looks to be Google's first legal victory in the battles over the project. From Google, via its Inside Google Book Search blog (and also on its main blog):

WBG, a German publisher, today decided to drop its petition for preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project. WBG (whose legal action was supported by the German Publishers Association as an industry model) made the decision after being told by the Copyright Chamber of the Regional Court of Hamburg that its petition was unlikely to succeed. It's our belief that the display of short snippets from in-copyright books does not infringe German copyright law. Today the Court indicated that it agreed, drawing a comparison with the snippets used in Google web search. And the Court also rejected the WBG's argument that the scanning of its books in the U.S. infringed German copyright law.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:29 PM | Permalink

Google Loses French Lawsuit Over Vuitton Trademark

I just got word that Google lost the French lawsuit we reported on Monday involving the Louis Vuitton trademark. I do not have any more details at the moment, only that they lost. I will try to update this entry when I have more information.

Postscript: I was just sent this information from Bloomberg news. "Google Inc. must pay LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA 300,000 euros ($375,800) for breaching copyright rules with its advertising service, a French Appellate court ruled."

Postscript 2: News stories are finally now appearing:

• Vuitton tops Google in Paris court, International Herald Tribune
• Louis Vuitton says court upholds Google ruling, Reuters
• The Paris Court of Appeals Confirms Sanctions against Google for Trademark Counterfeiting, Unfair Competition and Misleading Advertising, Louis Vuitton Press Release

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Social News Site Digg Adds New Categories, Features

Sites that rely on user generated content are all the rage these days, from online encyclopedia Wikipedia to social bookmark sites like Del.ico.us. Digg relies on its 300,000 users to suggest important news stories from sites all over the web, and promotes those that get the most "diggs" (votes) to its front pages, providing a collective view of what web users think are the most important stories of the moment. Earlier this week the site rolled out new subject areas and tools that make it easier to drill down on the types of news that interests you personally and ignore topics that you don't find useful. More on Digg and this populist approach to "editing" the news in today's SearchDay article, Digging into the News.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:12 AM | Permalink

June 27, 2006

New Players in Travel Search Threaten to Disrupt Status Quo

Travel search has improved enormously over the past several years, but serious travellers still find themselves checking multiple web sites to make sure they're getting the best deal. That may change with the launch of two new services that use historical and predictive data to not only find the best prices for specific flights, but also to suggest the best dates on which to purchase your tickets. Brian Smith has more about the new services in today's SearchDay article, New Players in Travel Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:06 AM | Permalink

June 26, 2006

Follow-Up: School Couldn't Reach Google Until Injunction Filed

Catawba County Schools in North Carolina obtained an injunction to remove private material from Google because it had no luck getting action from the search engine after trying other routes, the district tells me. The school district also stressed that it didn't claim that Google had somehow hacked into its servers. Here's what Catawba County School's chief technology officer Judith Ray emailed me about the situation:

We asserted that Google had somehow bypassed our login information, not that they had hacked their way into the system. Hacking, to me assumes malicious intent and we never intended to imply that Google was doing anything other than spidering all the web sites available.

There is also miscommunication about "all users" being required to log in. The DocuShare server is a repository for both public and private information with logins being required for users who are authorized to view the restricted information. There are hundreds of pages of information that we share from DocuShare with users around the state. These are completely open and are not supposed to [be] password protected.

We did troubleshoot this situation by searching for the students' information at Yahoo, Dogpile, and AltaVista. We did not find any information on these three search engine returns and we attempted the searches over a three-day period.

We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google. We could not get operators to connect us with technical support, the legal department, or to anyone higher up in the organization. We were only given an email address to which we could submit a complain - which we did but got no response. Google has a link to submit an emergency request [see here] but on both Thursday and Friday of last week, the link took you to a dead page. Only when the news media submitted its own inquiry to Google did we get a call regarding the situation. And [Google] has been most helpful in working through this situation with us.

Of course, none of us who are employed with Catawba County Schools at the current time were involved when Xerox set up this server. We are trying to ascertain if the server was incorrectly setup/protected or if the appropriate include meta tags or strings were not included.

Google Blamed For Indexing Student Test Scores & Social Security Numbers from us earlier has more background on the injunction plus how I was finding pages from what the district said was a password protected area to still be available through Yahoo. As clarified above, some of these pages indeed didn't require a login to view.

Our story originally was headlined "Google Blamed For Hacking & Indexing Students Test Scores & Social Security Numbers" and said in one part, "the school [district] blames Google for some how breaking into a password protected area and indexing the content."

As stated above, the school district itself never appears to have said anything about being hacked, only that Google somehow got into information it believed was password protected, as it says on the home page of the district site:

We do not know how Google was able to access the secure, password-protected site. Once Google does access a site, it places a copy of the data on its own server. We immediately called and emailed Google, requesting the urgent removal of the link and site data. We have eliminated the link from our end and it appears that as of Friday night, June 23, 2006, Google eliminated the site from their end.

The hacking reference seems to come from the "Google 'hacked our website'" story at The Inquirer, which we linked to in our original story. While the headline says "hacked" in quotes, the story itself doesn't have anyone from the school district saying this.

Digg also has a School claimed google hacked it's private servers and then posted that data article. Again, the school district isn't alleging hacking, only that Google somehow got into information it believed was restricted. How that happened is still being investigated.

As for the reference to Xerox in the school district's explanation, in doing some investigating in our original piece, I noted that the server seemed to be managed by Xerox and shared by other companies as well, with material for those companies appearing to be hosted on the school district's domain. As noted, the school district doesn't know why this was happening, and it remains something they are looking at.

Finally, Google's had problems with the automated page removal tool before, though not that it was down but instead allowing people to remove pages from sites they didn't own. More on that in our 2004 story, Google Confirms Automated Page Removal Bug.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:35 PM | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Google, Kill The Web Search Counts!

Number one on my 25 Things I Hate About Google list from March was "web search counts that make no sense." This week's fiasco with the "5 billion spam pages" in Google only underscores that those counts really are a big issue that can be noticed by more than a few tech heads. Fix them or get rid of them, I say.

Adam Lasnik from Google's search quality team has been running around to various public forums explaining that it really wasn't 5 billion pages that got indexed from one master domain but instead a counting glitch that makes the problem seem worse than it was. We noted Monday that he commented over at Threadwatch:

We have noticed that some site: queries are showing bizarre results and it's turned out to be tied to a bad data push. We're fixing it now....

I'm saying that the results counts are drastically off.

Adam's also been at Digg:

Our engineers recently noticed that our site: queries (number of results listed for a search) were showing bizarre results. This has turned out to be tied to a bad data push, and we're fixing this right now.

In the case being discussed above, the number in "about [x billion]" is currently incorrect. We haven't indexed anywhere close to as many pages of these sites as is currently suggested. It's a significant results estimation error, thankfully limited in scope but clearly pretty stark when it appears.

And over at John Battelle's blog:

Compounding the issue, our result count estimates in these contexts was MANY orders of magnitude off. For example, the one site that supposedly had 5.5 billion pages in the index actually had under 1/100,000th of that.

John's post is probably the most important illustration of why those counts really do matter, given that he took them at face value -- and so many others will, as well.

When I saw the story on Monday, I doubted Google really had indexed so many pages, especially given the known problems with the site: command recently. While Google doesn't report the total number of pages it indexes any longer, it wasn't that long ago when 5 billion pages would have been over half the reported size, as John noted:

5 billion pages is the entire size of the Google index just a year or so ago. The last claim, before they stopped MAKING claims, was 8 billion...think about that.

Now sure, maybe Google really did index that many pages. Maybe they've expanded so much that there's plenty of room. More likely, adding that massive amount of pages really should have caused a lot more good pages to go missing, to make room for them. There would have been a ton of screaming *widely* across the web from site owners big and small.

I know, I know -- some believe Google's running out of space, and Eric Schmidt even commented on a "machine crisis" which the company later denied was an issue with web search. Certainly many webmasters have long been reporting missing pages in the wake of shifting to Google's BigDaddy crawling infrastructure. But many webmaster also have not been having problems.

Maybe Google is so screwed up that it IS picking up billions of spam pages from a few sites and dumping good stuff. However, I think that's unlikely. I think lots of pages did get in from this site, though maybe in the millions rather than billions. And perhaps collectively, millions of pages of spam from a number of sites are pushing good stuff out. But that 5 billion figure for this particular site (and its subdomains)? I do think it was a counting error.

That counting error is a big problem in and of itself. As said, many people take the counts at face value, even trying to use these meaningless figures in court cases as Fox News once did or the US Attorney General once did before the US Supreme Court.

Enough is enough. Make the figures accurate or stop reporting them at all. Last year, I lobbied for Google to drop the index count on its home page, something that eventually happened. Now they should strongly consider doing the same thing with results count.

Time For Results Counts / Number Of Matches To Go? from Gary Price last year talked about this perhaps being a good next move for Google and the other search engines to make. Certainly the time now seems right.

Google, like Yahoo won't let you go past the first 1,000 matches anyway (Ask goes to 200; MSN to 250). So who cares about showing how many matches there are? Counts like these are remnants of the days when search engines first appeared and showing that they had lots of matches helped perhaps make you think they must be good or comprehensive. But if the counts mean nothing, why keep using them?

Ah -- but it's only an issue with the counts if you do a site: command, you might say. Certainly we've known about a bug with that since May. We've been told some of it has been fixed, but clearly bugs are still being worked out.

But are regular search counts accurate? If I search for djkfdkjfdkjddfdfdd, I get told there are no matches. So if I shift to -djkfdkjfdkjddfdfdd, I should get a count of all pages in the index that don't contain that word -- and since we know there are no pages with it in the index -- I should get a count of ALL pages Google has indexed. And that count?

Results 1 - 10 of about 25,270,000,000 for -djkfdkjfdkjddfdfdd. (0.07 seconds) 

So there we have it -- Google has 25 billion pages indexed. Maybe. Or maybe not. This type of search sometimes has produced figures in the past that you knew couldn't be right. Plus, as I wrote before, Google's long had counting problems. I don't know whether to trust that count or not. And if I can't trust it, why offer it to me? Especially why offer it to me if after a glitch, you have to run around doing damage control to say the count is wildly inaccurate. Just get rid of it.

Instead, this is what I want to see in the future:

Results 1 - 10 

OK? And how about giving an option to have a number show up next to a result, for those who want it. That would be nice if I want to refer to the exact position of a particular listing to someone else. But the total number of matches? It's meaningless. And the time it took to search? Chest thumping we don't need anymore.

One exception, however. Google Sitemaps has just added a bunch of expanded reporting. I want them to go further and let site owners get accurate index counts through that system.

Keep in mind that a site: command is incredibly processor intensive. It's not something most searchers do, so spending the time, energy and machine power to get hyper-accurate results for regular Google searches isn't a priority.

Instead, move site: searches to work within Google Sitemaps, and you take the burden off your main machines. It's also something you can perhaps have scheduled to run as a report, something generated en masse during slower periods for anyone who wants to get that type of data. If three people all want site:amazon.com data, you run that once and give all three the info on a scheduled basis.

Yahoo rolled out a similar Yahoo Site Explorer tool last September. It was a good move. It would be a good move for Google to also make, along with dropping the general results counting on Google results pages.

Want to comment? Please join our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Get Rid Of Results Counts On Google?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:32 AM | Permalink

What the Critics Said

The web has made it easy to seek out criticism to help us decide what to watch, listen to or read. But as with web search in general, finding the best sources of criticism can sometimes be a frustrating experience. In today's SearchDay article, Searching for Critical Acclaim, I take an in-depth look at a service that aggregates reviews of movies, books, music and more and assigns a unique score that represents the collective critical opinion on the quality of each reviewed title.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:36 AM | Permalink

Google Answers: Ask Whatever You Like, Except About Google

We wrote earlier about Google pulling a question at Google Answers about Google. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped followed-up further and found that Google officially disallows people to ask questions about the company because the researchers at Google Answers aren't Google employees.

Got that? Freelance researchers are apparently qualified to answer questions about any other company in the world, but when it comes to Google, special treatment is required. Incredible.

In Google Answers Question Removed, Philipp says he was told:

Questions about Google, Google Search, and search engine optimization are not allowed because Google Answers researchers are not employees of Google. Researchers don?t have access to any ?inside? information. The information they do have access to is available for free on the Google help pages or by writing to Google support.

And Steve Hall, who started this all when his question was rejected earlier this week, was told:

We'd like to clarify the reason for removal of this question. Please note that Google Answers researchers are not employees of Google. They are independent contractors, and they only have access to information about Google and Google Search that is publicly available. Therefore, all users with questions about Google and/or Google Search are directed to these Google support pages.

In the comments to Steve's post, someone raises a good point that Google might have this policy to help keep those getting responses from thinking they are getting "official" information from Google. I can understand that. But that can also be dealt with differently than just removing questions wholescale. And no questions on search engine optimization, as Philipp was told? Please.

For the record, the Google Answers FAQ says this about questions that aren't allowed:

Google Answers discourages and may remove questions that:

• request private information about individuals
• want assistance in conducting illegal activities
• are meant to sell or advertise products
• refer or relate to adult content
• are homework or exam questions
• seek specific information about Google or Google Answers (email answers-support@google.com instead)

Fair to say, I think that last line should go. People should be able to ask about Google and Google Answers, at the very least because such restrictions make the entire system seem silly.

More important, the Google help pages and other information about Google do NOT have everything you'd want to know about Google. Consider:

• How does Google technically perform censorship in China? (Answer -- see this good New York Times article, with info not on the Google web site that I know of)  
• How did a web site recently get so many spam pages indexed so quickly in Google? (Answer -- our article is one of many that explains its both a glitch with Google's site: command plus probably just a big problem with Google's spam control pages, something not covered on the Google web site)  
• Is it cloaking if the New York Times puts up a page in front of those clicking from Google to reach paid articles? (Answer -- it's a matter of debate, as going on in our Search Engine Watch Forums. Google has general guidelines, but there's no agreement on whether these apply. And there's nothing on the Google site giving a definitive answer).

Out of curiosity, I did a little searching at Google Answers to see if much was getting through about Google. Not much, that I could see. But this question caught my eye, Mod Rewrite code for the .htaccess file. It asks:

I have a website called www.greathostels.com it is written in php i need to know the code to put in the htaccess file to make it search engine friendly using mod_rewrite as at the moment its not effectivly spidered.

The answer was a list of pointers to other sites, all of which look pretty useful to me, someone who is not an expert. But the person asking also raised a good point:

If asking a Php code question i think the answer should be provided by someone who knows PhP code.

Which got him this over-the-top response:

Apparently you negelected to read the FAQs for the Google Answers service:

"Are Researchers experts in their field?"

"All Google Researchers are tested to ensure that they are expert searchers with excellent communication skills. Some of them also have expertise in various fields. Your question may be answered by an expert in a particular field or by an expert searcher. Either way, if you are unsatisfied with your answer for any reason, you may apply for a full refund." http://answers.google.com/answers/faq.html#experts

Our job is to provide an answer to your question. If we personally lack the expertise to do so, we seek out authoritative resources on the internet.

Therefore, I referred you to an authoritative site which provided information which was extremely specific to your question. To imply that the authors of The SEO Toolset website are not experts in their topic, when they authored precisely the information you requested, and created precisely the URL Rewriting Tool which you so badly need, is the heighth of insolence and absurdity.

I would request that my answer be removed by the editors, simply to remove the taint of my association with you, but they tend not to remove answers which have satisfactorily answered the question.

If you ever plan to use this service again, I suggest you register under a different username, given the fact that other researchers will be more than reluctant to deal with someone who doesn't bother to inform themselves about what to expect from the service.

Ouch. I can understand the researcher feeling slighted. But it's also a fair opinion to have, that it would be nice if an actual expert in the area answered the question. Which brings it back to Google's censorship of questions about itself. It's OK for people to research things like PHP and rewriting, even if they have no expertise in them -- but Google itself is too sensitive a topic?

Oh, but remember, people can write to Google Support to get real expert advice. You mean like I did when Gmail went down for me last week? You mean like Tom Foremski did over at Silicon Valley Watcher when Gmail went down for him yesterday? I don't think he got a response. I know I didn't -- and this is now a week after I had my problem.

Instead, I hunted and hunted through support areas and eventually guessed that a solution for an entirely different problem might work for me. It did. But go read my Getting Gmail To Resume POP Access With Captcha Unlock article, because it explains just how lame the Gmail support documentation is in terms of helping people with this problem. And yet, that's what Google Answers thinks is fine for people to use instead of being able to ask questions?

And as for company questions, while asking about Google is off limits, these are fine:

• RSS Feed and Yahoo
• Microsoft's battle against open source software development / Linux
• Help Me Reinstall iTunes

Apparently, having researchers answer questions about other companies without inside information is OK. It's only Google itself that needs special protection.

What do you think? Should the policy change? I'm going to ask in two places and will postscript links here. The first will be our Search Engine Watch Forums. The second will be Yahoo Answers, where there are no restrictions about asking about Google -- or Yahoo -- that I can see. Perhaps that's one of the reasons it's growing by leaps-and-bounds, as covered in my recent article, Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers!

Want to comment? Come join:

• Why Shouldn't Google Answers Let People Ask Questions About Google?, Yahoo Answers
• Google Answers: Question Everything But Google, Search Engine Watch Forums

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:15 AM | Permalink

Google Partners With Adobe For Toolbar Distribution In Shockwave, Other Product To Be Named

Both Adobe (PDF link) and Google have announced a new deal where Adobe will distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads. That was supposed to begin yesterday, and bundling with other Adobe products will happen in the future.

Wait a minute? Weren't Yahoo and Adobe buddy-buddies? Yes -- a special version of the Yahoo Toolbar is built into the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader program, through a deal dating back to October 2004.

In January of this year, Google began distributing Adobe Reader as part of the Google Pack without the Yahoo Toolbar being part of it. Google told me (article for SEW members) then that the Adobe-Yahoo agreement only covered the distribution Adobe did.

So is the Yahoo-Adobe deal completely over? No. Reuters reports that Adobe says that will continue:

Adobe previously included Yahoo Inc.'s toolbar as an option with the Shockwave Player, Adobe spokeswoman Katie Juran said. Adobe still offers the Yahoo toolbar as an option for its Flash Player and Adobe Reader products, she said.

I just uninstalled Acrobat Reader and downloaded a fresh copy. I definitely see the Yahoo Toolbar as part of the latest installation.

As for the Abobe-Google deal, the bundling with Google Pack wasn't based on payment, Google told me at the time. This latest deal is a financial arrangement, though exactly how much money is changing hands is not disclosed.

As for the distribution, I downloaded Shockwave and got no prompt for the Google Toolbar to be added. Of course, I already had it in Internet Explorer, and that seems to be why I didn't get a separate install. The Shockwave FAQ suggests that you should see a separate install process and that this won't happen if you have the Google Toolbar already.

That FAQ also notes that the Yahoo Toolbar, previously bundled with Shockwave, has now been dropped. In addition, it says that that third parties that distribute Shockwave do not have to bundle the Google Toolbar with those distributions.

The Google Blog post also says:

Starting today, Adobe is offering the Google Toolbar to its customers as a free download -- a great way to take Google search with you anywhere on the web.

So far, that seems to be true within Shockwave. But it's also a bit overstated. The Google Toolbar on its own is not offered anywhere on the Adobe products page, nor does a search for "google toolbar" flag any page for those who just want the toolbar on its own

The best, most specific information is part of the Shockwave FAQ that I've mentioned. There is at least a direct link to the Google Toolbar download page. But that's much different that the idea the Google Blog suggests, that people visiting Adobe might be getting a pitch for the Google Toolbar on its own. Not yet, not so far.

Postscript Barry:

I was sent a screen capture of this in action, you can view the screen capture at tcal.net.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:48 AM | Permalink

June 21, 2006

The Search & Branding Tug-Of-War, Again

"Cannes Lions Diary: Search under scrutiny" from the Financial Times at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival covers what we've seen before, traditional ad buyers worried that search is going to rob their budgets while search engines planning to do that theft try to distract with a "search is a brand thing" message.

First, let's do the sound bites out of the event. Here's what Laura Desmond, chief executive of Mediavest USA (which the FT says "advises clients such as P&G, Masterfoods and Kraft on buying and planning media") is quoted as saying:

Google is going to have to change its business model soon. Search alone isn't where marketing is today. It is about search and branding and putting the two together.

As for the search engines, we have:

Damian Burns, head of European agency relations at Google, said: "There is a need for self-education among agencies and clients. But I don?t believe that you can have people being exposed to brands on search results day after day without that having an impact on brand building."

During one conference event, campaigns by IBM and an onscreen prompt by Donald Trump, presenter of ?The Apprentice?, the US reality show, for viewers to investigate a new coffee product online, were cited as examples of pairing television and search. In both cases, online searches for keywords related to the campaigns rose sharply after relevant keywords were used onscreen.

Speakers said marketers would in future have to time their spend on search engine keywords to coincide with television or press campaigns to get the best results.

OK, let's go back to Desmond. First, is Google in trouble for only doing search? Actually, the company does more than search. All those ads across the web, the contextually placed ones through AdSense, those aren't search. Moreover, some of those placements are image and video ads sold on a brand-building friendly CPM basis.

Now let's say Google really did only have search ads. Why would it be in trouble for failing to put search and branding together? I mean, search marketers haven't depending on branding value for their stunning success over the past 10 years. What, today suddenly you need to have a brand component?

Search marketing is a fundamental advertising activity that stands alone from others, as I've been stressing in keynote speeches recently. It works because it gets your message in front of people who are overtly expressing a need, often without any exposure at all to brand advertising that tries to build that need.

Saying search must address branding is like saying that direct marketing address branding. You don't need to have a brand lift for direct marketing to be successful. Neither do you need a brand lift with search.

Having said this, search certainly can help with branding. Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has taken a fairly anti-branding stance in his Search Advertising Does NOT Build Brands post, and here's some of my counter-response to him in the comments:

What do you think made Zappos a brand name when it comes to buying shoes online? Those magazine ads you saw for them? That TV spot? Wait ? I don't think they do that stuff. What they do is a lot of spending to show up in search engines when you search for ?shoes? and related terms. You did a generic search, you keep seeing a particular provider, and you learn about that brand.

Hey, need an espresso machine? I learned an entire new brand, Whole Latte Love, simply because when I was doing searches, I kept coming across their site. J&Rs in New York? If you?re in Manhattan, you know that brand as well as I knew Fry?s living in California. But J&R was a mystery to me until I kept seeing them in some shopping search results before making a trip to New York. Now that brand is rooted in my mind, not because I saw some offline ad but because I saw them first in search. That brand did build in my mind, to me.

I've done panel after panel on the intersection of search and branding at our SES conferences. We have another one coming up for our San Jose show this August. Actual advertisers and brand holders continue to say there's a brand value in search. They don't say they'll build brand only with search. Nor do they say they want all the branding money to come away from other venues like TV and solely support search. In fact, they want TV ads to keep going -- those help fuel the searches they buy.

Instead, the real pushing point is that they want more of the ad spend. They have a type of advertising that converts incredibly well and, in my opinion, is incredibly undervalued still. If the ad spend pie isn't getting bigger, then it has to come from the traditional space -- a space itself which has to be feeling more pressure given the relatively poor metrics it can offer.

As for the search engines, they've been pimping brand value to traditional advertisers to woo spending since Overture's big study way back in 2001 (see here and here). There is brand value with search ads, of course -- but if they really wanted to help establish search as a serious fundamental marketing activity, then how about leaning on the Cannes Lions festival to recognize that with awards just for search. Here are this year's awards. Search isn't a category, not even within the Cyber area which does recognize things like email marketing.

For more on these issues, here's some selected reading:

• Search Ads Getting More Attention From Big Advertisers
• Yahoo To Ban Bidding On Competitor Trademarks To Stop Comparison Advertising
• Mazda Taps Into Pontiac TV & Search Ads Again
• Big Guys Crowd Out Little Guys in SEM Arena; Some Branding Focused Advertisers Willing to Spend "Whatever" It Takes
• Search May Not Be From Branding, But It Will Still Pull Branding Spend
• C'mon In Brand Owners, The Search Water's Fine
• Building Roomba's Brand Through Search
• Branding Boosted By Paid Ads, Research Says
• Search Can Provide Brand Lift, Study Finds (for Search Engine Watch members)

Want more? We've got plenty. Check out our Search Ads: Branding & SEM Tips: Branding categories, if you are a Search Engine Watch member.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:22 AM | Permalink

Mashups and Other Fun with Flickr

A big part of the appeal of Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service, is its ease of use. It's not only easy to upload and work with your own images, but it's also a snap to search for and play around with images uploaded by others—in relatively sophisticated ways, if you take advantage of the Flickr API to create mashups that combine images with other applications. In today's SearchDay article, Hacking Flickr I review a new book that's part of the O'Reilly Hacks series that shows you how to take maximum advantage of Flickr's capabilities.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:59 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

It's Not Just Google With Disappointing Results

We have been poking hard at Google for disappointing search results, but Google is not the only search engine that has been disappointing me recently. You can group Yahoo and MSN and even Ask.com into the search engines that I have been disappointed with.

Over at the Search Engine Roundtable, I cover what I call "forum buzz," the discussions taking place within the SEM/SEO community. I tend to pick up on algorithm shifts and post the details at my site.

Today, I covered two threads, one I named Yahoo! Also Easy To Spam and the other MSN Asks Webmasters What Are Quality & Authoritative Sites. But what really got me was Danny's postscript on Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible showing Yahoo has a similar issue.

Typically, I have always had a search engine to fall back on when one wasn't "doing it for me." Today, I don't have that search engine. Google pushed me over the edge with the Sub Sub Domain Issues. Yahoo is easy to spam with comment spam (ummm, nofollow not working?), and MSN is being laughed at, IMO. Ask.com, they are good, but way too slow to update at this point.

To make it even worse, Google still refuses to take a stand on the whole cloaking debate. Just take a look at the back and forth in our Search Engine Watch Forums thread!

So where does that leave me? Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com are all disappointing right now. Tomorrow? Well, I can always hope for a better tomorrow. Who knows, maybe a new Google will come along? Maybe AltaVista will rise up again?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:25 AM | Permalink

Microsoft, Google & Others Call For Unified Federal Privacy Protection

Microsoft bravely took part in the search privacy panel we did at our SES New York show earlier this year (coverage here and here), saying it would welcome better US federal protections on privacy issues. Why? It would let Microsoft and the searchers it serves know exactly what data government agencies could and could not have. Now Microsoft, along with Google and other tech companies, are pushing to make this happen.

Calling for federal consumer privacy protection over at the Official Google Blog talks about Google getting behind the organized effort and points to a statement letter (PDF) asking for a unified federal approach to consumer privacy. The effort is by the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum, part of the Center For Democracy & Technology.

Companies signing the statement are:

• Kodak
• eBay
• Eli Lilly
• Google
• Hewitt and Associates
• Hewlett-Packard
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Procter & Gamble
• Sun
• Symantec

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:16 AM | Permalink

A Web of Local Search Services

The major search engines tend to capture the lion's share of press, but there are dozens of other players in the local search space, offering myriad opportunities for search marketers trying to get in front of people searching for local products and services. I've got a review of an excellent guide to many of these services in today's SearchDay article, Who's Who in Local Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:47 AM | Permalink

Google Pulls Question About Google From Google Answers

Peter Da Vanzo reports on an individual who posted a question on Google Answers that was removed by Google. The question was, "What percentage of Google searches are contextual?" Specifically, the person wanted to know what percentage of Google searches give back results based on the content of a page someone is reading.

You can see the thread title in the cache or via this image capture, at this moment in time, where the poster was willing to pay $20 for the answer. A Google editor removed the question, stating:

Hello hallsteve11-ga,

Thank you for your question ID 739118, titled "Percentage of Google searches that are "contextual"." We've removed your question because you can find the answer on our main site, free of charge. All publicly available information about Google is available at: http://www.google.com/about.html.

For additional questions about Google, please visit: http://www.google.com/support

Thank you for your interest in Google Answers. Please visit us again.

Sincerely,

The Google Answers Team

Is this a case of Google censoring a question that they don't feel comfortable being answered?

Postscript From Danny: I don't think there's anything "uncomfortable" about the question, especially since Google doesn't really contextually create search results anywhere. It does put ads on pages that are based by analyzing the content/context of those pages -- but those ads are not searches. Still, pulling the question makes no sense. If someone wants to ask a question on the service, let them answer it. And pointing at the Google About page doesn't answer the question at all!

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:39 AM | Permalink

June 19, 2006

Google Yanks Sites 5 Billion Pages After Spam Complaint

I covered a DigitalPoint thread which uncovered several domains that was able to rank billions of pages at the top of the Google results within a couple of weeks. The methods deployed to rank the pages seemed to include excessive use of subdomains, cloaking, content theft scraping, alexa traffic boosting and blog comment spam. I listed the documented steps here. Some suspect that Google's new URL handling with the big daddy update allowed "old school" cloaking to begin working again.

A Threadwatch post shows screen captures of the spam and also has a comment from Google representative, Adam Lasnik. Adam directly responds to over 5 billion pages of this domain being indexed, saying:

We have noticed that some site: queries are showing bizarre results and it's turned out to be tied to a bad data push. We're fixing it now.

Yes, we are aware of the site command issues (Google's mentioned them itself). That may mean it is far less than 5 billion pages indexed in this case -- but still, plenty of pages got through.

If the site command is the issue or even if it is not, this is still indicative of other substantial problems plaguing Google that are making the rounds on discussion board and blogs lately.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:09 AM | Permalink

June 16, 2006

Schmidt Talks On Staying In China, GBuy & More

Conde Nast Portfolio, a new business magazine out next year, landed a nice coup of having Eric Schmidt speak yesterday at its launch party (Schmidt's also apparently set to be one of the first profiles in the new magazine). The video of the interview is online here, covering mostly stuff you've already heard Schmidt say before in other interviews (the LA Times had one last week) over the past years. But here are some things worth highlighting to me.

What would be the one do over for him? He says if Google had done any one particular thing three months earlier, it would have been better.

China was an example of this. In hindsight, he wishes Google had gotten a Chinese government approved version going sooner. "I don't think we would have changed the decision, but I think earlier, the better." He didn't say exactly why. My assumption would be that Google would be stronger in China compared to Baidu, but also that he would say they would have been serving people in China better for a longer period.

Was Google cofounder really suggesting last week that Google was having second thoughts when he said:

"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.

No -- it was either a nuanced comment, a misquoted one and there was also a whole part of what he said missing, Schmidt said. The missing part Sergey had said was, he explained, was that Google had decided to go ahead with what it considered the lesser of two evils, serving people even though it had to do censorship.

There's more of the how Google operates stuff, the 20 percent time (for engineers -- still not others, apparently), the 70-20-10 time allocation of work time, and the idea of not trying to tell people what to do, for fear of stifling creativity. Instead, Google suggests what are company priorities and hopes employees agree because they, too, want to work on what's important for the company.

He talks about Google doing ads on cell phones in Japan and says they'll come to Europe this summer and to the US within the next 12 months.

GBuy? That's the press name, not Google's name, and "It's not like PayPal at all." He says its designed to help advertisers have their customers buy things more quickly than through other mechanisms. We'll see. If PayPal means sending money between two people, it probably won't be. If PayPal means an alternative to buying with a credit card (or having a credit card account as a merchant), then I think GBuy will be very much like PayPal. And it operates this way already on Google Base. For more, see Google GBuy Launch Later This Month To Challenge PayPal?. And hang in there. Schmidt said it's coming soon.

Will Google do its own hardware? "It's much better to have a partner," and "It's much better to be in the software business," he said. The economics are better, he explained.

Biggest competition? Yahoo and Microsoft are both strong and good competitors, but Yahoo is the "primary competitor."

Is Google too powerful, especially given statements he made years ago relating to Microsoft that could be applied to Google today. There are a number of other choices consumers could go to, he said -- "and we know this."

In other words, Google knows that it could potentially lose customers at any time, so it will self-police itself. Same thing he told me back in 2002 in my Google: Can The Marcia Brady Of Search Stay Sweet? article:

"We have very poor lock in. Microsoft has very high lock in," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when we spoke at Google's offices last month. "The switchover cost for you to move to one of our competitors is none. As long as the switchover costs are so low, we run scared. Everyday I wonder if there are very smart people at Berkeley coming up with a new algorithm," Schmidt adds -- but in a way that clearly suggests that he wants Google to run scared, in order to keep the company smart and honest.

Although to update things, Google has much better lock-in these days, given Google's many portal features. People are storing email, web analytics data, photos and spreadsheets to name only few things they may not wish to abandon, not to mention kicking the Google Habit can be hard and people aren't likely to do it unless Google gets really bad, as I've written.

As for having knocked Microsoft when he was at Sun for releasing weak products and using customers as guinea pigs, how does he respond to accusations that Google does the same? He says they have a two to three month product cycle now. To be fair, the endless betas Google used to do have gotten better.

During Q&A, Chris Anderson of Wired asks about the impact AdSense has on fueling spam across the web -- search spam, comment spam, trackback spam and so on. Schmidt responds to say Google looks had at preventing click fraud, not really answering the question.

ClickZ also has coverage of his talk in Google's Schmidt at Conde Nast Lunch Today and Reuters looks at the GBuy comments in Google tests Web buying system, says unlike PayPal.

Need more on Schmidt talking Google? See our Google , Google: Employees and Google: Revenues categories of Search Topics for archived articles going back for years, if you are a Search Engine Watch member.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:57 AM | Permalink

Bill Gates To Work Part Time at Microsoft in 2008

Tons and tons of news coverage on Bill Gates's announcement he has given up his "chief software architect" role now and will be stepping down to be a part time employee and chairman in July 2008. Gates would like to spend more time working on his charitable foundation the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The BBC has a nice Q&A on the changes here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:57 AM | Permalink

AdWords Ad Scheduling Officially Launches

Google AdWords officially launched their new ad scheduling, enabling advertisers the ability to schedule the appearance of their ads based on both time of day and day of the week. This new feature, which competes with dayparting that Microsoft AdCenter has had since their beta launch, was released worldwide to all advertisers across 40+ languages.

Another feature now allows publishers to specify their own time zone, or the time zone they would like their ads to appear in. The dayparting feature allows advertisers to specify the time period they would like their ads to appear. It is worth noting that the ads are served based on the advertiser specified time zones. So an advertiser on the west cost of the US could schedule ads to appear between 1-3pm PST, but someone on the east coast would see those ads between 4-6pm PST. An advertiser could also chose to schedule their ads to display only during their hours of operation when they would be available for customer support or on the phone.

Dayparting features not only work for keyword targeting but you can also use it for any site targeting campaigns on the AdSense network.

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 1:13 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Model

I was never a big Slashdot fan, given that I found the conversations about search often had comments from people who didn't know what they were talking about. Digg came along and hardly won me over. Having one of my stories Dugg over there reinforced the idea that Digg was Slashdot 2.0 in all the wrong ways. Now AOL is trying to revive its flagging Netscape brand by turning it into a Digg-clone or Slashdot 3.0, if you will. You'll find the new version here.

Good luck. Seriously, I know Slashdot/Diggish sites are obviously popular with plenty of people who are not like me, and I fully recognize they serve their own communities. I've even pondered doing our own search version for Search Engine Watch, just as John Battelle has been thinking about this week. But if so, I'd never give up the editorial model that I'm used to. Call me old fashioned -- heck, I still like reading print newspapers -- but I still think there's a place for someone you trust to help filter out what they think is important.

Of course, any individual or small group might not have the "wisdom of the crowd" and miss a big event. So things like Digg definitely have a role. They also have their imperfections, too -- the crowd can be full of idiots or manipulated behind the scenes by only a few, as Digg's been accused of.

Anyway, perhaps Netscape will turn out to be a new super-site for the community news crowd. We'll see. As for the site itself, I took a fly though to see what's up.

The home page has a Netscape Anchors area at the top, where Netscape's paid editorial staff is picking out stuff to feature. That's nice. I like the idea that key things might get play this way.

Off to the right-hand side, you've got Channels, topics of various types. Want to see what's Dugg (Nugg?) for video games? Head to the video games category (conveniently its own subdomain, making it nice crawler-fodder for the search engines).

Each category has its own featured stories. Below that, you'll find the RSS feed for the page, allowing you to subscribe and get just the latest posts for that area. Nice.

Of course, one of Netscape's big selling features is the idea that it is both broader -- covering more than technology that Digg handles -- plus granular. You can get stuff just about movies or just about politics, if you want it. (FYI, Digg plans its own expansion next week).

What Netscape is doing sounds great, until you look at something like Topix. That's not a community generated news site. Instead, stories at Topix are automatically routed into particular categories. And those categories leave Netscape in the dust.

Video games? I don't want Playstation 2 stuff mixed in with Nintendo Wii items. At Netscape, that's going to happen. At Topix, Nintendo Wii is its own category -- with its own RSS feed, by the way.

How about contributing? You need to be a member. Sign-in here, sign-up here or recover your password here. I tried recovering my password, figuring I must be a member of Netscape somehow, someway. I still have my old, old, old AOL name floating about, plus I signed up for the Netscape portal ages ago, when it opened. But the recover feature just sat there grinding away until finally telling me to "Please try back soon!"

Fine. I'll sign-up. I'm not much into avatars, but offering five lame ones is, well, lame. Sure, you can upload your own. I'll get right on that!

What's the minimum information you can get away with to register? Name and email won't cut it. You've got to give up a birth date, as well. A ZIP code or post code doesn't seem required, but Netscape fails to tell you that on the reg form.

Then again, maybe it is required. I could never get my registration to process correctly. No doubt the new site is under a big load. No doubt they knew it would be, so the failure to keep up is either (A) lame or (B) calculated so they can say, "we're so popular that all the demand crashed us. Either way, it's not pleasing.

For any story, you can click to see what others are saying about it. You then have an option to say if the story is good, bad or block seeing comments from a particular person in the future. None of this can be done if you aren't signed in, however. I haven't explored this more, but all the voting probably helps stories rise or fall in Netscape plus allows individuals to gain more attention in the system

There are "Top Netscape Contributors," listed on the right-hand side of the home page. Want a list of them? There's no dedicated page that I can see. Similarly, while there are "Netscape Anchors" also listed, you can't find a page dedicated to all of them. More lameness.

I wanted to play with submission, but as I explained, the system's either not letting me register or I'm registered but it's not letting me sign-in. I can see that stories can be assigned tags in addition to being placed within channels. Ugh. It feels like Netscape is trying to straddle both the Web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. As a result, you can see all stories tagged family or you can see all stories in the completely different family category. Nothing confusing about that.

Enough of my poking. How about what others are saying?

First of all, what they aren't saying is any help information on the site that I can see. Want to know more about how the new Netscape works, from Netscape itself? There's no info offered. Well heck, the privacy policy and the terms both gave me 500 internal server errors, because I tried to reach them from the family area, and the links (like this one) weren't pointing in the right places. I'm sure help will come, just as those bad links will get fixed, but it would kind of nice to have had it at the start.

Netscape from Jason Calacanis, who is running Netscape now, says pretty much zilch and just points at coverage elsewhere.

Digg this: Calacanis relaunches iconic Netscape.com as a "social news" site at SiliconBeat says the official launch is for July 1 and quotes Calacanis promising "open source journalism" and covers how other names for the site rather than using the beat-up (to me) Netscape brand were considered. But Netscape won out as being tied to the internet and discovering new content. Tied to the internet? Sure. Discovering new content? Yeah, right.

AOL's said to be bold and ambitious by turning a major portal into sending traffic to smaller sites. Um, that's called Google and Yahoo and any search portal you care to name.

The story covers that clickthrough rate is part of the ranking algorithm, so nice to know that will never get abused :)

The Los Angeles Times in Web Users to Make News on Netscape Relaunch talks about the gamble that AOL is making in possibly losing the 11.2 million people who visit the site each month, if they can no longer have the portal features they want. It also covers how the anchors will be sent out to do coverage in areas they watch over. It also talks about Calacanis as self-proclaimed renegade AOL employee who got much of the Netscape work done in a weeklong code jam. Perhaps that's part of the registration jam I'm dealing with now.

Netscape.com Relaunched As a User-Driven News Aggregation Site; Calacanis is GM, Netscape over at PaidContent.org talks about the site having eight anchors/journalists watching over the content and how current Netscape portal features like mail will move to AOL.

AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts from the New York Times talks about the drop in visitors to Netscape (so why not throw the dice?).

New Netscape.com focuses on news from News.com covers more on how the anchors are following up on stories, plus how in addition to the eight anchors, there are 15 part-time specialists. It concludes with Calacanis not sure if it will be a hit.

Certainly, it's a brave attempt. I like the idea of trying to overtly mix in the editors along with the community participation. Whether those editors will get in the way of the community wave that's pushed along the popularity of Digg remains to be seen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:52 AM | Permalink

SEO for All the News That's Fit to Search

The New York Times has one of the most popular news web sites, but until this year that was largely because of the strength of its brand. After its acquisition of About.com, the Times embarked on an aggressive campaign to make its web site more search friendly, a complex process that's paid off with notable traffic gains for the company. Today's SearchDay article, Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly, takes a look behind the scenes at how the Times and its vice president of enterprise search, Marshall Simmonds, pulled it off.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:48 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

Yahoo, MapQuest Bring Where 2.0 Back to Earth

Excuse the pun, of sorts. Many of the speakers and panelists over the past couple of days at Where 2.0 demonstrated a range of cool technologies or whiz-bang features that probably don't have a hope of becoming breakout, mass market consumer applications. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or useful. But the question is: where will these companies be in 5 years?

Presentations from Yahoo's Paul Levine and MapQuest's Jim Greiner today independently focused on practical issues like business models and mass consumer adoption.

Paul Levine, Local GM for Yahoo, had the unfortunate challenge of being in front of a hungry crowd before lunch and dealing with some technical glitches with his presentation. However he did an excellent job, given those challenges, presenting tons of information in a compressed 15 minutes. Levine raced through Yahoo's broader social media strategy, Local and Maps. He also announced the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog, which Yahoo sees as a communication tool for all its local constituencies (bloggers, press, merchants, consumer-influencers and developers).

Levine said, "Participation is guiding our strategy, for Yahoo broadly, for search and especially in Local." He reiterated the FUSE (find, use, share and extend) concept. "We want to tap into the amazing body of content that's out there broadly, whether it's online or in people's heads."

Levine identified three principal constituencies for Local and Maps: consumers, merchants and developers. Levine said that Yahoo's strategy is to build "a container" for consumers to provide content to Yahoo. He cited Answers and Local ratings and reviews as two of several examples. Merchants are the business model and developers help extend the value of Yahoo's platform and tools. Regarding monetization Levine asked the semi-rhetorical question: "Where's the business around all this; where's the value creation?"

That's a theme that MapQuest GM Jim Greiner echoed in his talk later in the afternoon. Greiner said that he wanted to impress upon the crowd "three simple truths" that MapQuest has learned in its more than 10 years in business: 1) focus on what's truly useful to consumers, 2) make it economically viable and 3) aim for the mass market.

He gave examples of each but pointed out that the dominant use case of mapping online is still driving directions. By his own admission, MapQuest is not the innovator it once was, but it is the market leader. He showed comScore traffic data reflecting MapQuest's leadership and continued growth, despite some of the "sexier" features being promoted by its competitors. But he acknowledged that some of those features would be added to MapQuest: personalization, aerial and satellite imagery and street-level photography.

Greiner stressed simplicity and utility and cited Wayfaring.com as a mashup tool that ordinary people could use without any technical knowledge. Ironically, however, the founders of Wayfaring.com haven't quit their day jobs because, according to hearsay, they don't yet have a business model that permits them to do that.

Indeed, there are only two or three business models online: subscription/licensing or some version of advertising. And with advertising you ideally have to offer targeting and some degree of reach. This is very difficult for most of the small consumer-facing sites at Where.

Effectively then these startups become labs and talent incubators for the search engines and portals. While most of these companies hold out hope of being the next Flickr or del.icio.us, both of which Yahoo acquired.

In contrast to Greiner's very pragmatic, "real-world" approach, Yahoo's Levine struck a balance between practical questions (i.e., monetization) and technological innovation. On the latter point he discussed the integration of Yahoo assets such as Flickr, Local and mapping and the work being done at the Yahoo Research Lab in Berkeley. As an example he discussed automatic geocoding of photographs from mobile phones using cell-tower triangulation.

Levine ended by seeking to differentiate Yahoo's Maps and API from its competitors. He went through a list of bullets but mentioned the Yahoo content API as part of the overall value proposition for developers: Flickr, Local content and traffic in addition to the underlying mapping platform.

Levine also pointed to branded online campaigns created by Baskin Robbins and Columbia Pictures utilizing Yahoo's mapping tools as evidence of its richness and adaptability.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:22 PM | Permalink

A New Local Search Marketing Guide

I've often been amazed that there isn't a more organized effort by search engines and others targeting small business advertisers to "educate" them about online marketing. There are independent efforts here and there, but all players would benefit from a concerted initiative. Until then, small businesses have to rely on more informed colleagues and the serendipity of discovering resources online. One such resource, put together by Matt McGee, is the relatively concise Local Search Marketing Guide.

The Guide targets small businesses and provides a helpful explanation of the options on search engines and a few other sites: MerchantCircle, Citysearch and InfoUSA. But there is a dizzying array of other options. For example, the Guide doesn't get into Internet Yellow Pages, social search-directory hybrids (InsiderPages, Judysbook, Yelp) online newspapers or the ever proliferating vertical segment, which often offers some of the most targeted ad inventory for particular industries. Some of these other options are covered in the Yellow Pages Association's Local Search Guide, which is more of an industry showcase than a small business primer however.

All of these other online segments have local advertising for small businesses. To be fair, McGee has put together a "local search" guide and covered the options on the major search engines. I would recommend including at least some of these other places to advertise. But of course you have to draw the line somewhere.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Searcher Behavior Update

Search marketing has evolved from relatively simple optimization of web pages into a more sophisticated process involving a number of variables. Apart from tactical maneuvers with SEO or PPC campaigns, savvy search marketers are increasingly trying to understand searcher behavior, and attempting to proactively anticipate user needs. More and more research is providing hard data to support these efforts, writes Grant Crowell in today's SearchDay article, Understanding Searcher Behavior.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:11 AM | Permalink

Japan To Build Own Search Engine With 30 Japanese Companies & Government Help

The Mainichi Daily show that Japan is going to be building out their own search engine after conducting a focus group on the idea. Thirty organizations in Japan and the University of Tokyo will be working to develop the Japanese based search engine. Part of the group includes big brands such as Hitachi, Fujitsu and Nippon. The Japanese government plans on providing a subsidy for the project. Why? "Many people in Japan fear that the domination of the three firms will prevent Japanese companies from entering the market." The European Union, led by France, is doing something very similar.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:40 AM | Permalink

Looking At Links After Looking At Patents

I know, I know. Everyone everywhere is running SEO interviews with everyone. But Bill Slawski Interview over at SEO Buzz Box is well worth a read. Aaron Pratt's got a great set of questions that he puts to Bill, who in turn has very clear, good responses that show how the original Google notion of links as votes has become complicated for both Google and search marketers.

I have a slide in my long-standing Intro To Search Marketing session I do at our SES conferences that bullet points a number of ways search engines might or might not count links these days, to help illustrate why you can't just depend on that old PageRank meter.

Bill's responses go beyond the bullet points, for those who want to dig deeper into some of the many patents and research papers that have been released. Bill, of course, covers patents for us on the blog. But if you're looking for a nice, concise catch-up piece with his thinkings out of patents from the past, give this article a read.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:03 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2006

MySpace Looking To Auction Search To Google, Microsoft or Yahoo

We heard last month that MySpace is interested in partnering with Google or Microsoft. Now Yahoo appears to be in the running. MySpace-owner News Corp's Chief Operating Officer Peter Chermin said today MySpace plans to "auction off our search business of of the three biggest, Google, Yahoo and MSN, and see the best we can get."

I thought Yahoo was already powering the results at MySpace, since you can see Yahoo results coming up when you search over there. This Reuters article mentions the same. But Yahoo tells me that's not the case. It's undisclosed Yahoo partners that are reselling Yahoo's results to MySpace. And presumably, MySpace would get a better deal by cutting out the middlemen.

Coincidentally, TechCrunch had a post today about MySpace and its stature as the sixth largest search network, based on recent comScore figures. But as I commented over there

Let?s qualify that sixth place ranking. They have a 0.6% share of the US search market which is way, way behind 5th place Ask with a 5.8% share and not even registering with Google?s 43.1% share. Well, they?ll catch up. Yeah, maybe. Then again, with all those pages viewed, this is the best they can do with search activity already? And that search is powered by Yahoo, so though MySpace isn?t a Yahoo site, Yahoo certainly gets its listings in front of this small percentage of searchers.

You can't ignore the monster that MySpace has become and the potential it represents. Then again, it currently is tiny in search even with those millions of users.

Postscript: Previously I'd written that Revenue Science was providing the middleman service of search results for MySpace, because that was the name I was given by Yahoo when I asked about the search results. Yahoo later pointed out that they said Revenue Science resold their contextual listings to MySpace but that the keyword-triggered results are handled by others, partners they won't name.

Revenue Science also emailed to say they do more than act as a middleman for web sites, providing ads based on behavioral activity. That's true. And they may be providing behavioral ads for MySpace. It's whoever is providing the search results that's serving as the go-between.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:24 PM | Permalink

Searching for a Place to Live, Part 2

SEW correspondent Greg Sterling continues his roundup of a number of the most popular new real estate search verticals in today's SearchDay article, A Real Estate Vertical Search Roundup.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:24 AM | Permalink

Google Earth: An Emerging 'Geobrowser'

I often hear people say about Google, "Other than search it's just a bunch of 'me-too' products." Whether or not you agree, you have to admit that in the case of Earth and Maps that's clearly not true. Although maps have become an important "battleground" in the so-called "search wars," it's an area where Google has clearly innovated with its developer tools and user experience.

There were a number of technical things about the new Google Earth rollout yesterday that went over my head; I'm not a developer and I was in a room of developers and engineers who were very much the intended audience at Google's Geo Developer Day on the Google campus. But I was impressed by a number of things yesterday that I'll try and capture here.

As Danny already posted, you can read about the new Google Earth 4 and associated features on the Google Blog. So I won't recap all those things. I'll run down what was interesting to me and where I think all this may be going.

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced the session I attended and emphasized the importance of geography and location generally. Schmidt said, "Geolocation is one of the big opportunities around search." He pointed out that Google was "investing heavily in the 'core infrastructure': better maps, faster servers, more local context and data."

We also keep hearing on analyst calls that Maps and Local are areas of success for Google, both in terms of usage and revenue. But its competitors, most notably Microsoft, are being at least as aggressive in trying to build out maps and related tools and user functionality. So this is going to be an area of accelerated innovation in the next couple of years.

John Hanke, Google Earth GM, moderated the session and discussed a range of things both technical and non-technical. Among them he discussed the intended 3-D mapping of cities around the globe with Google's SketchUp product. This is also an ambition that Microsoft shares. But what was impressive yesterday was a demonstration by Mark Limber, product manager for SketchUp, involving the real-time creation of a 3-D model from scratch and using imagery from Google's 3-D warehouse. He created a textured, photorealistic building in downtown San Francisco and plugged it into Earth in less than five minutes. He also spoke about some of the potential commercial applications of the technology for realtors, architects, designers and urban planners, among others. Here's a laundry list of SketchUp's commercial uses.

Another impressive element of the discussion concerned the role of the "Google Earth Community," which Google clearly sees as integral to its build out of the data layer for Earth and Maps. Google's Michael Jones, CTO of Earth, discussed Google's philosophy of "participatory mapping" and demonstrated some of the applications that third parties had created on top of Earth, including the relatively well known National Geographic data layer. (As an aside, this starts to redefine what the magazine is by putting content in a geographic context.)

Jones also demonstrated how you can layer historical photographs on Earth and effectively "time travel" by showing prior views of an area (e.g., the San Francisco Bay Area circa 1900). He also spoke about how information that one wouldn't ordinarily think of as geographic can actually be integrated into Earth and Maps. As an example, he mentioned how a developer had mapped all of Shakespeare's plays in Earth (their physical settings) with their associated historical details and text.

Google is encouraging the community of developers, and increasingly ordinary users, build out data on top of Earth and Maps. And we'll see tools that make it easier for ordinary people to create "mashups" over time. To that point, speaker Jessica Lee discussed KML files (a version of XML for Earth) and how they're an alternative way to publish mashups for people who don't use the API. This may still be too complicated for most people but it's moving in the direction of broad accessibility.

During the Q&A session at the end, I asked two questions. One was about the future relationship between Maps and Earth. John Hanke had formerly told me, after the Google acquisition of Keyhole, that Earth was essentially a "laboratory" for Maps. Clearly it has become something much more. He laughed and didn't remember saying that. But he and his team pointed out in response to the question that Maps and Earth now had the same infrastructure and there would be more and more overlap in the products. They saw them, however, as different use cases ultimately.

The other question I asked, prompted by something Jones had said earlier, was about Earth as a "geobrowser." As an aside, I ultimately believe some version of 3-D mapping converges with multi-player gaming. Then things will really get interesting. Someone asked a question along these lines and Hanke, who has a personal interest in gaming, responded, "Let's talk about that offline."

But the notion of Earth or Maps as an alternative way to search the Internet or discover information is only going to gain momentum. Ask's CEO Jim Lanzone long ago discussed with me the limitations of the "ten blue links" approach to delivering certain kinds of content. Google Earth is the opposite of the ten blue links: it's a rich visual and location specific way to browse for content; and almost any type of data (including video) can be rendered inside of Earth. It's literally an alternative web-browsing interface and paradigm. And in that regard it's incredibly fascinating.

The level of enthusiasm from developers in the room yesterday was very interesting to observe. Speakers were interrupted by loud applause several times in response to various techical statements. Such remarks and the response to them were generally lost on me until their significance was explained in English. It was at times a little like being in a foreign film without subtitles.

People that understand mapping and the associated tools are really excited about it as a platform and interface. Also the showcase of mashups, most of which have no commercial application whatsoever, reflected the creative appetite and enthusiasm for mapping and its potential uses.

Given the technical possibilities, the use cases and the increasing competition, which will only fuel the continuing evolution of the product, it's safe to say that dynamic mapping and 3-D rendering online are at the beginning of a potentially explosive development cycle. And that will likely take us in directions we're only vaguely aware of right now.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 9:20 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Schmidt: Google Still A Tech Company Despite The Billboards

Figuring everyone's had enough Google exec interviews at the moment that cover the same old ground, I put the Los Angeles Times interview today with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on our budget to be a headlines-only reference, like this:

• At Google, Innovation Is Not Just Fun, Games, LA Times (Q&A with CEO Eric Schmidt - and Google, he says, it still a tech company despite making 99 percent of its income off of ads)

Said Schmidt:

Q: Is Google a media company or a technology company?

A: It's better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. We're in the advertising business — 99% of our revenue is advertising-related. But that doesn't make us a media company. We don't do our own content. We get you to someone else's content faster.

John Battelle caught the same "we're a tech company" reference and gave it an entire semi-rant:

But to equate Google not doing its own content with a free pass from the media company classification is, well, absurd. That presumes that media companies only make packaged goods - traditional content - and ignores the fact that the majority of media companies in a post web world (and plenty in the pre web world) are not "creators of content" they are innovators in the media experience business in one way or another.

He goes on a bit more, concluding:

The entire media world is fearful of Google; insisting you are not in their business is a placating calculation. But my two cents: No one is buying it.

I agree entirely. Actually, I sort of thought the entire "Google media company or not" meme was dead ages ago. I last put it to Google back in 2003, getting back from Sergey Brin:

Google has an important technology component. But we also care about the utility of the technology and for our advertising network and publishers. So, I think we're a technology company that applies technology to media.

In 2004, even if Google still wanted to delude itself as being a tech company, the products it sold didn't show that, as I wrote after image ads were released:

Google, of course, is more than a search engine itself. Aside from portal features, it's a major media company, as I've written before. Anyone who has failed to get this picture can't miss it now, as Google announced yesterday that it will distribute graphical ads on web sites.

Skip forward to 2006, when Google went into radio. If there were any holdouts to the "Google's a tech company" notion, surely they'd be wiped out by that move. I wrote:

Guess anyone still entertaining the notion of Google as a technology company versus a media company can put that to bed. Putting ads on radio isn't really a technology business. Nor is it central to that mission of organizing the world's information. Neither is putting ads into print or slapping them up all over the web, either

So yeah, seeing Schmidt still embrace the notion that Google's a tech company is like disputing the existence gravity. And the argument that they're not a media company because they don't own the media content themselves? Right with John -- doesn't matter if you own it. It matters if you earn off it.

That takes me back again to 2003, when The Register argued that Google had problems being in the advertising business because it didn't own its own billboards. From my analysis then, I explained:

Where Orlowski's article is wrong is the idea that Google doesn't own enough billboards for its advertisements. Google's web site is incredibly popular, a giant billboard that it completely owns. It's not a media agency for its own site -- it IS the media owner.

To dismiss the Google web site is to suggest that a major television network in the United States such as NBC is in trouble because it doesn't own the other networks, as well. As long as Google's own site stays popular, and there's every reason to expect it will, Google is in the enviable position of being a major media owner....

Meanwhile, the Google AdSense program by anecdotal accounts has proven to be a knockout punch at coopting billboards owned by others for free. It seems difficult these days to encounter a site that doesn't seem to be carrying Google AdSense links. The Washington Post just ran an article with publishers raving about them. I even now get horrible spam promising to tell me how to make money off Google AdSense.

Perhaps calling Google an advertising company might be less open to debate, since that's the main product it sells -- advertising. But given the billboard idea, I don't think calling it a media company is off the mark. Google's in the billboard business, filling up those that it owns (via software, its own web sites) and those it rents from others with ads.

Meanwhile, here's one more jaw dropper from the

Q: Was your corporate motto, "Don't be evil," a direct response to Microsoft? A: No. It had nothing to do with Microsoft. Larry and Sergey, and certainly I when I joined the company, spent almost no time on Microsoft. This is a press-generated focus. We don't spend very much time talking about Microsoft. Q: They're sure fascinated with you guys. A: We do not spend our time talking about them. It's perfectly fine if everyone wants to obsess about what we're doing. We want to obsess about what we're doing and how can we do better.

Sorry, asking the US Justice Department and the European Union to investigate whether Microsoft is unfair with implementing search within Internet Explorer shows you do spend time talking about them.

I'm not saying Google plans its moves totally around what Microsoft does, nor that its plans are about wiping out Microsoft. But the two companies simply overlap on too many things these days. And Microsoft has Google very much in its sights as a target. Google, despite setting its own agenda, obviously must talk about what Microsoft does as part of its planning.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:45 PM | Permalink

Google GBuy Launch Later This Month To Challenge PayPal?

Google's GBuy Could Be 'Revolutionary' from Forbes covers news from RBC analyst Jordan Rohan that Google's existing payment system -- Google Payments -- may be expanded for any merchant to use outside of Google Base.

SEW's chief news correspondent Barry Schwartz has already documented how Google Payments works at Google Base, and he provides a round-up here. But Google Base isn't really a consumer-facing site. Sure, consumers go there -- but only if they are super-savvy or in the few instances where Google highlights Google Base listings in regular web search results.

As a result, Google Payments is hardly a PayPal-killer. Merchants who want to sell but can't take credit cards can't use Google Payments outside of Google Base, to my knowledge.

The RBC report suggest that will change as of June 28, that any merchant could use what it calls "GBuy" as a payment system outside of Google Base. Moreover:

On its core search results pages, Google will designate each merchant accepting GBuy as a "trusted GBuy merchant." If consumers view this as a mark of safety and security, Rohan believes this should increase click-through rate.

Bloomberg asked me about the system on Friday, and my response was this:

I think it's unlikely that Google would give merchants any type of mark in its regular or "core" search results. I think they'd be fearful searchers might interpret that as some type of paid inclusion or preferential system. Bid rank also isn't used for core search results. AdRank, however, is used for determining how paid listings appear. They might factor this into those paid listings. I also think they might do this in places where it would be more acceptable, such as in Google Base listings or the far-more consumer-facing Froogle site.

RBC's research note is big on the idea that by getting people into GBuy, Google will know what sites are handling transactions and thus be able to charge more for ads. Sure - but as I said, I think the idea that flags or icons will appear in regular results is unlikely.

RBC's note also pitches the idea that Google is building a one ID, one password system that might rival Microsoft's Passport system:

In other words, a user signed up with Google for GMail, Google Base, and now GBuy will be able engage in all kinds of activity on the web (including shop and pay) without having to log in to different services from different vendors; in concept, GBuy may be one piece of a larger "passport"-like system currently in place at MSN/ Hotmail.

If the idea is to challenge the horrible Passport system, then Google's on the right path. Currently, it Google can't even make the existing Google Accounts system it offers work right for its own services.

Havoc With Google Accounts from me last December covers some issues about this. I still see some of those problems continuing. Here's another person this month reporting the same.

And what's up with the GBuy name? Isn't it Google Payments? And where did Google Wallet go? And didn't Google swear it wouldn't compete with eBay-owned PayPal? OK:

• Google Wallet: In June 2005, we started hearing about Google planning to handle online transactions through something code-named "Google Wallet."  
• We're Not After PayPay: So said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in late June 2005, after Google Wallet rumors heated up.  
• We Don't Believe You: So said the head of PayPal in December.  
• GBuy Will Have Icons & Everything: So said the Wall Street Journal, giving us the GBuy name. Unlike the RBC report, it said that GBuy icons would only be alongside paid ads.  
• Google Payments: Opened in February, "Google Payments" is the name widely given to the program (sign-up request here) that lets you take payments through Google Base.  
• Google Checkout: Last month, more rumors about the system perhaps being called Google Checkout, based on domains registered.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Robert Scoble Departs Microsoft To Startup Podtech

Blogvangelist Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to work for start-up Podtech.net. Robert's not been tied into the Microsoft search efforts, but he has commented publicly on them on many occasions, providing an unofficial voice in the way he's done on many things Microsoft. His departure certainly is a PR blow to Microsoft.

Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup from Niall Kennedy is a nice, short rundown on the news. Niall was a recent PR win for Microsoft in terms of bloggers, so perhaps he'll benefit from Robert's departure.

Microsoft's top blogger Robert Scoble is leaving from Silicon Valley Watcher has the first news on Robert leaving. Robert himself has thoughts up in Correcting the Record about Microsoft.

Podtech, FYI, is down both for me and Barry, probably under the traffic for everyone checking it out. That's not a good sign, though I'm sure they'll recover.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:59 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

"Gnomedex 2002" On Google Shows Again The Need For Webmaster Control Over Titles & Descriptions

We've written before about the need for search engines to give webmasters more control over their titles and descriptions. Today, I came across another good example illustrating why this is needed -- Google telling me that Chris Pirillo's popular Gnomedex event is happening in 2002, as you see in the screenshot above.

I'm usually not one to do much with screenshots, but I'm jumping into them big time with this post to help illustrate why this problem is happening. Gnomedex is listed in the Open Directory's fairly well abandoned Cyberspace Events category. Here's how it looks there:

Ages ago, some human editor there wrote up a title and description for the then-Gnomedex 2002 event. Now when you search on Google, Google decides to use that title and description rather than pulling information from the Gnomedex home page itself.

This won't always happen. For example, look at this screenshot:

Now the title is different. What happened? Google dynamically decided that using the title from the HTML title tag of the Gnomedex home page was more relevant than using the Open Directory's title of this page. Notice that previously I searched for just gnomedex but in the second screenshot, I looked for gnomedex tech conference. Adding those additional words not only changed the results but also how Google felt it should describe the page.

Now look here:

This time, BOTH the title and description are drawn from the page itself, rather than the Open Directory. What happened? My query changed to gnomedex tech conference enthusiasts. Google again examines the Open Directory's title and description for the page to see if it contains my search words or would be relevant to show. It decides against that and instead turns to using content from the page itself.

There are very good reasons for descriptions to dynamically change. Extracting text from a page that matches what you've searched for can help you know if that's a good page to click through to. That's the primarily reason Google did dynamic snippets/descriptions ages ago.

Nor do you want to always depend on the meta description tag. As I'll show in a future post, many authoring programs can insert this tag (along with title tags) with no descriptions or with no information. That's bad -- and that's one reason why Google depends on the Open Directory information in part.

But enough is enough. MSN Search just introduced a way for site owners to just say no to having the Open Directory information be used to describe their pages. I want the rest of the search engines to climb on board with it. Using that would eliminate the problem above, just as it would eliminate the case we've already written about, where Google is making it seem as an Alaskan gubernatorial candidate has already been elected.

Since I'm doing screenshots, let me spin that one out, as well:

As you can see, a search on alaska governor shows you both a fact result at the top of the page (and it's correct -- Frank Murkowksi is the governor) plus a link to the official site for Murkowski.

Now Tony Knowles used to be governor of Alaska. The former two-termer wants the job again, so he's running against Murkowksi. He's even got a campaign web site, as you can see in a search for his name:

In fact, you can also see in the screenshot that the Knowles campaign has been so successful that he's already been declared governor of Alaska by Google in the same search results. Look at the second listing, and you'll see the title for the official Alaska governor web site is "Governor Tony Knowles."

What's going on? And why's the description mention Murkowski as governor? Again, it's an Open Directory issue, where Google has decided to use just the outdated title from over there.

This Open Directory category, until recently, used that title for the governor's web site. The ODP has since fixed it after Threadwatch brought attention to it, but it's still floating around in the data stream. For example, here's a search at the ODP showing it:

 

FYI, this isn't just a Google issue. Over at Ask for tony knowles:

You can see in the third listing that Ask does exactly what Google is doing. But also look at the candidate web site listed first. Isn't he running for governor? Yes, but the OPD still has him listed here as running for US Senate. Ask used both the ODP title and description, making this seem out of date.

And here's MSN, birthplace of the noodp meta tag you can use to prevent this type of stuff happening. For a search on tony knowles:

Oops -- Tony is both running Alaska as governor currently and also has gone back in time to run for US Senate. The good news is, if he can go back and get elected, then maybe he'll meet with Sergey Brin last Tuesday when other senators refused to at the last minute and help lobby his counterparts in the US House Of Representative not to vote against net neutrality, as they did yesterday. Time travel -- magic!

Seriously, while it's great to have the opt-out, that's only going to help if people proactively use it. Most will not do so until after some big problem is flashed in their face. A better solution these days is probably to stop using the ODP as a data source at all unless people specifically opt-in for using its titles and descriptions.

Well, at least Yahoo doesn't have these types of problems. After all, Yahoo uses stuff from its own Yahoo Directory. So in a search on tony knowles:

Man, can't the ODP get a break? Sure -- this time, it's the Yahoo Directory category that is out of date. Cruise over there, and you'll see that tonyknowles.com is given a description by Yahoo about his senate attempt. That was correct at the time, but since then, Knowles has changed the web site over for his gubernatorial attempt.

FYI, sometimes Yahoo DOES use the OPD as well as its own directory. So a noodp tag would be useful to help things there -- plus perhaps a noyahoo tag as well.

Let's go back to Gnomedex, and I'll finish off with a few things. Here's what Ask is currently showing:

First, the Smart Answer on the top from Wikipedia is pretty nice, I think. But how about the listing of the site itself. What's with this "Gnomedex 6.0" stuff?

That was the title tag on the site the last time Ask was there, which according to the cached page was May 22. Since the title tag has changed since then, the two don't match. That will get corrected the next time Ask goes back -- assuming it doesn't decide to use the ODP listing, for some reason.

As I said, a good first move would be for all the other search engines to get behind the noodp tag that MSN introduced. Honestly, a better solution would be to stop using the ODP information altogether, so this type of stuff stops happening.

FYI, for more background, Proposed Search Engine Standard For Titles & Descriptions on our Search Engine Watch Forums covers a long discussion we had on the topic last year. That led to a live forum discussion on the topic involving search engine reps that's covered here: Session Five: Day Two: Indexing Summit 2: Redirects, Titles & Descriptions.

I've been terribly, terribly remiss in not doing the last follow through myself on what was discussed, including the idea of a "I really mean it -- I'm not just making a mistake" meta tag that tells the search engines to only use material from your web page. I did a short summary of the results here, and next week, I'll finally make time to get things finished up on that. The time is finally right for change, I suspect.

Want to comment or discuss? Start a thread in the Search Engine Optimization section of our Search Engine Watch Forums, and we'll come back and link to it from here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:54 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

Yahoo Answers Coming After Wikipedia's Crown?

Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers! from me in SearchDay today looks at new stats that fuel the notion that Yahoo Answers is perhaps becoming a social interacting phenomenon like YouTube or MySpace. As a reference resource, it has come from nowhere to be the third most popular site, just one behind Wikipedia (though percentagewise, it's further back. The longer version of the story for Search Engine Watch members goes into more depth about how Yahoo is building traffic for Yahoo Answers plus how search marketers can appropriately tap into the area. Click here to learn more about becoming a member

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Photos Upgraded, Beta Available

TechCrunch has a good writeup on the new Yahoo Photos beta. To access the beta go to http://photos.yahoo.com/ and after you sign in, you may see a "try the new beta" link, click on that. I personally do not see it, so I will base my notes after TechCrunch's coverage.

New Features Include: + AJAX functionality to drag and drop photos + Taggings and sets from Flickr + Free uploading, unlimited + Also point and click tag editing + "Smart Albums" which creates albums by ratings, tags, date, etc.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:22 AM | Permalink

Lawsuit Over Killed Anti-China Ad On Google

Google Sued for Allegedly Refusing Anti-China Ad at Wired News covers a lawsuit filed against Google after it refused to carry ads from activist Christopher Langdon protesting against the Chinese government.

You'll find the lawsuit here. I skimmed it very, very quickly. The key part is this:

Google's rejection of all three of my ads denied my rights of free speech and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, Langdon is claiming constructional protection to say what he wants on Google. It's not going to happen. Google has no requirement to print what he wants or carry his ads any more than a newspaper might. The public forum/public property argument he makes won't hold up, I'd say.

The courts will decide, of course. I suspect he'll lose, but it will certainly focus renewed attention on Google's ad policies that he dislikes.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google Calls On Users To Lobby For Net Neutrality

Google cofounder Sergey Brin might not have been able to lobby all the US senators he wanted earlier this week to stop a bill that threatens net neutrality. But Google still has a big stick to wave -- its users. The Debate over Net Neutrality on the Official Google Blog urges Google users to call their representatives and ask that the bill be stopped (it's up for a vote this week).

The blog points to an open letter Eric Schmidt has written to Google users, bulletpointing three action steps -- call, sign online petitions and sign-up for a new Google Policy Alert list. That list is notable. It will give Google the ability to mobile users for future policy fights -- assuming they jump in on it, of course.

The really big gun has yet to be rolled out. There's nothing I see on the Google home page about the call to action. C'mon Google, if you're that serious about it, put something out where your users will actually see it, on the home page.

Searches on net neutrality don't bring up any Google house ads that target those in the US. They do bring up ads for the two online petitions Google is promoting: ItsOurNet and SaveTheInternet.com. No idea if these are free or discounted ads -- I'll check on this and postscript if this turns out to be the case. I suspect not.

Unofficially, Microsoft calling for action. At least Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is, in his Key network neutrality bill up for vote tomorrow.

Postscript: Net neutrality failed in a US House Of Representatives vote yesterday, sadly.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:01 AM | Permalink

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