Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Blogs Bubble Into Business. Great in-depth article in Computerworld on how enterprise weblogs are being adopted.... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] 1:58:02 PM    Trackback []

My Yahoo Beta Tests RSS Feeds. Everyone is buzzing about the fact that Yahoo is beta testing the addition of any RSS feed to it's My Yahoo portal, a move that may signal an inroad to the mainstream. I didn't want to comment on this until I had a chance to play with it; today I had that chance. Here are some of my observations. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:34:34 AM    Trackback []

TECH TALK: Rethinking Search: What Others Say. Before we go ahead, here are a few quotes from various publications which give an overview of the action in the Search space: Business Week: “Google has decided that its customers should gather information through inputs of text search terms by using more or less the same simple interface to search for news, things to buy, or any other topic. That's a small but important distinction. Google assumes that customers are smart enough to learn to search with words rather than with the graphical and pull-down menus used by most of its competitors…Taken to its logical extension of providing an interface for every popular service or sector on the Web, Google becomes the omnipresent middleman and a clear and present danger to just about any company that relies on the Internet for commerce. Which, increasingly, is every company in the developed world.” Wall Street Journal: “Yahoo wants to combine personalization and customization features to extend the usefulness of searches… In the future, Yahoo officials say, searches could become much more personalized. They could be tailored to return results that reflect users' past Web-surfing behavior, for example, or preferences or interests they list in a profile... Yahoo has long let users customize its site in a number of ways, such as setting up pages to track selections of favorite stocks. A recent page for the Indiana Pacers Web page, for example, highlighted an upcoming game against the Memphis Grizzlies. In addition to the date and time, the page included links for users to add the event to their calendar and to buy tickets. Similar combinations could be blended with conventional search, to help deliver consumers to the pages of advertisers or merchant partners.” Search Engine Watch: “Last year at this time there was really no such thing as ‘local search.’ Fast forward twelve months and local is one of the hottest topics in search… Why local? The answer, as one might expect, is revenue-or more precisely, potential revenue. When you add up the number of all the paid search advertisers in the world right now, the total is approximately 380,000. Yet, there is substantial overlap among the advertisers of the different paid search networks. (It's rare a company that uses Google but not Overture and vice versa.) So, as a rough estimate, the figure is probably closer to 250,000 paid search advertisers on a global basis…By contrast, the U.S. alone has about 10 million small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and there may be as many as 30 million more such businesses in developed countries around the world. In the U.S., most of those SMEs, the bulk of which have fewer than nine employees, conduct the majority of their business within 50 miles of their locations.” WSJ: “Google is holding exercises on Amazon's borders with its Froogle retailing engine. Amazon, too, has made moves beyond its core retailing business: The company increasingly acts as a guide to third-party stores in categories such as sporting goods and toys, and is developing an e-commerce search service. Meanwhile, eBay relies on search to help users find just about anything anyone would like to buy -- and its popularity and PayPal payments unit put it in a strong position should it get an expansionist itch. Then there's InterActiveCorp, which is a top provider of searches for airline tickets, hotel reservations and the like, but may want to establish a stronger position in everyday searches…Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, InterActiveCorp: They arrived from different starting points, and have different strengths, but all may be combatants in the new round of search wars.” Jeremy Zawodny: “Search often leads to transactions. The search engine companies want a cut of those transactions--just like Amazon or eBay get. Think of them as search services for a minute. Expect to see a lot of work going into vertical search markets: cars, real estate, electronics, hotels, vacation deals, etc. And expect to see the existing big search players aggressively [re]positioning themselves as the place to go to search for products and services, not just information.” Tomorrow: What Others Say (continued) [E M E R G I C . o r g] 9:27:19 AM    Trackback []

TECH TALK: Rethinking Search: What Other Say (Part 2). Wired News: “As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they have a pretty big flaw. They often deliver too much information, and a lot of it isn't quite what we're looking for. Who really bothers to read the dozens of pages of results that Google generates? Some intriguing technologies are getting better at bringing order to all that chaos, and could revolutionize how people mine the Internet for information…If the Internet is a giant bookstore in which all the books are piled randomly on the floor, then Vivisimo is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense…Consider it a 21st century Dewey Decimal System designed to fight information overload. But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical analysis, a method that even works with other languages…A similar process powers Grokker, a downloadable program that not only sorts search results into categories but also ‘maps’ the results in a holistic way, showing each category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear as more circles that can be clicked on and zoomed in on…Another visualization possibility is offered by TouchGraph, which has a Google plug-in that shows links as an interconnected web, an appropriate image for the World Wide Web.” News.com: [1] “Search providers are increasingly trying to deliver a wealth of information onto results pages quickly, rather than having people sift through numerous Web sites to find answers. The more successfully they can do this, the greater the likelihood that people will return and develop a loyalty to that provider.” And [2]: “Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said that the company has ‘only just begun’ with its grand plans to grow its Web search business, highlighting 2004 as a year when search will become omnipresent throughout its family of sites.” An Asian success story is the Chinese search engine, Baidu. Wrote Forbes: “Beijing-based Baidu is China's most popular search engine, Li said, averaging 30 million text searches a day in Chinese alone -- a seventh of Google Inc's 200 million in myriad languages… Co-founder Robin Li declined to disclose revenue, but said the number was doubling or even tripling every year…About 80 percent of turnover last year came from sponsored links, where a client pays to have its name and Web link appear at the top of a results list when particular words are searched.” As we look ahead to what can be done in the search field, we would do well to remember these words by John Battelle: “To profit from search, a company needs three elements, all of which Google already has. First, you must have high-quality ‘algorithmic’ search, which attempts to match users perfectly with what they're seeking. Second, you need a paid search network, which allows you to display links to paying advertisers alongside your editorial results. And third, you need your own distribution. In other words, you must own the site where the consumer makes his or her query and the results are displayed.” So, from Amazon to Baidu, Google to eBay, Microsoft to Yahoo, everyone seems to want in on the Search business. And yet, in India, search languishes. We haven’t even recognised its importance for boosting traffic, utility and revenue. India needs its own search engine focused on our local needs (the answer is not Google’s India search). We have a khoj.com (which my company, IndiaWorld, had launched in March 1997, and is now owned by Sify), but a lot more needs to be done. By combining ideas from what the world’s best are doing and some emerging technologies, it should be possible to rapidly build one. Tomorrow: The Next Indian Search Engine [E M E R G I C . o r g] 9:25:43 AM    Trackback []