Dylan Hunter

From eMarketer, (they’ll lock it up soon, but out of fairness, here’s the link until they do):

Search Engines Help Small Businesses

MAY 22, 2007

Small businesses depend more on search engine traffic than larger firms, according to a study conducted by Hitwise in early 2007.

The firm measured the percentage of average monthly traffic companies in the Internet Retailer “Top 500 Guide” received from search engines in 2005 and 2006. Half of the businesses ranked from the 400th to the 500th positions depended on search engines for 50% or more of their total site traffic.

By comparison, none of the top 100 retailers generated more than 40% of their site traffic from search engines, and half had between 20.1% and 30% of their traffic come from search engines.

Web-only merchants averaged 64% their of monthly site traffic from search engines.

Chain retailers and consumer brand manufacturers averaged 28% and 27% of their site traffic from search engines, respectively.

Was an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminding us in the course of designing social suggestion-based sites / software to not forget one of the most critical reasons for in the first place - serendipity / new discovery. Sometimes this is best accomplished by “more like this,”‘es and/or “people who viewed this purchased..” kinds of things, (i.e. narrowing / refinement goal-oriented) and sometimes best accomplished by purposely broadening / adjusting the scope to introduce some new variance and seeing where things progress from there.

Many years ago there was a little search startup called Direct Hit here in MA, (who earned $500M on a cheaper version of what I wanted to do, but that’s another story) who really was the first entity to hang their hat on social suggestion-based search results, knowing full well that most folks only look at results 1-3, and almost no one beyond 10, so that those results that it initially presented as 1-3 would almost always tend to stay there, whether they were the best results or not - i.e. for anyone who’s ever used Excel, an infinite circular error.

As we all took this kind of click-through analysis / adjustment functions in to become one of the ranking criteria we used, (and / or at least used to internally evaluate how good a job we were doing in delivering relevant results - with all of the appropriate mechanisms for negating bounce - i.e. clicking through on a link, saying “this isn’t what I wanted” and hopping back to the search page, etc) the import of regularly introducing different results into the mix to make sure we were actually doing a much better job of delighting folks became more and more clear then, and still holds true today.

But enough of me babbling, Nat does a superb job of describing, so go read it from him!

Very glad to hear that AOL took the “riskier” path, (see prior discussion on my post here and that it’s doing so well for them.

New York - A Time Warner executive said on Tuesday that the media giant’s strategy to offer AOL’s content for free has attracted new users at a faster rate than expected, Reuters reported. Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner’s COO, told investors that 40% of the service’s new users were not previously paying subscribers, adding that AOL’s advertising sales have been “very robust.” Bewkes also said that former subscribers were adopting AOL’s free services more quickly than originally predicted, Reuters reported. The company announced its radical change in strategy in early August, all-but abandoning its dial-up Internet model in an attempt to increase its ad revenue by attracting larger numbers of users.

More temporarily here. Unfortunately, since Yahoo keeps expiring their news articles, which really makes for a significant hole in the discussion if one reads one of my prior posts, am sure will be finding a good substitute soon. BTW - note to Yahoo: Please seriously rethink this expiring thing - I know one of the last things you care about anymore is linklove, but for those of us writing about stories you post, you’re really giving us every incentive to find someone else to use / link to / send traffic to. Does that sound like a good long-term strategy for an online media company?

Whew, does this one bring up some haunting memories of some very similar conversations we had back at ATW a long time ago. We, like AOL, were generating far and away more revenue from an older, dying, rev stream, with major downward pressure on it, (ours being white label B2B licensing fees - dropping even more precipitously than AOL’s - down 80% in 16 mths) with new customer win rates and renewals on our older line of business falling through the floor, again, as AOL’s.

We really had two major choices - either go whole hog consumer, turning ATW.com into a formal search portal, (we had been dancing around for 2 yrs). My opinion, this gave us both the highest degree of control over our future as well as highest long-term potential once we adjusted focus, but also required restructuring, as well as a strong leap of faith that our newer efforts would work, or shop around the internet business entirely, keeping it going via the older dying rev streams in the interim. In our case, the choice was made in favor of the status quo / liquidate - the lure of the drug of current revenue, even if dying, has, and will always be, amazingly powerful, making leaps of faith, especially when also requiring restructuring/firings, very hard to pull off. From the view up here in the Nosebleeds, I would agree that this is the right way for them to go, but we’ll have to see whether their Board bites.

Dulles, Va. - Two weeks away from pitching his radical plan to transform AOL into a free, ad-supported service, CEO Jonathan Miller is expected to call for thousands of layoffs and a “near halt” to marketing of the company’s trademark Internet service, The New York Times reported on Monday. Miller, who will detail his proposal to the board of parent Time Warner, is expected to “defend his unusually draconian plan by arguing that trying to wring every last dime from its dial-up subscribers is preventing AOL from being as aggressive as it can in competing with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on the web,” The Times reported, citing anonymous AOL executives. The plan, however, could be a tough sell to some board members, since they would initially have to accept lower profits until the company is able to boost its advertising revenue. The plan is scheduled for public announcement on August 2.
Link

BTW - Since I absolutely hate places that put content behind forced registrations, will hopefully be moving the above link away from the NYT very soon. Apologies to everyone for including links to this kind of crippled content if you hit this before then.

Just checked out Jobby after reading about on TechCrunch, and darned if Michael wasn’t dead on - the interface, (with a slight glitch on the “user experience” tag for some reason) is definitely awesome, (heck, almost turns looking for a job into a video game! ). Will definitely have to keep in mind going forward.

Would be really cool if, as it grows, live jobs appeared in a right pane or something in order of best match to their tag clouds, as well, (now that _would be_ a video game! ).

And for a viral piece, since recruiters care often care most about what others say about you, how about throwing in a little LinkedIn endorsement kind of thing, on-the-fly weighted by the skill of the endorser for the given tag, (i.e. for “Product Mktg” or “Ruby on Rails,” etc., you would get further gooses for the number of people who endorsed your skill on those tags if they also had high skill / endorsements for theirs, moderate for moderate scores, low for low - yep, peer review / Backrub / Google for jobs! ). Also should help out a bit in differentiating the 4000 people that’ll all come up with Advanced on tags A, B & G, which are most important for a given job.

Six Apart, the creator of social networking site LiveJournal and maker of blogging applications like Moveable Type, just snagged $12 million in a private round of funding from three firms, sources said last week. The series C round, rumored to include Intel, catapults San Francisco-based Six Apart into the thick of an emerging area of Web-focused investments that go far beyond search-related companies. But so far, public market access to that new industry-comprising companies that house content media properties as well as content tool makers-has been nonexistent.

….In any event, these new blended companies are becoming the talk of the media investment world. "Blogging and social networking are coming together," says one source familiar with companies in the new industry. "We’re coming out of the tech bubble doldrums and the next generation of media is online [content-driven companies]."

In the recent past, online search has been the star of Web-focused investing, but that’s rapidly changing as investors consider what happens after users conduct a search on Google or Yahoo. Typically, they then click on the links retrieved and move on to other sites, which are chockablock with content–the new "it" zone for advertisers.

More

Now _this_ is useful - 2 good solid things that could be done right now by SE’s to limit the ability of governments, (i.e. Beijing, The Bush Administration) to make you party to their immoral, and what should be illegal, acts:
1) Figure out a way of how to get by without cookies / user profiles / click-through redirects, (certainly more than a tad problematic re: relevance, and nukes the possibility of user-adaptive search, but certainly worth experimenting with and seeing how much actual effect it would have vs. the gain of actually _not having_ this kind of info, even if subpoenaed).

2) Set all activity to use SSL to make it more difficult to spy on info traffic, (’course, am sure each and every government will try to put up barriers to this use of SSL - Bush would say that being able to snoop this info is critical to finding someone who’s doing research on how to build a dirty bomb, Beijing to find someone who’s trying to figure out how best to promote self-determination for Taiwan and / or Hong Kong).

China has responded to international criticism of its Internet regulations by saying its rules are ‘fully in line’ with the rest of the world.

More

Oi… it’s iWon all over again… I like the suggestion from Bubble Generation:

Don’t pay people to use search–pay people to help improve Yahoo search. Give anyone a tiny micropayment for a tiny contribution to Y search. Leverage the massively distributed specialization of the edge to improve/filter/rank results.

Don’t know that micropayments is the right vehicle for motivation, nor necessarily that social tagging is the right answer here on the algorithms side, (though it definitely does have merit), but they’re definitely onto something solid about using the Yahoo userbase much more actively, (as I used to use mine at ATW many years ago, all made even more disappointing since Yahoo Search is an ATW derivative).

The short answer really is that Yahoo doesn’t need to offer any more incentive than actually really working with and then delivering ideas from their customers on how to make their individual search occasions more relevant to them. Think about how much it’s worth, (in prestige, and, for many, actually in cash) to be listed on a “Top 500 Contributors to Yahoo Search” for the Month / Year. Forget about giving them $1 per 100 searches or a bonus 5000 frequent flyer miles, (whoo-hoo!) or, even better yet, taking the whole iWon playbook and providing entries to a weekly drawing for $1M.

Give folks the ability to contribute, (ideas, code snippets, heck, whole add-on search-based products that Yahoo could then endorse and promote to the benefit of both that person and Yahoo) and then the ability to point to a Yahoo URL that says “Joe helped us blah, which resulted in one of the most used Yahoo apps in the last year” and if you don’t think that’ll be a huge catalyst for increasing interest / loyalty / positive press, etc., you’re smoking something!

And as to how to work through the tremendous number of thoughts / random brainstorms / add-on products, etc., guess what - Yahoo has a couple of social tagging assets it’s picked up recently. Since they’re trying to raise interest / engagement, etc. amongst the masses, the masses seem a good place to start!

Use Yahoo search, get a reward?

A nice reminder for later about using RSS for categories / search results, etc., (almost a direct analog to when some folks bookmark certain searches and just periodically re-issue). News readers have certainly replaced some of the things that folks used to go to SE’s for, as well as inserting additional competition for time while online. Certainly no reason the SE can’t easily morph to also be avail through this type of interface.

Search Meets The Syndication Engine
by David Berkowitz, Tuesday, January 24, 2006

A RIDDLE: WHEN IS A search engine not a search engine?

One of the most popular blog search engines isn’t really a search engine at all, and its index spans far more than just blogs. Today, we’ll devour a few lessons from Feedster in exploring how it offers a new model for the search business.

What is Feedster? It depends on whom you ask. On Feedster’s site, the company writes, “Feedster is foremost a search engine.” Yet when I asked Feedster President Chris Redlitz whether he’s concerned about Google or Yahoo! dominating his business, he said, “If we were just a search engine, we’d be much more concerned. We’re really much more of a syndication business.” Feedster, the search and syndication engine, specializes in aggregating RSS feeds, the behind-the-scenes backbone used by blogs and a rapidly growing variety of content ranging from major news sources to classified listings.

This is how a niche search engine aims to stay competitive: by specializing its focus and differentiating its model. While a search engine on the surface, Feedster aims to engender long-term loyalty by syndicating its results and allowing users to subscribe to the feeds. That means the most valuable consumer for Feedster is not the one searching its site; it’s the subscriber, who then accesses the feeds from his/her preferred reader of choice. The subscriber can even choose to receive feed updates via e-mail.

While the feed reader business, connoting a software or online application for gathering and accessing blogs and RSS feeds, is still in its infancy, the safe long-term bets for the winners there are the usual suspects: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL. In other words, many of the most valuable consumers of Feedster are those accessing its content via another search engine’s site. Thus Feedster’s greatest potential competitors are also its most promising distribution channels.

One key differentiator for Feedster is that it has much more content than just blogs, emphasized Redlitz. “We get compared to Technorati a lot,” he said. “They’re a blog search engine… We’re different because we’re feed-centric. We’re not just looking at the blog pulse.”

Feedster’s business model centers on RSS advertising, syndicating ads every few posts into its feeds. If you’re looking to run an advertising campaign on Feedster, get in line. “We’ve probably turned away more campaigns than we’ve run,” said Redlitz. Holding Feedster back for the time being is an inventory crunch. Redlitz said Feedster could double its inventory this year, yet advertiser demand is spreading beyond the early adopters. I asked Redlitz when he foresaw inventory meeting advertiser demand. He answered bluntly, “I don’t think it will.”

In the context of other developments in the search engine space, Feedster fits in most closely with vertical search, both as a vertical search engine itself and as a distribution channel for other vertical search sites. In aggregating others’ feeds, Feedster can be a resource where consumers can subscribe to publishers’ feeds of news, jobs, movie reviews, recipes, message board posts, product listings, travel deals, and other types of content. The syndication model changes the nature of search from a pull to a push model, and in the push model, search isn’t really search at all.

Keep an eye on Feedster’s next moves. The company is launching a mobile service in Japan in the next several weeks, and consumers will likely benefit from personalization options down the road. One thing’s for certain: even while billing itself as a syndication engine, Feedster’s future developments will inevitably parallel where search engines head.

So now, when is a search engine not a search engine? In Feedster’s case, it’s when it can better serve consumers by making search only a small but integral part of its value proposition. It’s not what you are; it’s the value you provide.

David Berkowitz can be reached at dberkowitz@gmail.com or via his blog at MarketersStudio.com.

I actually worked on something similar a bunch of years ago, at the time more oriented toward personalization of search results, but, if anything, the threshold of how good you have to be on to make it worthwhile should definitely be lower in an ad context, so should be a good feature when they launch, (presuming they actually do it well, which, unfortunately, MSN Search does not raise great faith in - perhaps their folks in Beijing will be better at! ).

Is hardly iron-hard, but you definitely can predict several demographic components by how people express the same / similar ideas, at least good enough to try using as ad segmentation technique, and then as long as you can keep pushing the acquisition needle further over, you keep investing!

“Microsoft Corp may soon be able to tell whether an Internet search query comes from a man or a woman.

“…’There’s a confidence interval around one’s gender,’ [Jed] Nahum said in a telephone interview. ‘Advertisers can start to tailor their message based on those estimates. Using the new technology, Microsoft will be able to tell, for example, that someone searching for the term `Dodge Caravan’ is more likely to be female than someone searching for `Dodge’ alone.’”

More (warning: coming from Taipei, so it’ll take a sec to load)

A follow-on to my moment on NPR. The not offering Gmail or Blogger in China’s a nice touch. We’ll see how long that holds. More

They say everyone gets their 15 seconds of fame, I just got my 1:45! A good episode of OnPoint talking about Internet Censorship and Surveillance, including whether Search Engines were colluding with repressive governments by filtering results in China, Iran and others, (including France! ). The discussion started to turn a little dark toward the Search Engines being active and willing participants in such repression, so I called in and hit them up for the right answer, given the practices of even our own government post-9/11, (where any search engine can be subpoenaed covertly for query logs on anyone / everyone, and you’re not even allowed to disclose that such a request was made).

Didn’t get one, of course, (unfortunately, short of some kind of supranational authority to preserve the ideals we have, but which other countries definitely do not share, I don’t know what that answer could be - I _really_ wish that I did).

Anyway, pull up the broadcast, go to 36:01, and you’ll hear “we have a call from Dylan in Northborough” - guess what - that’s me!!!! Yeah!

Woo-hoo - here’s one for the good guys! I hate these kind of utterly bogus attempts at supporting failing business models through technology, and specifically this kind, where you’re hiring a company specifically to piss off your most avid consumers.

Again, here’s a bizarre idea that I’ve spoken of before - work on correcting the value imbalance, and crap stunts like what this company used to do, (again, hooray!!! ) become unnecessary, (and yes, I’m well-aware that it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to hire a couple of hackers to do this than to address the real issue, but it’s hardly the way to make friends and influence people like - oh - those folks who are your only shot at being able to survive as a business over the long term…).

It’s about time, as The RIAA, etc., keeps working harder and harder to make sure that it keeps killing any services working on what is very much a high-demand service,*1* *2*to see at least the nail driven into the coffin of one of theirs.

It’s funny, but if there were a RIAA for text content owners, there would be no search engines at all, (no Google, no Yahoo) as they all locate content that inherently has all IP rights reserved, (by its very production) and point directly to the most “useful” IP, most often taken out of the context desired by the copyright owner, facilitating _massive_ copyright infringement, while concurrently making money by selling ads around these infringements, and, of course, not sharing a dime of this revenue with the copyright holders of the content itself, (and, in fact, concurrently charges the IP-infringed should they wish to get people to examine their content in its originally-designed context, and for its original purpose). Instead, Search has become a multi-billion dollar industry, with tremendous growth potential, and has become a critical part of all our lives on what could have been entirely snuffed out in the early days of the Web, if the “PublisheRIAA” had been established. And we all would have been… better off therefore?

—————

*1* Normal folks outside of college campuses won’t be able to use for several years, at least, but some darned fool gives The RIAA access to Internet2, and they promptly work to shut down a file sharing service in its infancy there - i2Hub - read more here

*2* As well as the solutions that these services would drive to the increasingly-problematic bandwidth expenses for individual bloggers / podcasters, etc., (and if you don’t think this is a real issue and hindrance to richer and richer media being created by more and more individuals, go ahead - try producing your own show, and find out the entirely-counter-to-radio economics of doing so, due to both bandwidth expenses and the obscurity of royalty payment schemes, and then tell me that continued work isn’t needed to solve these issues).

And what about VoIP - Skype gets bought out for literally billions of dollars, by providing us the ability to make phone calls anywhere around the world for free, (or, really, rather by making it now included as part of our bandwidth expenses). And where did this technology come from? Yep, some of those “pirates” from Kazaa, (and yes, can still hold them out as laudable for the Kazaa product itself, as I can entirely without conflict consider them scumbags for largely being the naiscent force behind the growth of the spyware industry - tech good, business model bad).

A company that fought net piracy by adding fake files to file-sharing networks is being closed down.

Overpeer led efforts to battle the rising popularity of file-sharing networks such as Kazaa.

More

Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day….

More.

An amusing mini-romp through some of those legal jewels embedded deep within the standard EULA. I liked Claria’s - to paraphrase: “I’m a scumbag, and am going to send back all kinds of nasty stuff, and you have no right to know what kind of stuff I’m going to send back, nor do you have the right to do anything about it…”

Funny stuff, especially for an app that no one, but no one, actually would _choose_ to install on their own, unbundled, un-”quietly mixed into the fine print of an installer,” un-ActiveX installed, etc., etc.

Too bad, too, from what I know, they’ve developed some pretty neat user profiling technology that could be used to make lots of folks very happy if applied to Search, eComm, etc., (i.e. similar technology is used to determine which result an SE should actually display to you, as opposed to your neighbor, to try to figure out what you mean when you pop in those 2 nigh-unto random words) - instead, it’s used to piss people off.

A search engine based on was the topic of my big Business Plan while at Babson, and still have not just great faith, but believe in the import of, as Search continues to mature - i.e. there’s not nearly enough being done to modify non-ad-related content to pay attention to what _I_ actually want - and yes, Local does get a bit further toward this, so it’ll be what I, and several million other people in MA might find relevant, but, guess what, for many items, I’m going to be a lot closer to folks in NJ, where I grew up, on others, closer to folks in NH or ME, where I vacation, on others closer to folks in Alaska, where someday I still hope to go, or folks who travel to the Himalayas, etc., etc.

I know _very_ well how tough it is to make these kinds of associations, as well as to update, determine when to re-assess which component groups we belong in, etc., but that doesn’t mean that it’s not an extremely important problem to work on, not just for the business opportunity, (though there is plenty of that) but for the good of us all. And yes, we’ll have to work through / around some the FUD that’s been inspired by the Scumbags, but we’ll get there - especially in societies that pride themselves on the value of the individual, to have Search reaching for anything less will always leave the prize unclaimed, and the opportunity to be surpassed, self-evident.

I know I am hardly the first blogger to deal with this situation, but wanted to send along a nice, positive “may you roast upon a firey spit” to our friends working with Online Poker and Phentermine, (there, you got your one mention, and no, you’re not getting the links). Now piss off, (and yes, I know perfectly well that not only is there not a chance in hell that these folks are actually listening, but even less of a chance of them actually heeding me, but sometimes a good “shaking your fist at the sky” is important, nonetheless - keeps you strong on why you don’t want to engage in these kinds of business practices when confronted with folks who keep pushing to swim deeper and deeper toward the darkness! )

———

For those of you who don’t know what comment spam is, there are some seriously scummy companies - they used to work with porn, where they used to try game my index on ATW.com* all the time - but apparently have found online gaming and prescriptions at least as profitable - out there who build bots to find blogs, and then submit random, utterly unrelated crap as comments to those blogs, which include their links, trying first and foremost to build up their Google PageRank** numbers, as well as hoping to get the maybe one in ten thousand folks who might actually click on to find out what this random non-sequitor is all about to actually engage.

For those blogs / forums that are unmoderated, these links go up, and if Google / Yahoo, etc., haven’t yet detected their most recent bit of random crap, (i.e. they change IP’s, emails, text, doorway pages, etc. all the time, and am sure have gotten smart enough to ensure that the true IP’s are entirely masked, and the ones they submit are sufficiently randomized so as to make it more difficult to connect) for at least a point in time, they get to profit from the connectivity calculations to boost their ranks within the algorithmic portion of these search engines, thereby attracting more extremely cheap leads, (though Teoma, in using their more “segmented only to the query” version of connectivity should at least isolate these idiots to fighting back and forth to only their own sewers).

Is forever the anti-spam / porn / spyware economic problem - there is much more profit for the companies doing this than there is for the companies trying to resist, (where usually doing a better job in dealing with is only a cost***). And so long as this remains the case, (which’ll be nigh unto forever) we’ll have to deal with, and lose the economic value of the time spent in all of us dealing with, (i.e. how much cash could we all generate in the same amount of time it takes us to moderate our blogs / forums to make these things go away and go away and go away…. And yes, I know WordPress 1.5+ has some method of decreasing comment spam, but afraid I haven’t yet been able to get my webhost to upgrade me beyond 1.0.x even after repeated requests - and yes, this indeed may turn out to be enough of an issue for me to move webhosts - or, via the extreme power of inertia - it may not! )
————

* Have I told you how much it hurts my heart every time I have to type the link to ATW anymore? What’s there is nothing more than a tired shell - my Old Girl, as a distinct entity, with its own advantages and disadvantages is long since gone, (though at least adding nicely to Yahoo). It’s as sad as when Disney bought Go.com, gutted it, refused to do any work to keep it up, refused to sell it, (I tried! ) and killed it through neglect, (and that wasn’t nearly as interesting a search engine) as happened with:

AV, (I almost never used, but I’m sure I’m far from alone in missing them having their full boolean advanced search - some things are important just to _be_ - as something in the World - even if only 4 people on the planet actually use - this is one of them), as happened with

Hotbot, as happened with

Northern Light, (one of my old personal favorites on the relevance front - from a business model perspective, were clearly always one of the weirdest), as happened with

….,

but as will unfortunately never happen with MSN even though looking at the mistakes that they continue to make that all of us already went through and solved years ago, it probably should, (but MS has to remain MS, and do it their own way - their focus has always been on how things can be best for them, rather than how they can be best for the consumer, and luckily, they have more than enough cash to continue to totally not care, and there are more than enough people whose most important market trait is inertia).

** And yes, I’m well-aware that Google doesn’t actually use PageRank, the algorithm, anymore. Am referring to the PageRank _concept_ - i.e. weighted link popularity to approximate concepts of authority, which I’m sure they’ll always use in one way or another, (if only to keep a tight, well-understood PR message). And if you’re _seriously_ picking these kind of nits, am sure there are plenty of other folks who would be much better foils for random, senseless and otherwise unproductive argument, (i.e. I never understood the point of debating, either).

*** Even for the anti-spyware guys, who do get comped specifically to fight, they get comped to remove stuff, and if that means wiping out a whole mess of false positives, who cares? They don’t get paid to work hard on parsing the nice ones from the nasties, they get paid to make things go away, plain and simple, with the specific exception of never tagging Google or Yahoo since the bad PR would kill them, regardless of the practices of their apps - i.e. did you know that if you have the PageRank button active on your Google toolbar, (which is the default condition) that they’re watching literally every single site that you, your husband, your wife, your children, go to, (though I suppose if your child is an early-pubescent, it might be a good thing to scare him a bit about people watching what he’s watching! )? Did you know further that both Google and Yahoo update their toolbars to do whatever they’ve chosen to do without your knowledge or consent? This stuff certainly scares the bejesus out of me!

I’m hardly an anti-javascript zealot, (in fact, there are many times where I’ve been a strong proponent, and am definitely interested in where AJAX could go) but I do have to say I definitely find it highly irritating that when I go to a new website without javascript activated, I either get absolutely nothing, some random jumble of text, and/or can’t navigate at all. Come on, folks, javascript is supposed to _enhance_ the experience, not preclude it! And yes, as a user, given the horrible extent to which companies, (even ones with great brands) have abused javascript for use with pop-ups/-unders, it is definitely a wise idea to start with it turned off, and only enable for trusted sources!

If you’re one of the folks who went over to Firefox primarily to get away from the pop-up hell that is IE, (and/or because you believe that no one company should have the level of hegemony that MS has commanded for quite some time, especially not with the business practices that are all too tempting for any monopolist, but especially MS) you will have noticed that in the last few months, as our new friend has started getting some very strong browser penetration numbers, that some folks have started breaking through Firefox’s higher resistance to pop-ups, etc.

To get back the browsing environment that we got Firefox for in the first place, I _strongly_ recommend installing the NoScript extension, which defaults javascript off, but when you go onto a new site with javascript, it will pop a small band on the bottom of the browser to let you know that the site has javascript. You can then either choose to enable for that site either permanently or temporarily, and pretty much be back off to the races. Although a bit of a pain in the beginning, you do get used to it after a bit, and once you start seeing all the entities that are trying to do things to your computer without your knowledge/consent, you’ll never even think about browsing without it, (i.e. did you know that Sourceforge, the core of Open Source, no less, drops Tacoda tracking cookies on you when you go that site - come on, of all the sites that cater to some of the most psychotic online privacy proponents, SourceForge doing this?!).

Now, I actually understand and believe in the value of behavioral analysis, (both for search, where I first tried even before working on Alltheweb,* and now in advertising, though in the latter case, I honestly do find myself somewhat conflicted on the issue of tracking cookies - btw, in case you couldn’t guess, I also have y cookie settings set to prompt me before anything happens! ) but on a personal level, I do find myself feeling quite irritated when things happen to my PC that I didn’t _specifically_ ask to have happen, and since I’ve installed NoScript, and now seeing how many companies are trying to do all kinds of questionable things, I would _always_ suggest going to Firefox, installing NoScript, setting cookies to ionly be set by the given site, and then to have the site ask you whether it’s ok to cookie you.

I definitely _do_ wish NoScript would modify from being whitelist-only to providing a blacklist option based on popularity of folks submitting sites to be blacklisted to them, but having worked on similar technologies in a failed attempt to pull off a Safe Search version of ATW for Pax I know how this can quickly blossom into a _huge_ pain in the tail for even firms getting paid good money to solve, forget about random folks contributing personal time and effort to help out, (thank you, Giorgio!!! ).

——————–

* Was the basis for the search engine I designed while in B-School @ Babson. Yes, for those who have poked around a bit, that’s the “better version of Direct Hit before Direct Hit existed.” Taught me several very important lessons:

1) If you believe strongly enough in the value of something, don’t let yourself be dissuaded even if authority figures you respect tell you what you’re proposing is irrational / impossible. Heck, if you think about it, there’s nothing rational about Search in the first place: making not just one, but multiple copies of all the knowledge and experience of the entire planet? Most people don’t even think about how utterly insane that is, so when was any web search concept ever rational?

2) Even for highly-capital intensive ventures, (of which, Search is definitely one) you can’t allow yourself to abandon a good idea because you’re not going to get funded. Now, back in ‘97-’99, when I was going to B-School, that was the proscription:

A. Business Plan
B. Management Team**
C. VC Funding
D. GO!

Now, in ‘05, Search is definitely coming back, so yes, there are at least the glimmers of hope, where 3 yrs ago, we were all trying to figure out how to “re-cast” Search on our resumes, since there were certainly no Search companies hiring, (at least here in the Greater Boston Area) and since there was a truly sick and disgusting semi-triumphant attitude to see those crushed in the post-Bubble fall, (i.e. early 30’s VP’s). And yes, there were many of us who _were_ jack-asses, (much of the Lycos staff coming immediately to mind - hated their partners, hated each other, bragged about so-and-so having been “shit-canned” after 6 months, the median lifetime of a Lycos person back then) but there were many of us who loved the Internet for the chance to do something extraordinary, to actually have an impact on the companies we were working for, rather than just being a random cog, and yes, for sure, to make enough in doing so both to make secure lives for our families, and to ensure that we could do it again a couple of years down the road when the funding sources told us we were out of our minds yet again, (i.e. do you honestly believe that Google could have become what it is today if it had tried to launch in the funding climate post-2000? As I said, though, am definitely pleased to see interest in Search coming back up - you’ll still have to bootstrap hard, and probably be able to make a go of it for a good 12-18 mths or so, which’ll be nigh unto a killer for many of us, but it’s still infinitely better than it was, but the question on Google post-2000 still stands…). Well, at least some folks are still living the Dream, and for the rest of us, Hope dawns again!! - And this time, there _will_ be a liquidity event before the financial markets choose to crush us again, and forget B2B - yes, it’s a very easy way to get good a good bunch of cash / traffic at one shot, but the very protracted last recession should have shown us all that corporations do _not_ behave rationally to their environment, refusing to invest even as the consumer economy remained very strong. B2C - takes longer, may need to be funded from some B2B endeavors while corporations remain “positive,” but so long as you’re providing a product / service that has value, individuals _will_ continue to consume, and you _will_ be able to survive through the down times. Businesses, as now well-established largely-economically-irrational actors will not.

Whew! Enough random catharsis for today, time to get back to productive uses - I have my own company to try to bootstrap for now, and prospecting’s not getting done while I sit here babbling about ancient history!

————————-

** ‘Course, “Management Team” was always probably the hardest of those steps, especially during the up times, as anyone who was willing to shelf his idea, where he’s the CEO, for yours, where you are, probably wasn’t good enough to be on your Team, if you really wanted those “A-players” that everyone’s always spouting about. Still a huge issue for anyone who looks back into their history and sees tens / hundreds of millions, if not billions, in value fail to have been created by the companies that these folks were a part of, (i.e. how much are the folks from Excite, Lycos, AV, as well as me still kicking themselves in the tail on a nigh-unto daily basis? Ah well, get up, dust oneself off and move on, but yes, when the bills come due each month, and you’re still playing with mail float while trying to scrape by, as opposed to working on something that people the world over will truly appreciate, and which is thus truly joyful to work on, it does get hard….)

Ok, so what’s actually managed to get me out of a 10-month hiatus to actually put up another blog post? Really, podcasting, (which I’ve been falling in love with over the last 1.5-2 mths) but that’s fodder for another post, (or 2 or 12). But at this precise moment, it’s an article in the Channel Register that’s talking about Yahoo re-assembling some of the old IBM Clever guys again, with speculation toward reviving at least some portion of IBM’s old Clever project.

Why’s this so inspiring? Several reasons. I first actually read about Clever in Scientific American back in ‘98 or so. At the time, even though officially I was (and am) a business guy, I was (and am) a total tech geek, and the beauty of the system that they described was so amazingly apparent in comparison to what was out there at the time, (yes, even our friend Google, who I remember thinking was a “cheap copy” of Clever at the time - ok, “more pragmatic” copy would probably be more appropriate - Clever could take 11 mins at query time, which was, of course, ludicrous, but from deep geekdom, it was like seeing the Mona Lisa and then thinking about a poster of some other girl - the latter was much more practical, but nowhere near as breathtaking - see, told you - was and will always be, first and foremost a math geek, so I very much to this day see beauty in elegance rather than bludgeon) that I literally fell as close to in love with a search technology as one could.

Actually, not too long before the time that that article came out, I had been working on a business plan for a new kind of search engine for the business plan competition as part of my evening MBA with Babson, (back then, winning Babson’s business plan contest was an excellent way of getting real funding and being able to actually make a real company, so we all worked mighty hard on pulling it off). In essence, it was a better version of Direct Hit, before Direct Hit launched, using user clicks as the prime mechanism to improve relevance sorts, but with the addition of a strong user profiling component, so that it only would use the clicks of folks “like you” to define your sort for a given query, and of those people like someone else when they issued the same query.

Knew the marketing side of the business would be much easier, (to Direct Hit’s absolute credit, to this day there is no company’s tagline that I love better than what theirs was - “One Site, Millions of Minds” - perfection - simple, totally got the concept across - wondrous! ) so spent 6 months figuring out the tech side, i.e.:

- How much could you know about someone the first time they came to you - what things would be the best to use and to what degree - IP resolution, (removing all entries from Vienna, VA, of course; all the AOL folks) associating the person with the user group for which his search term was most populous, etc., etc.

- How, and to what level, could you refine the user’s profile given his query and click patterns, frequencies, etc., other data that you might be able to infer from offline sources, based on the data you could pull, (most notably, via IP, allowing for the error that the IP is actually where your provider connects, not you, which can radically affect the usefulness of this variable).

- How would you know when the user’s behavior suggested a subclass of whatever class you had him currently a part of vs. when you should migrate him to another segment tree, etc., etc., (hey, I told you I was a geek at heart - the business side is how I try to make things actually come about! ).

Anyway, enough of the “Dylan’s Direct Hit before Direct Hit” story for now, (though I still find it interesting that I presented the concept in Wellesley, MA, and shortly thereafter a new company was founded in Wellesley, MA, but that’s something else…. I know, I know, and Kennedy was really killed by a hellish combination of Girl Scouts and escapees from Area 51… ).

The second part of my interest (very short version) is that I was PM for Internet Search for Fast Search & Transfer from nigh unto the beginning in ‘99, (left in ‘01) which was bought out by Overture in ‘02, (I think) and thence by Yahoo, (4 mths thereafter) so if Yahoo is indeed working on bringing at least portions of Clever out of mothballs, and reunifying it with my Old Girl, that makes me happy on so many levels, (we actually did do a deal with IBM, and licensing some of Clever was discussed, but IBM decided they were going to figure out how to use by themselves, or nobody was). I truly miss the old discussions we used to have as to what defines relevance, to whom, what technologies / areas of R&D might improve, etc., etc. Awesome fun stuff to work on, and am working right now on figuring out how best to apply, (with no cash, of course - I have little-to-none, nor do I see a whole slew of VC’s dying to give me some! ).

And this time, when I want to do PFI or text P4P, (as I did in ‘00) or, much more importantly, the next thought on monetization, (since back then, I was in a good place to pull off - now, I’d have to be an idiot to go head-to-head vs. Google & Yahoo, but am sure there are plenty of holes around them) I won’t have to worry about speculation from others that doing so would isolate our B2B clients, (even after Google had done the same thing to Yahoo) even given that they had already pushed me from $4.00 per thousand queries down to $1.75 16 months later, (soon fully inverted to “I don’t pay you - you pay me $5.00 per thousand”).

$100M for the technology when Overture bought my Old Girl out, $1.5Bil when Yahoo bought Overture plus my technology 4 mths later, $23Bil+ Google IPO…. oh man, I could have been…. Stop… Not productive, except in once again reminding me that speculation belongs only as a way of educating tests in the actual open market, but it is the market, and not random speculation, that should determine what a company tries to do. And yes, I had Alltheweb.com, which we’d grown to 5.5M queries per day at that point, half of a Lycos, (when Lycos was actually impressive) so rather than costing me $1M a year in infrastructure costs to support, could have been…. Stop…. Again, would’ve, could’ve, should’ve - who cares - it’s done.

Ignore the still-sore spot, (obviously! ) read the Clever article. Hope that the guys can figure out how to use some of the better concepts from Clever such that it can respond in less than 11 mins, (i.e. beauty is certainly beauty, but it’s still better to actually make something a reality along a path and get better from there - if something only exists in a lab, it doesn’t exist) unify that with my Old Girl, (now also combined with AV & Inktomi) and bring something extraordinary about.

For me, gives me great hope - not just for Yahoo, (though, as you can tell, I still would love to see my Old Girl glow again - it’s been a bit, certainly now @ ATW.com, she’s barely even a shadow) but more importantly, in adding to the assertion that there indeed is still life in doing Search well. I have no cash, but I don’t care - at this moment, I am more pleased than I’ve been in a long time!

Now to figure out the hardest part of the solution that I’ve been trying to figure out for months, if not years - how the heck to work on, after work, while still putting the right amount of time into my wife and daughters, who are much more critical - if you find yourself lucky enough to be married to someone who was with you when you were (at least theoretically) worth a small fortune, and she stays with you when you’re once again worth nothing, without a moment of hesitation or recrimination, (other than the “don’t even talk to me about equity again!” ) hold onto her for dear life - better than one in a million. And if you further are greeted every day when you come home, regardless of whatever happened, with smiles, loving hugs and excited squeals of “Daddy!!!” you’d be a flaming idiot, (and yes, this is preemptive for an elder me, just in case) to endanger that - for any reason - ever.