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My 2 featured articles for the week ending June 24, 2005:

Archived blogs for the week of June 20, 2005

908 - June 24, 2005 - 9.59 AM EST

Growth pressures in the search industry

Google is now considered a media company and in June, it beat Time Warner to become the most valuable business in the media industry.

Now, US investors are again awarding crazy valuations to fast-growing companies: last quarter Google revenues grew by 93 per cent.

Time Warner, meanwhile, is finding growth, 6 per cent currently, hard to come by. It doesn’t help that Time Warner hasn’t figured out what to do with AOL, which is pretty damning when you consider it is five years since the “merger of the century” brought the internet provider and the Time Warner empire together.

AOL still remains one of the world’s great internet properties, but it has, until now, failed to develop in the way of Google or Yahoo.

Instead it has muddled along with the tricky transition from highly profitable dial-up connections to the greater uncertainty of broadband.

The new idea is to develop AOL.com, as a portal sucking up advertising and search-related revenues — a Goo-hoo!, me-too strategy that sounds reasonable, but so obvious as to be embarrassing.

Time Warner has also largely run out of growth opportunities at home. It is already the biggest Hollywood film-maker and is the world’s largest magazine publisher. The company could expand in TV channels, but it has given up on music — where the industry is battling the downloader — and was never much into radio, which, satellite radio apart, is out of favour.

A partial exception is cable networks, where Time Warner is buying up parts of its rival Adelphia. But the cable business will then be partially spun off — too much cable and Time Warner risks becoming a wires- in-the-ground business with a few entertainment assets. Before long investors will start agitating for it to sell the “non-core” film studios, a dreary scenario for any media group.

Posted on Businessblog™

907 - June 23, 2005 - 7.35 AM EST

Is Yahoo better than Google?

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, is asking Google and Yahoo to explain the reasons why their reported results are sometimes much larger than their actual viewable results.

“Can someone from Google or Yahoo help me to understand why their reported results are sometimes 1000 times larger than their viewable results? I look forward to being educated.”

This comes as a response to Tristan Louis’s comparisons between Google, Yahoo, and Technorati’s results. Tristan compares Technorati, Yahoo, and Google on indexing the blogosphere. Here’s what he concluded:

Yahoo generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results.

Posted on Businessblog™

906 - June 22, 2005 - 8.21 PM EST

Just how knowledgeable are search engines?

Leading search engines still become confused when a specific question of knowledge is queried. Hoping to fill the gap, Answers.com and Ask.com have pledged to provide more adept responses to vexing but straightforward questions about history, science, geography, pop culture and sports.

Both search engines aim to provide a correct answer explicitly at the top of a search's first results page — or with a highly placed link to a Web page that contains the information.

Their mission raises a question: Just how knowledgeable are these search engines? To find out, I staged a very unscientific test consisting of questions culled from a recent edition of Trivial Pursuit. My mock game pitted the avowed prowess of Answers.com and Ask.com against the Internet's most widely used search engines — Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.

The findings: Answers.com and Ask.com appear to be a step ahead of Google and noticeably smarter than Yahoo and MSN when dealing with such esoteric questions as "What glass beads are created when a meteorite strikes the Earth's surface?"

Both Answers.com and Ask.com guided me to the correct answer (tektites) with the first link on the results page — an aptitude that both sites displayed with 10 of the 20 questions posed in the theoretical game. When they didn't get the answer with the very first link in response to some questions, both search engines generally came through within the next two links.

Posted on Businessblog™

905 - June 22, 2005 - 6.02 PM EST

Google says it will not compete against PayPal

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed yesterday that the company wants to expand into online payment services, but said at the same time Google won't compete against PayPal. In a company-issued statement, Schmidt said the company does not plan to offer what he called a "person-to-person stored-value payments system."

One of the main features of PayPal, a division of eBay Inc., is the ability for consumers to store balances in order to make e-commerce payments.

Following a story by the Wall Street Journal published on Friday, speculation ran rampant about Google offering a PayPal competitor.

Instead, Schmidt said that Google is looking to expand its current online payment services, which is largely used to handle payments from advertisers and to Web publishers in Google's popular online advertising programs.

Posted on Businessblog™

904 - June 22, 2005 - 10.22 AM EST

MSN Local in beta testing

Microsoft launched its MSN Local Search on its search engine. MSN uses a basic local search result selection of local businesses populated by biz data centers and also has integrated mapping via Microsoft MapPoint and digital aerial images supplied by US only TerraServer-USA (which are quite primitive when compared to the Google Keyhole Sat Images).

Adding to the group of major search engines offering a local search function, which include Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and even Amazon, MSN Local Web Search is a respectable first try in Beta.

Additionally, the Microsoft Virtual Earth team will join MSN Search, bringing over 10 years of mapping and geo-location experience. MSN states the move “allows MSN to provide an immersive experience that enables consumers to search, navigate, explore and discover local information through the next wave of local search technology.”

Posted on Businessblog™

903 - June 21, 2005 - 9.56 AM EST

AOL to unveil overhauled Internet portal

AOL executives want to unveil a revamped AOL Internet portal that will offer visitors free access to services and features that in the past were available only to paid members.

The strategy is a major shift for the once high-flying division of Time Warner, which had considered AOL's walled garden of online content a major selling point.

But an erosion in the number of the Internet firm's dial-up subscribers has prompted executives to change course and directly challenge the kings of free Internet content, namely Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and Google.

"This situation we find ourselves in -- people say -- is that the brand is declining and dial-up is falling," said Jim Riesenbach, a senior vice president at AOL. "But I think we're at a great point that we're really bullish about."

Starting Tuesday, a test version of the new portal will be accessible via a link at aol.com. A limited number of features will be available at first, with more added in the coming months.

AOL believes that creating a free portal will expand its audience beyond just subscribers. Online advertising will provide the revenue.

The free Web model has propelled Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, and Google, based in Mountain View, to great financial success over the past few years. AOL, in contrast, has foundered.

AOL's membership has dropped from a peak of 26.7 million members in 2002 to 21.7 million at the end of the first quarter this year as subscribers switch to high-speed connections offered by other companies. AOL's dial-up service costs $23.90 monthly.

Posted on Businessblog™

902 - June 20, 2005 - 12.51 PM EST

Google to compete directly against PayPal?

Google did not respond to requests for comment on the reports. Any potential move by Google to enter the Internet payments sector could prove lucrative - PayPal earned eBay $233m in the first quarter of this year.

However, should Google decide to enter the online payments arena, it may affect the company's relationship with one of its largest advertisers, PayPal parent eBay.

Posted on Businessblog™

901 - June 20, 2005 - 8.07 AM EST

Privacy rights to resurface at Google?

Google's new contract with the University of Michigan contains no safeguards for protecting the privacy rights of people who will search the university's library collection using the Internet.

The contract was made public Friday. Google announced plans late last year to digitise and index as many as seven million volumes of material from the University of Michigan to make them searchable on the Internet as part of its Google Print service, a searchable index of books.

Google also has agreements with Harvard, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Stanford, where Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page began their search work before launching their company in 1998.

While the library projects have prompted copyright concerns from university groups and publishers, privacy issues are the latest wrinkle in Google's plans to expand the universe of web-searchable data.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2005. All rights reserved.

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