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Europe Wants Search Engines to Delete Data Sooner
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 7, 2008 | Share This
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The European Commission may soon tell search engines to delete user data within six months, the BBC reports, after a report found that search engine data storage might not do enough to protect user privacy. From the Beeb:
The report from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said search engine providers had “insufficiently explained” why they were storing and processing personal data to their users.
It said “search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for”.
The report said the personal data of users should not be stored or processed “beyond providing search results” if the user had not created an account or registered with the search engine.
Currently, Google keeps data associated with users for as long as eighteen months, but then anonymizes its data logs. Google’s Public Policy blog didn’t waste any time responding to the EC:
We believe that data retention requirements have to take into account the need to provide quality products and services for users, like accurate search results, as well as system security and integrity concerns. We have recently discussed some of the many ways that using this data helps improve users’ experience, from making our products safe, to preventing fraud, to building language models to improve search results. This perspective — the ways in which data is used to improve consumers’ experience on the web — is unfortunately sometimes lacking in discussions about online privacy.
Though Google acknowledges that discussion about online privacy when it comes to search and its other products is needed, it doesn’t actually initiate the dialogue or take a real position in this post. Understandable - now that Google owns DoubleClick and will have its hand in more targeted advertising, more user privacy doesn’t help its bottom line. Same goes for Yahoo and Microsoft.
More:
- Charlie Cooper of CNET breaks it down.
Yahoo Mobile’s oneSearch Goes 2.0, Now with Voice
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 2, 2008 | Share This
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Yahoo is beefing up its mobile capabilities, today announcing key improvements in mobile search. According to the company’s press release, it will blow out its user-facing products, create standards for mobile widgets, and continue to develop monetization in the mobile space.
More specifically, Search Engine Land notes Yahoo is opening up its oneSearch platform, and also cut a deal with voice-search technology company Vlingo. Yahoo led a $20 million round of financing for Vlingo, which makes speech recognition software that will better position Yahoo against Google and other competitors. Mashable notes that speech recognition will likely become more integral to mobile search:
It’s evident that speech recognition is going to be pushed as a driving force for a good portion of development regarding mobile search over the next few months, to say the least. Perhaps Yahoo will even apply Vlingo more directly to some of its other mobile applications as well.
Google’s Search Share Keeps Rising
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 19, 2008 | Share This
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Google’s search share grew 0.7% in February 2008, according to stats released by comScore today. The search giant continues to eat away at Yahoo’s share, which declined 0.6% in the same period. Microsoft also lost 0.2% and Ask.com gained 0.1% (anyone wonder how much that has to do with their ads on Google?). From comScore:
When it came to overall query volume in February, comScore reported across-the-board slowdowns, for Google and everyone else, of 5% to 8%. ComScore notes that some of this decrease is seasonal. February’s missing a couple of days compared to the rest of the month; it’s unclear whether that’s what “seasonal” means or if the comScore data is at all adjusted for the difference.
In related news, the fight for search share has now landed on radio: CNET reports that Yahoo is currently running local radio ads in the San Francisco area, in an effort to convince Google users to switch over. This is a very strange strategy for an online media company that has a vast stable of properties and partnerships - rather than using a dying medium, Yahoo should be better at leveraging the Internet that it helped build.
Ask.com Will Cut 40 Employees, Target Mom Searchers
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 5, 2008 | Share This
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Ask.com has said it will lay off 40 employees, or 8% of its workforce, and it is giving up the fight for Google’s market share as a general search engine by repositioning the company to focus on answering question-based queries that come from women. Per Reuters, here is Ask’s new audience:
The company found that about 65 percent of its user base are women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast. That contrasts with the wider search market, where women account for closer to 48 percent of users.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This move sets Ask.com back to its Ask Jeeves days, sans mascot. Though Forrester analyst Charlene Li says targeting the married mom audience is a smart move for Ask, Rafat Ali at paidContent notes that it’s still an uphill battle against Google.
Microsoft Bids $44.6B for Yahoo
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 1, 2008 | Share This
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This morning Microsoft extended an unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, amounting to a 62 percent premium on Yahoo’s Jan 31 closing stock price. Said Microsoft in today’s press release, “We don’t actually want the company, we just wanted to see what the media would do“… okay, maybe they didn’t say that exactly. But in the search world, it’s an understatement to call this bid a big deal (note Techmeme screenshot left).
For Searchviews readers, here’s a rundown of what happened and what’s important to take away:
Microsoft Wants To Buy Yahoo
…They have for awhile (see rumors from 2007, 2006). Recognizing Google’s unrivaled lead in traffic & technology, Microsoft sees an opportunity to tap Yahoo for its audience, engineering talent, brand value (esp. in search), and social media properties (Flickr & Del.icio.us). In the meantime, Yahoo has spent the past month hemorrhaging money and employees, and is in serious need of a bail out. So far, industry analysts broadly agree that a deal is likely to happen.
What’s the Deal?
There is much discussion about the terms and implications of the deal. Here’re a few standouts:
- Henry Blodget says the deal will happen on Microsoft’s terms, since Yahoo is desperate, and there’ll be no competitors to counter MSFT’s offer.
- Paul Kedrosky says it’ll happen, but the conjoined Microsoft-Yahoo still won’t beat Google.
- Danny Sullivan envisions a lovechild born of Yahoo search, Microsoft ads, Yahoo’s audience, Microsoft’s “technological prowess”, and Flickr.
- Loren Baker concurs that Yahoo Search will take over Microsoft’s Live Search, and predicts that old-school SEO practitioners will feel some pain, while secondary search engines (Ask.com) will potentially gain market share.
- Shar Van Boskirk writes on Forrester’s blog that the merger will help grow online advertising by yielding “laser-target ads” & easier ad management. Shar also has some interesting thoughts about increasing convergence of media + technology.
Though the combined search impact is undoubtedly huge, the opportunities in display should not be overlooked. A combined MSFT/YHOO would be the clear leader in display advertising, reaping the benefits of Yahoo’s traffic volume and Microsoft’s ad serving technology (esp in wake of their aQuantive acquisition).
And Third Place in Global Search Goes to…
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 28, 2008 | Share This
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Chinese search engine Baidu beat Microsoft for third place in the global search market in December 2007, comScore reported late last week. Baidu, which recently relaunched in Japan and has 70% of the search market in China, captured just over 5% of the global search market while Microsoft claimed just under 3%.
The winner was Google, with 62%, trailed at a very distant number two by Yahoo’s 13%. And Ask.com’s 1.1% share and eighth-place spot is threatened by Russian search engine Yandex, which follows Ask closely at 0.9%. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld expresses surprise that three of the engines on the list don’t use the Roman alphabet:
The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet… Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.
But though English is by far the front-runner when it comes to world Internet users by language, claiming just under a third of all users, China is number two in the list, with nearly 15% of Internet users speaking Chinese. So Baidu’s popularity makes sense, and its expansion to Japan should help it gain more of the world’s search traffic (7% of Internet users are Japanese speakers).
What is surprising is that other local engines aren’t better represented in search share, whether or not the alphabet is Roman. Some of this is likely due to restricted Internet access: Arabic, which saw more than 1500% growth online from 2000 to 2007, is spoken in countries that frequently block or censor the Internet. But Spanish, which is the third most popular online language and is not censored, does not have a local engine represented in comScore’s list. It will be interesting to see if Baidu can continue to capture more of the global search market share and if engines from other countries - like India, which has a huge population and is experiencing a tech boom - will begin to appear on this list.
Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 11, 2008 | Share This
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This week, we’re launching Searchviews: Week in Review, a digest of sorts in which we’ll highlight the past week’s Searchviews posts, along with noting other top stories in search, social media, and Internet news. Look for it every Friday. Happy weekend-reading:
- This week’s theme was “open,” and it’s shaping up to be the theme of the year. First, Sony BMG let go of DRM, but they came up with a dumb scheme to sell redeemable giftcards. (Thankfully, they got smart and struck a deal with Amazon yesterday).
- In other “open” news, Google and Facebook joined the Data Portability Workgroup, which wants to let Internet users take their social data from site to site. Not to be outdone, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Flickr jumped on board, as well. Many of these sites don’t actually want users to be able to do this because it hurts their pageviews, so we’ll see what happens.
- And final point in “open”: Bebo now invites everyone to design applications for its network.
- Wikia Search finally launched, but to some pretty harsh criticism. Lesson to entrepreneurs: less hype, more private alpha. Incidentally, another “human-powered” search engine, Mahalo, is growing like gangbusters despite initial blogosphere scoffing.
- Ask.com lost a CEO, but kept it in the family with their replacement. Barry Diller really wants you to try his search engine, people, and 2008 is the year he wants to see you migrate over en masse.
- Microsoft kicked off what’s sure to be a year of many M&As with its acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search company FAST.
- Surely our favorite story this week, though we didn’t spill any digital ink on it ourselves, is the Facebook hoax pulled by one young Frenchman, Arash Derambarsh, who got himself “elected” Facebook president via an app… and managed to convince the entire French press that it actually means something. Apparently lack of understanding of social networking is even more pronounced in the European mainstream media (as in, they don’t get it at all) than it is stateside (where journalists and bloggers represent the bulk of users over 30).
- And finally, a bunch of stats released this week affirmed something we’ve been feeling in our gut for a while: online video will overtake television, probably. I mean, would you rather watch those annoying judges from Dancing with the Stars on their own spin-off, dance-off show that is already painfully hyped and will probably make you want to pluck your eyes out… or would you watch this compact but totally genius interpretation of our American past, Drunk History? Not that we’re biased or anything, but we’ll say more about this particular topic soon.
Microsoft to Bid $1.2 Billion for Enterprise Search Co. FAST
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 8, 2008 | Share This
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Microsoft said today it will offer $1.2 billion to acquire Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian enterprise search company. The software giant’s offer is for outstanding shares of FAST stock on the Oslo stock exchange and represents a 42 percent premium to the actual stock price. FAST has more than 3,500 enterprise clients, among them the Washington Post and Time Warner. Julie Kent at Search Engine Journal outlines FAST’s pricing, its relatively new focus on search monetization, and its market share:
FAST’s technological solutions are high-end and customized, with pretty lofty license and maintenance fees. Average license feels range from $300,000 to $600,000, with annual maintenance fees starting at $60,000.
The company’s primary focus at this point is “monetization”, or the use of search engines embedded in applications for financial transactions.
In 2007, FAST reported sales in monetization accounting for 70% of revenues, and enterprise search engine sales making up the other 30% of sales. For 2008, FAST projects $200 to $210 million in revenue, which is about a 10% market share of what IDC is forcasting will be a total $2.1 billion spend on corporate search applications in 2008.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land also reports there are rumors that Microsoft will use FAST technology to become a better contender in the consumer search market, while Larry Dignan writes that the deal will spur consolidation in the enterprise search space and details how he thinks Microsoft will integrate FAST products into its existing offerings:
Microsoft is likely to raise a ruckus in enterprise search and force consolidation among FAST’s rivals. Microsoft can bundle FAST with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and probably poach some features for its consumer search if warranted. And Microsoft will gladly take FAST’s search engineering talent.
Wikia Search Launches in Alpha, Slammed with Bad Reviews
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 7, 2008 | Share This
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The long-anticipated search engine from the people behind Wikipedia, Wikia Search, launched today in alpha to mostly poor reviews. Mathew Ingram sums up the blogosphere’s reactions at The Globe and Mail:
Mike Arrington — the editor of TechCrunch, a technology blog that can help to make or break companies with a favourable review — called the service a “letdown,” while the Centernetworks blog described it as “not ready” for prime time. Stan Schroeder, who writes for a popular tech blog called Mashable, said point-blank that Wikia Search “sucks.” Others were even less complimentary.
After a year of hype and $14 million poured into this project, the resulting search engine interface is pretty (and they win cutest search engine logo, for sure) but the actual search results are indeed disappointing: Mashable’s Stan Shroeder notes that the first result for “Wikipedia” is a German listing, and Search Engine Roundtable points to abysmal results for “George Bush.” Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim also writes that Wikia Search looks very susceptible to SEO black-hat tricks, which may kill the project outright.
But it’s important to remember that Wikia Search’s human-powered, social-search approach means that the search results pages will be thin until people start using and contributing to the engine (or rather, if they do so). This is not unlike challenges faced by another social search engine, Mahalo, which is faring a lot better than people had expected. In TechCrunch comments, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself admits/defends the engine’s shortcomings (as does this caveat on the Wikia Search about page), noting that Wikipedia had a similar paltry start, and he says Wikia Search is a project to build a search engine, not the completed search engine itself:
So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.
We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.
Wikia Search relies on user-written Mini Articles (here’s one about Google), but it’s strange that they don’t utilize the already user-written content from Wikipedia to help fill these out - why reinvent their own wheel rather than take advantage of their massive content base? It would be a mistake to write off Wikia Search outright, so we’re filing this one under sites to check back on.
New Search Engine Blekko: Future Google Challenger?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 3, 2008 | Share This
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Look out, Google: Rich Skrenta, co-founder of news site Topix and the Open Directory Project, and the inventor of the first computer virus, has announced he will be taking on the giant with his new search startup, Blekko. Skrenta wrote that he’ll be taking on Google because the web has changed and grown remarkably since Google’s founding a decade ago, and yet it still has very little significant competition:
The web is big. Really, really big. It’s literally billions and billions of pages. It’s Carl Sagan big. And it’s doubling in size every year or two.
So the idea that what you can see in positions 1-3 above the fold on Google are the sum of what the web has to say about every possible query is crazy.
And yet they have 85%+ market share, and little effective competition. At the same time there is such a fabulous business in search. It’s the highest monetization service on the web, by far. Why does this Coke have no Pepsi?
Skrenta is not revealing much about his strategy for taking down Google, but he has written that he doesn’t like PageRank. Blekko thus far consists of six people and $2 million in funding, and TechCrunch reports that there may not be a public prototype until 2009. Though it’s hard to imagine Google bested in search, it was once a little startup too, so it’s not impossible that another company could eventually claim part of its significant market share. And as Arrington at TechCrunch points out, Blekko may not need significant market share to be a success, as even 1% of the search market is said to be worth $1 billion.