“The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more.”

I have to admit, searching on Glue Pages is pretty cool. The modules of information are split between traditional Yahoo directories (finance, maps, news, images) and well-known third party sites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Quick Facts, MonsterTrak) and change depending on the specific query. For example, a search for “Microsoft” pulled up the company’s stock charts from Y! Finance, job postings in India from MonsterIndia.com, and Yahoo! News postings. A search for “Mumbai” pulls up the city’s Wikipedia entry, train information, restaurant locations and phone numbers, and a gallery of Flickr images with the Mumbai tag. Finally, a search for “Ferrari” pulls in a Yahoo! Images gallery, HowStuffWorks.com, relevant eBay items priced in Indian rupees, and a set of YouTube videos tagged with Ferrari. Third party sites can sign up to be placed in a module by emailing the Glue Pages team.

Classic search results are still on the left-hand side of the page, and sponsored links modules also exist. Something no one is mentioning, however, is that the Glue idea is very similar to how Ask.com presents its results. Below are screenshots from Yahoo! Glue Pages and Ask.com searches for “mango”.

The most noticeable difference is the emphasis given to classic search, with Ask.com placing them prominently in the center, and Yahoo more shunting them off to the side. Glue Pages definitely puts more weight on the module content and consequently each module has more information then the corresponding one in Ask. Furthermore, Yahoo possesses more third-party sources of module content than Ask, with an emphasis on image and video multimedia. Overall, I’d say the conclusion is that while Ask.com has had the right idea, Yahoo’s Glue Pages has gotten it right in this beta.

If nothing else, it allows users to understand a topic they are searching for information on at a glance while creating a high probability of the user finding relevant specific information on the main page in an aesthetically-pleasing manner. For now, Glue Pages is only beta for India, which houses one of Yahoo’s key research and development centers in Bangalore, but between this and Google launching YouTube India just a little earlier, it’s definitely a good time to be a user in that large and rapidly growing market.

Share This

“Search is great, but you can’t advertise Coca-Cola in search.”

Danny Sullivan brought this to our attention over Twitter. Now, while the context of the article is how Google is the winner in this Microsoft-Yahoo standoff (there’s no escaping that story, is there) it’s just difficult to overlook a statement like that. I mean, search connects brands with concepts - is there anything more central to Coca-Cola’s marketing than this? A quick search confirms that Coke’s current management believes this as well - paid search ads for MyCokeRewards.com and the Coca-Cola Store show up on Google when you search for the brand name. Furthermore, the first page of results is dominated by Coke-branded pages including Coca-Cola.com, DietCoke.com, theCoca-ColaCompany.com, and Music.Coca-cola.com. Why does that make a difference? The brand’s presence is so broad that Coke’s presence is pushing potentially inflammatory websites off the first page, such as KillerCoke.org, a website that outlines the torture and killings of union leaders at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia.

No wonder Peter is the former CMO of Coke.

Really, this is just more evidence that CPG companies don’t understand search and online advertising, as we mentioned last week.

Share This

Well, in the end the magic numbers were 19, 33, 37, and 24. $19 is what Yahoo was trading at on January 31, immediately before the Microsoft acquisition story broke. Overnight, Yahoo daily share volume increase tenfold and share price skyrocketed about 53%, where it remained during the three months of talks. Microsoft’s final offer for Yahoo was $33 a share (a 72% premium over January’s pre-acquisition talks price), with Yang holding out for a sky-high $37 a share. Not unexpectedly, as today is the first full trading day since the end of negotiations, Yahoo’s share price has plummeted about 15% to around $24, the biggest drop for Yahoo in two years.

The questions being asked are how will Microsoft expand its online market share without Yahoo, and what Yahoo’s next move will be. There is some speculation that Microsoft is eying AOL, or waiting to get back at the table with Yahoo in a quarter or two (about the time it’d take to think of a better name for this deal than ‘MicroHoo’). Since Yahoo’s share price is hovering above the original $19 a share, I’d wager the latter is getting priced in.

Another issue that is getting priced in is the potential of a Yahoo-Google deal. The two had a mutually-described successful implementation of Google’s search advertising on Yahoo’s properties, which could point to future joint projects ahead. However, I think Google may have pushed a little harder to get in with Yahoo because of the pressure from the Microsoft offer. Now that there’s no competitor at the table, Google can take its time in whatever it chooses to implement, leaving Yahoo the big loser in all of this.

Indeed, it’s difficult to get away from being negative on Yahoo after everything is said and done. Despite Yang’s assurances that all is well, there is little that points to investing in Yahoo as a defensible long-term strategy that will produce returns. No doubt this aggravates shareholders and execs, who could have escaped with a sweet profit from the Microsoft deal. Any combination of the Big Three would be subject to government review and antitrust regulations, but this first move represents the opening gambit of an acquisition chess game as Microsoft looks to combat Google on its home turf, search.

Share This

On Searchviews:

• Our take on consumer package good companies and their definition of branding
• E-mail meets social networking in startup Zenbe
• MediaPost article by our own Peter Hershberg on understanding your customer’s search vocabulary
• An analysis of Henry Blodget’s SAI Live 25
• We catch Google displaying “ad scores” on searches
• A new paper on real image recognition in search
• Peter weights in again, this time on Google’s suite of services and what it means for the future of search

Elsewhere:

• Grand Theft Auto IV launches to a thunderous response while mocking some well-known companies in the way only Rockstar can
• Google debuts TV Ads, a way of encouraging AdWords advertisers to move to TV
• AT&T announces plans to subsidize the new iPhone by $200 this summer, fueling speculation as to the reason why
• The Web hits its 15^th anniversary
• Microsoft and Yahoo go back and forth on the takeover deal, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer weighing his options after Yahoo’s board raised it ask price to $37 a share, a 26% premium

Share This

Especially vexing to these advertisers is the idea that they might actually get penalized for showing up more frequently:

“An executive at one CPG marketer recently noted how perverse the search-pricing model has become for the industry.

‘It used to be that impressions weren’t in the pricing model,” he said. But Google eventually incorporated them in a roundabout way, he said.

‘If you get too many impressions without getting clicks, the price goes up, or they kick out off completely,’ he said. ‘So they thwarted with their pricing model the window we had to actually deliver impressions…because of course it makes their revenue go up. But that makes our value go down – for everybody in package goods.’

He said the company had purposely tried to maximize impressions while minimizing clicks in search ads, though he termed that ‘smart buying’, not ‘gaming the system’.”

To me, this approach seems completely wrongheaded.

Search ads absolutely contribute to branding - having a brand show up in a prominent place on Google or Yahoo’s results page draws a big mental connection between the query and the company. But simply showing up in search isn’t valuable. The ad placement isn’t really where the value is. It’s in the click. The click is what transforms a branding opportunity.

When a person visits a search engine, it’s not because they want to read a bunch of company listings side by side. It’s typically because they want to visit a site that can offer useful information to a question or need they have. The ad itself doesn’t have much value… it’s all about context and intent. “Does this ad answer my question? Let’s click through and find out.” After the click, the user makes a decision about the relevance of the result, and therefore the brand.

Saying that you appreciate the branding value of search and actually understanding the branding value of search are two completely different things. I understand what’s causing the dissonance - CPM pricing is comfortable. They understand it, and it gave them advantages. But this new model isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s provided users with a service that they generally appreciate, and has made more money for the engines than they could have made under the old two-martini-lunch-and-a-handshake model. The smartest brand marketers understand this and have learned to love the click.

Share This

If that’s not enough for you, don’t worry: we haven’t even hit the big idea yet. TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson describes Zenbe’s notable function:

“Zenbe’s big idea, however, consists of a feature called “ZenPages” that are intended to help you organize your email into projects or topics. Instead of just putting messages into folders… you can assign messages to ZenPages with specially designated tags.

…This lets groups collaborate around email without having to CC each other on every single one. Calendar events can also be shared this way.

In addition to sharing emails and calendars, you can install a range of other default widgets: a group task list, an agenda, a discussion thread, and a list of relevant links. But here’s where your imagination should take off: Zenbe also plans to allow 3^rd-party apps onto thses pages, ones that have direct access to users’ emails.”

It’s clear that this is a huge opportunity for email to move into the realm of social networking, in a sense. There are already several third-party integrations announced, including YouTube and Flickr. Unfortunately, Zenbe is still in private beta, but we’ll be looking for the startup to make ripples when it eventually goes live.

Share This

MediaPost has posted an article by Managing Partner Peter Hershberg on the importance of understanding how your customer searches for your products. More from Peter:

“In paid search marketing, buying keywords that no one searches for can be a huge misstep, causing marketers to miss out on valuable traffic and reduce the impact of their campaign. In search engine optimization (SEO), creating website copy and title tags (the words that show up on the top bar of the browser only) that don’t resonate with searchers means the site is less likely to come up when it’s most relevant to the audience.

Instead, marketers should learn from the mistake of brands like Wachovia, which includes a page for vehicle loans on its site. Though it’s an accurate umbrella term for what Wachovia offers, the phrase ‘vehicle loan’ just doesn’t have the same volume as ‘car loan’. Again, while this may be how Wachovia defines its services, it’s not what customers look for.”

Read the rest.

Share This

“Like public companies, the value of private change in real-time, but there’s no convenient way to track these changes… until now. We’ve created a real-time tool, the SAI 25 Live, that indexes the value of the SAI 25 companies to the NASDAQ. The SAI 25 Live updates the values in real-time (with a 20-minute delay). So if you’re jealous of all your friends at public companies who can recalculate their net worth all day, just check out the SAI 25 Live. This will tell you how much your stock options are worth right now.”

Now, there are a multitude of techniques available to perform valuations of public companies practiced by investors, ranging from the textbook (dividend discount model, earnings multiplier model) to the obscure (ask James Simons at Renaissance). However, they all have one thing in common: a heavy reliance on the availability of financial data, like revenue and profit numbers, free cash flow and balance sheet results. Unfortunately, these numbers are rarely publicly available for private institutions like those on the SAI 25 Live, leading one to wonder how accurate these valuations are. From the SAI 25 Live valuation page:

“Valuing companies is a subjective exercise, one that is highly dependent on information. In theory, companies are worth the present value of future cash flows, but since no one knows exactly what future cash flows will be (or the perfect rate at which to discount them), theory and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. An additional challenge of valuing private companies, as opposed to public ones, is that detailed financial information is often unavailable or outdated. And many private companies are often early in their growth cycles and therefore haven’t reached mature profit margins.

Ultimately, of course, private companies are worth what any stock or asset is worth – what someone will pay for them.”

Of course, here Blodget is correct twice. Private companies are certainly worth what people will pay for them. Also, theory and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, which is exactly the value of this analysis. The SAI 25 Live takes into account implied valuations in private financings (a terrible absolute indicator, but of some value directionally given an existing valuation), financial performance (nonexistent for most of this list), market share and market size (doable), and growth rate (dependent on revenue numbers, which are rarely reported and so must be guessed) making this list a poor indicator of anything other than relative valuations (Facebook is worth more than Ning, who knew?), and even there it can only be used sparingly (company X being worth Y times that of company Z on this list is probably meaningless). In the words of Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

“Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nontheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by ‘splitting the difference’ between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$8- million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between the two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.”

Agreed. Some have even gone so far as to call it an attention-grabbing activity, like FakeSteve:

“To make it fresh and dynamic, they somehow yoked these made-up numbers to the NASDAQ so their made-up numbers change into new made-up numbers all day long. That way all these [employees] working for worthless companies will click on that list all day long…generating loads of stupid traffic for Alley Insider. And trust me, that’s the real point of this list. It’s a cheap ploy for ginning up traffic.”

Or for pulling financial information straight from the horse’s mouth. There are so many requests for data that could correct these valuations that it almost seems like a device for getting these companies to divulge their actual numbers straight to SAI. Regardless, it is difficult to accept a 25x revenue valuation for Facebook common stock, given that Google trades at between 10.5x and 15x revenue, which in itself is unusual. Also, Wikipedia, valued at $7 billion, is a nonprofit, meaning the assessment measures Wikipedia’s asset value if it were to change into a for-profit organization. This change would certainly affect its users, which in turn would affect the site’s operation, affecting the valuation.

Perhaps the best thing to take away from this is that it is indeed just an entertaining parlor game to perform these valuations. Serious investors should already be familiar with this.

Share This

Contrary to other reports, it’s not just for international searches, however. At Reprise, we noticed the numbers appearing under domestic searches. In the screenshot below, a search at 11:35 EST for “grand theft auto” pulled up two sponsored links, with the scores displayed between them (boxed in red).

Strangely, subsequent searches were unable to replicate the result, and as of noon EST it seems the scores are gone from international searches as well. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any Google updates on the issue.

Share This

“On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.”

How is this different from what is currently done? Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand:

“Image search at the major search engines today relies largely on looking at words that are used around images – on the pages that host them, in image file names and in ALT text associated with them. No real image recognition is done by any of the majors. Search for “apples”, and they haven’t actually somehow scanned the images themselves to “see” if they contain pictures of apples.”

In their paper, Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja introduce algorithms that can actually “look” at the image itself rather than the associated text, find similarities, and rank the pages in order of similarity to an original image deemed to be the correct result for the query. In the words of VentureBeat’s Anythony Ha:

“The new system proposed in the Google paper ranks images based not on text, but on the common ‘visual themes’ found in each search result. In the McDonald’s example, the VisualRank system would see that the company’s famous golden arches are a common visual theme, and prioritize pictures that feature the arches prominently. Testes of this new system returned 83 percent fewer irrelevant search results than Google Image Search, according to the VisualRank paper.”

This is definitely a cutting-edge development, if it can be implemented successfully. It will help cut back on duplicate images, but more importantly, will reduce image spam, where photos are tagged inappropriately and show up for unrelated searches.

Share This