SLOW Movement

NY Times: Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

December 26, 2009

Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

By STEFANIE OLSEN

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: The Science of Managing Search Ads

December 22, 2009

The Science of Managing Search Ads

By MIGUEL HELFT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Cyber Monday had gone swimmingly for Tiny Prints.

Despite the economic downturn, customers streamed into the Tiny Prints online store on the Monday after Thanksgiving, called Cyber Monday because it is one of the busiest days of the year for Web retailers. They snapped up the company’s custom holiday cards at roughly twice the rate of a year ago.

But in the following days, Ed Han, the chief executive, and his team made a risky bet in search of higher profits. Hoping that traffic and sales would stay up, they pulled back on the Google search ads that had helped drive visitors to Tiny Prints.

The gamble backfired. Just as Tiny Prints pulled back, competitors appeared to spend more aggressively to display their ads when people typed “holiday cards” or “photo cards” into Google. By the middle of the week, sales growth began to taper off and a bright holiday season suddenly appeared a bit less rosy.

“We knew we had made a bad decision,” Mr. Han said. Tiny Prints reversed course, but it took the company, which is privately held, more than a day to recover — a critical amount of time during the heavy shopping season.

For most people, Google and other search engines are essential tools to navigate the Web. But the workings of the text ads, the blurbs that peddle goods and services on the search results pages, are largely hidden from Web users.

For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age.

“It is critical,” said Ellen Siminoff, the chairwoman of Efficient Frontier, which helps companies manage their search advertising campaigns. “You have to have data and be able to analyze it. It’s a bit like playing chess, but you are blind to what your competitors will do.”

Many industry insiders say search engine marketing, as the practice is known, is one of the most effective forms of advertising ever devised. In just a decade, it has grown into an $11 billion business in the United States. It accounts for the vast majority of Google’s $22 billion in annual global sales.

Google’s service, called AdWords, dominates so thoroughly that some advertisers have felt at the mercy of the company, and complained that they had little control over the complex advertising system. One company, TradeComet, filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of artificially increasing its advertising rates.

But by and large, businesses find search advertising effective and continue to flock to it, albeit at a slower rate than in previous years. As growth has tapered off over the last year, Google has stepped up its outreach efforts to help midsize companies like Tiny Prints use its tools more effectively, hoping that will encourage those companies to spend more.

“It’s good for our business and it’s good for their business,” said Claire Johnson, vice president for online sales and operations at Google.

Like many other businesses, Tiny Prints also buys search ads on Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. While results are “very attractive,” the traffic coming from those sites is small compared to referrals from Google, Mr. Han said. As a result, Tiny Prints spends nearly 90 percent of its search marketing budget on Google, he said.

Mr. Han said that Tiny Prints, which specializes in high-end custom-designed greeting cards, had been working at perfecting its search advertising for the last two years. Its three-person team, veterans of Walmart.com and eBay, has become expert at poring over spreadsheets and sifting through the data about visitors and shoppers on the company’s Web site. During the holiday season, they monitor ads and traffic patterns hourly, and meet daily with Mr. Han and other executives to adjust budgets and strategies.

During one of the company’s daily budget meetings in mid-November, Anna Fieler, the vice president for marketing, said, “We are on a trajectory to overspend on search.” She then added, “But we are delivering on revenue.”

Search ads are bought from Google through an auction, and businesses pay Google only when someone clicks on their ad. An ad’s position on Google’s search results pages depends on Google’s secret formula derived from bid prices, the rate at which users previously clicked on the ad and a “quality score” determined by Google.

Since not all clicks turn into purchases, the trick for advertisers is to make sure that the amount they bid, multiplied by the average number of clicks needed to make a sale — the cost of acquiring a customer — does not exceed the profit derived from that sale.

But that can be easier said than done.

Early in the holiday season, for example, most people are window-shopping, so few clicks turn into sales. Tiny Prints is forced to pay more than $50 to acquire each customer, leaving little room for profits on an average order. Relying on spreadsheets of buying patterns from previous years, Tiny Prints search marketers make the case to Mr. Han that their cost of acquiring a customer is on track.

“We are seeing day by day that it is starting to dip,” said Isabelle Steiner, the director for search marketing said at the meeting in mid-November. “I’m projecting that by end of month, we’ll be spending $35.”

Based on those assurances, Mr. Han then gave the team the green light to increase spending on search ads. But Mr. Han brought up another point: competitors could disrupt the plans if they suddenly started bidding aggressively on the same keywords as Tiny Prints.

“What if Hallmark comes in on Saturday?” Mr. Han asked, referring to the Thanksgiving weekend. “Do we have a plan to react to what competitors might do?”

The plan, Ms. Steiner said, was to monitor the site around the clock.

A couple of weeks later, the vigilance paid off.

In a spot check squeezed between a birthday party and her own Christmas shopping, Ms. Fieler was welcomed by a screen of red alerts indicating that the Tiny Prints ads had fallen off the first page of Google search results for important keywords.

“We were then forced to make and implement a new plan to react to the competitive environment real-time,” Ms. Fieler said. “It was very tricky trying to balance not overpaying by participating in the frenzy with getting the impressions and clicks we needed to drive the business.”

By mid-December, with the bulk of the holiday shopping season behind them, Mr. Han and his team were looking haggard. In addition to late-night discussions of bidding strategies over instant messaging, they had pitched in to help wrap and ship orders.

Mr. Han would not disclose the company’s sales. But he said that by and large, the ad campaign on Google, which drove more than 20 percent of revenue, had been a success.

“Of the eight most important days of the year, we got seven exactly right,” Mr. Han said. “On one of the days, by our standards, we fell on our face.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Happy Thanksgiving!

My very first Thanksgiving in Salt Lake City! :)

 
Doodle for Google featuring Snoopy :) Found on www.google.com on Thanksgiving Day.

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November 26, 2009

Editorial

A Thanksgiving Toast

Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.

What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving table or for the faces we’re missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?

It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next Thanksgiving rolls around, we’ll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with suffering as much as with joy.

That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past and celebrate the present and open us to the future.

There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company 

Isreal News Agency: SEO, Google and Sex

SEO, Google And Sex

Tel Aviv ---- October 21, 2009 ..... The following parody is a cute tale of SEO, Google and sex which may have it creative origins in India. A magical place where thousands are employed for only a few dollars and whose mission is to attract both reader and search engine using any means they can. These busy Indian optimizers use a variety of legal spam methods, including employing the word sex to attract. Sex is the number one searched word on the Net with over 582,000,000 pages coming up on Google.

Even The New York Times has worked to ensure that its site and search results are incredibly Google friendly, so Google friendly in fact that a recent search for “sex” on Google currently serves the NY Times internal archive search results for sex as #2. 

In the story below, notice how often the word sex is used, along with the words Google and SEO. But what really made us smile in writing and editing this story was how organized and creative the writer was. He didn't just throw out some words hoping that some literally trash would stick to the search engines. For it remains the creative balance between good and interesting content and the optimization of that content which makes today's Internet Web and news author relevant.

SEO or search engine optimization is a term widely used in Internet marketing. It is quite useful for any Website in Israel, New York, London, Paris, China or India for increasing traffic, sales and services. It is crucial for any site to achieve its optimum ranking results in Google, Yahoo and numbers of other search engines.

SEO is the process of increasing the volume and traffic to a web site from various search engines by increasing organically the search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now, what is sex?
I think there is no need for the explanation of this term because it is the most searched term on the Internet. Everyone knows about sex and its importance for stability, sensation and satisfaction in life. So, it is referred to as a basic need. In the same way as SEO is critical for your site.

Why SEO and sex is important? SEO is important for the instant growth of your business. If you are not ranking well in the search engines then it can help you in various ways. It will enhance your site traffic. Traffic will increase your sales and services as you penetrate the market.

If you rank well, you may even establish a brand name in your specific market.

Sex is a sensation which is most important for a healthy, happy and peaceful life. A greater satisfaction may increase your thinking and coolness in life. If you enjoy healthy sex on a daily basis then it can enhance many other aspects of your life.

For ultimate satisfaction, a healthy sex life is important. In the same manner with SEO if you secure more organic traffic results on Google then the greater will be your satisfaction.

With a more natural and open approach as to your involvement in sex, the more powerful the sensation. In the same perspective as when you get a boom in business then naturally powerful results may fill you with sensation.

There are various similarities between SEO and sex.
But there are some differences which makes SEO better than sex. Well friends, I am going through the alphabetical approach to describe how SEO and sex is similar and dissimilar.

Both create sensation. SEO and sex both create intimacy and boundless sensations. SEO is a sensational thing for any Website and sex generates sensation through physical intercourse. As I stated above - SEO brings traffic to a site organically or naturally and sex creates sensation in the orgasm and in the human body by a natural phenomenon.
Both are organic functions - although both can be paid for. But please, do not confuse Google Adwords with prostitution. Although both may be optimized through the use of keywords.

As traffic increases for a site it brings new customers and increases business for the company or organization behind the site. In a similar way, as the climax during sex increases the pleasure increases. So, traffic for a site may be simulated with the orgasmic climax in sex.

Expertise is needed. In both cases an expert may generate wonderful results.
An SEO expert can manage the site for Google and Yahoo rankings well in the SERPs and secure increased traffic to the site. It is the tactics based on extensive professional marketing knowledge, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs), Web 2.0, viral marketing, PR and the practice of the SEO expert by which he or she can have a site ranked high in a very short time for targeted traffic. A practice which can work quicker and stay stronger than Viagra!

In a similar way, an expert in sex can generate more pleasure than a new member. He or she may know about the right sexual positions, time and the procedure to follow which can increase organic results and pleasurable sensation in the body.

Optimization is critical. Here is where SEO differs from sex because the word sex does not contain the letter “O”. SEO is the process of optimizing search results by using the professional knowledge of an SEO professional.

Professional SEO services will increase the optimum results day by day. But in the case of sex a human having more sex may lessen his or her interest and stamina with time.

Then we have the X - Factor. The “X Factor” refers to the indefinable“something” that makes one thing better than other. SEO is the process of making an “O”rdinary site into an e“X”tra ordinary site so the X letter is silent in SEO in this way. So, here is the difference or X - factor which differs SEO from sex and makes SEO more potent than sex.

Well friends, SEO has an extra silent X which proves that it is better than sex.
Now let's examine excessive linking in SEO and excess of sex.

Excessive means “exceeding a normal, usual, reasonable, or proper limit”. Linking which means “to become connected with or as if with a HTML link”.
Google released their guidelines on Link Scheme and below one can find violations of Google’s Webmaster blackhat practices that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

One must be wary of links intended to manipulate PageRank. Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web. Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging such as "link to me and I’ll link to you." Buying or selling links that pass PageRank are also forbidden.

Excessive linking may harm your site SEO Google search results and authority. When you link excessively the search engines will stop counting them when evaluating your authority.

Now in the case of sex the result is the same.

Excess sex may be harmful to your health. Some health care providers say that excess of sexual activity can put an extra strain on your heart, especially if your heart is already weak from a heart attack or heart disease. There is an exception to this rule when it comes to prostate cancer where recent research indicates that daily sex and ormasturbation may actually reduce incidence of this cancer by up to one third. And that daily sex for females may actually act as a catalyst for them to perform more domestic chores. Please do not slay the messenger here for these recent news developments.

Now for our professional assessment of the effect of no SEO and no sex.
If a site owner has no SEO then he may loose an opportunity to increase his or her business. And the site and owner may worry about other tactics which may be far more expensive for him or her. And he or she may go for paid or sponsored referrals such as Google Adwords - or sponsored links. And he or she may loose the opportunity to secure customers naturally.

These men are optimized but not for the Internet. The INA cautions all males athletes from taking part in sex before participating in sports. This is due to endorphins being released from the male's brain during sex. Research does indicate that endorphins have little or no affect on SEO, social networking, Web 2.0 or Internet marketing practices.

In the same way in the case of no sex the life of a human being may become random and full of dissatisfaction. We only recommend no sex activity in sports for male athletes about to set Olympic records in track and field, basketball, football, soccer, tennis, skiing, baseball, cricket, swimming, hockey and shooting. Sex is a basic need so its fulfillment is necessary for a healthy and peaceful life.

The concept for the above news story was found on the Web from SEO experts in India. We from the Israel News Agency spent hours correcting grammatical mistakes but must give credit to our busy friends in India for their unending, relentless enthusiasm and non-verbal Web creativity. 

If you care for more information on SEO or sex, you may check out the following websites: Israel Pr.com (English), Israel SEO Pr.com (Hebrew) or New York SEO Pr. Or you can take a relaxing and sensual trip with us to India in the near future!

The above news content was edited and SEO optimized in London and Israel for the Internet by the Leyden Communications Internet Marketing PR SEO Group London SEO Pr New York SEO Pr Israel SEO Pr Israel, London, New York.

Woo hoo......... :) :)

I pass my Google Advertising Professional (GAP) test!!! :)

Search Insider: Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned From Google

Everything I Need to Know About Business I Learned From Google by Aaron Goldman , Wednesday, October 21, 2009 And the beat goes on. What started off as 10 simple marketing lessons learned from Google blossomed into 15 and then 20before seeding a full-fledged book (in-progress). From there, I dove into lessons from Google about product development.Today, I'd like to bring it up a level to what Google can teach us about general business practices. For my next topic, I think I'll lighten the mood with we can learn from Google about dating -- so start tweeting your suggestions now! 1.     Innovate or die. Google fosters a culture of innovation by allowing employees to spend 20% of their time working on non-core projects. And, for core projects, it puts a relentless focus on continuous improvement. Heck, in the past year alone, Google made 359 changes to its Web search product. I guess when it's as easy as a click to switch from Google's bread-and-butter product to a competitor, it had better keep innovating. Netflix is a great example of a company devoted to innovation. It runs a contest awarding $1 million to anyone that can improve its recommendation algorithm by 10%. 2.     Automate or die. Despite ballooning to over 20,000 employees, Google is still a very lean operation. It's long held the belief that most problems can be solved by machines, not people. For example, when it first developed its search engine, rather than manually classify the Web into a directory of helpful links -- as some other companies had -- it created a technology to crawl the Web and assign value to  Web sites based on the number of inbound-links. Search marketers know better than anyone the power of automation -- whether that means bid management or multivariate testing. One that I'm particularly fond of is Kenshoo for its ability to automate not just the bidding process, but many parts of the campaign management process, including keyword generation and copywriting. 3.     Tap the long tail. This, of course, is another Chris Anderson theory -- in my last column, I riffed on " FREE" -- that draws from Google or, rather, helps explain its success. Google has made a living on the tail, from allowing people to access obscure Web assets to activating small mom and pop advertisers. Anderson's book has plenty of examples showing companies exploiting and profiting from the long tail, so I won't rehash them all here. Clearly, though, the Internet has moved the market for many products from mass to niche. When it comes to drawing up a business plan, size simply doesn't matter as it used to. Scale, on the other hand, matters very much. Just don't confuse the two. One example worth highlighting here is crowdSPRING, a start-up in Chicago. CrowdSPRING has unleashed the power of the long tail for sourcing creative services. Anyone can post a project and a bounty and get submissions from around the world before choosing the one they like best.  4.     Keep your head in the cloud. Google has made no secret of the fact that it believes cloud computing is, to quote Howard Hughes, "The way of the future." Google's product suite -- from Search to Gmail to Docs -- fully harnesses the power of the cloud and makes it one of the world's biggest metaphorical squatters on the other Big G's real estate. I've been on a bit of a sustainability kick lately. Scott Kier, a friend and colleague, has opened my eyes to the power of the triple bottom line -- people, planet, and profit. Not only is cloud computing environmentally friendly due to improved resource utilization, but it can be people- and profit-friendly as well by eliminating data-loss and fostering virtual-collaboration. The concept of tethering employees to offices in knowledge-work industries is quickly being proven ineffective. Let your people work from anywhere and reap the benefits of increased productivity -- no more death-by-meeting, not to mention, lower rent and overhead. Salesforce.com is a terrific application of cloud computing, allowing customers to manage CRM effectively and collaboratively. And HP is a company that's long embraced the "work from anywhere" model to much success. 5.     Don't scare users. Google practices this principle in a number of different ways, and it was part of its early rallying cry when introducing advertising. From its clean, inviting homepage to its overt lobbying, er... I meandisclosure around data collection and privacy protection -- Google goes to great lengths to avoid scaring consumers. Google also works hard to keep from frightening its other core constituents -- media publishers, advertisers, and agencies -- with varying degrees of success. Ain't that right, Frenemy? There are plenty of organizations that have put this lesson to good use. One recent example is the Corn Refiners Association running a campaign to dispel myths about high-fructose corn syrup. I'll close this thread in my next column with... 6.     Respect the law of supply and demand. 7.     Focus on your hard-core users first. (Submitted by Dave Chu of Eton Corporation.) 8.     Keep your customers close and your competitors closer. 9.     Follow the law of averages. (Via David Gould of Resolution Media.) 10.  Find your golden goose, then give away the farm. 11.  Make yourself very profitable for other businesses. (Another Chu-ism.) Aaron Goldman is founder and managing partner of Connectual, a rep firm dedicated to connecting the digital marketing ecosystem. Contact him here.

NY Times: Real-Life Lesson in Using Google Adwords

The pressure is on... one week left before taking the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) exam!

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October 15, 2009

Small-Business Guide

Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords

By DARREN DAHL

Quick Tips:

• Set a budget, a daily or monthly amount you’re willing to spend.

• Begin by casting a narrow net, advertising in your local market and then expanding to additional markets like Google’s AdSense network.

• Try to choose keyword terms that your competition has overlooked to keep per-word costs low.

• Remember that good campaigns require constant adjustment.

Suggested Readings and Resources:

• Google’s step-by-step guide to getting started.

• Google’s blog about AdWords.

• AdWords for Dummies

It used to be that business owners often struggled to afford advertising for their products or services. Google AdWords has changed that by offering an inexpensive way to spread the word. But if you don’t do some careful planning, you can easily find yourself spending thousands of dollars with little to show for it.

Here are the basics: Google AdWords are keyword-driven ads that show up along the right-hand side of a Google search page under the rubric “sponsored links.” People who search for terms related to those you select — say, “widgets for sale” — will see your ad alongside the results of their search. How high up your ad appears on the list of sponsored links will depend on how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign. The more you spend, the higher your ad will rank. Because AdWords is a pay-per-click service, you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad.

When you begin your campaign, you create a text-only ad that includes a link to your Web site. Then you select the keywords that will determine which searchers see your ad. You can — and should — specify how much you want to spend, what language(s) your ad will appear in and even the geographical reach of your ad. Google also gives you the opportunity to post ads through its content network, AdSense, which will place your ad on Web sites that offer content that relates to your keywords.

Googling the term AdWords will return dozens of pages of links to experts of all kinds promising to help you construct and optimize an AdWords campaign of your own. What follows are lessons learned the hard way by business owners who’ve actually taken the plunge:

Be Sure AdWords Is the Right Choice

Brent Hollowell and Jesse Travis, co-founders of a travel accessory retailer in Baltimore called Zen Class, had high hopes when they began using AdWords to promote their Nirvana Seat Back Organizer, which slips over an airplane’s seatback tray. While they knew they might get clicks if they paid for words like “travel accessories,” they feared the cost of close to $1.50 a click would be prohibitive because not every visitor would be looking for their product. They decided to be more specific and set up an AdWords campaign using the keywords “airline seat back organizer,” which cost about 5 cents a click; anyone who searched on that phrase would see their ad along the right-hand side of their screen. The problem was that the campaign, after running for several weeks, produced very few clicks on their site. They realized that most people were unaware that seatback organizers existed and thus were unlikely to search for one.

“Given the challenge of having a product that hasn’t existed before, AdWords may not be the best tool for generating interest and sales,” Mr. Hollowell said. He and Mr. Travis have found they get better results advertising through more traditional product-placement ads and using search engine optimization (S.E.O.) techniques to improve their site’s performance on organic Google searches.

Set a Budget

About a year ago, Georgette Blau, who runs On Location Tours in New York City, set up an AdWords campaign to promote tours that were timed for the release of the “Sex in the City” movie. In doing so, she says she made a mistake: She ran the ad on the Google AdSense network but failed to set a budget. An ad placed on the Google network can quickly appear on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing, it can also run up quite a tab. “Our ads were showing up everywhere, and we spent $600 before I could shut it off,” she said. Ms. Blau now sets monthly or even daily budgets for her campaigns to promote a “Sopranos” or “Gossip Girl” tour.

Focus on Local Markets

When Apple first introduced the iPhone, Matt McCormick, who runs a phone-repair business called Jet City Devices, saw an opportunity. Knowing that the iPhone’s screen was prone to damage, Mr. McCormick began bidding on keywords like “iphone repairs” and waited for business to flood in. A problem soon became apparent: while his site was swamped with traffic, very few people were actually mailing in their phones to get them repaired. But, after changing his campaign to run only on searches initiated within 50 miles of Chicago and Seattle — cities where he had physical shops where customers could drop their phones off in person — Mr. McCormick says his conversion rate jumped to 10 percent: “If you’re in business in only one or two cities, then Google’s localization feature can save you a ton of money, reduce AdWords competition, and bring great traffic.”

Narrow Your Keyword Net

Just as you might use quotation marks to limit the scope of a Google search, you can use brackets and quotes to focus your AdWords campaign. In fact, this is critical. If, for example, you select “widgets for sale” in quotes, your ad will show up anytime people search for those words — even if they search for, say, “blue or red widgets for sale.” If you use brackets to select [widgets for sale], on the other hand, only those people who search on the exact phrase will see the ad.

Catherine Wood, who runs an online designer clothing site called LaGrandeDame.com, suggests being selective about the keywords you place within those brackets or quotes. Ms. Wood said she followed Google’s guidelines when she set up her first campaigns this past April. “They tell you to try to choose the terms that will collect the most clicks,” she said. Ms. Wood began with 20 or so keywords such as “plus sized dresses” and “designer plus sized clothing” — somewhat general terms that she put in quotes. The result was that she received lots of traffic and quite a few customers. But, for the first four months she ran the campaign, she spent more than $5,000 a month, which meant she was spending more than $200 a new customer.

After learning her expensive lesson, Ms. Wood narrowed her keywords and used brackets to focus tightly on product names like [David Meister black dress] and [Anna Scholz Peacock Neru jacket] to drive very specific traffic to her site. She also learned the value of negative keywords — words you can specify (at no cost) so that people who search for them are blocked from seeing your ad. Ms. Wood, for example, stopped paying for clicks for anyone who searched for Halloween costumes.

Create Landing Pages

Ed Scanlan credits AdWords with helping build his company, Total Attorneys, a firm based in Chicago that provides outsource support to small legal practices. He suggests creating specific landing pages tied directly to the ad you’re running to maximize your chances of turning visitors into customers. Sending a visitor to your all-purpose home page can leave them feeling lost or aggravated. By contrast, if Mr. Scanlan runs a campaign based on a term like “legal case support,” people who click on the ad attached to those words land on a specific page designed just for them. These pages should ask users to take an action, like signing up for a mailing list or filling out a survey, to capture the visitor’s contact information.

Stay on Top of Your Campaign ...

David Metcalfe has used AdWords to promote XNet, a data center in Chicago. About a year ago, he noticed something strange was happening — his click-through rates were going through the roof. That sounds promising, but he was getting traffic steered to his site from a Web site in Spain — even though he had set his campaign for the Chicago area only. Mr. Metcalfe eventually got his money back from Google, but it took him six months of daily contact to do so. While this was clearly a fluke — and possibly criminal on the part of the offending site — it demonstrates two things: Pay-per-click campaigns carry risks, and the burden of monitoring them falls upon the owner of the campaign. “When you’re an entrepreneur dealing with a major corporation like Google, it can be hard to get someone to have a conversation with you,” Mr. Metcalfe said. “I was grateful I caught it when I did.”

... or Consider Outsourcing It

Monitoring an AdWords campaign requires a lot of effort. That’s why some entrepreneurs, like Rick Smith, prefer to outsource the management of their campaigns. Mr. Smith, who sells kitchen supplies online at chefsresource.com, says he originally set his AdWords campaign on autopilot. But he realized that while he was spending a good chunk of money each month, he didn’t know what kind of a return on investment he was getting. After attending an S.E.O. trade show near his home in Laguna Hills, Calif., about two years ago, Mr. Smith hired a firm to run his campaigns for him. The firm now tries new keyword combinations or ad text based on Smith’s latest inventory of cookware or knives. They update or change the ads on pretty much a weekly basis, adding in seasonal or holiday hooks when appropriate, and they monitor the results. In return for a percentage of his monthly budget, the firm sends him a weekly spreadsheet showing how much he has spent and how much revenue has been generated. “I’m spending less than I did when I did it myself,” said Mr. Smith, “and I’m getting more sales as a result.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

BusinessWeek: The Dubbing of 'Bing'

BTW June 4, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

BTW

The Dubbing of 'Bing'

The new name for Microsoft (MSFT)'s search engine is meant to capture the sound effect of a lightbulb moment. But coming up with "Bing" was hardly spontaneous for the software giant. It took six months and dozens of experts to settle on the name.

Brand naming is serious business in an age when goods must have global appeal and when an unfortunate choice can turn a promising product into a punch line. Web surfers looking for Fling, a low-calorie Mars candy bar launched in California in January, found that www.fling.com is a site specializing not in chocolate but in sex. Mattel's latest American Girl Doll, which just hit the stores, turns out to share her name, Rebecca Rubin, with an alleged arsonist wanted by the FBI.

Microsoft was determined to get it right when, in early 2007, it decided to rename its "Live Search" service. Interbrand, the firm that won the job of developing a list, assigned eight people to brainstorm names around such themes as "speed" and "relevance." Over roughly six weeks they came up with more than 2,000 choices, winnowing as they went along, says Paola Norambuena, who ran the project. First to go were names that weren't catchy or were hard to type. As two trademark lawyers and 20 linguists pored over the 600 remaining choices, the team also eliminated any used by other companies—or profane in any language.

That left 50 to 60 to show to Microsoft, which picked eight, submitting those to focus groups and more trademark screening. On that short list: Kumo (Japanese for "spider," and also the project's code name) and Hook. Bing won out, says Microsoft's Danielle Tiedt, who manages the search engine's marketing, partly because it was close to the "aha!" sound in many languages. "It's short, appealing, memorable, active," says Jeremy Faro, a senior director at branding agency Landor Associates. Still, despite all the hard work, bloggers are taking potshots. One popular quip: Bing is an acronym for "But It's Not Google."

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

Washington Post: Google Economist Sees Good Signs in Searches

Google Economist Sees Good Signs in Searches
Jobless Queries Down, Real Estate Up

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 12, 2009

Google chief economist Hal Varian is pretty confident the national economy is recovering, and he's not just basing that on government data.

He says he can tell from Americans' search habits.

In March, the number of Google users searching for information about unemployment benefits or employment centers began to drop, Varian said. Overall unemployment has continued to climb, of course, but new jobless claims have declined since peaking earlier this year.

"As a contemporaneous predictor, predicting the present through search queries has been a pretty good predictor of initial (jobless) claims," said Varian, who was visiting Washington this week to make the case that government agencies should use Google tools to better draw current snapshots of consumer sentiment, corporate health and social interests.

There also has been an increase in searches for homes and real estate agents, he said, possibly foreshadowing new strength for the housing market. Google Trends, a tool that aggregates search terms, also showed an early spike in interest in the government's "Cash for Clunkers" auto purchase incentive program this summer. Perhaps the government could have avoided that whole kerfuffle over the program initially running out of cash, Varian said, if officials had been watching search trends.

A former economist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Varian has an optimistic take on the economy that befits someone from a company whose stock price has nearly doubled in the past year, even as much of Wall Street tanked. But Varian says government data back up the impressions he gets both from Google's search metrics and from the continued strength of the overall technology sector.

While companies are slow to rehire, they aren't laying off employees as aggressively as many economist thought they would at this point in the year, Varian said in an interview at Google's Washington offices.

"Firms are very cautious, though, but there is some optimism returning," Varian said, adding that gross domestic product, the main measure of economic output, will probably increase first as demand for services and products increases. He said temporary employment is ticking higher, a measure that Varian says typically precedes a rebound in full-time hiring.

But companies will be slow to begin hiring again until it is clear the economy is back on track. And it's too soon to tell when the economy will turn around in earnest, he said.

"Employment is going to take a longer time, unfortunately, to recover," he said.

Varian began working with Google seven years ago to help design its ad business, in which millions of auctions are conducted every minute for advertisers to market everything from dance classes and fruit juicers to local car dealerships near the results of search queries. That business made $21 billion for the Mountain View, Calif., company last year.

He said the government's economic stimulus plan has already shown signs of success, with more jobs in fields such as education because of federal funds. By spring, more jobs growth will come from infrastructure projects such as expansion of high-speed Internet service. The administration is scheduled to hand out over $4 billion in funds for broadband projects this November.

With more stability in the economy, Varian said more help for private companies, such as tax incentives, could help spur an earnest recovery.

"On the other hand, I would hesitate to say we need any more major initiatives at this point," he said. "The die is cast and things seem to be moving in the right direction. Let's stay the course."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

NY Times: Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

August 24, 2009

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

By ALEX WRIGHT

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online. As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, which is backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been canceled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a Cornell computer science professor, and Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, whose early investors include the National Science Foundation, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

For casual Web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

“I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” said Mr. Grimes, who suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

Ms. Pang envisions a search engine that fine-tunes results for users based on sentiment. For example, it might influence the ordering of search results for certain kinds of queries like “best hotel in San Antonio.”

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Doraemon Cake :)

I want this for my next Burp Day!

Source: http://media.photobucket.com/image/doraemon%20cake/ozzytan/Doraemon.jpg

FT: Capture that web page

Capture that web page

By Paul Taylor

Published: June 25 2009 20:24 | Last updated: June 25 2009 20:24

Like many information workers, I rely to a large extent on the internet, and the web in particular, for research. But it can be like navigating a labyrinth – even with a search engine – and the challenges do not stop there.

Once I find golden nuggets of information I often want to save, copy and sometimes share them with others. I typically use cut and paste for this although it merely copies the words and not the way they are displayed, inc­luding alongside images. It is also a bit hit-and-miss if complex data are involved.

I often need to go back to the original information source to check context or follow another hyp­er­text link, but retracing steps on the web can be surprisingly tricky simply using browser bookmarks (see below) and favourites. Even then, the information I am seeking may no longer be there.

So I set out to investigate a new kind of browser tool designed to ad­dress such problems. Two, iCyte (www.iCyte.com) and Iterasi (www.iterasi.com), are both free and share a similar ap­proach to enabling users to capture, store and share web pages exactly as they appear, at a particular point in time. You can save any web page and return to it any time, from anywhere, even if the web page owner later chan­ges or deletes the whole page or part of it. If I am tracking how a fast-moving news story develops on a website, I can record a snapshot and then track how it chan­ges over time. It is a valuable tool for researchers, lawyers and others con­cerned with how events unfold.

Iterasi, which launched in “beta” or test form early last year and is a free service, works on both Windows and Mac-based machines and allows users to capture a copy of an entire web page, including images and web links, at any moment in time. If you want to track how a particular page changes over time, Iterasi now includes a built-in scheduler that returns to a website on a regular basis (set by the user) and save pages automatically.

Once you create an online account, Iterasi lets you save pages in two ways. The easiest is to use what it calls a “bookmark­let” – a toolbar menu item that works with all the main browsers. When you click on the bookmark­let, it runs a snippet of computer code in your browser, grabs the URL you are viewing and sends it to Iterasi’s internet datacentre. Iterasi’s hardware goes back to the web page and saves it into a private or public Iterasi archive, which can then be viewed from any web-based PC.

The pros and cons of relying on bookmarks

In spite of some drawbacks, bookmarks work well as shortcuts to frequently used websites, especially if they are used with one of the free tools available.

These include Xmarks, (www.xmarks.com), which synch­ron­ises bookmarks across several PCs, and Delicious (www. delicious.com), a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralised source.

Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) lets you clip exactly what you want from a web page and then save, print, e-mail or post it on a blog. And Offline Downloader (www.offlinedownloader) enables users to download an en­tire website to browse it offline.

But if you bookmark every page of interest your list will become unwieldy. A more fundamental problem is that bookmarking saves only the link to the page, but most pages change over time and some disappear. Bookmarks and favourites take you to where information once was but not to the information itself.

Similarly, saving a URL or web address does not always work – if, for example, the page is locked in a site that requires a log-on.

Alternatively, Iterasi users can download and install a more powerful browser add-on that features additional commands and works with either Internet Explorer or Firefox and sits in your browser’s toolbar.

ICyte works in a similar way but features a simpler and more intuitive interface. Once you sign up online, just download and install the browser add-on, which installs a small iCyte button in the browser toolbar (iCyte works with Windows, Mac and Linux mach­ines running Internet Exp­lorer 6 or 7 and Firefox 3 and 3.5.)

You can save a snapshot of a whole web page or a section of highlighted text and/or images within a web page by clicking on the button and creating what iCyte calls a “cyte”. Rather like using a highlighter pen and paper, highlighted text in a saved page remains highlighted when you review the page later making it easy to find and keep track of the bits you want to keep.

When you create a cyte, you can add it to an existing project or create a new one. You can also add tags and notes to the cyte to make it easier to search your personal database of saved web information later. “Projects” are accessible from a “My View” page on the iCyte website. From there, the contents of cytes making up a project can be moved into another project, e-mailed to colleagues, ex­ported to Microsoft Word for editing or, if the cyte is a table, ex­ported to an Excel sheet file – all with no cutting and pasting.

You can also add pages and text you have found to existing public projects. For example, the iCyte community already includes a project on climate change. If you find a new document you think is relevant to this topic you can save it as a cyte and add it to the climate change project. Similarly, if you are working with others on a particular research topic you can create a shared project that all team members can access and contribute to.

Users can manage their cytes, which are stored online, by signing in and clicking on a “Manage Proj­ects” link, which includes the option of creating or changing projects, designating public and private levels, and adding notes or adding people to a project.

I have already found many uses for iCyte, including keeping records of online transactions, capturing receipts and compiling research.

Best of all, it is free, easy to use and powerful.

Paul Taylor answers your  questions on gadgets, gizmos, software and services at www.ft.com/gadgetguru

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

BusinessWeek: Search Challengers Are in Hot Pursuit of Google

Info Tech May 7, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

Search Challengers Are in Hot Pursuit of Google

Big players and startups aim to offer better search engines to steal away some of that lucrative traffic

By Robert D. Hof

Google (GOOG) dominates Internet search, but a growing number of companies are trying to come up with something better. On May 15, British mathematician Stephen Wolfram plans to launch an online service intended to provide more useful answers to search queries than the standard list of Web pages. IBM (IBM) just took the wraps off a computer program designed to field questions well enough that it can compete on Jeopardy! with the game show's best human contestants. And Microsoft (MSFT) is planning to relaunch its own search service this spring, though the details are top secret.

Why challenge a company that has crushed every contender to date? Certainly, rivals want a slice of Google's $20 billion in search-related revenue. But they also see that search has loads of room for improvement. Too often, search engines return a list of Web sites people must comb through for information, and that's if they get the right sites at all. The Google challengers, as well as Google itself, aim to divine the essence of what people are searching for and to provide answers that come closer to what they actually want than the standard list of blue Web site links.

These services have been hyped as "Google killers," but they're really no such thing. Google remains essential to most Internet users, and the new services are often more complementary than competitive. For its part, Google has been relentlessly tweaking its own search engine, trying to prevent others from getting a toehold. "It's a huge challenge for anyone to break the Google habit," says Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Web site Search Engine Land. "But there are a lot of things Google doesn't do that are necessary, so there is a need for alternatives."

The most ambitious is WolframAlpha, which takes a new approach to collecting information and presenting it. Its staff of 250 culls government and other public databases and crunches the data so they can be presented quickly as useful facts and figures. The idea is to "give everyone expert-level knowledge of everything," says Wolfram.

For instance, a search on "New York Tokyo" gives you the populations of both cities, a map of their locations, and the estimated flying time between them. Search on "$100,000 at 5% ARM," and you'll see tables on mortgage payments and principal balances over time for several interest-rate scenarios. "When you're doing [traditional] search, you're being told: 'Here are some places where you might look,' " says Wolfram. "We're trying to compute answers for questions that people have." It is hardly an all-purpose search tool, though. For many everyday queries, say, "Chicago restaurants," WolframAlpha produces few helpful results or nothing at all.

Other startups are staking out new territories of data that Google hasn't yet conquered. Twitter, which lets people post short public messages about what they're doing or thinking, has just added a way to search all posts. Twitter has quickly become the go-to place to find out what's happening in real time—from airplane crashes to the latest Apple (AAPL) rumors. Because it takes hours or days for Google to index most Web pages, the search giant's results generally don't offer the same immediacy.

USING FRIENDS

Perhaps the most promising new search enhancement is bringing people and their knowledge and contacts more overtly into the search results. The startup Aardvark, for instance, whose staff includes five former Google employees, lets people send questions by instant message or e-mail to friends whose social networking profiles show they're knowledgeable about particular subjects. Ask Aardvark what's the best off-road bicycle to buy, and a friend who's a cyclist might answer with a model and a good local store. Another startup, Mahalo.com, uses a staff of people instead of computer algorithms to organize search results for the most popular search terms. That helps eliminate unhelpful sites and save time.

Then there's Microsoft, which has tried unsuccessfully for five years to slow Google. When the software giant relaunches its search engine later this spring, it's likely to focus on giving people all the tools and sites they need to accomplish a given task, such as booking a hotel room in the city they're flying to. "[Users are] looking for insight and knowledge rather than just links that navigate you to a Web site," says Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice-president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group.

Google isn't standing still. Already, its searches usually return not just text links to Web sites but also photos, maps, and other information. On Mar. 24, Google unveiled a technology that helps it understand the meaning of words and their associations with similar words. For instance, if you search "Star Trek," you get videos, news on the new movie, and a list of related searches at the bottom of the page, such as "spock star trek." "You should expect to see great new things in the next few years," says Udi Manber, Google's vice-president of engineering for core search. "We should just solve your problem."

But the main reason the new services face steep odds is that they're not yet businesses—or not lucrative ones. Google's huge impact was not so much in search technology but in perfecting a way to make a lot of money by matching relevant ads to search results. Wolfram says his company can profit in several ways, including by posting advertising alongside search results and by licensing WolframAlpha technology to companies to help them crunch internal data. He says he may yet turn to an established Internet company, such as Google or Yahoo! (YHOO), to develop the advertising business. "There are certainly discussions along those lines," Wolfram says. "We're open to all sorts of partnerships."

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

Search Engine Face-Off

How does the new WolframAlpha compare with Google (GOOG)? Technology Review put the two search engines through several tests and gave results side by side. One search was for "Microsoft Apple" and another for "Sydney New York." The comparison underscores that Google and WolframAlpha try to deliver very different information for users.

To see the Technology Review comparison, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/search-engines/reference

Hof is BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief.

IHT: Google Gives Dusty Books a New Public

 

Google Gives Dusty Books a New Public

 

By Motoko Rich
Tuesday, Jan 6, 2009

Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase "you're not the boss of me." Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google's book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story in "The Church," a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library, at the University of Oxford.

Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away in libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.

Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google's book search, said that every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers.

Zimmer, whose site is visualthesaurus.com, said Google's book search "allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise."

A settlement in October with authors and publishers who had brought two copyright lawsuits against Google will make it possible for users to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under copyright protection.

The agreement, pending approval by a judge this year, also paves the way for both sides to make profits from digital versions of books.

Just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is unknown, but few expect it to generate significant earnings for any individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book program to contribute significantly to its bottom line.

"We did not think necessarily we could make money," Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and its president of technology, said during an interview. "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

Revenue will be generated through advertising sales on pages where previews of scanned books appear, through subscriptions by libraries and others to a database of all the scanned books in Google's collection, and through sales to consumers of digital access to copyrighted books. Google will take 37 percent of this revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.

The settlement may give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in a digital form and allow writers to make money from titles that have long been out of commercial circulation. Of the seven million books Google has scanned so far, about five million are in this category. Users are already taking advantage of out-of-print books that have been scanned and are available for free download. Clancy was monitoring search queries when one for "concrete fountain molds" caught his attention. The search turned up a digital version of an obscure 1910 book, and the user had spent four hours perusing 350 pages of it.

For scholars and others researching topics not satisfied by a Wikipedia entry, the settlement will provide access to millions of books at the click of a mouse. "More students in small towns around America are going to have a lot more stuff at their fingertips," said Michael Keller, the librarian at Stanford University. "That is really important."

When the agreement was announced in October, all sides called it a landmark settlement that permitted Google to proceed with its scanning project while protecting the rights and financial interests of authors and publishers. The parties agreed to disagree on whether the book-scanning itself violated authors' and publishers' copyrights.

In the months since, all parties to the lawsuits - as well as those, like librarians, who will be affected by it - have had the opportunity to examine the 303-page settlement document and try to digest its likely effects.

Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grew.

Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building their own digital collections, no other significant private- sector competitors are in the business. In May, Microsoft ended its book scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate player.

For readers who might want to buy digital access to an individual scanned book, Clancy said, Google was likely to sell at least half of the books for $5.99 or less. Students and faculty at universities who subscribe to the database will be able to get the full contents of all the books free.

For the average author, "this is not a game changer" in an economic sense, said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers and president of the digital media investments group at Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books.

"They will get paid for the use of their book, but whether they will get paid so much that they can start living large - I think that's just a fantasy," Sarnoff said.

Fortune: Careful what you search for

Careful what you search for

Tech Daily: Internet search engines know a lot about their users - maybe too much. Do we really care?

By Jia Lynn Yang, writer-reporter

Last Updated: December 31, 2008: 1:51 PM ET

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Google recently released its annual rundown of popular searches for 2008 - what they call the "zeitgeist" list - and it's a reminder, once again, of how much we reveal about ourselves every time we type into a search bar.

We're interested in Obama, but we're also extremely fond of posing questions to Google like, "what is love?" and "what is life?" (also popular in the "what is" category: "java" and "scientology").

Search engines have become modern society's version of an oracle - the place to ask all your questions, and after some churning of algorithms, something akin to an answer pops out.

Alone with just your computer screen, these searches can feel very private. But Google & Co. gather a lot of information about you as you surf, including the date and time for your search, your search terms, and your IP address, which is an 11-digit number that identifies your computer and, more important as far as advertisers are concerned, your location.

Companies like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Yahoo, and Microsoft know it's in their best interests to guard user information very closely. But that information is also key to their business models: they need user data to improve their search engine formulas and, to attract advertisers, match a marketing pitch to an individual's interests.

So if you're a 33-year-old working female who lives in New York City and who likes to search for Jimmy Choo pumps, you might see ads for a local shoe store - thanks to the personal information the search engines have about you.

"There are many free online tools, but they're not really free," explained Greg Conti, a professor of computer science at West Point and the author of Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? "We end up paying for them with micro-payments of personal information which, in turn, are captured and used for data mining and targeted advertising."

Protecting your identity - is it enough?

Still, the practice of gathering and keeping user information has long been controversial. Critics say it violates users' privacy. The search engines argue that user data is crucial to their ability to innovate and stay competitive.

Earlier this month, Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) said it would keep personally-identifiable information in its database for no more than 90 days, down from 13 months previously. This fall Google said it would keep your data for nine months instead of 18 months. Microsoft retains your information for 18 months.

At that time, the companies say they delete or disguise any information that could be tied to a specific individual, including IP addresses, in case the information is accidentally leaked or is stolen. They keep other information like your search terms and the time you conducted a search.

There are big differences, however, in the way that companies make user information anonymous. Google (MSFT, Fortune 500) and Yahoo, for instance, block the last three digits, known in tech circles as the "last octet," of your IP address. Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) says it deletes the entire address.

Opponents, however, say Google and Yahoo's measures don't go far enough. "[Removing the last three digits of the last octet] is like taking the last digit or two off a phone number," argued Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's the preceding digits that give you the most information."

A cautionary tale

All of the hand-wringing raises an important question: how much do users really care about their privacy?

Conti, the West Point professor, interviewed some 250 college students about two years ago and found that they knew or suspected their surfing habits were being recorded, but said they really didn't care. "They needed the quick fix of information and that outweighed any longer term concerns [about privacy]," said Conti.

This isn't all that surprising in the Facebook era. Many of these same college students are probably avid members of a social network, where they happily divulge their favorite movies, what they did over the weekend, and their relationship status. Marketers, in fact, point out this free flow of information in arguing that people actually want to see advertising tailored specifically for them.

So does privacy really matter? It should.

Consider AOL. In 2006, the Web portal accidentally released details of up to 20 million Web searches by some 650,000 of its users. Names weren't attached to the searches, but they were disturbing in their level of intimacy.

At the site AOL Stalker, which has the leaked search results, the most popular search is User# 672368. In the course of two months, this user searched "curb morning sickness," "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby," "baby names," "abortion clinics charlotte nc," and "engagement rings" - in that order. (AOL and Fortune.com are owned by Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500).)

It's not just personal embarrassment that's at stake, argue privacy advocates. Merger talks between two companies, for instance, could be compromised if high-level employees at either company used the Internet to search for information about the potential partner - and those searches, along with the employees names, were made public.

Here's an idea for how to raise consumer awareness: if we could see our search history all in one place, we might realize just how much information we're handing over and entrusting to others. For many, like those unlucky AOL users, it would be like opening up a personal diary. 

First Published: December 31, 2008: 1:27 PM ET

Google wants something for nothing

Washington Post: Firms Push for a More Searchable Federal Web

Firms Push for a More Searchable Federal Web

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 11, 2008; D01

Google's professed corporate mission is "to organize the world's information."

But for years, the U.S. government, one of the world's largest depositories of data, has been unwilling or unable to make millions of its Web pages accessible.

"The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it's not published or it's on Web sites which the government has put up which no one can index," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a recent presentation at the New America Foundation.

Now Schmidt has a unique opportunity to change that as an informal adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, a tech booster who dubbed his first Senate law "Google for government" because it aimed to make federal information more accessible.

Today, a wide array of public information remains largely invisible to the search engines, and therefore to the general public, because it is held in such a way that the Web search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can't find it and index it. Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft officials agree that people would be better served if more public information became accessible to their search engines.

A person using one of the search engines, for example, can't find Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against a given company, can't discover the picture of a specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian and can't search by name for the details of a Vietnam War casualty.

And for many Web users, if an online item can't be found with a Web search engine, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist.

"Unfortunately, too much of the public information provided on government Web sites just doesn't show up when the average American does a Google search," said J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships. "As a result, information that is intended for the public's use is effectively invisible."

To be sure, much of the information that the search engines are asking for is already digitized and available on the Web. EPA enforcement actions can be found through a portal on the agency's site, details on Egyptian artifacts can be found through a search of the National Museum of Natural History and details of a Vietnam War casualty may be found by searching the National Archives site.

The trouble, as the search engines see it, is that most Web users have become accustomed to finding information by typing queries into one of the engines -- and if they don't find it there, they give up.

Needham estimates that 1,000 federal government Web sites are inaccessible to search engine "crawlers," the programs that are run to discover what information is available on the Web.

Much of the inaccessibility stems from the fact that so much federal government data, while public, can be accessed only after users fill out an online form. The search engines' crawlers generally can't look into such databases.

For example, Google notes that a user seeking details on an Environmental Protection Agency enforcement action against Anheuser-Busch can't be found by entering a simple search query such as "EPA enforcement Anheuser-Busch." Instead, a person needs to know to go to a particular EPA enforcement Web site and enter "Anheuser-Busch."

To make those databases visible to search engines would require the federal government to make each item into a Web page and then to provide a list of those Web page addresses to the search engines.

Microsoft is working with more than 25 federal agencies to make their Web sites "crawlable" by search engines.

"I do agree with Google," said Molly O'Neill, chief information officer of the EPA, which has more than 200 Web sites. "When people search, they should be able to find the data."

But information technology officials in the federal bureaucracy said that the transition may require significant manpower and that the costs could be large.

"We have been working very closely with Google," said Francisco Camacho of the Web services division of the Smithsonian. "With limited resources as always, it's a little bit hard."

The National Archives expects that its entire database containing descriptions of its holdings will be available to Google by January, said Pamela Wright, a program manager for the National Archives and Records Administration. The EPA has made some sites accessible, too, and the Smithsonian has sent Google the links for 78,000 pages, Camacho said.

Some federal officials have grumbled, however, that Google is making this push purely for financial reasons: The more that is available to search engines, the more people will use search engines, letting Google show advertising to more people.

"The more information is available, the more people are likely to use Google," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of http://SearchEngineLand.com. "It does help Google in the end."

But Needham said the company's motive in the federal Web site effort isn't the money; it's making sure customers find what they want.

"We don't care because there is monetization value," Needham said. "It's because if we fail to answer a question, then our users are disappointed with us, not their government."

Washington Post: 4 Captivating Companies and What They Share

 

 

4 Captivating Companies and What They Share

By James Ledbetter and Jacob Weisberg
Sunday, September 14, 2008; F01

Ask yourself this question: Aside from the company where you or members of your family work, how many companies do you actually care about? We think that for a lot of us, there are only four: Starbucks, Apple, Google and Amazon -- call them the SAGA companies. Of course, reducing what's exciting about American business to SAGA is an exaggeration, but stay with us for a bit while we make a case that these four corporations represent a distinctive and distinctively American contribution to 21st-century capitalism.

The SAGA companies do very different things and are of hugely different sizes: Google's market capitalization is about $158 billion; Starbucks is down to about $12 billion. Yet they share some remarkable traits. At the most basic level, each has transformed not only a specific commercial marketplace but also some important aspect of contemporary life -- computing and music for Apple, information and advertising for Google, coffee for Starbucks, books for Amazon. In doing so, each has had an appreciable impact on our daily routines, taken on a looming presence in popular culture, and often engendered an intensity of feeling more often associated with tastes in entertainment or political views. Together, they have created a new model of business innovation, culture and values.

But what, really, do the SAGA companies have in common? Here's a start:

· They have a ubiquitous presence. Ubiquity doesn't necessarily make SAGA companies global market leaders; the worldwide proportion of computer users who own Apples is small and will probably never catch up to the formidable PC. But in many countries, iPod usage is surging, and all the world wants an iPhone. As for the others, Yahoo retains a slight global edge over Google in Web traffic, but that will probably not last much longer, and it is Google whose name is synonymous with finding information on the Web. (We figure that between us, we perform 100 Google searches a day and can easily go for weeks without using another search engine.) Amazon may not dominate e-commerce outside the United States as much as it does inside, but in few of the countries where Amazon operates Web sites is there a competitor that sells more books online. Starbucks manages to be everywhere and also across the street.

· They reflect the comparative advantage of today's America . . . Dial back to the Fortune 500 list of 1958, and there's no mistaking the difference: a half-century ago, the iconic U.S. companies were about making and moving stuff: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were all in the top 15. Oil companies and steel manufacturers filled the other top slots, along with General Electric, Eastman Kodak and the company still widely called in those days International Business Machines. Granted, SAGA companies do not rank that high on today's list, although they are often more profitable than firms that bring in more revenue. Nonetheless, they represent the dramatic shift away from domestic manufacturing and toward an idea-driven, consumer-focused, value-added economy. It is also not coincidental that all four companies are based on the West Coast, reflecting the shift in America's demographics and centers of innovation.

· . . . yet they are genuinely global. Not very long ago, the undisputed symbols of American business abroad were Disney, McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Those brands remain tremendously powerful, but they have long felt as if they were monoliths imposed on other countries from abroad. (It's hardly surprising that McDonalds outlets are frequently the targets of anti-globalization protests.) By contrast, SAGA companies blend more easily into their environments by allowing international customers to explore their own tastes and preferences. Amazon could never get away with selling only American books and DVDs; an iPod has no obvious nationality, and despite some carping from European regulators, Google functions fairly seamlessly as an international Internet tool.

· They are restless innovators. None of these companies made its business by being the first to add any new physical thing to peoples' lives: Starbucks did not invent coffee or even the coffee house; with the exception of the Kindle, almost every item available on Amazon is conceived of and produced off the Amazon campus; Apple didn't invent the computer, the cellphone or the MP3 player; and Google invented neither the search engine nor the paid search model.

For the most part, SAGA companies don't invent; they perfect. The SAGA triumph is one of tweaks and packaging. That can sound lightweight, even derogatory, but it shouldn't be underestimated; remember that when Amazon started doing business in 1995, the vast majority of Americans had never bought anything online and had legitimate reasons to fear doing so. What SAGA companies have taught the world is that there is strong business sense in focusing maniacally on what customers want and then finding the most effective ways to deliver it.

· They follow their founders. Howard Schulz, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, and Jeff Bezos are as different as personalities come in business: Schulz is a famously nice guy; Jobs pretty much the opposite of a nice guy. Page, Brin and Bezos don't fit the stereotype of the charismatic chief executive at all. But each of these leaders continues to be central to his company's identity and has remained (or returned) as an embodiment of the company's culture and values. Jobs has kept Apple intensely focused on product and advertising design. Bezos has rooted Amazon to delivering top-notch customer service. Page and Brin embody Google's belief in algorithmic solutions, experimentation and bottom-up creativity.

· They engage consumers on an almost spiritual level. This may sound a bit silly, but it is crucial in understanding why people feel so passionate about SAGA companies. Think of the reaction this summer when Starbucks announced it would close 600 outlets: There were protests and petition campaigns throughout the country. Americans reacted as if they had a legal right to lattes within short reach of their homes and offices. In large part, this is because the companies inspire both a sense of community and the ability to create personal brands -- I am my iPod -- which is a powerful combination.

In a book published last year called "Firms of Endearment," three business writers argue that America is going through what they call an Age of Transcendence and that successful companies understand they need to appeal to stakeholders on a level that is more than just dollars and cents. That approach is literally built into SAGA companies, such as Google's famous "20 percent time," which allows employees to work on personal projects during office hours. But it also means tapping into the passion of customers, suppliers, communities and stockholders. Each strives not only for profit and growth but also for social and even moral significance.

These commonalities help explain why many other innovative and successful companies -- Yahoo, Whole Foods and Microsoft, for instance -- don't make the SAGA cut at the moment. Yahoo hasn't changed anything about American life. Whole Foods is a presence in upscale life but has yet to achieve the mindshare of a Starbucks. Microsoft is no longer characterized by a strong sense of purpose. There are a few other companies that we think of as potential SAGAs. One is Netflix, whose SAGA status will probably depend on how it adapts its business to the age of digital downloads. Another is Facebook; its explosive growth and deep engagement suggest SAGA-like passion, but it is still relatively young and occupies a space vulnerable to fads.

Of course, SAGA companies themselves aren't invulnerable. Each has gone through a crisis. With the exception of Apple, each might now be plausibly said to be going through a slump (as Apple did in the mid-1990s). Both Starbucks and Apple had to bring back founders to run the companies after investors and even many customers lost faith with corporate leadership. Starbucks's plan for global growth has stalled and may never be realized, and Google has been criticized for failing to develop and integrate the companies it has gobbled up in recent years. But it's the ability to admit shortcomings and to retool the corporation that sets the SAGA companies apart. Even when they're going through tough times, they're still the companies we want to read about.

James Ledbetter is editor of the Big Money. Jacob Weisberg is editor in chief of the Slate Group and author of "The Bush Tragedy."

FT: Google still struggling to conquer outposts

Google still struggling to conquer outposts

By Richard Waters in San Francisco, Robin Kwong in Hong Kong and Robin Harding in Tokyo

Published: September 16 2008 17:18 | Last updated: September 16 2008 17:18

Google has made little headway against entrenched local search companies in a handful of countries around the world, in spite of making a concerted investment since the middle of the decade.

Non-Google world map

See our interactive graphic

EDITOR’S CHOICE

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Space offers high-speed net access to Africa - Sep-09

Google to broker TV ads for NBC Universal - Sep-09

Ad body opposes Google-Yahoo alliance - Sep-07

Indeed, some of the local players, having withstood the challenge and consolidated their position, are looking to capitalise on their success.

Yandex, which handles 46 per cent of search queries in Russia, has been preparing since the spring for a listing on the US stock market. Seznam, which controls 63 per cent of Czech searches, has been the subject of a number of buy-out approaches, according to two internet industry insiders.

Along with just three others, these represent the only local companies that have prevented the global search business from turning into “Planet Google.”

Baidu in China and Naver in South Korea each handle about 60 per cent of internet searches in their respective countries, while Yahoo Japan claims slightly more than half of its local search market.

The wisdom of Confucius

In Google’s engineering-driven culture, algorithms rule.

But to compete in some countries where it is behind, Google has had to take a leaf out of the locals’ book by turning to humans rather than computers to answer questions.

A lack of content lies at the heart of the problem.

With relatively few local language web documents to search, Google’s search algorithms cannot prove their edge.

South Korea’s Naver and the Czech Republic’s Seznam both have successful services where users answer questions posed by others.

Google has copied that with a new service of its own, called Confucius.

Introduced in the emerging markets, it has been extended into Chinese and Thai, showing that Google is prepared to change its normal game plan to reflect local preferences, Mohammad Gawdat, Google’s head of emerging markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says.

Although he does not refer to it, Google had a similar service in the US until two years ago but closed it after failing to make inroads against Yahoo Answers, the market leader.

In another attempt to attract more local language content, Google recently launched an Arabic version of Knol, a Wikipedia-like service designed to attract user-generated articles.

That was the first non-English language version of Knol and a sign of the importance Google gives to building a long-term presence on the Arab-language internet, Mr Gawdat says.

Some common themes lie behind these local success stories, internet veterans say: Google has played second fiddle to rivals who invested much earlier, perfected their technology to work with local languages and came up with innovations that Google is now having to copy.

These companies have since been able to consolidate their hold thanks to their well-known local brand names and a strategy that often relies on combining search with a range of other portal-like services to keep users on in-house sites.

When it comes to the most prominent of these markets, China, senior Googlers do little to disguise their frustration. Baidu’s lead has much to do with regulations that have hurt foreign competitors, they suggest.

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, said in an interview with the FT last month: “Because Baidu had such a head start largely because of the various bizarre laws that China has with respect to foreign media. It will take a while, but we will eventually do well there.

“All of us should tell the Chinese that their local markets need to be open to foreign investment, they need not favour their local competitors.”

Yet similar complaints cannot explain other markets where the search juggernaut has been forced to play an unfamiliar supporting role. In these countries, Google has been kept at bay by locals who have turned their “first-mover advantage” into a lasting lead.

In Russia and the Czech Republic, Google was late to invest and did not initially match the locals in the quality of its local language results, admits Mohammad Gawdat, who oversees112 countries for Google as head of the emerging markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

But he adds that investments made since the middle of the decade, for instance to adjust its algorithms to reflect the nuances of local language, have put Google’s search results on a par.

Quality alone may not be enough. Having got ahead, the locals are proving hard to dislodge. Baidu’s strong domestic brand, for instance, should enable it to keep its lead as new users come online, particularly in “third- and fourth-string cities”, said Dick Wei, an analyst at JPMorgan.

In Japan, a surge in Google’s market share has petered out as Japanese internet users have shown their preference for portals such as Yahoo over a pure search engine.

In the longer term, Google is relying on its ability to invest more in technology to give it an edge, particularly as the number of web documents in local languages explodes and local players find it harder to keep up, Mr Gawdat says. It is also counting on its greater experience in delivering relevant advertising alongside search results to leapfrog locals.

For now, though, the instructions from senior management are clear, says Mr Gawdat: build the best service and don’t worry about market share. “It may take more time, but who cares? The rest of the world is doing really well.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Online Media Daily: Study - Swing Voters Influenced by Search Ads

Study: Swing Voters Influenced By Search Ads

by Mark Walsh, Tuesday, Sep 9, 2008 7:15 AM ET

With national polls Monday showing John McCain pushing ahead in the presidential race, a new study says search marketing could play a key role in influencing all-important swing voters. About 7% of people searching online said they were likely to change their vote before the election, according to a survey by search engine marketing firm Didit that looks at the interplay of search activity and political attitudes. "As we near Election Day with a remarkably even presidential race, an enthusiastic and interested population will turn to search engines for as much information as possible," said Didit President David Pasternack, in a statement. What's more, there's no limit on how much any individual or political action committee can spend on search terms and no record of who is buying the ads. "It's a little like the Wild West," said Didit co-founder and CEO Kevin Lee. "Only the search engines know what dollars are being spent by whom." In monthly reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign has disclosed payments to major search providers including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Obama has already spent more than $3 million this year with Google alone. The McCain campaign doesn't break out spending by online vendor in its FEC reports, but the Republican nominee is believed to be spending millions on a search campaign viewed as more aggressive and effective than Obama's. Data released Monday by Nielsen Online showed McCain ramping up both display and search advertising in August. Image-based impressions jumped 254% during the month to 58.3 million, while sponsored search link impressions increased 43% to 21.6 million. By contrast, Obama's display impressions dropped by almost half to 216 million as search impressions fell by 18% to 949,000--less than 5% of McCain's total. In addition to sheer volume, some search experts say the McCain campaign has shown more savvy in using paid search by buying keywords tied to election issues and outbidding the Obama campaign on terms such as "Joe Biden." Snapping up keywords linked to issues or opponents' names could provide an edge--especially with voters who can still be swayed, according to Janel Landis, senior director of search development and strategy at search marketing firm SendTec. "What the Obama/Biden camp refers to as the "scare tactics" of the McCain campaign are seamlessly integrated between offline and online, hitting the undecided voters from all angles with consistent messaging," she wrote in a report as part of its ongoing analysis of the candidates' online campaigns. When "Sarah Palin" emerged as one of the most-searched terms on the Web last week, the McCain campaign was ready with ads that invited users to learn more about the Republican vice presidential pick. Not only did the Obama campaign not bid on her name, but also passed on related terms such as "Alaska State Trooper" and "Palin Allegations" that could link to information about Palin pushing to have her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper. The report noted that even the company Zagg, which makes a protective sheath for cell phones and other gadgets, bid on "Sarah Palin" to run an ad claiming "invisibleSHIELD for the iPhone 3G would make the perfect running mate." The Didit study suggests that search advertising is an effective way to sway potential swing voters. It found that the people most likely to change their view of a candidate are those who click on links favoring the opposition, with 40% switching sides. Nearly one-third switched based on negative search ads. "That's proof that attack ads work on the Internet, too," said Didit's Lee. The study further indicated, however, that opposition-related keywords had only a slight effect on changing voters' opinions, while ads praising the candidates were the most persuasive. The Didit survey, accessed via a sponsored link, was completed by 1,447 participants, more than 95% of who are already registered to vote in the upcoming election. Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

FT: What did you do on the internet today?

What did you do on the internet today?

By Peter Aspden

Published: September 5 2008 19:19 | Last updated: September 6 2008 02:06

There are many ways in which the internet has had a negligible effect on our personal lives. We still go to the movies. We like having supper with friends. We gossip over a beer or a coffee; we ask, and get asked, for dates; we save up for holidays to help us unwind on a sandy beach. Football stadiums fill up on a Saturday afternoon, as do the best angling spots. We love going to see the Rolling Stones, again.

None of these pastimes – let’s call them the western way of life – is much transformed by engagement with the internet, other than in the trivial sense of making it easier to book tickets or tables. The physical essence of what we do bears a remarkable similarity to what we did 20 or 30 years ago.

And yet there has been a revolution in our lives. A quiet, subtle revolution. The skills and tools we have acquired in the workplace – zipping from one task or field of enquiry to another with bewildering speed – have followed us into our homes. The interconnectedness of everything means that the world really has come into our sitting rooms.

That used to be said of television, of course, but this is different. Television was controlled, curated, crafted to appeal. The relentless flow of information that gushes through the new media – wait, I’ve just received a text message to tell me that my eBay bid on a rare early Beatles single has been trumped – is promiscuous and predatory. We are easily seen as its victims. But it needn’t be so.

The unprecedented demands made of our brains in the 21st century can be stressful, to be sure. We are required to make lateral leaps in our imaginations on a daily basis; to hold several competing ideas in our minds at the same time; to work in various time-frames and shades of thought.

The hyperlink syndrome, the way our minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, means that we have become addicted to the breadth of everything rather than the depth of something. The contemporary mind needs to be elastic and happy to forage in alien fields. We are yanked out of our comfort zones and must appear happy at the prospect. The methodical toiler who moves from beginning, to middle, to end is regarded as a dullard.

At times, it all appears too chaotic. But here is a comforting fact: it is not a competition. You can’t move faster than the internet. Scientists may insist that the circuits inside our heads are still superior to anything produced by machines, but it just doesn’t seem that way. The screen in the corner of your room is like your pet Alsatian: it is awesome, wild and potentially out of control; it just needs to be tamed.

I have just upped the bid on the rare Beatles single. I am in the information loop, yet I am also indulging in an esoteric hobby. I am making myself acquainted with a new circle of characters with whom I have at least one thing in common; yet I can remain, up to a point, anonymous. I’m winning a competition. I’m shopping. I am not restricted in my movements. I am free, relaxed, stimulated.

The overall result of my pursuit is cosmically unimportant, yet it matters enough to be diverting. I have tailored all the technology at my disposal for my own gratification. And, goodness, there has never been a better time for gratification. Techno-philosophers talk of the “oneness” of the forthcoming world, as media forms come together, with a sense of spiritual longing (see, for instance, the spoddier bits of The Matrix). But what most of us want from the newly-configured world is the ability instantly to get anything we want.

When I can’t sleep at night, I walk around for a while, download an early episode of Miami Vice, put it on my iPod and watch it in bed. I could just as easily order a Nepalese takeaway or a Siberian prostitute. When I go jogging, I listen to the New Yorker’s latest podcast on the American presidential election. It saves time, and tells me all I need to know on the subject.

We are moving towards an era in which everything will be available, everywhere, all the time. It is a revolution of technology, but also one of sensibility.

And it is about much more than instant gratification, of course. The phase we are in now is exciting, because we are right at the beginning of the revolution. Yes, once we learn how not to become a prisoner of the internet, and use it to complement rather than replace our wider field of vision, it makes life easier, more compact, in a host of inconsequential ways. But there are wider intellectual issues at stake, too.

One of these is the fragmentation of the world that arises from hyperlinking. This has manifested itself in important cultural spheres. At Tate Modern, if you want to see the collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, you will not see the normal chronological progression as devised by art historians, but a mix-and-match treatment of artistic themes that asks you, the viewer, to make allusions and connections.

If our children become used to thinking in this way, the resulting shift in their intellectual framework could herald no less than the death of linear narrative, or the death, at least, of that reassuring narrative, so beloved of Enlightenment thinkers onwards, that says that things generally get better over time. Perhaps they don’t, and perhaps we need to shock ourselves out of that belief.

In the meantime, all those silly ways we entertain ourselves online can act as a metaphor for the tumultuous changes to come. Think of an obscure song that once meant a lot to you. Find it online. Buy it or download it. Send it, share it, edit it, improve it. Anything is mutable. The world seems a confusing place. But has there ever been a better time to create Utopia?

Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer. His columns can be read online at www.ft.com/aspden

........................................................................................

‘My life would practically grind to a halt without it...’

Tony Hall, 57, is chief executive of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Previously, he was director of news at the BBC

How much time do you spend on the internet every day?
It various enormously and depends on what I’m trying to research. At weekends it’s more, because I use it more for research and for shopping. But I also tend to listen to internet radio a lot. I’m learning Italian at the moment, so I listen to a radio station from Puglia called Radio Subasio (www.radiosubasio.it). I have to confess it’s full of pretty grotty music but I like to hear Italian being spoken.

How would having no internet access affect your daily life?
It’s unimaginable really, especially in terms of how it would affect the speed with which I can research a subject. When the art historian Michael Baxandall died last month, I was able to immediately go online and order his last book, Words for Pictures, a collection of essays including a long piece on Piero della Francesca’s “Resurrection”. The essence of its effect is really a speed thing.

Which podcasts do you subscribe to and where do you listen to them?
Time-shifted radio is great. I commute, so podcasts are wonderful for listening to stuff on the hoof. It’s mainly Radio 4 that I download (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4). I love In Our Time, Analysis and Front Row podcasts. Also, I enjoy listening to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on the way home in the evening. It makes the commute time well spent. At the moment I’m also reading The Rest is Noise, a book by Alex Ross about 20th-century music, and he has a website (www.therestisnoise.com) which has both musical bites and leads you off to more obscure recordings. It’s wonderful and you really do need it for the lesser-known pieces.

How do you surf?
I like to think I’m incredibly disciplined, but then suddenly find myself having wandered off into an area that I hadn’t thought about at all. You see a link and think “I’ll just go there”, and before you know an hour has past. It’s wonderful for serendipity.

Where do you shop online and what do you buy?
Second-hand book are particularly good places to buy online. I also buy most music online. I bought some wonderful sitar music and Rajasthani folk music online from an Indian website. I couldn’t walk into any music store in Britain and have bought that, but there it was.

Is surfing a ‘work’ or ‘leisure’ activity?
It’s both. It is pleasurable of course, but also it’s a great practical tool for all the boring stuff like keeping track of your expenditure.

What did you do on the internet today?
I’ve just been looking at the McCain story and the appointment of Sarah Palin as his running mate. BBC News is pretty much up on the screen all the time. I like the video and audio options they have.

I’ve also been looking up an artist, to find out when they’re next doing something that I can go and see. That’s hopefully for a future project at the ROH, so unfortunately I can’t tell you who that is. I also fixed up lunch with somebody.

. . .

Martha Lane Fox, 35, founded Lastminute.com in 1998. In 2005 she launched Lucky Voice Private Karaoke

How much time do you spend on the internet every day?
So much that I feel like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix!

Does this change when you’re not working?
It doesn’t change dramatically – I think that the traditional boundaries between work and play are shifting, for some people the web gives enormous freedom in how you spend time.

How would having no internet access affect your daily life?
I feel as though my life would practically grind to a halt. I think I would be a less-organised, less well-informed and less inspired person. I swing between being higgledy-piggledy and just following the thread of a debate or search and totally ruthless, depending on what I’m looking for. That’s the beauty of the web – you can get to a specific point more quickly than ever before or you can just drift.

Which podcasts do you subscribe to and where do you listen to them?
I get the Guardian technology podcast (www.guardian.co.uk/technology) and a couple of political ones – I spend ages downloading music and novels, which I listen to while I do my daily physio routine.

Where do you shop online, and what do you buy?
I buy everything online. If I can’t find something then I am tempted to get in touch with the retailer to encourage them to build a website! Styleshake does fantastic made-to-measure dresses (www.styleshake.com), I go to Net-a-Porter for fashion (www.net-a-porter.com) and Mydeco for homeware (mydeco.com).

Do you consider surfing a ‘leisure’ activity?
It depends. Yes, when I’m reading news, or watching the latest Obama campaign videos or slipping in some cheeky shopping.

What did you do on the internet today?
I read an excellent political blog on opendemocracy.net about Georgia. I looked at TrueTube to view films that ex-offenders had made (www.truetube.co.uk). I worked on the developments I want for my foundation’s site (www.antigone.org.uk). I watched Hillary Clinton’s Denver convention speech. I created a playlist for my first sing at our new karaoke bar – Lucky Voice in Islington.

. . .

Luke Johnson, 46, is chairman of Channel 4, runs the private-equity firm Risk Capital Partners, and writes a column for the FT

How much time do you spend on the internet every day?
Two or three hours – largely e-mail and research.

How does this change when you’re not working?
Less at weekends – perhaps an hour a day.

How would having no internet access affect your daily life?
It would force me to speak to people more, which might be a good thing! But investigating companies, people, industries and learning about the world would be much harder.

Are you a disciplined surfer?
At work yes; at home less so.

Where do you shop online and what do you buy?
Travel at Opodo (www.opodo.co.uk); insurance; books, DVDs at Borders.co.uk; presents.

Do you consider surfing a ‘leisure’ activity?
Yes, unless you are disciplined.

What did you do on the internet today?
Legal documents transmitted; many dozens of e-mails; this interview; researched my FT article.

. . .

Baroness Greenfield, 57, is professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford Univeristy, and a director of the Royal Institution

How much time do you spend online every day?
Apart from e-mails, I try to spend as little time as possible online, because if I do go on, for example to do shopping, I find it hugely time-consuming and addictive.

How does this change when you’re not working?
It tends to be more domestic things at weekends. Recently I’ve been redecorating my bedroom so I’ve been using the internet a lot for looking for different type of bedroom furniture.

How would having no internet access affect your daily life?
It wouldn’t upset me, but not having e-mail access in a world where everyone else does would make me panic after about 24 hours.

How do you surf?
I don’t go off at tangents but I’m not that sort of person anyway, and it’s something that I’m aware of in myself and get irritated about in others. I tend to be very methodical and focused. Because I do so many things in my life I have to be like that.

Which podcasts do you subscribe to?
I don’t tend to listen to them. I have an iPod but use it mainly for themed music for parties. My parents recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary and so we put the iPod on and played lots of music from the 1930s and 1940s – not the sort of thing you can just go out and buy – which I had to download. Well, my brother had to actually.

Where do you shop online and what do you buy?
Certainly not personal things, like clothes. Shopping is a much more intimate experience on the high street because you get to interact and hold things up against you, which is much more pleasurable. I tend to buy practical things more: for example, I recently bought some floorlights and shopping online for those gave me a fantastic sense of choice and much wider options than if I was shopping on the high street.

What did you do on the internet today?
Only e-mails today. But yesterday I bought a wonderful chest for the end of my bed – to put bed linen in and sit on. I’ve always wanted one.

. . .

David Willetts, 52, is Conservative MP for Havant, and shadow secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills

How much time do you spend on the internet every day?
Roughly two hours, including e-mails. I have a wonderful laptop, a MacBook Air, which is so light I can take it everywhere.

Does this change at weekends?
Not usually. I try to deal with the bulk of work-related e-mails mainly during the week and more domestic and personal things at the weekend. Although the nature of politics generally means that the two tend to converge.

Do you consider surfing a ‘leisure’ activity?
No, I don’t. I don’t really do that much “surfing” because I find it rather frustrating. I definitely don’t “free-fall” when I’m online. I think that it can become incredibly addictive and actually begin to take over your life. If I’m looking for something, like a quote, I try to be as efficient as possible.

Do you subscribe to any podcasts?
No I don’t. But what I am interested by are iTunes U – university lectures which can be downloaded by students. My son has introduced me to some fantastic American science lectures, in particular TED Talks (www.ted.com). They seem to be much more widespread in the US than here, although UCL and the Open University use them; I think we need to start catching up over here.

How would having no internet access affect your daily life?
I would have to make more phone calls for minor organisational matters. The e-mail has basically replaced the phone call, so that the phone call has become a much more significant form of contact.

Where do you shop online and what do you buy?
I buy lots of books online, mainly second-hand through AbeBooks (www.abebooks.com). Although I still do go into second-hand bookshops, I buy many more second-hand books now than I use to. Also, although it isn’t strictly speaking shopping (because I haven’t booked anything with them yet), a site I often look at is SwimTrek.com. I’m a very keen long-distance and outdoor swimmer and I find looking at it very encouraging.

What did you do on the internet today?
A bit of shopping on emusic.com. I bought some Mozart, and downloaded some songs from the film Shrek which I’m keen on, and also a really wonderful song by Ryan Adams called “Amy”. I did some research about Birmingham for a pamphlet I’m writing for the forthcoming Conservative party conference. I tracked down a Sidney Webb essay, which I needed a quote from, and looked at the Tolkien website because, like me, he was brought up in Birmingham.

Interviews by Elizabeth Kirkwood

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008