• Ross Fadner, May 18, 2006, 10:45 AM
  • Google, Yahoo And The Library of Babel Search Engine Watch Google's Tower of Babel-like goal to capture all the world's information in a searchable database conjures up images of Borges' "Library of Babel" from his masterpiece The Fictions, which contained not only all of the books that have been written in every language, but also those that had yet to be completed. With more than half of its projects yet to be completed, that sounds something like Google, all right. But what will it take for Google (or Yahoo, Microsoft and the Open Content Alliance) to truly assemble a modern-day "Library of Babel?" According to a recent New York Times Magazine article, these projects are scanning about a million books a year, which currently amounts to 5 percent of the books in print. And what about Web search? Search Engine Watch asks. It's far from complete; there are millions of lost Web pages out there, and others that are still invisible to the search engines. How will the major engines recoup this "ephemeral literature?" Recent studies suggest that the half-life of a given Web page is just under two years, after which time many of these pages disappear if they are no longer linked to. While Google and Yahoo most likely haven't thrown any pages away, the Internet Archive--the most complete, publicly accessible archive of the Web--only has about 55 billion pages, a fraction of the content that's been posted to the Web. If they really wanted to, could Google and Yahoo restore all those potentially lost Web pages? It's "not unthinkable," Search Engine Watch says, but it would certainly take greater resources than either company has or is prepared to devote to such a project at-present. Read the whole story...
  • A Real World Lawsuit Involving Virtual Real Estate Wired It's not quite ad-related, but evidence abounds that virtual worlds are coming into their own as alternative real-world business opportunities. This time, a property dispute involving a gamer versus Linden Lab, purveyor of Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, is headed to real-world court. Gamer Marc Bragg, who's also a lawyer, is suing Linden Lab for freezing his user account after a land deal went bad, and then shutting him down completely. Bragg is demanding $8,000 in restitution. Second Life is one of the only virtual worlds in which members actually own the content they create. Bragg, who owns nightclubs and other "in-world" businesses in Second Life, says he paid $300 for a plot of land through an auction; Linden Lab says he used a hacker-like method to secure the plot at an abnormally low price (plots usually go for $1,000). Second Life supports a burgeoning trade market in real estate, clothing, vehicles, and yes, advertising, which have all contributed to a growing in-game economy, supporting full-time businesses and entrepreneurs. Read the whole story...
  • Hardware Companies Unite Against Net Neutrality CNET News.com Major corporations continue to pick sides in the Net Neutrality debate. Yesterday, 3M, Cisco, Corning, Qualcomm and 30 other technology heavyweights sent a letter to Congress firmly opposing new legislation that would prohibit providers of broadband Internet service from favoring some Web sites over others. This view, of course, is backed by major telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T and cable providers like Comcast. Internet firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which would have to pay fees for access to more bandwidth over their respective networks, support stringent Net Neutrality legislation. The Web firms are hoping to gain public support from the financial services sector, whose businesses could also be adversely affected by bandwidth discrimination. Many of the companies that signed the letter sent yesterday to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi provide hardware to the likes of AT&T, BellSouth and Comcast. Meanwhile, groups like MoveOn.org, the American Library Association, and even the Gun Owners Association of America have also joined forces in support of preserving Net Neutrality. Read the whole story...
  • Yahoo Execs: Future's Bright Retuers Not to be outdone by Google and Microsoft, Yahoo did some analyst day grandstanding of its own in San Francisco yesterday. Search execs in particular trumpeted the targeting capabilities of its new advertising system; Tim Cadogan, the company's vice president of search, boasted that Yahoo now collects "more data about the quality of advertisers' listings than any other competitor." The new system measures an ad's performance on a five-point scale and is able to determine specific criteria like queries that indicate a specific versus an implied intent to shop. I'm not sure how familiar Yahoo is with Microsoft's AdCenter, but the Redwood giant also unveiled a completely revamped ad system this month that targets by network behavior, demographics and search history. It's impossible for a neutral party at this stage to formatively declare who has the better targeting system. I'm sure they're both better than what was offered before; after all, it would seem that both MSN and Yahoo Search have nowhere to go but up in their bid to wrestle market share away from Google. Like MSN, Yahoo hopes to leverage its user data to improve overall ad effectiveness across its network. Read the whole story...
  • Yahoo: New Ad System Won't Help Revenues this Year Reuters.com As we know, Yahoo's overhauling its search advertising system, but CFO Sue Decker, speaking yesterday at the company's annual analyst meeting in San Francisco, doesn't expect the changes to make a positive financial contribution until 2007. Yahoo's overall revenue should grow 24 to 31 percent this year, settling into a compounded growth rate of 25-26 percent for the next few years after that, she said. This would be slightly faster than the 22-24 percent growth projected for Web advertising overall. Yahoo's new SEM software won't be available to ad buyers until the third quarter in the States and the first quarter '07 for overseas advertisers, which is why the new system won't positively affect revenues this year. In April, Yahoo said it expected 2006 revenues between $4.6 and $4.85 billion. Meanwhile, in recent years Yahoo's margins have stabilized at around 40 percent, as the company balances ad growth with investment in new areas. Decker said more than half of the company's immediate ad growth will come from increases in revenue per user as a result of its new ad system. Read the whole story...