Category Archives: Google

Microsoft’s next Big Thing: visual search

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From VentureBeat.

Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.

The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them quickly, and narrow down your search based on brand, price, and other attributes. Unusually for Microsoft, the user experience is actually quite impressive, with the image results and the transition between search pages providing some nice eye-candy. It’s certainly a much flashier experience than Google Image Search. Bing Visual Search is supposed to be live any second now, so you can see it for yourself.

Micropayments: the fantasy lives on

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From the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how to charge for content online.

The revelation comes in an eight-page response to the NAA’s request for paid-content proposals, which it extended to several major technology companies and startups. It’s surprising, given the newspaper industry’s tenuous relationship with Google, that the company was involved at all…

The Google submission (pdf) is available here. It says, in part:

Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers. However, “open” need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models — including content available only via subscription. While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue. In addition, a successful paid content model can enhance advertising opportunities, rather than replace them.

When it comes to a paid content model, there are two main challenges. First, the content mus offer value to users. Only content creators can address this. The second is to create a simple payment model that is painless for users. Google has experience not only with our e-commerce products; we have successfully built consumer products used by millions around the world. We can use this expertise to help create a successful e-commerce platform for publishers.

Beyond the mechanics of any payment system, users must know the product exists. Discovery and distribution are just as, if not more, important to premium content as they are to free conten given the smaller audience of potential subscribers. Google is uniquely positioned to help publishers create a scalable e-commerce system via our Checkout product and also enable users to find this content via search — even if it’s behind a paywall. Our vision of a premium content ecosystem includes the following features:

  • Single sign-on capability for users to access content and manage subscriptions
  • Ability for publishers to combine subscriptions from different titles together for one price
  • Ability for publishers to create multiple payment options and easily include/exclude
    content behind a paywall
  • Multiple tiers of access to search including 1) snippets only with “subscription” label, 2)
    access to preview pages and 3) “first click free” access
  • Advertising systems that offer highly relevant ads for users, such as interest-based
    advertising.

    • If anyone can make such a system work, it’s Google. But I doubt that it will work, for the reasons Clay Shirky set out some time ago.

    The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition. News that this has been tried many times in the past and has not worked is unwelcome precisely because if small payment systems won’t save existing publishers in their current form, there might not be a way to save existing publishers in their current form (an outcome generally regarded as unthinkable by existing publishers.)

    The micropayment idea is really a wistful fantasy of a print-based culture which thinks that it can have the benefits of being online without having to change its basic way of thinking and operating.

    Google’s bid for our literary heritage

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    If you have any free brain cells next Tuesday, spare a thought for Denny Chin. He is a judge on the US district court for the southern district of New York. And he has the job of deciding a case which has profound implications for our culture.

    At its centre is a decision about how we will access printed books in the future. And, as you might guess, Google is at the heart of it…

    The published version of the column omitted the reference to Professor James Grimmelmann’s terrific commentary on the case. If you’re interested, you can get the pdf from here.

    Now you see it, now you don’t.

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    This morning’s Observer column about the power that Google now wields.

    Most of the time we don’t think about this because the company provides such a useful service to the average web user. But if you look at it from the point of view of someone who runs an online business then you get a very different perspective. In The Search, an excellent book about Google, John Battell tells a story that illustrates this perfectly.

    It concerns a small entrepreneur called Neil Montcrief, who in 2000 founded a small e-commerce business (2bigfeet.com) selling outsize shoes on the net. For a time, the business was modestly prosperous because of the traffic Google drove to Montcrief’s site. By the middle of 2003 he was shifting $40,000 of big shoes a month.

    “And then, one day in November of that year, everything changed. Traffic to his site shrivelled, cash flow plummeted and Montcrief fell late on his loan payments. He began avoiding the UPS man, because he couldn’t pay the bill. His family life deteriorated. And, as far as Montcrief could tell, it was all Google’s fault.”

    In a sense, it was. But Google had not targeted him: the vaporisation of his little business turned out to be just collateral damage in the ceaseless war between Google and the armies of people who try to ‘game’ its search results…

    Facebook, Friendfeed and, er, Google (of course)

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Google’s page-rank search technology is good, but it’s still pretty primitive – try looking for a hotel in rural France or a plumber in any UK town. You could say that search is about 5% solved, with 3% of that down to Google. With 95% still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or collaborative dimensions to pure computational algorithms.

    Which is where social networking comes in…

    The strange case of Apple, AT&T and Google Voice

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    The Google Voice team also developed a free App ie, application to run on the Apple iPhone. This would enable all US iPhone users to access the cool services above. The team submitted the App to Apple for approval in the usual way, only to have it rejected. Then Apple went even further: it deleted from the App Store two similar programs, GV Mobile and VoiceCentral, which had been there for months.

    The VoiceCentral author got a call from an Apple functionary, who said, "I'm calling to let you know that VoiceCentral has been removed from the App Store because it duplicates features of the iPhone" – and absolutely refused to discuss the matter further.

    At the moment, nobody really knows what lies behind Apple's intransigence. But conspiracy theories abound…

    LATER: Jason Calcanis has published a terrific essay: “The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts”. Great stuff.

    Schmidt finally ends conflict of interest. War now starts in earnest.

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    From BBC NEWS.

    The resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt as a director of Apple’s board has failed to halt a government inquiry into possible antitrust violations.

    Mr Schmidt stepped down because the search giant’s business increasingly competes with Apple’s.

    The Google CEO recused himself when Apple’s board discussed the iPhone.

    In a statement the Federal Trades Commission said “we will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies”.

    And the NYT reminds us that Google and Apple still have one other Board member in common — Arthur Levinson, the chairman of Genentech.

    So now instead of having Google+Apple vs. Microsoft we will have Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft+Yahoo.

    There ought to be a board game in this somewhere.

    Round Three

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    From Jason Calcanis:

    And so ends the second chapter of search and begins the third.

    Chapter one was inception up until the launch of Google.

    Chapter two was Google’s rise and Yahoo’s death.

    Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google, with
    the inevitable emergence of a third and fourth player.

    That’s the silver lining for startups in all of this. As Google and
    Microsoft lock into a dog fight for revenue and market share, leaving
    the Yahoo carcass on the side of the road, the bevy of crafty startups
    will get their chance to take the third, fourth and fifth positions in
    this very important race.

    The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that
    innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your
    talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never.
    Never.

    Yup. Yahoo blew it.

    Is PageRank now skewed to big brands?

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    We all know about the chaos that follows upon the regular tweaks in the Google PageRank algorithm. (John Batelle’s book
    has some chilling stories about the impact these changes can have on small online businesses.) But here’s a new allegation:

    Since the beginning of this year, increasing numbers of big brands are appearing in the top ten search results on competitive generic search queries. They are elbowing out of the way thousands of lesser sites in the process. No-one is quite sure why this has happened, but some suspect that changes to Google’s algorithm made in February dubbed the ‘Vince update’ (after the Google engineer that made them) are responsible. This has benefited big brands to the detriment of smaller players.

    [Source.]

    And Google’s response? See below.

    1.5 billion App downloads don’t count — says Google

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    From FT.com Tech Blog.

    Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.

    Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.

    He claimed that even Google was not rich enough to support all of the different mobile platforms from Apple’s AppStore to those of the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and the many variations of the Nokia platform.

    “What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said.

    “Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning.

    “We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

    Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies said…