Just a matter of time. From GigaOm.

This was embargo’d till Monday, but AOL just told me the embargo was broken so I can post it now. AOL has worked with Google to execute a white label version of AdWords that allows AOL advertisers to target only AOL audience members. The benefit to AOL is that they get to cross sell their Ads.com and display advertisers into AOL Search. This is the first such white label deal I’ve seen done, though there may be others (I have a mail into Ask to

Many of you have noted that my postings have been hurried and cursory lately, that will continue for some time. I’ve been dealing with some family issues (my father) and things have been unusually busy over at FM lately as well. That said, I don’t want you to miss the stuff I’ve been reading simply because I don’t have the time to lard it up with my trenchant analysis. Here’s a summary from UBS’s Ben Schachter, for example, on the Feb Comscore s

With My Maps.

A public article, so I’ll point to it, on Ask’s campaign to differentiate from Google in the UK….

Autonomy, an enterprise search co out of the UK, is sure to add to all the hoo-ha about copyright technology in the Google/YouTube/Rest of World kerfluffle with this announcement on deep copyright search from its Virage subsidiary. The release, in part: Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and proponent of Meaning-Based Computing, today announced the release of Virage Automa

Local.com is a public company, so it has to be ready to defend its numbers. I just got a release which claims a $35 RPM for the site. That’s pretty darn good. Not Google good (estimates say Google’s at nearly twice that) but still, very good. IRVINE, CA, Apr 04, 2007 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX News Network) — Local.com (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that it has surpassed the $35 milestone for search traffic moneti

First, they finally gave me a Google Desktop for the Mac. But I will be honest with you. I am not eager to have Google scan my desktop and organize my information. It’s not that I don’t trust the folks at Google, the people I know there are all high integrity and I’m convinced their values pretty much mirror my own. It’s that I don’t trust Google, the corporation. Am I alone? Or a paranoid freak? And in the spirit of helping the web be more ef

Thanks to Gary and SEL, news that Yahoo has appointed Reggie Davis, a lawyer (bio thanks to Gary), to focus on click fraud. From the release: Davis will serve as the company’s first senior executive dedicated to continually enhancing the quality of Yahoo!’s display and search listings marketplaces. As vice president of marketplace quality, Davis is responsible for developing and executing a strategy aimed at driving more rapid inno

Nah, they’re not spinning out a newco with Yahoo, but it’s a start. According to LiveSide: Microsoft today announced the creation of a new group spun out of Windows Live, the Live Search and Ad Platform. Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search, formerly MSN Search) will join adCenter in a new group that will not report to Steven Sinofsky and Windows Live, but will be headed by Satya Nadella, and report directly to Kevin Johnson, the Platfor

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Terry Semel knows he needs a win, and it sounds like he’s got one. He told an AdAge audience that Panama would “some very exciting numbers” this quarter, according to Reuters. “I’m totally all smiles,” Semel said. “We are very excited and very happy and I’m smiling broadly.”

Craig alerts me to a days old NYT search spam piece and related research from MSFT. From the Times: Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them. A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a

News from Yahoo on mobile search: Today we are launching Yahoo! oneSearch on our Yahoo! Mobile Web service, which is accessible to the more than 85 percent of you in the US who can use a browser on your mobile phones. If you ever tried using mobile search before today, you’re familiar with the list of links you get as your search result, just like those you’re used to getting on your PC. But is that what you really want on your ph

Another sign that Microsoft, or someone else, could buy business from Google: Comcast is using the Wall St. Journal as a broadcast medium to potential partners that its deal with Google is up soon, and it’s looking for someone to buy the business. Price tag? $100 million. From the non-public article: Comcast Corp. is negotiating to use Microsoft Corp.’s Internet search services on its broadband portal, a sign the cable titan isn’t happy about i

A NYT story dated for Monday says Lycos will re-enter the US search/portal market under the brand Jubii, the name of a Danish subsidiary. Er. OK. I have a soft spot for Lycos, it bought the assets of Wired Digital, which I owned a very small portion of in 1997 (I don’t own any of it now). I’ve always rooted for the company, though it’s never won anything, to be honest. So, with that in mind…Go Jubii, Go!

Shashi Seth, that is, who just moved to YouTube, GigaOm reports.

More here…

More here…

Veoh, out of beta today, is Eisner’s bid to create something for his pals in the entertainment biz to buy so as to combat YouTube/Google, in my very jaded view. On the other hand, it was a strong second tier player before he got involved. And Lost Remote likey. More here. PS - when you go to the site, a TV Guide channel thing starts running with typical Hollywood schlock. Ugh.

Will have more to say on this asap…

BRUSSELS — A court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google (GOOG), claiming that the Web search Internet search leader infringed copyright laws and demanded it remove their stories.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that operates the world’s most-used search engine immediately said it would appeal, claiming its Google News service was “entirely legal.”

A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection

Reader JG points me to this release, from IBM Research in Haifa:

IBM recently announced the launch of a new EU 6th Framework project for Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval (SAPIR) to build a large scale information community that will make multimedia files more accessible.

SAPIR is geared towards finding new ways to analyze, index, and retrieve the tremendous amounts of speech, image, video, and music that are filling our digital universe

From Matt at Venturebeat. More when I can grok…

Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, will announce Friday it has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google.

The technology, developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, seeks to understand the meanings between words, akin to the way humans understand language — and is thus called “natural language.” It has been thirty years in the works.

The deal is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google

I can’t keep up. But these guys are trying…

Kevin Heisler, the new SEM analyst at Jupiter, asks for your help in preparing an industry report on the SEM marketplace. You can take his survey here.

Kevin notes to me:

This is my first report for Jupiter since I was hired as an analyst to build out the Search Marketing practice. It’s the foundation for vision and concept reports I’ll be writing this year, as well as our next Search Engine Marketing Constellation of SEM agencies, services and technologies.

The questions for U.S

There’s other search monetization news today with the announcement of FAST’s AdMomentum. Release is here. The publisher-centric ad platform is due out in the spring. More from this AP story. Tidbits:

Fast is marketing its platform _ dubbed AdMomentum _ as a one-stop solution for Web sites that want to become less dependent on Google and the other large advertising networks operated by Yahoo Inc

Curtain raising pieces on Panama from Time, SEW, the NYT, and Beal.

From Amr Awadallah, a Yahoo fellow, but one worth listenting to.

Some background, Panama brings two core changes:

One launched a few months ago and that is the new advertiser facing UI (user interface), it is much faster and easier to use than the original Overture UI (which was not upgraded in years) and brings many new features like ad templates, creative testing, immediate ad activation, and geo-targeting.
The other core change is what Yahoo! will launch late evening on Monday Feb 5th, and that is the spanken new Quality-Ordering marketplace

I should have a regular roundup of new search startups, but for now, consider it noted: Digger. Release. More on Cnet’s investment here.

Steve Ballmer gives an interview to the FT, the summary is here. From it:

Microsoft’s next big challenge is to address the threat posed by advertising-supported business models such as Google’s, Steve Ballmer, chief executive, signalled on Monday as the software group launched Vista, its new operating system.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ballmer said that, having focused on the threat posed by open source software over the past few years, the company had now turned its attention to advertising-funded business models.

That means, I presume, that all those Vista engineers have now been tasked to focus on search

When Live Search launched, I was happy to see how the company positioned search as in the early stages of development (sure, they quoted my book, so that helped). But since then, it’s been mostly bad news for Live Search. A reader (thanks Michelle) pointed me to this Cnet story. In it, the author describes what most of us already know - that Microsoft has continued to lose search market share, and further, that some analysts believe that the Live brand has confused the public

Neat idea, a search engine that can find music when you hum it. It’s called Midomi.

Cnet reports:

Launching in beta mode on Friday (this past week), Midomi allows people to search for a song by singing, humming or whistling a bit of the tune. The site then offers search results that include commercially recorded tracks or versions of the song recorded by others who have used the site. The technology also lets people listen to the exact section of each of the results that matched their voice sample.

(thanks, Scot)

Fascinating:

I keep hearing about Krugle from developers. They tell me it rocks for looking up stuff. Need shopping cart code? Search for it on Krugle. Now compare that to Google/Yahoo/MSN.

Now, I can hear you now “developers don’t matter to search engines.”

Oh, yeah? When I visit Google there’s a huge plasma screen that shows every Google search done in real-time (it only shows that a search was done, not what the search was about)

Hate to say I tol’ ya so but…from an email from Google PR:

Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide

Very interesting, noted on SEL: Gogole now includes paid links you’ve clicked on as part of your search history.

Google’s Adsense service is totally dominant in the marketplace. Yahoo’s YPN - so far anyway - has proven feeble, and Microsoft’s AdCenter has failed to move out of early stages. Game over? Hardly. Hardly at all. Both these major players are going to push hard in 2007 to win in syndicated paid results, and then there’s Ask, AOL, and many others who have intentions in this space

I’ve known Peter for a long time, he was at IDG when I was running the Standard. Only a couple of months ago we met to talk shop (and Google, of course) as he was running AllBusiness.com, an interesting restart of sorts (it’s been around the funding block more than once). Now Peter has taken a big job at IAC. Jim Lanzone at Ask.com, for example, will report to him, as will many others. I’ve sent him an email and hope to run a short interview here.

WikiSeek launches today. I am traveling, so will not be able to take a look till later…

Game search engine Wazap nets $7.9 million, Venturebeat reports. That’s a lot of money for a niche search engine, but gaming is a hot market…

Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, emailed me to let me know about news from his company and Comscore. From the release:

TACODA®, the world’s largest behaviorally-targeted online advertising network, today announced that it has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with comScore Networks® to integrate comScore data with its existing massive Audience Networks™ database of behavioral insights

From Mark’s column:

One problem in the sex blog snafu is the nature of the blogs’ subject matter and the exploitation of sex searches online. Blogs like Tiny Nibbles and Dirty Pretty Things and ErosBlog try to give insight into human sexuality in a more artful way than the average glossy porn magazine. But so many unsavory characters are trawling the web trying to divert the huge amount of sex searches to their own businesses — even if the business has nothing to do with sex.

Related

VentureBeat has a nice editorial surmising the impact of Google’s controversial decision from April to begin charging a licensing fee for use of its AdWords API this month:

Just trying to understand the API pricing in a specific business situation is a challenge, as is clear from seeing the Google price sheet

From O’Reilly:

Jen Pahlka of CMP, our co-producer on the Web 2.0 Conference, just sent a pointer to an Advertising Age article noting that Web 2.0 was the most cited Wikipedia article of the year, beating out such pop-culture topics as Steve Irwin, Mark Foley, and Snakes on a Plane, as well as other tech topics like blog, Ajax, and RSS.

And I have to say, the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0 is indeed pretty darn good, so I just incremented that link count by one..

PodZinger announces users can now search keywords within the YouTube database. Via SplashCast:

Speech-to-text video and audio search engine Podzinger just announced this afternoon that users can now search inside YouTube videos with a tab on the front page of Podzinger. The functionality appears to have been added in late December but I haven’t seen any blog coverage of it yet…

How’s the quality? I did a search for Starbucks and Podzinger found 120 results so far - compared to 3,000+ on YouTube searching text

A list of the Top 100+ Search Engines of 2007, graciously compiled by SEO Charles Knight, with some editorial tinkering. Thanks Charles.

A9 amazon.com answerbag AOL Ask.com Ask.mobile askville AURA! Baidu bessed blinkx boing ChaCha ClipBlast! Clusty collarity CometQ d e c i p h o del.icio.us digg digg labs swarm eurekster exalead Feedster FINDITALL GIGABLAST Google Google /*Code Search*/ Google Mobile ICEROCKET inQuira ixquick Jambo Jyve KartOO keyCompete Kosmix krugle KwMap last.fm like Live QnA LiveDeal lurpo MavenSearch mnemomap MS

Boing Boing covers the demotion of many popular sex related blogs in Google’s ranking. This reminds me of the great Florida wipeout…

Om has the scoop from a Bloomberg report:

Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, the Chinese P2P video software company has confirmed that Google will become an investor in the company, according to a Bloomberg news report.

Om had the original rumor, as well.

Google.cn search for Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology.

Not sure I have much to say about this yet. I have lobbed a mail to Jimmy Wales to see if he’d be open to talking here…

Jimmy Wales, founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is planning to build an online commercial search engine that would compete with Google and Yahoo.

The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today, Wales said Tuesday

Stanford’s HighWire Press Passes 1.5 Million Free Full Text Articles

Google Patent Searching Goes Live

More News and Info Sites for Your Mobile Browser

Google, NASA, SkylineGlobe, and World Wind

AOL Adds It’s Social Networking Service to Its Mobile

Spock Networks announced today, in the company’s first official press release, that it closed $7 million in Series A funding, in a round with Clearstone & Opus Capital. Spock is an ambitious people search engine company that both VentureBeat and GigaOm have mentioned before. Spock plans to launch a closed beta early next year.
“Everyone is curious about what is said about them online

Google has surreptitiously and summarily hacked-off the SOAP branch of its search API, directing developers to the AJAX API without even a blog post. O’Reilly notes that Nelson Minar, the originator of SOAP API at Google, says that this is part of the product discipline drive earlier seen with the ending of the Google Answers program