Yahoo! announced in a press release on November 5th that they are disappointed that Google decided to back out of their advertising agreement proposed back in September. While Google was more easily intimidated by the Department of Justice which had already hired a litigator in order to block the deal, Yahoo! had been trying to work with the DOJ to find a compromise.

Yahoo! President, Sue Decker stated that “Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and we are disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw… rather than defend it in court.”

The agreement was an essential step in strengthening Yahoo! Corporation. It would have allowed Yahoo! to step up their investment, growth and general business strategies. Decker stated in a memo to her employees that although the Google deal would have helped to accelerate their strategy for growth, Yahoo! still has other deals and efforts in the works. She also went on to say that this fall-through does not change “Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search.”

She cited the improvements that Yahoo! has undergone including “monetization and driving query growth.” Decker also noted that just in 2008, Yahoo! has added and developed new ranking models, index updates and expansion and fine-tuned their overall performance. “Not surprisingly, we are seeing results, with the company benefitting from strong RPS gains, as discussed in our Q3 earnings call. Further, we are adding search and contextual ad functionalities on a regular basis.”

At a 2.0 conference in San Francisco, there were questions about whether Yahoo! would allow Microsoft to purchase it under the current circumstances. Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang replied, “There’s no new news.” But he also stated that buying Yahoo! at the right price would be the best thing Microsoft could possibly do right now. When asked about a possible purchase of AOL, Yang said that he couldn’t talk about it.

Yang did however talk about his commitment to Yahoo!. “I don’t take my position lightly. It’s a very serious obligation… There has been a lot of change, a lot of people coming and leaving, but the plans we’ve tried to execute against have been done and I’m extremely proud…”

Despite their disappointment, execs at Yahoo! seem to be incredibly optimistic and seem to plan on moving forward aggressively. According to Decker’s memo, Yahoo! is stepping up the “efforts to create a more open, efficient and effective marketplace…” This will mean new tools designed for easier interaction between users, advertisers and publishers. Yahoo! also has plans to lead the way in cutting edge technology advances in order to provide better products, services and platforms for customers. As consumers, business owners, marketing professionals and developers we’ll just have to wait and see where Yahoo! really decides to go from here.

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The Defrag Conference held in Denver, Colorado in the beginning of November, played host all of the top execs in the search industry including Tom Chi of Yahoo!, Bradley Allen of Siderian Software, Derek Murphy of Isys Search Software, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters and more. So naturally there was some incredibly interesting dialogue regarding the future of search going on there. During Steve Larson’s presentation on “Next-Level Discovery: Open Search, Semantic Search, etc.” the top question on everyone’s mind was this: What will the next-generation of search engines look like?

“The only problem with search is that it’s awful, but other than that it works pretty well.” Tom Chi of Yahoo! Corporation said of current search engines. He was referring to the fact that although search is a wonderful and useful tool, it could also be a little more user friendly and helpful. “People are still doing navigational searches for Ebay.com” he added. This is significant because not only are they getting relevant direct results on their results page, they are also getting lots of other stuff they don’t need – both in direct results and in the ads section. It’s become “flooded with too much noise” as Murphy puts it. People hardly know what to do with the millions of results they get.

As a basic internet instructor for adults I see it everyday. Students look up at the top right hand corner and see that there are millions of results for “Gardening” but I can’t get them past the first page for some reason. If what they are looking for isn’t right there in those first ten results, they just give up. They would actually rather try another keyword than venture deeper in to the website. Occasionally I can get them to page two or three, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Another problem is unintelligent search results. When users search for “eby.com” they don’t get anywhere, even though what they’re looking for is obvious. Major search engines aren’t compelled to change this because those faulty search results yield the same profits that correct ones do.

Yahoo! has started to take steps to help its search platform evolve through SearchMonkey, which I’ve talked about before. It is essentially a mix between a wiki and a search engine in the sense that it allows website owners, developers and programmers to create applications that enhance the users search experience.

Other search engines like are working on vertical search systems that give more specialized results. Siderean is interested in developing a vertical search for business tools, networking and resources. Both Yahoo! and Siderean are taking a smart step forward since part of the problem, according to Tague, is that search corporations need to solve is how to integrate search with social graphs and networking.

So what’s the future of search? Will change come in an amalgam of search, wiki and social networking? Or in an evolutionary bang in proportion to algorithms? No one seems to really know what the gen-next of search will look like. But don’t worry. Users can rest assured that the experts are on it.

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About five months ago Google and Yahoo! announced an agreement that would allow Google to advertise on Yahoo!’s paid search result columns, and in turn allow Yahoo! to utilize Google’s AdSense program in the US and Canada. The deal was made in an attempt to strengthen Yahoo! as a corporation after Microsoft tried to take the company over.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

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For those who may not have heard that there was a plethora of publishers and authors attempting to sue Google.com for copyright infringement: Back in 2004 Google.com launched their book search program for which thousands of books from university libraries were scanned and made available on the World Wide Web for public consumption. The book search allowed users to search with a keyword, author name, title, etc, and Google would bring back relevant samples out of those books.

Sounds great, and it was. Unfortunately Google failed to get permission from the authors and publishers before scanning and posting their work. As a result, Google.com was sued (almost exactly three years ago to the day) in 2005 by the Author’s Guild, The Association of American Publishers and several other copyright holders for profiting from their work without properly compensating them for it.

Well on Tuesday, the two sides finally reached a settlement.

So what does this mean for Google, readers, publishers and authors? David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer stated in his Official Google Blog on Tuesday that

“This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.”

David Drummond, Google

Not only was Drummond pleased, but Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expressed their excitement over the deal as well. All in all it was a very fair and beneficial ruling. Let’s do a more detailed breakdown of the settlement to see what Google, the copyright Holders and Readers can expect to happen next…

GOOGLE
The internet giant will be allowed to scan books that have a valid copyright which are also out of print. They can sell online access to individual books within digests and volumes, offer subscriptions to university databases. In the near future they should be allowed to let subscribers print the books that they search for and find on Google.com.

Google is also expected to fund and help to establish a new Book Rights Registry which will be managed by copyright holders. The purpose of this new registry is to “address the orphan works problem” by locating and representing copyright holders, make old and out of copy books more available to the public, and to distribute all royalties that Google pays out.

Of course there’s always the matter of money. Under the settlement Google will be paying out a total f $125 million as an upfront payment and an additional $34.5 million to fund the new registry.

Google Hands Over $125+ million in Settlement

PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
Obviously the new Book Rights Registry will be beneficial to all copyright holders since it allows them to be paid fairly for the use of their work. Aside from cashing in on 63% of Google’s book search profits, publishers and authors are getting about $45 million up front – or about sixty bucks per book.

Copyright holders will be able to have more control of how their work will be used. Google will be allowed to give non-subscribers a look at about 20% of the content in each out of print book. Subscribers will have full access to Google’s scanned out of print tomes. In order to offer the same access to in print books, Google will need permission from copyright holders.

Drummond notes in his blog that although the settlement only covers United States users and copyright holders, Google will do it’s best to respect everyone. International authors and publisher will be able to register themselves in the new Book Rights Registry so they can be paid fairly. International users will be able to search and view the full content of out of print texts, “but will not be able to preview or purchase access to books online unless these services are authorized by the rights-holder of a book.”

READERS
Under the agreement, readers will need to subscribe to services in order to view the full text of these books. They will also have greater access to more texts that they wouldn’t have other wise, which was Google’s and the copyright holders’ ultimate goal.

Thanks to a part of the agreement that allows Google and participating libraries to develop new technology and services, users and subscribers with disabilities will also have full access to these books.

For more information on the deal, you can go to Google’s press release.

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Well, SearchMonkey has been around for about a year now and there’s good news for developers and website managers/owners whose applications have been rejected by Yahoo! SearchMonkey. They may now qualify for acceptance. For those experimenting with new apps, Yahoo! has introduced their new SearchMonkey Experimental Applications Gallery. Developers can go onto Search Monkey and use the SearchMonkey Developer Tool in order to test out, post and even gain a little popularity for their Experimental Apps.

Nick Cox of Yahoo! Search states in the YSearchBlog that although guidelines for submission are pretty clear, they are willing to bend the rules a little for experimental apps that at least function as intended and don’t have any “major issues.”

Users who are looking for the newest beta applications can go to Yahoo! Search Gallery Beta and select the “Show Experimental Enhancements” link at the bottom. Right above that link it will tell users how many new experimental apps are available. From there you can play around, provide feedback directly to the developers, make feature requests and even get automatic updates on your favorites.

It’s pretty slim pickings right now, but if it’s anything like Google’s App Gallery, (and it kind of is) then I’m sure it will take off pretty quickly with the Yahoo!-lover crowd.

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Blogscoped posted an interesting tidbit about Googles rumoured new (Click here for the full article)

Basically, it appears as though Google has finally taken its learnings from being an open source powerhouse (Android is another good example) and it using its high level of insight into the way in which people interact with webpages and online and rolled it all up into a neat little project.

They seem to have taken the best of all the different browsers and rolled them all up into the one neat little package. Can’t wait to get my hands on a working beta of this one, it should be interesting to see how much more they can integrate their search knowledge into a desktop app.

Below are some key points from the blogscoped article:

Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”

Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.

As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.

Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”

Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).

To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

You can also check out the official Google announcement on their blog here.

Google Chrome image is by Google

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Google recently updated the way in which it communicates adwords quality scores to its advertisers. These fundamental changes, give a more insightful and meaningful metric to advertisers which is “first page bid” instead of “minimum bid”. Basically, a minimum bid is a pretty useless idea of how well your ad is going to be seen, especially in a competitive category because a minimum bid usually will be somewhere deep in page number 3 or 4 of results pages.

Here is how Google explained the way in which the new formula will work in their latest inside adwords post

Here’s an example to illustrate how per-query Quality Score works:

Nancy’s Dairy advertises on the keyword ‘milk.’ Nancy’s ads perform better on the keyword ‘milk’ in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query ‘milk delivery’ than on ‘milk,’ and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword ‘milk’ is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy’s keyword ‘milk’ will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it’s likely to perform better, i.e., in the U.S., on ‘milk delivery’ and on certain search network sites.

Now, the biggest problem i see with this is that Google STILL DOESN’T give advertisers the ability to run bulk, campaign wide quality score reports. That however is a whole different issue that i will address shortly.

Google also states that quality scores will now update in real time which is a massive improvement because until now, quality score sweeps could happen several days or even weeks after making a change to an ad. Which is of course a bad thing when it comes to paying too much for clicks.

One of the other big changes is that keywords will no longer be deactivated. I’m sure we have all come across dozens of keywords in large accounts which will quite often become deactivated due to low quality scores. In fact, i’ve always found it quite useful to look at accounts in adwords editor and sort by keyword status, the inactive keywords are always the first ones to be optimized!

Google the ever evolving beast is doing a fantastic job across almost all areas of adwords and is still lightyears ahead of Yahoo, Keep up the good work guys!

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Google’s products are always evolving, AdWords, Gmail, Maps are hardly the same from one week to the next. So it was no surprise this week, when Google unleashed a whole bunch of new features on Google Maps.

Local search is changing and Google and Yahoo have started to deliver a new suite of products, specifically designed to give people results, richly populated with local data, photos, reviews and anything else which has a geographical tag associated with it.

Explore this area - Google maps starts to deliver user generated content

Let’s look at the first major change, the left hand navigation column, now has a little snippet of text which says “Explore this area” Below that text is now a selection of images from that location. Big deal you may think, but look a little closer and click on the explore this area link.

Let’s do some sample searches and see what comes up. Go to Maps.Google.com and try searching for “Yellowstone” (Or simply click on the Yellowstone link to go right there)

Ok, so we have the map open and we can see Yellowstone, old faithful and everything else within the area. Now, let’s click on “Explore this area” and really see what this feature does. You should see some images appear, on the main map interface that look something like this picture below.

The beautiful thing about this, is that this content is from the general public, peoples personal experiences with the area you are looking at. Not just some salesperson, trying to convince you about how great the holiday will be. You can now explore photos, videos, reviews and get a much more immersed within the area, all through the use of Google Maps.

Let’s do a little exploring on this Yellowstone map we have open, i clicked on one of the images of the world famous geyser known as “old faithful” and bang what’s this, its a youtube video somebody took of old faithful playing within Google maps.

I’m not going to go through the interface image by image for you, i suggest just opening up Google Maps, searching for something that you know well, clicking explore and then seeing the quality of content you can find.

I Expect that the amount of content and the quality of it is only going to increase exponentially as people start to tag their holiday snaps with geographical data, so lookout for new refinements to this feature.

Maps gets real - Google maps now featuring real estate listings.

Ok, so we have just seen the new explore this area feature and all that comes along with it but did you think they would stop there?

Every real estate site that i use to look for houses (I am currently looking to buy so i visit them frequently) seems to use Google Maps to show me, exactly where the house is. So, it seems only logical for Google to do the opposite and start to integrate real estate listings directly into Maps.

The biggest problem i have when searching through real estate sites, is the fact that their search is, well, extremely bad and outdated. I dont want to search by price range or number of bedrooms, i would prefer to search by location and then choose from the houses i like, all the while keeping in mind which streets the house is on and how far it is from work.

Let’s do an example real estate search, to do this you will need to click on “show search options” on the right hand side of your maps search box, then from the dropdown choose real estate. Now do a search for your favourite location and you are browsing real estate listings with photos and descriptions.

The implications of this little addition are huge for the real estate industry. Google could effectively, allow people to sell their house, directly through Adwords and cut out the middleman real estate site. I’m not going to go into detail about my thoughts on that in this article as i am preparing a seperate, more in-depth commentary about that topic. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, i suggest keeping an eye out for these new little icons that popup from time to time on Google Maps and play with them as much as possible.

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Recently, Google Japans homepage had some changes that might not seem too major to most, but these changes represent the first time Google has added graphical links directly to the homepage of any one of its country sites!

Google is now becoming a destination and not just a search engine, something that, until now, it has always stayed away from doing. This has always been Yahoo’s market. Googles new steps, to become more of an integrated destination, are a sneak peek into what the search giant will look like in 12-18 months time.

What does that mean to the rest of us?.. To be honest, who knows at the moment. Google is growing in so many ways, with so many different properties, that its impossible to tell what difference any one of these is going to make at the moment.

Stay tuned, i will post more thoughts on this as i see these changes roll out.

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In case you have been hiding in a cave for the last few weeks and don’t read newspapers or watch the tv, You would know that Microsoft made a bid for the once mighty search engine Yahoo in a deal worth over 44 Billion dollars! After roughly a week of deliberation on the offer Yahoo has now officially rejected the offer saying that it substantially undervalues the company and is a predatory move designed to take advantage of the current share price slump.

Analysts and search guru’s have been a buzz over the possible implications a merged Yahoo and MSN would have for the broader search community and i have just one comment to make regarding this. Any kind of serious competition to Googles almost total market dominance has to be a good thing, regardless of who the player that consolidates the number two search spot ends up being.

More recent reports have come in that News Corp is supposedly in talks to merge its myspace and fox web properties along with some private cash on the side as well with Yahoo in order to gain a 20% stake in the company which would value Yahoo at roughly 50 billion total.

No doubt there will be more updates to come as the battle for Yahoo continues.

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