Microsoft Yahoo: Search Realities
July 14, 2008
The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Reuters have covered the most recent Microsoft Yahoo mating dance in excruciating detail. If you have not seen these three media giants’ take on the Yahoo snub of Microsoft’s and Mr. Carl Ichan’s most recent offers, just navigate to one of these links:
- New York Times here but you have to register: Angle is shift from saber rattling to escalating conflict
- Reuters here: Angle is “guaranteed ad revenue” for five years
- Wall Street Journal here: Angle is impasse that will lead to an “incredible dance”
You can explore links galore on Techmeme.com and Megite.com. I can’t add much to these reports of this ménage à trois. I would like to point out that when some sort of deal goes through, search gains a new urgency. Here’s why:
- Google faces a real pit bull in the legal squabble with Viacom. Based on my research findings, Google may for the first time face a perfect story: lousy economy, escalating annoyance from developers over the Apps flap, and the privacy monsoon unleashed with the YouTube usage data decision. Now is the time to strike Google, but if the internecine warfare continues, Microsoft may miss this opportunity to deal a potentially devastating blow to the GOOG
- Yahoo is in disarray. Open source is a great idea. Cutting deals with Google is a great idea. The problem is that when one looks at the long term impact of these great ideas, the great ideas undermine the foundation of Yahoo. Better shore up that foundation before the basement fills with water and undermines the entire shotgun house
- Capturing headlines is not the same as making money. Microsoft itself needs to concentrate its forces, set priorities, and get down to business with regards to [a] Web search and [b] enterprise search. The senior management of any organization has a finite amount of attention and energy. Whatever is available needs to be focused on closing the gap with Googzilla and making gains in the severely fragmented enterprise search sector.
No doubt business school case writers are sharpening their pencils. Unless Microsoft can resolve this Yahoo business, the company may miss its chance at the brass ring. Google can settle with Viacom, mend its fences, and rebuild its lead with regard to Microsoft. Agree? Disagree? Help me fill in the gaps in my understanding.
Stephen Arnold, July 14, 2008
Google Faces an Attack of Infinite Legal Eagles
July 3, 2008
My news reader overfloweth today, July 3, 2008. The legal eagles are circling the Googleplex, dropping subpoenas and court orders on the Googlers. In my two studies of Google–The Google Legacy (2005) and Google Version 2.0 (2007) I complied with my publisher’s request and included a list of the vulnerabilities Google faced in its charge to market dominance. I won’t reproduce the list of the dozen or so issues my research identified.
Instead, let me highlight one that has remained a threat constant since Google’s engineers sought inspiration from Yahoo Overture online advertising as a revenue generation mechanism. Google coughed up some cash and stock to Yahoo shortly before the company’s initial public offering. You can read the Google side of the deal here. Since that time, Google has been lawyered up, defending itself against all comers.
In my research, I asserted that lawyers and mathematicians, particularly brilliant mathematicians, don’t always see problems in the same way.
Kurt Opsahl’s “Court Ruling Will Expose Viewing Habits of YouTube Users” makes it clear that Google will have to produce usage data pertinent to YouTube.com, Google’s video service. You can read the full story here. This write up includes links to court documents, and you can grind through the legalese at your leisure.
Usage data is a crown jewel at Google. Few people know what Google captures. Even fewer have seen the fragments of information about the data model into which the usage data are inserted. I did write about one exemplary data table in my KMWorld column a month or two ago. If a legal eagle finds someone who can interpret the log file data in a Googley way, other legal eagles will join those circling the Googleplex. These legal eagles won’t be there for a drink of Odwalla and to get their automobiles washed.
The Bottomline is that this decision, if it survives a legal challenge, is likely to be problematic for Google. Lawyers and log files will result in a different output than achieved from rocket scientists and log files. In math there’s a notion of aleph. This is an aleph of woe for Google or
If you find legal eagle activities interesting, you will want to take a gander (no logo pun intended) at TechCrunch’s essay “Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users to the Wolves”. I like this piece because it underscores some of the issues in a scuffle between old media and the GOOG:
I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online videos services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video. YouTube’s core value is in it’s network effect – the library of content along with its massive user base.
Please, read Mr. Arrington’s essay here.
My take on this matter is that Google has its work cut out for its attorneys. My recollection is that Google has some of its attorneys in temporary quarters about one mile from the Google headquarters. Google’s senior management may have to move some of these JDs into Google headquarters and some of the math PhDs out to the trailers now housing some of Google’s juris doctors.
This silly goose thinks Viacom means business, and it is no puny Internet Service Provider in Chicago complaining about an Outlook migration tool. You can read about this legal issue here. This is video, folks. Video is real money. Infinite money in our digital culture.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2008
Yahoo’s Semantic Search Still Available
July 3, 2008
In the firestorm of publicity burning through blogland, Yahoo’s semantic search system has been marginalized. I admit, the url is not the easiest to remember: http://www.yr-bcn.es/demos/microsearch/. The moniker Microsearch seems to be intended to tell the astute user that Yahoo processes microformat information. A microformat is a Web-based data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata.
The site is labeled a demonstration, and the Yahoo logo is visible in a funereal black, which I quite like. The service is called Microsearch. The system supports supports RDFa marked-up pages plus some other semantic formats. Yahoo says:
Microsearch is a richer search experience combining traditional search results with metadata extracted from web [sic] pages. At the moment your Yahoo! Search is enriched in three ways: [a] by showing ‘smart’ snippets that summarize the metadata inside the page and allow to take action without actually visiting the page; [b] by showing map and timeline views that aggregate metadata from various pages, [c] by showing pages related to the current result.
I had to dig a bit to find the explicit connection with the Semantic Web, but the site offers a version of semantic search. Yahoo includes a link to the Semantic Web page at the World Wide Web consortium.
Let’s look at the system. Yahoo provides some suggested queries, but I prefer my own.
My first query was “enterprise search”. The system returned the following result page:
The map was visually arresting, but it was irrelevant to the query and the result set. I looked at the results and was surprised to find Microsoft was the number two result. The other results were okay. The same query on Google returned more Microsoft links. My conclusion was that the “semantic” feature on Yahoo worked about as well as regular Google. The other conclusion I drew was that Microsoft is working hard to come up at the top of the results list for the word pair “enterprise search”. Too bad I don’t think of Microsoft and enterprise search as sector leaders.
My second query was for the phrase “Michael Lynch Autonomy”. Here’s what Microsearch displayed:
For this query, the map did not render. I assumed that the system would show me the location of Autonomy’s headquarters in the United Kingdom. Sigh. Microsearch is at version 1.4 on July 3, 2008, and whizzy features should be working. The results were stale. The top ranked hit was a 2006 interview. My recollection is that the Financial Times ran an essay by Mr. Lynch a few days ago. Alas, the system seems unable to factor time into its results ranking. News stories often carry time and date data, and News XML includes explicit tags for these data. I ran the same query on standard Google. Google returned the results set more quickly than Yahoo. Google’s results were poor. The first hit was to someone other than Autonomy’s Mike Lynch. The other hits were more stale than Yahoo’s. Autonomy may want to emulate Microsoft’s search engine optimization push.
Observations
The semantic features of Microsearch did not appear front and center. The mapping function did not work. Compared to Google, Yahoo performed as well as market leader Google. To be fair, Google’s results were not too good and Yahoo hit that benchmark.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2008
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