Bing zings: “Don’t get Scroogled this holiday season.”

But as it turns out, Bing does the same thing.

“It’s a classic case of engineers not connecting with their ad center counterparts,” said Jorie Waterman, the SVP of performance channels and optimization at True Action, an eBay-owned company that helps online retailers with their search marketing strategies.

Waterman added that Bing has a partnership with Shopping.com, which offers higher visibility through paid listings. “The paid listings have always gotten better placement,” she said.

In general, the issue Bing is raising has to do with a change that Google made this summer, which has stayed fairly under the radar. While Microsoft is hoping to shine some light on the subject now through the splashy campaign, it likely has less to do with the holiday shopping season and more to do with Google’s political situation in Washington, D.C.

In a Bing blog post, and a separate Web site found at Scroogled.com, Microsoft summarizes its argument:

In the beginning, Google preached, “Don’t be evil”—but that changed on May 31, 2012. That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.

It’s true that Google has changed the way it displays products, and this is the first holiday season in which retailers will have to pay to be included in the Google Shopping results. Before, merchants were allowed to upload their entire product feed into the search engine for free.

In a statement, Google would not comment directly on Bing’s attack, but defended why it made the changes:

Google Shopping makes it easier for shoppers to quickly find what they’re looking for, compare different products and connect with merchants to make a purchase. With new 360-degree, interactive product images, social shopping lists and a fast growing inventory of more than a billion products worldwide, Google is a great resource for shoppers to find what they need, at great prices for their loved ones this holiday season.

Along with the paid requirement, Google completely overhauled the shopping experience, stressing product images over text and allowing consumers to easily conduct price comparisons across numerous sites. It is a radical change for retailers, who are still grappling with how much to spend on the paid listings to see a positive return. However, Waterman said the new product images that appear in Google’s search results are resulting in a tremendous lift in sales for True Action’s retailers, which include Toys “R” Us and Levi’s. “It’s blowing our minds,” she said.

But as you might imagine, not all retailers can afford to pay, which means being excluded from Google Shopping results. Other retailers, like Amazon, are choosing not to participate. (That does not mean that Amazon’s results would not show up in organic listings when a consumer searches for a product from the main search bar. However, Amazon does not appear in the “Shopping” tab.)

Bing tried clarifying its position on the matter in a statement, saying that while yes, merchants can pay to have their products listed in Bing, there’s no requirement. Bing’s senior director Stefan Weitz said:

Bing includes millions of free listings from merchants and rankings are determined entirely by which products are most relevant to your query. While merchants can pay fees for inclusion on our third party shopping sites and subsequently may appear in Bing Shopping through partnerships we have, we do not rank merchants higher based on who pays us, nor do we let merchants pay to have their product offers placed higher in Bing Shopping’s search results.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com, who has been covering this subject closely for the past few months, wrote today that Bing’s campaign would be great, “if it were true.” In several screenshots taken of both Bing and Google search, he compares each search engine’s results, concluding that, “Bing is hardly in a position to be lecturing Google about poor disclosure and charging for listings, when it has the same issues.”

An important question, however, is which method is better for the consumer — paid or free listings?

“It’s a question mark,” Waterman said. “When it was free on Google and on Bing, I don’t think companies paid enough attention to the data — because it was free, so the quality of the data and accuracy wasn’t as good to give consumers the best information possible. Now you are paying for it, there’s much more diligence being paid to the data and the accuracy.”

Clearly, Microsoft’s timing with the campaign is a little fishy. While it lines up with the holiday shopping season, it also probably has a lot to do with the 18-month-long investigation of Google’s search business, which is coming to an end. As a source told my colleague, Liz Gannes, it’s now a good time to try and land something on Google: “All these people who have wanted to kill Google, this is their chance. They will never have a better opportunity than the next 30 days.”

Better get your lumps in quick, Microsoft — time is running out.

It’s been nice to see all the euphoria at Yahoo about free food and Apple iPhones kicking it up a notch.

But, purple people, guess what? Them’s just your basic table stakes in Silicon Valley these days and pretty much everyone else has had such perks for a long while now.

Thus, as nice as it is to drink your coconut water gratis, after two months in charge, it’s long past time to focus on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is up to besides making much-needed but obvious cultural changes at the troubled Internet giant.

She’s been busy with the expected listening tour of employees and also outside tech players — such as former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel — which is a textbook stop in the turnaround playbook.

Now comes the hard part: Actually beginning to make the significant decisions about how she’s going to turn around Yahoo and what the key issues of strategic focus need to be.

In a series of recent meetings, according to numerous sources inside the company, Mayer has begun to outline what those are to top staff.

Not surprisingly, they are many of the same thorny issues that Yahoo has been facing for a long time and which center primarily on making the company relevant again in a wide number of ways.

I’ll get to many of them over the next week in a series of What Will Marissa Do? posts — including looking closely at her new hires, when and how Mayer will deal with inevitable layoff decisions facing the company, where the sale of Yahoo! Japan stands and, finally, what she’s cooking up for key Yahoo products.

But the focus has to fall first of all on search and advertising, the two arenas that Mayer has been studying most closely, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

That has included a recent meeting and numerous discussions with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about improving Yahoo’s search advertising partnership, said sources at both companies.

That deal has been largely disappointing since it was struck under the regime of ousted CEO Carol Bartz several years ago.

Many reasons are given for the poor performance of the entire arrangement, including lack of improvement of cost per click and share growth for both parties. That means bid density and numbers of advertisers remain too low, especially compared to Google’s offering of access to a larger, more active and lucrative market.

Simply put, despite massive spending by Microsoft on search, users and advertisers get significantly better results overall with the search leader Google.

(You can read a great piece by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan from last year, which exhaustively looked at the issues until then.)

The irony abounds that it’s up to Mayer to fix this problem of improving revenue per search with Ballmer, since she has been among the executives who have made Google the search behemoth it has become.

Her particular expertise has been on search experience for consumers, which is just the area that Yahoo desperately needs to improve after handing over technology duties to Microsoft.

That move was controversial at the time and some feel it was a big mistake. But, most also think there is no going back at this point, given the enormous cost of running a serious search enterprise.

Such an idea is still being raised inside Yahoo, although it seems more nostalgic than a realistic possibility, given the enormous price and, more importantly, the departure of the company’s core search engineers in recent years.

That doesn’t mean Yahoo under Mayer can’t be key to helping solve Microsoft’s search tech problems. She certainly knows the entire arena, which has already given Yahoo increased credibility among Microsoft’s search engineers.

“None of Yahoo’s many CEOs knew anything about search technology and that’s certainly not the case here with Mayer,” said one person close to the situation at Microsoft. “When she walks in, she instantly has status among the geeks as someone who knows what she’s talking about.”

It still may be a losing battle, due to Google’s overwhelming dominance, but if anyone at Yahoo can spot areas of even small improvement — which can yield big returns — it could be Mayer.

In addition, she can spearhead Yahoo’s own efforts to reverse — or perhaps simply stop — search market share declines via delivering a better consumer offering.

That’s still heavy lifting, no matter the exec, since both Microsoft’s Bing and Google are better equipped to win here, too.

“It hard to imagine we are going to slow down in any way,” said one former colleague of Mayer’s at Google to me recently in a rather ominous tone. “We’re only going to get more competitive.”

Pressure much?

And more: Mayer is under a time limit, since guaranteed payments Microsoft agreed to pay Yahoo for the shortfalls on what was promised will be running out next year. The pair has renegotiated that deal before, and it will likely have to do so again.

Of course, Mayer could try to walk and threaten to take Yahoo’s search business elsewhere, a move that former CEO Scott Thompson was mulling before his ouster.

That’s not a surprising ploy, except it is probably impossible to pull off, a fact acknowledged by top Yahoo execs.

“It might feel good to say we have options in search,” said one person close to the situation. “But that ship sailed years ago.”

Indeed, especially since Google is the only choice of possible alternate partners and such a move is rife with major obstacles.

There is the issue of the contract with Microsoft, which could lead to a potentially explosive legal struggle Yahoo can ill afford.

“They can try to get out of the deal,” said one high-ranking person at the software giant. “But that’s a lot easier threatened than done.”

And, there is the clear regulatory hairball any search hook-up between Google and Yahoo would lead to.

That’s happened before, which Mayer knows well since she was a top exec in Google’s business when it tried to partner with Yahoo as a way to prevent Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for the company.

While times might have changed, Google is currently facing a likely battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its powerful search business, and trying to get Yahoo’s business now is a non-starter.

Thus, finally fixing the Microsoft partnership is key to Mayer’s success since it represents a little over one-third of revenue of Yahoo (see the chart below).

The bigger part of Yahoo’s business, as you can also see from the chart, has been display revenues. And that, too, has been a sorry tale of declines and ever more disappointing results.

A report by eMarketer on display market share had this depressing chart for Yahoo:

As is clear, the march downward for one-time leader Yahoo has been swift, and the prospects for the future are worse as Google and Facebook vie for leadership.

The reasons for this have been myriad, but Mayer has apparently decided that it’s been due in large part to the broken Yahoo ad tech platforms and their ever weaker performance.

As we have previously reported, she has determined that it’s now time to invest in improving them, both by funding internally and external acquisitions.

For that, she has formed a tight group of execs to scan the landscape for tasty and innovative treats for Yahoo to gobble up.

That includes: Scott Burke, SVP of Yahoo’s advertising and data platforms; Brian Silver, who runs the company’s Right Media Exchange; Xuhui Shao, a key engineering VP under Burke; and Mark Morrissey, the longtime tech exec who previously ran the company’s search business and was key to integrating the Microsoft search deal into place.

The cerebral Burke especially has been pushing ad platform improvement for a while and finally seems to have won the battle against detractors of the big and possibly grandiose plan by appealing to Mayer’s interest in not giving up.

Thus, the tabling of plans by Thompson, as well as interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, to outsource some of the automated parts of the display business to Google.

Those talks were very serious, as well as others to sell off Right Media, but they are done for now.

One major issue — the people in charge of the ad platform turnaround could also be seen (and most definitely are) as mired in Yahoo’s legacy of lackluster results and poor performance.

“It is kind of funny that the guys responsible for the decline now have the responsibility for fixing it,” said one source at Yahoo.

It’s a fair point to be made.

But that’s water under the bridge, apparently, since the group has been making the rounds, helped by Yahoo’s M&A execs, with a wide range of companies in many different ad tech area being considered (and some dismissed), including: Mediaocean, Turn, Criteo, PubMatic and Millennial Media.

Millennial is the most interesting, because it is a mobile ad play, where Yahoo is exactly nowhere (to be fair, less than nowhere) after years of botched efforts.

As with other companies, this is a critical arena for Yahoo, and yet one more that Mayer needs to focus on.

Lastly, Mayer has to make sure Yahoo’s premium display business remains strong. This is much more based on relationships with large advertisers than on major sponsorship and branding offerings, as well as creating consumer products and content that is appealing to marketers.

This area is now headed up by former Google exec Michael Barrett, who has publicly said he was staying put for now at Yahoo as its chief of revenue.

In fact, because he is in charge of all sales, he occupies the second slot under Mayer on Yahoo’s now strangely configured, punctuation-impaired and information-free management page.

But numerous sources inside and outside Yahoo said Barrett has also told many people that he is still not fully committed to staying in the role for the long haul.

If he eventually gets a lucrative exit package — something the new boss is not being very generous with overall, said sources — that will mean Mayer will need a high-profile and well-regarded ad exec to replace him; sources said Mayer has already begun reaching out to some candidates.

The pickings are slim, with only a few names on the list of those capable of taking on such a job. That includes: Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford, who was also a former top Yahoo exec; Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi; OWN’s Kathleen Kayse; MLB.com’s Bob Bowman; and any number of Google execs.

In that regard, as with all the other search and advertising overhaul efforts at Yahoo, it is a matter of attracting serious talent into the company going forward.

More on that — and more — to come.

Is that a big deal? Depends on whom you ask.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who sussed this out yesterday, has two big problems with the notion.

The first is that in at least one case a blogger’s post linked to Google in seeming violation of Google’s policy against so-called “paid links.” Sullivan’s bigger beef is that the content of the posts themselves consists of a video ad and some barely sensical text — the kind of thing that Google is trying to flush out of its search results by tweaking its algorithms.

So what’s going on? I’ve asked Google reps for comment, but I’m still waiting for them to get back from vacation. [UPDATE - they have, see below] But Unruly Media, the London-based company which ran the campaign for Google, was happy to answer. (Yup – Google, which dominates both Web advertising and Web video, relies on an outsider to promote its Web video ads.)

There’s nothing wrong here, says Unruly CEO Scott Button, except for what appears to be a one-off technical mistake by a single blogger. Here’s his email response:

Yes, it’s a campaign we were running at the end of December.

There’s a good response by Andrew Girdwood here.

Andrew’s absolutely right — we don’t ask bloggers to link to the advertiser’s site. It’s just not part of our business model. We help advertisers distribute video content and that’s what we get paid for. All links from the video player itself are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings. Even though we don’t ask bloggers to link, we do advise them to use nofollow if they do link to the advertiser’s site. This is really important and they should do it to protect themselves as much as the advertiser.

As far as I’m aware, there was one link in one post that was not marked nofollow. This was corrected as soon as we became aware of it.

We’re always completely upfront and transparent with bloggers that we are running commercial campaigns and who we’re working for. We always require that bloggers disclose any commercial incentive to post video content. We always require that bloggers disclose even on related tweets that they might do off their own bats.

It’s also a key part of how we operate that we don’t tell bloggers what or how to write. It’s really important that opinions expressed and the tone of voice belong to the author not the advertiser. Occasionally that leads to human error, as here, so we’re always really happy to have these kinds of example flagged and will sort them out as quickly as we possibly can.

Note that Button doesn’t address Sullivan’s complaint that the text in the bloggers’ post is barely better than garbage. That stuff may not be elegant, but it does seem to work — Unruly says its ad network reaches 725 million people a month.

UPDATE: Google has offered a response, and it doesn’t sync with Button’s. Here’s a quote from a Google spokesperson:

“Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

And here’s more along those lines, via Essence Digital, another Google ad vendor, this time posted on a Google+ page:

“We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.”

All of this back-and-forth finger pointing might seem odd to the outside world, but it’s not uncommon in online ads, where money and marching orders pass through multiple points on their way from the original customer to the site that runs the ad.

Here’s the video ad, by the way. I guess I should disclose that Google is not paying me to post this:

In a rare joint public appearance, the four men dove deeply into the big issues facing search at a Churchill Club event last week.

For instance, Singhal fended off Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” critique, the idea that online personalization presents a skewed view of the world that leaves out important things like opposing viewpoints.

Singhal said that personalization is a big factor in Google results for some queries, like restaurants, but not at all for others, like banks. “Our algorithms are tremendously balanced to give a mix of what you want and what the world says you should at least know,” he said.

There wasn’t a ton of discussion of Google+ and social, but Singhal affirmed Google plans to revive its recently closed real-time search feature, and said that “who knows who and who knows what” can be a powerful combination of signals about what information is important.

Pretty cool! Also, kinda scary!

At least it is in this video Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan shot yesterday outside the TED conference, where the search giant was demoing the project for attendees. It was also implicitly trying to explain, again, why it is exactly that an Internet company is building self-driving cars. But whatever. Check out this video!

And now ask yourself: If push came to shove, and I needed to chase down a drug thug who’d hopped onto the NYC subway, who would I want driving my car–Google? Or Popeye Doyle?

Duh.

Perusing AOL’s leaked damn-the-journalism-full-speed-ahead business plan, BoomTown was a little late to the Microsoft Bing event this morning called “Farsight: Beyond the Search Box.”

But things had certainly been cooking with gas when I walked into the meeting room at the University of San Francisco, which the organizers had decked out in white nubby rugs, white pleather couches and those white egg-shaped chairs found only in 1970s decor.

Schweeet!

First up was well-known investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, poo-poohing Microsoft’s prospects of ever making money in search.

“It’s difficult to produce a new search company,” said Thiel, noting that even with a growing market share it’s curtains for Bing, given the huge fixed costs. “As far as I can tell, it’s still not breaking even.”

Ouch!

By the way, Thiel sold semantic search engine Powerset to Microsoft for upward of $100 million in 2008 to help it, you know, get ahead in search.

Way to insult your money-bearing hosts!

Then, moderator Vivek Wadhwa harangued the panelists from Google, Microsoft and Blekko in the session “Who Will Win the Spam Wars?”

And they say I’m a snarky moderator! Wadhwa is snarktastic!

Wadhwa did not like any of it–not crappy content sites that sully Web search, not the efforts the companies were making to fix things, not the vision the trio had of the future.

And, by the way, Microsoft was not ever going to make money off all the company’s efforts.

Way to insult your hosts! I like this event!

Of course, what everyone was interested in was a smackdown between Google and Microsoft, given that the search giant accused the software giant of stealing its results today.

In an excellent, if exhaustive, post by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google said Bing was cheating by lifting its search results, which Google said it had proved via a “honeypot” sting operation.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” Google’s Amit Singhal told Search Engine Land. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The very presence of the word “honeypot” in any story about search algorithms is superb, in my book, even though this “controversy” is pretty much a he-said-he-said geek-off.

Google’s Matt Cutts kept up the cheater pressure at the Bing event, in a short debate with Microsoft’s Harry Shum, who was not having any of it.

“It’s not like we actually copy anything,” he said.

Translation: Actually, we do borrow, just like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevii, resulting in a social networking behemoth that will soon take over all search and make this whole debate moot.

Microsoft is rubber, Google is glue. And Facebook, which was not present at the search event, is the real sticky honeypot.

Like a print newspaper.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan was flipping through the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times yesterday and stumbled into this Chrome ad (click image to enlarge). It’s a reference to Google’s head-scratching “Things I Learned About Browsers” e-book.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to point out how ridiculous it is for a Web company to advertise anything at all in offline media. And how especially ridiculous it is for someone to advertise a browser in a newspaper.

But then again: It worked!

(Almost as surprising: Search guru Danny Sullivan routinely reads the print version of the LA Times!)

Or, more accurately, it doesn’t want to tell you about it: The search engine gets heavy use from people looking for “adult” topics (duh), but, for fairly obvious reasons, Google doesn’t want to fill your results page with naughty stuff if you’re not seeking it out.

But that does mean that in some cases people with more-innocent search queries won’t get Instant results.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spends some time walking through Google Instant’s (intentionally) blind spots–if you’re looking for the excellent “Naked Gun” movies, you’ll be out of luck, he notes. Same goes for Picasso’s “Blue Nude,” etc.

And of course, since Google (GOOG) is not actually infallible, Sullivan points out some instances where its censor misses some targets. For instance, “Demi Moore Bush” is not about the actress’s political views. Sullivan ultimately takes the logical step and types in all of George Carlin’s seven words to see how many produce results. Well worth looking at his piece to see how it turns out.

Meantime, here’s Carlin’s famous bit, and you can figure out on your own if it’s safe for work.

So how can Twitter generate more search queries than Yahoo (YHOO) and one fifth of Google’s (GOOG) total each month, as the company announced during its Chirp conference today?

Because Twitter’s definition of “search” is different from a regular person’s.

You probably think of a search as something you do when you enter a term into a search box and hit return. But Twitter’s network allows power users on clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic to create a standing search field for a particular term, which then automatically updates itself. Each one of those updates counts as a new search.

And those kinds of searches–made by a minority of Twitter users, with the aid of machines–are what account for most of Twitter’s search volume, Danny Sullivan explains quite well today, following a conversation with Twitter CEO Ev Williams.

As Danny notes, it’s certainly an important technical accomplishment for Twitter to be able to respond to all those queries. But it also illustrates why Twitter needs to and will move its ad platform beyond search queries.

[Image credit: a voir etc]

“Q: So if this is not the GPhone, when will we see the GPhone, and what will it be?

Eric Schmidt: We’re not announcing anything, but this is the platform for building a GPhone. It starts a whole wave of innovation…

Q: Does that mean there will be NO Google phone you can buy?

ES: Imagine not just one GPhone, but a thousand GPhones as a result of the partnerships…the many other people who will be joining the open initiative. We forgot to tell you that it’s available next week, and the terms are the broadest in the industry.

Q: …GPhone?

ES: We are not announcing a Google phone.

Q: Eric, I want to go back to the GPhone–what’s the deal?

ES: The deal is we don’t pre-announce products….If there were to be a Gphone, it would run Android.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt during a Nov. 2007 conference call on Android

During an Android demo in April 2008, Steve Horowitz, one of the original engineers working on Google’s Android platform, said “I’m here to tell you there is actually no GPhone,” echoing a similar point made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt when the operating system was announced. Now, not two years later, Google is telling us something different: There is a GPhone and its name is Nexus One.

At an event at Google’s (GOOG) Mountain View, Calif., headquarters this morning, a handful of company execs discussed the genesis of the Nexus One, tracing its evolution from the G1–the first Android phone–to the Verizon (VZ) Droid. In the short time since Android was launched, the number of devices running it has grown to 20, offered by 59 carriers in 48 countries.

“To help Android to adapt to the needs of users like you and me, our engineering department sometimes works with partners to speed innovation around Android,” Mario Queiroz, VP of Product Management, said during opening remarks. “But we want to do more. So we asked ourselves, ‘What if we worked even more closely with our partners to bring devices to market that will help us better showcase some of the technology we’ve developed?’”

The result: Nexus One. “The dictionary definition of Nexus One is a point of convergence. Its that point at which Web meets phone,” Queiroz explains. “The Nexus One belongs in an emerging category of devices we call superphones.”

Eric Tseng, a senior Google product manager, takes the stage to walk through Nexus One’s features, which we’re now all pretty familiar with: 3.7-inch active-matrix organic LED display, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, five-megapixel camera with LED flash, a trackball with a multicolor notification LED, light and proximity sensors that save power.

The device is 11.5 millimeters thick and weighs about 130 grams, which Tseng notes is no heavier than a keychain-size Swiss Army knife. Nexus One runs on Android 2.1, a.k.a. “Eclair.” Oh, it also offers “support” for personalization–engrave your name or that of a loved one on the back.

That’s the baseline offering, but there are other enhancements. Among them: Five home-screen panels that allow users to add more widgets, like Google’s GPS weather widget, which is evidently very exciting and “Googley.”

Another enhancement: “Living wallpapers,” dynamic, animated home-screen images–leaves falling on water, for example; tap the screen and the water ripples. Neat feature, but not exactly a killer app.

Also onboard: A photo-gallery app developed with the folks at Cool Iris and tricked out with some pretty slick 3-D viewing. Tip the phone and the photos recede, etc.

Finally, Google has developed some significant voice enhancements. Evidently, the company has voice-enabled all text fields on the device. “Now, we can speak our tweets and Facebook status updates,” says Tseng.

All in all, an impressive device. Be sure to read Walt Mossberg’s review for a more in-depth look at Nexus One.

So how do you get your hands on a Google superphone? Through a “Google-hosted Web Store,” says Queiroz. You can buy a phone with service from a carrier partner, or without service.

A Nexus One without service goes for $529. For $179, you can buy it from T-Mobile with service. In the spring, you’ll be able to buy it from–surprise!–Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD).

Transactions will be handled by Google Checkout, so if you’re a Google Account holder, purchasing the device should be fairly simple.

One last point worth noting here: Queiroz stresses that the Nexus One is the first of a number of products developed via this new collaborative process with partners. “Our plan is to add more carriers and more devices in the future,” he says.

Ah. As Eric Schmidt said back in 2007, “Imagine not just one GPhone, but a thousand GPhones as a result of the partnerships.”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE Q&A:

• Nexus Ones ordered from T-Mobile ship today.
• Google is the merchant of record. When you buy a Nexus One, you buy it from Google.
• Why was it necessary for Google to design the Nexus One? Google didn’t really design the phone. “HTC did, Google is just merchandising it.”
• Android 2.1 will be available for Droid and other Android devices soon.
• Google’s Web Store is “simply another distribution channel.” It is not designed to replace or disintermediate carriers or mobile phone retailers.
• Queiroz on the Google Web Store program: “If users are interested in a different form factor and our software supports it, we’ll pursue it. We’re going to look at different options of devices that can be added to the program. We will consider other mobile phones.”
• Andy Rubin, VP, Engineering: “Today’s superphone is tomorrow’s smartphone.”
• Question from Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land: “Where is the ad-supported mobile phone? Where’s the revolution?” Sadly, Rubin dodges. Gotta take a first step before you can change the world…blah lah blah.
• How do superphones differ from smartphones? Rubin: “It’s just the evolution of the platform….It’s the greater memory, the faster processors….The Nexus One is as powerful as your laptop was four years ago.”
• Question for Motorola’s (MOT) Sanjay Jha: Is Motorola worried that Nexus One will cannibalize Droid sales? Jha says no, and his presence here today supports that. Still it’s tough to believe him. Maybe Motorola and Google are already working on Nexus Two.

Schmidt added a bit of nuance to that message today, noting that the company had been surprised to see its European business bounce back as quickly as it has. Here’s my transcript of his opening statement.

We are clearly seeing aspects of recovery, and what is notable is that we’re seeing aspects of recovery not just in the United States but in Europe. I had been in error in assuming that there would be a lag, that it would the U.S. first and Europe second. Asia, of course, was never significantly hit in the first place.

So that means from a Google perspective that…we never stopped hiring, but we told our team internally and again, we’ve said to many other people that we are increasing our hiring rate and our investment rate in anticipation of a recovery.

Schmidt and Google co-founder Sergey Brin covered a lot of ground in the hour-plus press conference, and I’ll try to go back and break out out some of the other highlights. A few items worth noting in summary:

• Brin expressed contrition over recent Gmail outages and said the company was working both to prevent future failures and to react more quickly if and when they do happen. But he reiterated the argument, common among cloud-computing fans, that conventional email systems fail much more frequently.
• Schmidt repeatedly defended the proposed settlement Google had reached with authors and publishers regarding its book archive. Recurring theme: It’s not a perfect settlement, but it’s workable.
• Schmidt stressed the importance of porting Google’s Chrome browser to Apple’s Mac platform and said this would happen within months.
• Schmidt said Google was working on ways to help publishers sell their work on the Web (via one-offs or subscription). But he said he had no interest in promoting one publisher’s results over another, as Associated Press officials had recently suggested: “We have to be very very careful not to favor one media organization over another, with regard to speed or latency.”
• Schmidt, who’d previously noted that he expected Google to start making an acquisition per month, said that these would likely be small, five-to-ten-person companies. He added that it was unlikely the company would be in the market for something the size of a YouTube acquisition, which cost Google $1.65 billion. Translation: Don’t expect us to pony up billions for Twitter.

Earlier: My live coverage of the press conference:

Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin is sitting down with about a dozen reporters in Google’s New York City headquarters for a Q&A session. Tune in for live coverage. This should be a wide-ranging conversation, which I’ll attempt to cover live as well as I can. Please consider everything below to be a paraphrase unless it’s in quotes.

Brin is joined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Brin gives an unofficial intro.

Schmidt adds his own informal introduction.

Schmidt: We’re here because we have a global sales meeting in New York, and we’re winding that up right now. A series of internal talks, and the mood was “very, very positive.” We told them that “the worst is behind us” (which Schmidt has said before). We’re seeing recovery not just in the U.S., but in Europe as well. I had been in error in thinking it would be U.S. first, then Europe second. Asia is less important, obviously. We’re increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in an anticipation of a recovery.

Brin discusses some tweaks to search. Do you feel that Microsoft’s innovations with Bing will cause you to accelerate your innovations?

Brin: Competition is healthy. Microsoft (MSFT) has made its contributions. So has Cuill. Many of the tweaks in Bing we’d already seen from Microsoft Live earlier in the year.

Schmidt: I agree!

But do you think Bing is really different? Or just a rebranding.

Brin: [Demurs]

Schmidt: You guys should judge us and our competitors. We’ve been criticized for having a self-referential view of the world. But I’d argue that our success so far proves that’s been a good strategy.

Please talk about Android and other mobile plans.

Brin: We started with Android because it was a problem for us, as an end-user and a developer, that phones lacked powerful browsers and the ability to install powerful apps. I think Android has addressed this very well, but it has also pushed the market. It has pushed Apple (AAPL) with the iPhone and RIM (RIMM) and Windows Mobile. I’m pretty excited about the future; they’re getting increasingly capable browsers, and you can now write native applications across five platforms that will cover most smart phones. I think that having the software platform has freed the hardware makers from spending time on that, and they can rejuvenate their efforts on hardware.

Please talk about enterprise efforts.

Brin: We started in enterprise, like mobile, to address our own needs. When we started with mail in ’04, Web email was like a toy. We really focused on something that would work in an enterprise and then made it available to consumers. We feel we’re farther ahead (than competitors) both in email and in collaborative document-editing. We’re moving toward eventually having everything (all our applications) available everywhere. “I just think the cloud model is a better model….I do think this install-less model of a cloud is better….It’s definitely made me more productive.”

More on enterprise from Brin: We’ve been successful with both SMB [small and medium business] and increasingly with enterprise. We’ve got a big implementation with Genetech (DNA), and in Washington D.C. We’re specifically adding features for enterprise. That’s part of the Postini acquisition–to add some of those email features for enterprises. You’d be surprised to hear some of the things businesses ask for.

Please talk about recent Gmail outages.

Brin: Certainly we’re not happy with any outages. With those outages we’re at the “three nines” level, which is not where we want to be. Targeting “four nines” by end of quarter. We’ll let you know how we do. Focusing not only on outages, which we don’t like, but recovery time. Second outage could have been resolved in five or ten minutes, but we made errors in handling it, and it extended over an hour. But if you look at a typical enterprise today, those outages tend to add up to more than even these kinds of outages that we had in Q3. Also, we’re working on the number of people affected by outages. Trying to group people into pods so that if one goes down it doesn’t affect others.

You’re adding more complexity to search. It’s more confusing than it ever was. Same thing with site links. Is that an issue (it is for Danny Sullivan)?

Brin: I’d like to see all the options, available in all the corpuses. We don’t have all the same options in each offering. In terms of the links and snippets that we’re offering, we’re trying to experiment with that.

On Google book deal: If the judge asked you why he shouldn’t be concerned by the concentration of Google’s power, what would you say?

Schmidt: It’s an error to answer a theoretical question from a journalist. But anyway, we won’t get that kind of question. With respect to book search, we were doing something that we thought was appropriate. We were sued, and after three years of discussion, we’ve come to a settlement. This is perfectly normal. From our perspective, this is a settlement we like, it’s a settlement we think they’ll like, and we’ll hear what the court says, within minutes. Let me reframe your question: There’s nothing particularly exclusive about what we’re doing. The rights registry we’re doing is for the benefit of orphan works. “It’s not a particularly good business for us. We’re going it because we think it’s the right thing to do.” We don’t think the settlement is perfect, but we think it’s good.

What are plans to expand book search?

Schmidt: We’re already huge. There are millions of books that have never been read, and we’re going to deliver readers to those books.

Brin: We want as many works as possible in some form, because that’s of tremendous value.

Schmidt: This doesn’t cover all international books, all books in the world. [Some disagreement about this between Brin and Schmidt]. It will take time to get the registry up and running, so for the near future I think that’s all we can achieve.

Back to the economy, please.

Schmidt: We’ve tried for a while to figure out if Google is an accurate predictor of the economy, and we can’t prove it. If we could, we’d brag about it. Last early in the year we saw a decline in U.K., which surprised us. From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring. Which is why I said worst was behind us in May, June. We noticed a recovery “June-ish.” The conventional wisdom is that U.S. recessions are 18-24 months. Bernanke sees a recovery too, which we agree with. Conventional wisdom was that Europe would lag by three-five months, which we’re not seeing. Europe is not one country, and it varies a great deal depending on which country we’re in. I won’t go in to specifics but it’s the obvious stuff–the countries that didn’t have a big bump did not have a big fall. More on being a leading indicator: Obviously we’re a leading indicator in advertising.

Brin: And we’re good indicator for consumer spending, and you can see for yourself by looking at Google trends.

It seems as if Chrome isn’t having the impact with consumers that you would like.

Brin: [Starts, then stopped by Schmidt]

Schmidt: Some of your premise about Chrome is incorrect, in terms of adoption, and we’re going to get that message out.

Brin: It’s actually exceeding our benchmarks.

Schmidt: I see a lot of Macs in this room, and a lot of very sophisticated people are using Macs now and we need to get a version of Chrome out for that, which we’ll have in a couple of months. Key to browser strength is speed. In general, we announced Chrome OS and Chromium product. Everything is linked together: Cloud, chrome, etc.

At one point do Android and the Chrome OS come together or not come together?

Schmidt: Current definition of use platforms has to do with use patterns. Android for mobile, delivered via telecom store, heavily integrated with telco offerings, like our Verizon (VZ) deal, which we’re enormously excited about. The analog for Chrome is that it’s designed for a 10, 12-inch form factor. They both use Linux, etc. But they’re designed for different uses. [Netbooks?] May be some overlap there.

Is Google being too nice? Is there a rethinking of relationships with aggrieved groups?

Schmidt: In many ways we’ve always wanted to be this Google as opposed to the way we were perceived a few years ago. We’re particularly proud of the way we’re working with advertising agencies, which is very important to us. With the media industry, we’re having success with YouTube and YouTube monetization, and we’ll have more on that coming forward….”We have always wanted to have these partnerships….We’re learning how to do them in a way that they win, too.”

Brin: People can now differentiate between us and the Internet.

Schmidt: Google is an innovator. The Internet is causing collisions. Innovation plus collisions equals opportunity. For instance, the fact that Verizon has embraced most of the open principles that we put forth five years ago is shocking. “It’s pretty amazing. This is Verizon. It’s not some itty-bitty telecom start-up.”

Are you uncomfortable with Google employees’ sense of entitlement? [Per new Ken Auletta book]

Brin: [Refers to layoffs--Schmidt corrects him: "We did not have layoffs."] [Addendum: Schmidt was talking about Google closing engineering offices in Phoenix and other locations; Google did have layoffs last winter.] You’re right:

What do you think about publishers requiring pay walls, and how will you help surface that.

Schmidt: We’re starting with that YouTube. Overall, “there’s clearly a market for free content, and that market is the size of the Internet.” Also a market for subscription/paid. The analogy I would offer is TV. We all grew up with “free” TV. Now almost everyone pays for cable, and some people pay for pay-per-view, “which is ridiculously expensive,” but people will pay for particular events, like boxing. I think all three of those uses will emerge. We’re working on payment models, subscriptions, to enable that.

But what about surfacing paid content in search [this comes from WSJ.com editor Alan Murray]? Will you factor the desire of someone to pay for content into results?

Schmidt: We’re not going to use the price you use as our ranking in results. That’s not going to be our signal. But we’ll incorporate the price people are paying for your content into results. But I’m not going to answer this precisely because I don’t want to discuss how we produce results. The most interesting improvement you could make is that to the degree that we have more of the marketplace data available, we could take that information and reflect some of that in our rankings.

The AP CEO said Google or Microsoft might be willing to pay a premium for an advance look at the news.

Schmidt: We have a deal with the AP, and I don’t want to talk about any specifics of any deal. I don’t think that’s proper. “We have to be very very careful not to favor one media organization over another, with regard to speed or latency.” We are staying out of the media business. “You guys are very good at it, and we’re not.”

[Apologies for tech error; I missed the specific question and part of the following exchange, but the subject is entitlement.]

Brin: We cut down on snacks, etc. to “reset expectations” regarding entitlement.

Schmidt: “Google pays very well. Google is clearly a growth company. People at Google don’t work for those reasons at Google. We don’t want them to come to work for Google for those reasons. We want people to come to Google to change the world. Life is short.” The tightening in the last year has been good for this, by the way, the controls put into place by Patrick Pichette, who is our hero, have been very helpful.

Please talk about M&A plans and goal of one acquisition per month.

Schmidt: That’s been our historic pattern. I think we will be buying small companies–five, ten people. That’s where some of our best stuff has been. One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. “And I said, ‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”

Would you buy a YouTube?

Schmidt: Is there another one to buy? The problem with that size of acquisition is that you have to make your money back. I think that DoubleClick and YouTube will be two of our best acquisitions. DoubleClick is already close to paying back, and YouTube will get there soon. But bear in mind that any major acquisition now will involve a regulatory review, because of our size and because our competitors will make sure of that.

[Sorry, missed another question]

Do you anticipate making large upfront commitments for new or renewed search deals [as you did with MySpace and AOL]?

Schmidt: I’d rather not comment on search deals. We are in discussions with both of those companies. “Some of our best friends are in those companies.”

[Missed yet another one]

What will new tablet machines [like Apple's] mean for you? And to content producers?

Brin: Hardware is getting amazing with regard to cost. Used to be that display was expensive. Now that’s cheap, and so are chips, etc. Now, the main cost is broadband connection, or cellular, or however you get to the Internet. That’s why wide broadband availability is important to us. Think about how much you spend on access costs compared to the amount you spend on your handset. The phone cost is negligible.

Schmidt: Not sure how to answer question. We provide the infrastructure below what you’re talking about [touch interfaces, etc.]. Kindle is a good example. Don’t think about current one, think about one two or three years out. I think there will be many kinds of things like Kindles, and that’s a material change in the way people will interact with hardware, media.

Brin: I think it’s better if hardware isn’t locked down to specific platforms.

[Long exchange between Schmidt and Danny Sullivan that I'll have to pick up later]

Should Google be required to lease servers and access to Google checkout numbers to deal with “lock-in” issues that broke up the telcos?

Schmidt: Google Checkout isn’t interesting. But I think your analogy is wrong and that there are no data to support your theses.

[I missed the next question on the book settlement about orphan works, etc.]

Schmidt: A lot of these complaints are being made by people who don’t want a solution.

What are the reasonable book settlement proposals you’ve seen?

Schmidt: Goal is to get all the books to everyone and to get all the authors compensated properly. Some of the proposals make sense to me, but I don’t want to characterize them. Not a perfect solution, but the best one we can do.

How will book settlement affect international users?

Brin: It won’t. We’d love settlements that work across a range of countries.

Why won’t you be like Microsoft with regard to antitrust?

Schmidt: Many reasons. Culture, for one. Another reason is that majority of users are one click away from moving away from us. Third: If we went into an “evil room” and had an “evil light” shined on us, and we then behaved in an “evil way” we would be destroyed….There is a fundamental trust between Google and its users.”

Schmidt walks through “ludicrous” thought experiment whereby Chrome takes 80 percent of market share and then tries to lock consumers in, noting that it wouldn’t work due to open source.

Do you think you’ll take another stab at moving into radio, print?

Brin: We are quite optimistic on the TV front. Radio and print didn’t pan out as well as we thought initially. One of the reasons is that those mediums are moving online and consumers are moving online and the publishers/producers want to work with us there. “We were kind of at the dock where the ship had already left.” But TV is quite similar to the Web in terms, potentially, of measurability, so we’re excited about those prospects.

Is page rank broken? People are gaming it, etc.

Brin: No. We have to continually develop. Part of the issue is span, but the main issue is that everything changes. We’re doing a much better job of ranking than we did a decade ago. If we just rested on our laurels with what we wrote in paper from 1998, we’d be in big trouble.

Google is being unfairly blamed for the declining newspaper-industry revenue resulting from shifting reader habits, Schmidt told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan in an interview posted over the weekend.

“Because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything,” Schmidt said. “Imagine if Google didn’t exist. Would the same criticism still exist? You betcha.”

Read the rest of this post on the original

Among the enhancements to Yahoo’s search page design–the features that, in the company’s words, “exemplify how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience”–are the following:

• a unified, Bing-like design
• an enhanced search assistant
• the ability to play video within search results
• a set of filters that allow users to refine their searches based on prior queries or follow-on searches of other sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (click on image below to enlarge).

“The Web is huge, billions of pages, millions and millions of sites and domains,” explained Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s VP of search products and design. “You do not care about all of it. We are bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search.”

Which is all well and good. But isn’t that exactly what Google and Microsoft claim to be doing as well? Doesn’t everyone have a search assistant these days? Doesn’t Microsoft’s Bing already offer in-line video viewing in its search results? (Google once did as well, but disabled the feature over performance issues.) And aren’t Yahoo’s filters basically another version of Google’s “Show More Results” feature? They certainly appear to be.

So these things aren’t true innovations; rather, they’re innovations of the new-to-Yahoo sort. They’re table stakes at a search game that Yahoo has already lost. So “bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search” doesn’t really mean much when they’re already front and center in market-leading offerings, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land.

“There are certainly some aspects that are becoming commoditized in the foundation in search,” Cornett said. “You can either overwhelm people and give them millions and millions of results or show them what they care about the most. That is exactly where we’re going to continue, building a search experience that understands what they’re looking for.”

That sounds great–except it’s not anything different from what Microsoft says. And if Google doesn’t say it, that’s because searchers are voting with their actual search activity that Google’s already doing it. In addition, while Cornett suggested that Yahoo is somehow spending huge amounts of time and money coming up with a better personalized experience over competitors, the fact remains that Google has long offered personalized results that outdistance Yahoo.

Microsoft just announced in a blog post that it was “integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.”

Microsoft (MSFT) said it is not indexing all of Twitter in its new Bing search service–not yet, that is–nor has it made any kind of exclusive deal with Twitter to add this real-time feed.

Recent tweets will be prominently displayed near the top of the search page, but could also be spread throughout the results.

The feature is now rolling out, so might not be able to be accessed immediately. It will be updated every minute, said Microsoft.

Microsoft is the first major search service to do this on a regular basis, using public programming interfaces, or API’s, available to anyone from Twitter–and it is an aggressive move, which seems to be part of its major push by Bing (which is, in fact, seeing some share gain in yet another report released today).

But, all are moving in that direction. While neither Google (GOOG) nor Yahoo (YHOO) is regularly indexing any part of the microblogging service’s real-time data stream yet, both have been testing the idea internally.

All three, though, do index static Twitter profiles in some way in their search results. They also can show older tweets that have specific keywords in them.

The Microsoft effort is different, and, um–and I had absolutely no idea that the company was doing this–appears to include BoomTown tweets, as well as those from other tech bloggers like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and a “few thousand people to start.”

Still, in a mission-accomplished effort to creep me out, Microsoft’s Sean Suchter, general manager of its Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, noted in the blog, “starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.”

He then used my name and Twitter profile as an example, displaying some of my duller tweets of stories I had posted on All Things Digital.

(My testy roundelay with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld about the veracity of its Twitter-about-to-sell-to-Google post a while back would have been much more interesting, and pertinent too!)

In an interview with me this afternoon, Suchter described the addition of the specific tweets as a “first step” in adding a lot more real-time data to Bing.

“Given Twitter is the big gorilla here and it is a really interesting frontier for search, we thought it was important to get something out there,” he said. “It is also about us learning how users interact with it that will also be really interesting.”

Suchter said Twitter is aware of the move, but that Microsoft did not need any extra help from the San Francisco start-up to launch it.

Suchter said it would begin with a limited number of tweets for now and will not include search results of tweets about a person–although that is possible. And Microsoft, he said, was not able to index all of Twitter at the present time.

“We would like to grow this, because this area is so exciting, so we wanted to get the plumbing working to show we could do it,” said Suchter. “And since there is a lot of useful content in Twitter and in this real-time corpus, it has to be a big part of the search experience in the future.”

This is obviously a first shot in what will be a long war over real-time search among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–each of which has also been talking to Twitter about a variety of partnership deals that have yet to be struck.

Here is Suchter’s blog on the Twitter real-time data addition:

Bringing a Bit of Twitter to Bing

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like this:

The answer will include that person’s latest Tweets, along with an easy link to “See more tweets” from that individual.

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

And while we may not be famous, we are prolific, so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for all the latest news from Bing!

Sean Suchter, General Manager, Search Technology Center, Silicon Valley

Speaking of creepy stalking, please enjoy this nail-biting trailer for “Play Misty for Me”:

There is no doubt that Microsoft is pulling out the stops with the launch of its renovated search service, now called Bing, spending $100 million in marketing dollars.

But besides lifting the software giant’s share of the search market in early surveys, has it also given Microsoft’s (MSFT) stock an added boost?

Yes, indeed, but only over the last 30 days.

Here are some pertinent stock price data, using the No. 1 Google (GOOG) and the No. 2 Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft’s search rivals, as comparison:

Since the beginning of the year, the shares of all three were up strongly–Google is up almost 32 percent, Yahoo is up 20.3 percent and Microsoft is up 20 percent.

But if you narrow that to just a month, which is about the time frame since Microsoft launched Bing–by CEO Steve Ballmer at the D: All Things Digital conference, by the way, in a highlight video you can see below–the stocks show some interesting changes.

Google is up just over three percent in the 30 days and Yahoo is down two percent. And Microsoft? Up more than 18 percent (see the chart below; click on it to make it larger).

That pop is likely due to a perception of momentum from continuing market share reports showing the early promise of Bing, which has also gotten good reviews so far as an innovative product.

That includes yet another yesterday by Efficient Frontier showing Microsoft’s share of paid clicks continued to rise.

Said search-engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier in a blog post:

“According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bing’s share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.”

The blog also correctly added: “However, as Danny Sullivan rightly cautions in a recent blog post on Bing, two weeks does not make a trend.”

Nope, but it is a nice boost for Microsoft shareholders, who have not had a lot of those of late–its stock is down 17.3 percent since last year and 17.7 percent since five years ago.

And here is the video of Ballmer launching Bing at D7 in an interview by Walt Mossberg:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090624/comparing-google-yahoo-and-microsoft-stock-a-bing-zing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/ http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 23:04:03 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11385 When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down. It modified the new DiggBar so that only logged-in users would view submitted stories within a Digg frame and Web address, and also offered them the option to turn off the toolbar altogether.

But despite Digg’s move, the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Searchengineland.com wrote in an article about Digg’s toolbar changes, that Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that “frames break the fundamental user model of the web page.” “All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link?”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080728/totall-uncuil/ http://allthingsd.com/20080728/totall-uncuil/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:42:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2891 If your mission is to beat Google in the search market, it’s probably wise to give your upstart search engine a name that people know how to pronounce. It’s also wise to make sure that the name appears in the first page of search results. Cuil, the upstart search engine that debuted today with aspirations of unseating Google, has apparently done neither.

Cuil, sophomorically pronounced “cool,” isn’t exactly the sort of name from which global brands are made (Google arguably wasn’t either but at least people knew how to pronounce it). And if its search engine boasts greater comprehension and relevance than Google’s (GOOG) as Cuil claims, why doesn’t it display the company itself in a search for “Cuil” instead of “Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha,” “French Cuisine,” and “Lochaber”? (My first search for “cuil” returned nothing at all.) This, from a search outfit with a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s and an executive team of Google veterans?

“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”

And you have to be useful. Effective, too. Right now, Cuil seems to be lacking in both areas. “This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft (MSFT), much less Google, that’s another story.”

To be fair, Cuil does have one thing going for it: a privacy policy that seems to be quite a bit more favorable to users than Google’s.

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080728/totall-uncuil/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20070815/yahoo-tries-harder-again-maybe-to-no-avail-but-we-like-its-spunkiness/ http://allthingsd.com/20070815/yahoo-tries-harder-again-maybe-to-no-avail-but-we-like-its-spunkiness/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:49:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070815/yahoo-tries-harder-again-probably-to-no-avail-but-we-like-its-spunkiness/ Let me just repeat this one more time with feeling: Many, many of the products Yahoo makes are superior to those made by Google.

Yesterday, in fact, it deserved plaudits for grabbing the top spot on the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index report on Web sites. Yahoo’s score rose 4%, to 79, with Google declining to 78, a 3.7% drop and its second annual decline in a row.

That’s great for Yahoo, as it might signal a turnaround sign for the beleaguered Internet company. Except for that one niggling detail: Yahoo still cannot monetize its ad search as well as Google.

That situation, of course, might improve as its new Panama gains traction and also via the success of new technologies like SmartAds related to its recently weak display-ad business.

Newly installed CEO Jerry Yang is doing a top-to-bottom review of the company’s business that he announced during the last quarterly call with analysts to find improvements, including calling top talent at all levels of the company personally to buck them up and prevent a job exodus of those needed to make key changes.

But the state of its search and search-ad business will remain at the center of attention for the foreseeable future.

In a post last week, I wrote that the company was even going as far as considering an option to offload some of its search and ad-search business back to Google.

Such a move, even if done in part, could instantly add a whole lot of dollars to its bottom line, drastically cut tech costs and remove the focus on its constantly losing fight with Google as a tech leader.

“Better still, it would put Yahoo in a position to focus on its more competitive assets, such as outstanding media properties like Answers, Flickr and a range of tools and features that Yahoo does better than Google and many others.”

I did note that some might think the idea seemed “ludicrous.” And we got some great comments on this, many especially noting the need for a strong No. 2 alternative to the dominant Google.

But the most cogent argument against such a move came from longtime search guru Danny Sullivan, who wrote a long and convincing comment about why Yahoo should not do this, which I print in its entirety below:

Yes, the idea does seem ludicrous. For good reason. It would be a stupid thing to do.

“First of all, Yahoo is the strong No. 2 to Google. I suppose Avis should just give up renting cars and leave it all to Hertz? No. 2 is perfectly fine if you’re running a profitable business.

“Ah, but Panama disappoints. Um, we’ve had Panama for about four months or so. The execs in the previous quarter said give it one more quarter to kick in. That came, paid search was up–in fact, apparently the shining star in Yahoo’s revenues, and they should bail out.

“Seriously? I mean sure, I suppose they could take 80% or 90% and save the tech side. But then again, Microsoft launched its own paid solution. Ask did. AOL did. All three are playing catch-up to Yahoo, which has more history with paid search because of its Overture roots than Google. Give that up?

“Google execs keen on the idea? Why wouldn’t they be. But why not, because Yahoo gave Google its first big break? Actually, that would be Netscape. Getting Yahoo helped Google some, but Google would have been just fine without Yahoo, despite the Yahoo execs that think they somehow ‘made’ Google by allowing barely noticeable branding.

“Hey, I see lots of friendliness between Yahoo folks and Googlers–but make no mistake, Yahoo folks have plenty of competitiveness to beat Google. And why not–they do in many areas.

“And Yahoo losing market share? What, a year basically holding its ground in the face of both Google’s dominance and Microsoft’s attempt to gain ground, and people aren’t using it to search much.

“In the U.S., Yahoo has been slightly down the past four months according to comScore:

http://searchengineland.com/070716-232238.php”

I would agree with all Sullivan writes, except for the fact that it is critical that Yang and his team at least consider every single option that would move the needle significantly. And, of all the moves they might make, this one surely would change the company’s economics most drastically.

And, of course, Google would love such a capitulation–doubtlessly, they’re rubbing their hands together like Sylvester Sneekly, (a.k.a. The Hooded Claw) right now over the prospect.

There are a lot of options for the company, from “widgetizing” its apps to selling itself to doubling down in search even.

But the key issue is deciding exactly what Yahoo’s business going forward is: Is it a technology company, for which search is the heart of the enterprise? Or is it a media outfit, for which building ad-rich distribution networks of content and consumer tools is the focus? Or is it both? More importantly, can it be?

While I realize this is simplifying the stakes in the extreme, defining what Yahoo is and articulating that will be perhaps the most important thing Yang can do going forward. His problem is that Yahoo has portrayed itself as a lot of things over the years.

To me, at its heart, Yahoo has always been what it started out as and the acronym its name was created from: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (although it was originally “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” after Yang and other co-founder, David Filo).

While wrangling and making sense of the Web has risen in quantum levels of difficulty since Yahoo was founded in the mid-1990s, that goal of being a trusted oracle (like the one at Delphi, pictured above) is not a bad one still.

With its immense traffic and ability to satisfy customers alone, Yahoo could still lead the way.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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