Yahoo’s Luke Beatty said he is not worried.

“We welcome the change,” he insisted about Google taking aim last Friday at so-called “content farms,” producers of low-quality content that spam up the Web and the search giant’s results. “And we endorse what Google is doing 100 percent.”

That’s ironic, given among those allegedly hit hardest by changing of its famous algorithm–based on early, and perhaps questionable, surveys–is Yahoo’s Associated Content.

But, if true, and traffic at Associated Content–which the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought for $90 million last May–is indeed badly hurt, it’s obviously going to be a problem for Yahoo, which relies on advertising revenue as its core business.

A quick poll by Sistrix, a search engine optimization firm, using one million keywords before and after Google’s changes, showed that Associated Content’s “visibility index”– including keyword and ranking positions ranking and clickthrough rate–was down 93 percent.

So yesterday, Beatty, who founded Associated Content and now works at Yahoo, dialed up BoomTown to talk about what the Google shift will mean to Yahoo.

First off in the wide-ranging interview, he noted, “everything on the Web is changing all the time,” noting that Associated Content used to rely more on the now weakened Digg and RSS for its traffic and distribution.

“Obviously, that has changed and we have still managed to grow,” he said.

Beatty said it is still not clear that the new tweaks in search criteria at Google would mean for Associated Content’s offerings–coming from 400,000 contributors of all kinds.

“Our data will not be reconciled for weeks…but some will be up and some will be down,” he said, adding the overall, “I suspect it will be down, although it’s not accurate by any means in the numbers released so far, since there is no way you can know this early.”

Still, it’s obvious that Google’s latest move has not been not good for Associated Content, although Beatty noted that the Silicon Valley search king is no longer the main source of traffic for Associated Content material.

Instead, that would be the owned-and-operated sites of Yahoo, most of all, and–increasingly–social networking sites such as Facebook.

“When we sold the company, we know that sites of Yahoo itself would be the biggest driver of our growth and that was the plan,” said Beatty. “And, though smaller, social means of distribution are clearly the way people are now finding our content.”

In an email later, Beatty underscored this point:

“Search traffic is not our focus within Yahoo–it hasn’t been for 10
months…traffic sources have changed endlessly over that last six years…search is one, albeit an important one and clearly, [but] now it too is changing and we see the future of our content distribution coming from O&O properties and social networks, as much as anything.”

Still, Beatty said Associated Content will adapt as long as Google does not make its tweaks on a network basis and rather than on a site basis. (Interestingly, that would presumably include Google’s own–and often spammish–Blogger property, which is fueled by its powerful AdSense engine.)

“It appears that changes have been made on an asset-by-asset basis
is good–networkwide cramdown would be inappropriate and uneducated,” he said.

Still, the best way to fight the Google initiative is by delivering higher quality content, which Beatty said was being done at the company via a series of ongoing measures to improve overall submissions.

Those include a Yahoo style guide for content creators, a two-tiered human editor review process, analytical analysis, a featured contributor program and, interesting, an online tutorial process called the Yahoo Contributor Network.

It’s not exactly Harvard University, of course, but Beatty said there is more to come.

“We are committed to supporting and helping our contributors navigate through this and every other change in the crowdsourced content economy,” he said. “We want the best article to get more traffic.”

Of course, with Google’s doubtlessly continuing changes in its criteria for what good content is, presumably, that won’t be Yahoo’s to decide.

In another significant search announcement yesterday, Google said it was revising its algorithm to target makers of low-quality content.

The search giant has been criticized by many of late for the presence of too much spam in its results, which degrades the consumer experience on the powerful site.

Thus, “pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking–a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries,” said Google in a blog post.

The company continued:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality site–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Who Google is aiming at is unclear–some point to Demand Media, whose top exec recently said the content company welcomed any improvements to the search results in its recent quarterly call.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who has often touted the Demand’s good relations with Google, to a question from a Wall Street analyst about the series of recent declarations by Google to clean up its search results.

That was further underscored yesterday.

Interestingly, the Google post about the changes, titled “Finding More High-Quality Sites,” was authored by Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts–who have cut a high profile of late in the search arena.

Both Singhal and Cutts were quite vocal recently in loopy accusations about Microsoft’s Bing lifting Google’s search results.

And Cutts has been a frequent visitor to Washington, D.C. of late, to defend Google over its controversial acquisition of the ITA Software flight information company, as well as its search ranking process.

At a January 13 meeting, in an email obtained by BoomTown, Cutts was the draw:

Please join us!

You’re invited to learn

How Google’s Search Engine Works

Myth-busting and Q&A for House/Senate staff members

with

Matt Cutts

Principal Search Engineer, Google

Thursday, January 13, 2011

2:30 – 3:30 PM

House Visitor Center Room 201

How does Google’s search engine really work? Can websites pay Google to improve their ranking in Google results? What’s the difference between the “natural” results and the ads on the right hand side? And why does a particular website rank #1 or #3 when you do a Google search for your boss’ name? You’re invited to join Matt Cutts, one of Google’s top search engine engineers and the company’s ambassador to webmasters for a session on Capitol Hill where Matt will explain how Google ranks websites, address common myths about Google’s search results, and answer your questions. Please join us!

In another invite, low-quality content was the topic:

Matt Cutts is one of Google’s top search engineers who heads up the team ensuring that spam and low-quality sites don’t game search results. He is going to be here in DC to talk with folks around town about some of the recent calls for government to police or regulate the “fairness” of search results. Matt is a bit of a rock star in the search world and spends a lot of time speaking and blogging about these issues. Basically he’ll talk about how Google goes about ranking websites, how his team fights webspam, and he’ll provide a closer look at sites like Foundem and MyTriggers (who have filed antitrust actions against Google).

Finally, he’ll talk about the recent calls by some for Google’s search results to be regulated.

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but the noisy search algorithm changes, while welcome to those using Google, also have a pretty clear goal to burnish the Silicon Valley company’s image.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Here’s a blog post that Demand Media put up in response to Google’s announcement last night that it would prune low-quality content from its search results.

In a blog post titled “Finding More High-Quality Sites,” Google said:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality site–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Some think Google was aiming at Demand, whose top exec recently said the content company welcomed any improvements to the search results in its recent quarterly call.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared CEO Richard Rosenblatt, to a question from a Wall Street analyst about the series of recent declarations by Google to clean up its search results.

Demand went further in a blog posted last night, which is here in its entirety:

A Statement About Search Engine Algorithm Changes

How our content reaches the consumer–whether it’s through direct visits, social media referrals, apps or search–has always been important to and monitored closely by us. We also recognize that major search engines like Google have and will continue to make frequent changes. We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer. So naturally we applaud changes search engines make to improve the consumer experience–it’s both the right thing to do and our focus as well.

Today, Google announced an algorithm change to nearly 12% of their U.S. query results. As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results.This is consistent with what Google discussed on their blog post. It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term–but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.

Coming out of the IPO quiet period this week, we knew the topic of Google’s search engine changes was top of mind for many people–so we discussed it on the earnings call, in a couple of follow up interviews and are now issuing this statement. However, we generally don’t comment or speculate on changes by major search engines. They make changes nearly daily in a quest to give consumers the best possible experience, as do we.

Finally, in our Q4 earnings call on Tuesday we talked at length about the nature of our content and the consumer experiences we are delivering. Beyond our success helping consumers discovering our content via search, we also shared metrics around direct visits, repeat visits and social visits. We believe these metrics are leading indicators that our properties are developing into recognizable consumer brands that are delivering real value to an increasingly loyal community.

We believe these kinds of indicators are a result of our firm commitment to the interests of consumers, and that is where we continue to focus our efforts.

Larry Fitzgibbon is Demand Media’s EVP of Media and Operations, and manages the company’s rapidly growing network of consumer properties.

Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

The incident, according to Overstock, stemmed in part from its practice of encouraging students and faculty to post links on college and university websites associated with an Overstock discount program.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The 13-page CID includes 39 different requests for documents ranging from those setting forth Google’s policies and procedures for calculating AdWords prices and minimum bids to minutes and agendas from search quality team meetings and records of the “black listing” or “white listing” of specific Web sites. Also requested: Documents that “describe, analyze, or discuss competition for advertisers from Bing and Yahoo” and others concerning the strategy for e-commerce services like Froogle and Google Shopping.

It’s an extraordinarily thorough set of demands and shows the Texas AG to be reviewing not just Google’s ranking of search results and setting of advertising prices, but questioning whether the company favors its own businesses and advertisers in results. Has Google complied with them? That’s not yet clear, though company spokesman Adam Kovacevich says discussions with Abbott’s office continue.

“Since we started Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry, and while there’s always going to be room for improvement, we’re committed to competing fair and square,” he said. “We’re continuing to work with the Texas attorney general’s office to answer their questions and understand any concerns.”

Texas_GOOG_CID –

Now, five months into the job, Williams is finding a voice of his own, separate from Digg founder Kevin Rose’s, and trying it out on the Digg community; the longtime veteran of Amazon recently participated in a well-received Digg Dialogg video interview, posted on Tuesday, to answer user questions. (It’s viewable here).

“There was a launch that was in violent disagreement with what our community expected out of the Web site,” Williams told Leo Laporte, who facilitated the interview based on Digg users’ questions. “It’s truly a tragedy of the ages, to some extent.”

But Digg is still a “very vibrant Web site,” with close to 20 million monthly unique visitors, Williams said, and the opportunity to hone a focus on social news that other companies may not have.

(Plus, despite layoffs, a perceived lack of relevancy relative to other social start-ups and multiple leadership changes, Digg still has plenty of money in the bank.)

“It is our top priority to rejuvenate the community,” Williams said.

Digg’s latest launch, called V4, was seen by many as a move to devalue the site’s homegrown community. V4 was the most significant in a string of product changes that took power away from the small body of users that set the agenda for the news site and gave a stronger voice to publishers and Digg’s own curators. And V4 was also an overdue, complete technology overhaul that left out many much-loved features.

In the Laporte interview, Williams quickly tackled precise details about previous features the Digg community wants reinstalled, noting, for instance, that the site has already brought back the “bury” button, allowing users to counteract other users’ votes on submitted stories. He said Digg is also planning future features such as a honing of its news-ranking algorithms for slower weekend traffic, when less-worthy stories may make it to the top.

Beyond those tweaks, Digg will make large-scale efforts to become more personalized, said Williams, and to create communities around specific topics. That’s not necessarily something that the old-time crowd will love, but it may make the site more useful for a broader audience.

Williams encouraged users not just to visit the site, but to comment on and vote up stories with Diggs; those participatory behaviors have decreased as a portion of overall traffic since the launch of V4, he said.

Being the voice of Digg is no small task, and it’s not just because of the company’s hypercritical user base. Digg has long been associated with the founding presence of TV and online video host Kevin Rose. And until Williams joined, Rose had been interim CEO after longtime leader Jay Adelson was pushed out of the company in April. Now Rose is occupied with his many angel investments, a new video show and a newsletter called “Foundation.”

Digg users were uncharacteristically positive in the comments section of the Williams interview entry. (The friendly tone makes me wonder if the old crowd has indeed high-tailed it somewhere else!) “Digg is in good hands,” said one. “I must say that Digg is doing a fantastic job listening to the community and implementing new features,” said another. One user even acknowledged, “I realize changes take time to implement.”

But then again, it’s not the most aggressive move Reed Hastings could make. Note that the chart Netflix provides makes it quite difficult to really evaluate broadband provider against broadband provider, without doing a whole lot of squinting.

And even then, I can’t tell which light-blue line represents CableOne and which one represents CenturyTel.

We do know, because Netflix already told us, that Charter gets the best marks. And it appears that Clearwire, the wireless service co-owned by Sprint and some of the big cable companies, ranks dead last.

The news that most of you care about: Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the nation’s two biggest cable companies, appear to be in the top part of Netflix’s rankings. I’m asking the company for clarification for those of us with decaying vision.

And here it is, via CNET–a top-to-bottom ranking:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

You can click on the chart below to see a larger version, and you can read a technical explanation of what it measures over at the official Netflix tech blog.

Interesting PR campaign from Netflix, which is fighting with the cable guys and telcos over the cost of delivering all that streaming video to your living room: The company is going to publish a list of broadband Internet providers, ranked by performance.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s letter to shareholders goes on about his company’s position vs. the ISPs at great length, and I’ll reproduce it at the bottom of the post.

But you can summarize it in a sentence: If the broadband guys insist on gouging us to get video to our customers, we’re going to make a very public stink.

So tomorrow’s list is a warning shot, meant to give the ISPs a sense of where Netflix is willing to go on this one.

Hastings says the list will detail “which ISPs provide the best, most consistent high-speed Internet for streaming Netflix,” and offers a preview: Charter is tops, right now.

But if you invert Hastings’s description, you get what he really means: We’re going to tell some broadband customers that they’re getting screwed and should switch to a new provider. Heads up, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

In other news, Netflix casually tossed off another very good quarter: The company added three million subscribers in the last three months of 2010, and says that a third of its new customers are choosing its new streaming-only plan. International expansion is still on the table for 2011 and is a major focus for Netflix going forward, Hastings said.

Here’s his warning/threat to the broadband business:

Recently the FCC adopted a version of net neutrality for wired networks in the U.S., and it’s a step in the right direction. The focus is on fair-play within an ISP’s network, but does not explicitly address entry into the ISP’s network.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, nocharges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish on our blog ongoing performance statistics about ISPs collected from our 20 million subscribers detailing which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix. We can tell you now, though, that for our subscribers streaming Netflix, Charter is the highest-performance ISP in the United States.

Recently, there was a report that at peak times Netflix subscribers in the U.S. were driving about 20% of peak downstream last-mile Internet traffic. This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers.

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-alarge-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.

The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

The January 2011 issue ranking cellphones and services carries this headline on the cover: “Best and worst providers (Sorry AT&T).”

I’m going to try to pick up a copy this morning and will then update, but here are the highlights, according to the Houston Chronicle. AT&T got the magazine’s full black dot rating (that’s as low as it gets) in almost every nationwide category, while Verizon topped the rankings.

AT&T sent out the following statement in response to the rankings: “We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent–the equivalent of just one call in a thousand–of the industry leader.”

On the device side, the iPhone (the same one that the magazine once recommended against buying) tops the list of phones available at AT&T, the Droid X and Samsung Fascinate tied for best Verizon option and Samsung’s Epic and Vibrant top the options at Sprint and T-Mobile, respectively.

For the three months ended in September, Reasearch in Motion’s BlackBerry remained the leader in the U.S. with 37.3 percent of the smartphone market. But that share was down 2.6 percent from the previous period. Apple followed RIM with a 24.3 percent share, unchanged from its last ranking. Microsoft’s share fell to 10 percent from 12.8 percent and HP/Palm’s to 4.2 percent from 4.7.

Meanwhile, Android gained 6.5 percentage points to capture 21.4 percent of the market, which means Google’s mobile OS now reaches one in five U.S. smartphone subscribers.

Clearly, Google’s strategy of flooding the market with multiple handsets on multiple carriers at a wide range of price points continues to pay off.

Apple’s score is a new record in the personal-computer category, one that’s nine points higher than the company’s closest competitors–Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Acer, which all tied with a satisfaction rating of 77. Apple has claimed the top spot in the ACSI’s personal-computer rankings for seven straight years; the last time it was beaten was in 2003, when Dell bested it by a single point.

Impressive, eh? Now get this: The ACSI didn’t note this in its formal release, but its PC survey included the iPad. And evidently the iPad scored quite high. Higher than the Mac, actually.

“People said they find the iPad more satisfying than the Mac,” ACSI’s managing director David VanAmburg told me. “And that helped goose Apple’s ranking.” He added that that makes the iPad the highest-scoring product Apple sells and by extension the highest-scoring product ACSI has ever recorded.

Great news for Apple, particularly since folks obviously find the Mac pretty damn satisfying.

Now, the company’s certainly not without its customer-satisfaction issues; Antennagate is testament to that. But its facility in creating easy and compelling user experiences and dedication to those core values that CEO Steve Jobs often mentions–”We just want to make great products”–are clearly paying off, as this seven-year ACSI sweep demonstrates. And there’s a lesson for the rest of the industry there. “The biggest asset Apple has had for a long time is its commitment to innovation,” VanAmburg told CNN. “Others are improving, but the whole world watches Apple when it comes up with its new products each year.”

[Image credit: Gizmodo commenter Ahubbuch and ACSI ]

Although serial entrepreneur Al Warms sold his start-up to Yahoo and ultimately left the Internet giant to launch a new one, he is coming back a bit via an interesting partnership.

Warms’s Appolicious is aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the mobile apps market.

Now Appolicious will carry Yahoo’s brand at the top of its site and be surfaced throughout Yahoo’s News, Sports and other powerful media properties.

Everything will be co-branded. The words, “In association with Yahoo,” for example, will appear on the Appolicious site.

“I think it is a pretty huge deal in what it means to where apps have gotten in such a short period of time,” said Warms in an interview with BoomTown. “We want to make these apps relevant for Yahoo users.”

Yahoo’s VP for Media, Jimmy Pitaro, said that the deal was struck to make the increasingly complex world of mobile apps simpler.

“We’re focused on making people’s online lives easier,” he said. “Apps are huge, but also confusing to many, so we want them to be in the relevant place they belong and in context for our users.”

A baseball story, for example, might surface various related baseball apps, while a celebrity post would offer very different ones.

The partnership will be a big boost for Warms and Appolicious, given the huge traffic generated by Yahoo’s content offerings.

Warms sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007.

Warms left Yahoo (YHOO) in late 2008 and started Appolicious in May 2009 with about $500,000 in seed funding.

The start-up has since raised another $1.5 million.

Appolicious is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the exploding app galaxy in the universe of smartphones.

Right now, the innovative site focuses on iPhone and iPad apps, as well as other mobile platforms such as Android from Google (GOOG). Appolicious plans to add apps for the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

Using premium content, recommendations of friends and people like you–as well as a variety of lists, feeds, popularity rankings, images and videos–the idea is to do what the iTunes Store does not.

Namely, make sense of the plenitude of apps out there, most of which are on the iPhone.

To make that happen, users of the service also can list all the apps they have in an App Library, so others can see them.

Warms’s business plan is largely advertising, including a focus on attracting brands that want to be in front of apps consumers.

Here is a video interview I did with Warms when he launched Appolicious, as well as screenshots of the new Yahoo-branded site:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100421/appolicious-signs-partnership-to-integrate-with-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100408/xmarks-the-spot-kapor-says-start-up-can-find-buried-treasure-in-bookmarks-for-advertisers/ http://allthingsd.com/20100408/xmarks-the-spot-kapor-says-start-up-can-find-buried-treasure-in-bookmarks-for-advertisers/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:19:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26260

Social bookmarking start-up Xmarks, which has been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, launched a new advertising product today called SearchBoost, which it hopes will finally give it a viable business model.

Using a tool that displays user ranking and review information from the free synching service, Xmarks Chairman Mitch Kapor said in an interview with BoomTown that the ad offering essentially “decorates” a paid search ad, thereby boosting click-through rates by 15 percent.

Xmarks, which was founded in 2006 and offers a browser widget to record bookmarking information, will also give advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

With detailed usage data on over one billion bookmarks rated and reviewed by users, this information will be attached to the end of search results from both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) Bing on Mozilla’s Firefox and soon, on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome browsers.

Xmarks said the service will cost from $29 to $99 a month for advertisers and that it will also offer more elaborate plans.

In the interview, Kapor said the company is simply enabling the addition of existing and valuable information already gleaned from its millions of users and giving advertisers the ability to show it off.

Different colors–which you can see below, with orange for paid and blue for organic results–is used to distinguish between them.

“These reviews show up where they show up and advertisers can’t buy a ranking or a rating,” said Kapor. “If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that’s a good thing.”

Added Xmarks CEO James Joaquin: “We are allowing advertisers a tool that is already reflecting what the user base is saying is valuable…the real benefit is for brands that already have a high rank to declare that.”

Launching its business model, Kapor added, after growing its user base to four million active users, is the next logical step for Xmarks.

“This is the effort to move from that category to the category of sustainable enterprises,” he said. “And that is certainly a good thing.”

Here is Joaquin’s entire blog post on the move:

Today’s a big day at Xmarks. We’ve launched a new service for search marketers called SearchBoost, designed to increase the performance of paid search ads by displaying relevant Xmarks ratings and reviews next to sponsored links on Google and Bing search result pages. SearchBoost is a premium service with pricing starting at $29 per month.

SearchBoost is the primary business model for Xmarks, allowing us to keep our browser synchronization service completely free. While we obviously devote resources to this business, we’ve also recently launched Xmarks for Chrome and a new Tab Sync feature for Firefox. You can count on us to continue innovating and improving our sync products.

SearchBoost is also a natural extension of our vision for Smarter Search: displaying crowd-sourced ratings and reviews to help users identify the highest quality results on their search page. A small but vocal minority have told us (and may tell us again on this blog ;-) that they’re not interested in this feature. That’s OK with us: we’ve made it very simple to turn the Smarter Search feature off in Xmarks Settings. Many other users have sent us kudos for this important enhancement to web search.

We hope you’ll find ratings and reviews on ads as useful as they are on organic search results. It’s important to note that Xmarks ratings and reviews are completely crowd-sourced from our users. Advertisers cannot pay $ to improve ratings or alter reviews.

Finally, quick shout-outs to our chairman & co-founder Mitch Kapor who has kept us focused on his orginal vision of aggregating bookmarks to improve web search, and Xmarks advisor Eric Ries who helped us think through the early concept stage of what is now SearchBoost.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100408/xmarks-the-spot-kapor-says-start-up-can-find-buried-treasure-in-bookmarks-for-advertisers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091204/google-to-hold-an-anything-bing-can-do-we-can-do-better-search-event-monday/ http://allthingsd.com/20091204/google-to-hold-an-anything-bing-can-do-we-can-do-better-search-event-monday/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:28:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21465 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Google answered BoomTown’s blatantly begging plea to call, write or just say hi after I was inundated with news about Bing search from Microsoft (MSFT) this week–emailing yesterday about a “search event” to be held Monday in Silicon Valley.

It will be at the Computer History Museum, and the PR minion who wrote me (see email below) noted “there’ll be lots of news.”

News? Well, you don’t have to ask me and my Flip twice!

Included in the confab will be Google VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer, VP of Engineering and Renaissance man Vic Gundotra and Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who is known as the master of ranking algorithm and search quality.

Already, I feel dumber than a box of hammers. But, can I resist? Of course not!

Sources tell me the event is for unveiling a wide range of feature updates to the Google service, probably to take some of its search innovations out for a showy walk around the park before Bing sucks up all the PR oxygen.

Here’s the note I got:

Hey Kara,

Hope you’re doing well. Wanted to check in quickly to see if you or someone else from ATD might be interested in attending the Google search event being held at the Computer History Museum on Monday. There’ll be a lot of news, as well as an opportunity to speak with execs like Marissa Mayer, Vic Gundotra, and Amit Singhal. Would definitely be worth your time.

Let me know if you’re interested and we’ll get you signed up.

Now, if Yahoo (YHOO) would only throw a look-at-me-too search event soon, it will be a trifecta!

Until Monday, please enjoy a video of one of my favorite musical scenes and songs–mostly due to the line, “You couldn’t give me a lesson in long-distance spitting!”–from the movie version of “Annie Get Your Gun,” sung by the perfect Betty Hutton and Howard Keel:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091204/google-to-hold-an-anything-bing-can-do-we-can-do-better-search-event-monday/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20090901/serial-entrepreneur-al-warms-debuts-appolicious-hoping-iphone-apps-fans-will-find-it-delicious/ http://allthingsd.com/20090901/serial-entrepreneur-al-warms-debuts-appolicious-hoping-iphone-apps-fans-will-find-it-delicious/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:01:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17974

Longtime Internet entrepreneur Al Warms paid a visit to BoomTown HQ today to show off a new company he has founded called Appolicious.

That is the unusual name Warms–who sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007–has given to a start-up aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the Apple (AAPL) iPhone mobile apps market.

Warms left Yahoo (YHOO) last fall and started Appolicious in May of this year with about $500,000 in seed funding.

The site is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the app galaxy in the universe of smart phones.

Right now, the innovative site just focuses on iPhone apps–are there any others?–but Warms said he will soon include other mobile platforms, such as the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

Using premium content, recommendations of friends and also people like you–as well as a variety of lists, feeds, popularity rankings, images and videos–the idea is to do what the iTunes store does not.

Namely, make sense of the plenitude of apps out there, most of which are on the iPhone.

To make that happen, users of the service also can list all the iPhone apps they have in an App Library so others can see if they too own the iFart app (message to self: Hide that app deep in the library).

Warms hopes to make money on the site from advertising, including focusing on attracting brands that want to be in front of apps consumers.

Here is a video interview I did with Warms, where we discuss all this and more:

And, here are three screenshots of the site below (click on the images to make them larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090901/serial-entrepreneur-al-warms-debuts-appolicious-hoping-iphone-apps-fans-will-find-it-delicious/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090818/google-satisfaction-guaranteed/ http://allthingsd.com/20090818/google-satisfaction-guaranteed/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:28:43 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=23199 Google leads the search industry in market share. No surprise, then, that it leads the industry in customer satisfaction as well.

The company has once again achieved top rank among Internet search engines and portals in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, the seventh time it has done so in eight years. This year Google (GOOG) received 86 points, out of a possible 100, besting Yahoo’s (YHOO) 77 points, Microsoft’s (MSFT) 75, Ask.com’s 74 and AOL’s 70.

That’s a nice lead and one Google should have no trouble maintaining if it stays its course. This, in spite of Microsoft’s new search effort, Bing, and its “boatloads of value” search deal with Yahoo.

Though the latest ACSI scores don’t reflect either (they were complied prior to Bing’s launch and the Microsoft-Yahoo announcement) Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which compiles the rankings, doesn’t see them doing much to undermine Google. As Freed notes, Google is unquestionably king of search and the only competition in ACSI’s search category is for second place.

“Where will Bing’s market share come from? From Yahoo and MSN initially and maybe from Ask.com, though Ask is a niche player with stable customer satisfaction and market share,” Freed said. “It seems unlikely that customers will actually leave Google in enough numbers to allow Bing to seriously challenge Google’s market dominance, given Google’s extremely high customer satisfaction.”

Freed adds: “People are happy with Google, so why would they switch? They might switch if Bing is better, and that’s a tall order considering Google is the second-highest scoring ACSI service-sector company, behind Newegg.com. Bing has been called a search engine war ‘game changer,’ but Google’s game will be very hard to change at this point. If anyone can do it, it’s the combined resources and market share of Yahoo and MSN.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090818/google-satisfaction-guaranteed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090715/getting-noticed-on-the-iphone-app-store/ http://allthingsd.com/20090715/getting-noticed-on-the-iphone-app-store/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:01:32 +0000 Yukari Iwatani Kane http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=13505 In a megastore as big as Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone App Store, the secret to success is getting noticed. With more than 65,000 apps in 20 categories, app developers have come up with different strategies to accomplish that.

One focus is getting on Apple’s ranking lists, which people regularly comb through to find apps they want. Apple ranks free and paid apps based on the number of downloads. Developers say the ultimate goal is to be one of the top 25, which are listed on the first page of the online store when someone accesses it via his or her iPhone. The next 25 can still be viewed on iPhones, but numbers 51 through 100 can only be accessed through computers. Apple doesn’t rank beyond that.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090715/getting-noticed-on-the-iphone-app-store/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090312/video-eli-broad-explains-why-he-wants-to-save-the-la-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20090312/video-eli-broad-explains-why-he-wants-to-save-the-la-times/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:51:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5178 Why exactly does Eli Broad want to save his hometown Los Angeles Times? He explains in this video clip, an excerpt from his appearance earlier this week at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y.

As I noted before, Broad is a billionaire who can afford to bail out the paper if he really wants to. But it has become harder for him than it would have six months ago.

Forbes’s newest billionaire ranking pegs his net work at $5.2 billion, down $1.5 billion from last September.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090312/video-eli-broad-explains-why-he-wants-to-save-the-la-times/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081006/warning-iphone-sales-ranking-in-mirror-may-be-smaller-than-it-appears/ http://allthingsd.com/20081006/warning-iphone-sales-ranking-in-mirror-may-be-smaller-than-it-appears/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:17:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6269 Get this: Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 3G is now the second best-selling mobile handset in the U.S, after Motorola’s (MOT) RAZR V3. According to NPD Group, the device outsold the BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl and Palm (PALM) Centro between June and August to claim about 17 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. Moreover, about 30 percent of stateside customers who purchased an iPhone 3G during that period switched mobile carriers to do so. Nearly half, 47 percent, switched from Verizon (VZ) Wireless, another 24 percent switched from T-Mobile (DT), and 19 percent switched from Sprint (S).

An impressive showing. That said, NPD’s metrics don’t include corporate/enterprise mobile phone sales, which likely favor the Blackberry above all. Presumably, the iPhone’s ranking would have been quite a bit different if it did. Still, 17 percent of the U.S. smartphone market is quite an achievement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081006/warning-iphone-sales-ranking-in-mirror-may-be-smaller-than-it-appears/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20080819/well-this-is-pretty-funny/ http://allthingsd.com/20080819/well-this-is-pretty-funny/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:58:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=3487 My God, the irony–it BURNS. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) on Tuesday gave Apple its highest-ever score (PDF), awarding the company a record 85 points in its 2008 survey of consumer sentiment. This, as customer satisfaction with Apple’s iPhone 3G and MobileMe service presumably plummets thanks to some much-publicized outages and failures.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before, where a company scores 10 points over its nearest rival,” said ACSI head Claes Fornell. “It’s almost an aligning of the stars. There was a question mark last year about Apple, that maybe it had taken its eye off the ball by concentrating on the iPhone, but now, the iPhone and iPod and Mac are nicely aligned.”

Of course, ACSI scores don’t yet reflect the the pair of black eyes Apple’s (AAPL) suffered in the past few months courtesy of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe. And they will undoubtedly weigh heavily on the company’s next ranking. Said Fornell, “Apple will be very difficult to catch, but I don’t think that these results, where there’s a 10-point difference, will hold.”

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