Ask España: Out of Beta
October 27, 2005
Ask continues to make quite moves in the search engine world. This time with the launch of their Spanish search engine.
Announced in press conference in Madrid, the site offers a wide variety of features to help searchers find what they are looking for faster: solid Spanish language and Spain specific search options; Binoculars to preview results; the possibility of storing and sharing web pages and images through MiAsk; related search for suggestions to refine queries; News, Local, Product and Download channels in partnership with leading providers; Bloglines Notifier; and the just released toolbar: Barra Ask.
Businessweek Top Search Engine Brands
October 23, 2005
Business week has released the latest info about the top brands.
I always check to see where the major search engines rank.
As usual, Coke is #1.
#2 Microsoft (ok, this is cheating as MSN isn’t as big as MS)
#38 Google
#58 Yahoo
#68 Amazon (owns a9.com)
Google’s Q3 Financial Statements
October 23, 2005
Financial Highlights:
Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated $885 million, or 56% of total revenues. This represents a 20% increase over the second quarter revenues of $737 million.
Google Network Revenues - Revenues generated on Google’s partner sites, through AdSense programs, contributed $675 million, or 43% of total revenues. This is a 7% increase over network revenues of $630 million generated in the second quarter.
International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States contributed 39% of total revenue, compared to 39% in the second quarter and 35% in the third quarter of 2004.
Source: Google Investor Relations
Looks like AdSense is going strong. Makes one wonder if the incentive is to patrol the network so more advertisers don’t opt out, or a duty to their investors to overlook a few sites.
Ask releases two new features
October 21, 2005
Ask seems to be quietly rolling out new features all the time right now, and it’s not receiving a lot of press.
The first one contains additional information about video games. Links to cheats, trailers, and game information appear below some video game search titles. This is obviously an attempt to tap into the lucrative, yet hard to target 18-34 male demographic.
This demographic has been moving from TV to the net; often uses ad blockers; spends more time playing online games than surfing the web; often reads news through RSS and not on a CPM supported website. It’s an interesting experiment to see if some of the new Ask features can capture this demographics’ attention.
The second new feature is recipes. Good timing a month before thanksgiving, which is one of the top seasons for recipe searching.
With the ask.com acquisition, the re-branding of ask without the butler, heir own ad network, and new features quietly rolling out, ask.com might turn into a solid player without anyone realizing it.
SEW Blog: Pseudo Transscript of Google Earnings
October 20, 2005
Interesting article posted by Gary Price on the SEW Blog about a Google earnings call.
Worth a read.
Google Updates Privacy Policy
October 15, 2005
Danny shows an interesting image of the privacy policies compared to each other.
The old privacy policy is here.
The new privacy policy is here.
About Google.org
October 11, 2005
The Google blog posts a nice review of Google.org.
“When we told prospective shareholders about Google and how we wanted to do business, we said that we hoped our philanthropic efforts could some day have a greater impact than Google itself. We committed one percent of our profits and equity toward that vision. ”
Love ‘em or Hate ‘em - one just can’t argue with commitment to a cause.
Yahoo Integrates Blogs into News
October 10, 2005
The announcement by Yahoo that they’re integrating some blogs into news results prompted some to think that blogs were finally going to be considered mainstream, and rejoiced at the news.
Other individuals (including bloggers) just rolled their eyes thinking of both blog egos and spam possibilities.
Are blogs news? Depends on your viewpoint.
YSM Blog Announcement.
Yahoo News, now with blogs.
The long tail of Feeds
October 8, 2005
This is an interesting post based off of a web 2.o discussion about why feeds matter.
It’s interesting seeing someone compare the long tail on feeds, usually it’s reserved for keywords.
Now, for some investigation, why are Ask’s photos hosted at Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo?
Enough investigation, enjoy the post here.
Yahoo acquires Upcoming.org
October 4, 2005
Upcoming.org bills itself as a:
” social event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Manage your events, share events with friends and family, and syndicate your calendar to your own site. ”
Yahoo, in it’s expansion of local users, has acquired Upcoming.org.
Yahoo’s mission statement:
to enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge.
And how it relates to this acquisition:
Events are a particularly exciting area of human knowledge — chock full of rich local, social, and temporal data. People want to find out what’s going on near them, know what their friends are seeing and doing, and plan their outings. And they want to do it when they want, wherever they are, on any device, in a way that’s relevant to them.
Besides Yahoo local being very susceptible to spam, it is the best major local search engine out there. While this acquisition looks more like Y360 purchase, it’s integration into it’s applications will be interesting to watch.
Source: Yahoo Blog.
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