Google started offering secondary search boxes for major sites March 4, and TechCrunch readers split 55% for, 45% against the feature. Now the New York Times reports that some companies oppose Google offering secondary search.
According to the article, objections are focused on Google selling adds against the secondary search results and potential customers being led astray, by both competitors ads and because they are not immediately searching via the particular site.
Google users have long been able to search within a site with a site:abc.com search term query or via an advanced search. Google’s secondary search box simply makes an existing function easier to use.
The argument ultimately seems to come down to control. Consultant Alan Rimm-Kaufman told the NY Times:
Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher’s role in helping users find potentially useful content. “You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content,” he said. “This moves you further out of the loop.”….
Retailers, Mr. Rimm-Kaufman added, should be even more leery of this feature, and not because they will lose sales to competitors whose ads appear in Google’s refined search results. More sophisticated retail sites have search functions that take into account a customer’s past behavior to suggest certain items, as well as more accurate data on which items are in stock.
There was some sense though at the end of the article:
Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, an industry trade group, said online executives were growing accustomed to the idea that users often did not find their company’s content through the site’s own search box or its front page. More often than not, she said, users would find links to specific articles or products on blogs, search engines or other sites, and navigate to that page.
“So publishers are building their sites,” Ms. Horan said, “to make sure the experience is the same, whether users are coming in through the front door or the side.”
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A long weekend usually means less news, but for those looking for a new and quite often attractive take on news, the ongoing battle for geek chick supremacy offers a bountiful choice.
Michael discribed Morgan Webb’s daily tech show as “a winner” and even stays up till 2am to catch new episodes. Occasional mens mag model Morgan Webb delivers tech related news from across the world. Our August 2007 review here.
The results of the Australian Startup Carnival were announced Sunday, and as a judge I had the opportunity to review every entry. The carnival was entry based, so not every Australian startup was featured, and yet there were some great entries.
The winner was Perth, Western Australia based Scouta, a media recommendations service we’ve featured a couple of times on TechCrunch. The judges felt that although not without competition, Scouta’s recommendations across video as well as music offered something unique. Scouta has also moved into white-label service provision, offering a solid business plan that is already starting to see results.
Second placed was Good Barry, a service we covered in October 2007. GoodBarry’s GoodBusiness is an easy to use hosted eCommerce platform.
Third was a Google Mashup I frequently use myself: SuburbView. We’ve not covered it before on TechCrunch, and although it’s not the prettiest mashup, its ability to pull data from Australia’s leading real estate sites and break down that information into finite detail, from number of bedrooms, price, suburb, and even building type make it a practical service that is ripe for takeover.
A full list of the results can be found on the VS Consulting blog here. Judges comments are available here; it doesn’t take too much guessing as to which my comments were
Its Good Friday and while millions will be enjoying the day off, others will be attending church and praying for salvation. According to a Pew survey in 2004, 64% of American Internet users perform spiritual and religious activities online, so here’s a few sites appropriate for the day.
We covered GodTube in April 2007 and the site is still spreading the word. GodTube is a YouTube like Flash video sharing site focusing on using “technology to connect Christians for the purpose of encouraging and advancing the Gospel worldwide.”
According to ChurchMarketingSucks.com, “If you’ve ever complained about the smut and garbage that can happen on community-driven sites like MySpace, then People2Pray is the answer to what good is all this online community.”
Search the bible through a search box or navigate via tag cloud, eBible is “your personal online Bible that is easy to search and fun to use.” See our May 2006 review here.
BlogCatalog, one of the oldest operating blog directories is expanding with a with the beta launch of Social Search, a cross-network aggregation search engine that searches multiple social networks.
The Social Search feature is built on top on BlogCatalog’s Social Dashboard, which (like many services lately) aggregates member activity across other popular networks. The search feature allows users to search by single user, friends, or by anyone who has opted in to use the Social Dashboard feature.
I haven’t visited BlogCatalog in a long time, so I was surprised by some of the other features they are also offering. Personal news feed widget SocialStream allows members to broadcast their personal aggregated social network activity, wherever they place it, a similar function also available from Plaxo Pulse. This on top of a decent enough social networking platform that is built around a members blog listing and includes friends a topical group discussion.
Ultimately any site is only as good as the number of users it is attracting, and BlogCatalog is pumping through some great numbers, with comScore reporting just over 2 million unique visitors a month for the site on 6 million page views for both January and February. As the chart shows, this is significantly more than Plaxo, who offer some similar services. Newer aggregation services (including Friendfeed) were either not available or too small to be recorded by comScore so could not be directly compared. Alexa does provide some size and influence comparison here for those interested.
News Corp has acquired New York based religious community site Beliefnet, according to a report at FishbowlNY.
Beliefnet was founded in 1999 and provides a service that offers commentary and community discussion on various religious beliefs. The company has a checkered history, having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2002, then restructuring and emerging from bankruptcy in October the same year. According to earlier reports, around 70% of the sites traffic is related to Christian interests, with around 70% of users being females, and the most popular age group being 35 to 45. Beliefnet raised $7 million from Softbank Capital in 2005.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
In related news, a “source fimilar with the matter” has told Reuters that News Corp is not in negotiations to buy LinkedIn, rumors of which first surfaced on TechCrunch UK in November. The source claimed that News Corp was in talks with LinkedIn, but the two companies had been discussing future partnerships, not a takeover. With the Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal) acquisition being finalized a partnership between News Corp and LinkedIn would make a lot of sense; the premium business sites from Dow Jones provide a high-wealth business focused demographic that would sit well with LinkedIn’s business networking product.
Update: sources at Fox Interactive are saying they know nothing about the deal; this isn’t to say that its not happening but it is a little strange. The site may have been purchased by another part of News Corp.
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When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.
According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.
In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign in our earlier post also shows. With a 3G version on the iPhone due in 2008 that will finally deliver broadband mobile browsing speeds to the handset, this is a product that will just continue to grow in importance.
(via Computerworld)
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A iPhone focused LandRover campaign powered by San Mateo based mobile advertising startup AdMob has seen some interesting results (video demo above).AdAge has some details on the campaign here, but I obtained some raw figures from AdMob. Of those users who clicked on the Land Rover advertisement, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page. 88% of those users watched the video, 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership and 3% used the click-2-call action, all of who were highly qualified leads. Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement, 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds and 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute. Sales figures from the campaign were not available, but consider that the campaign was only 400,000 impressions; if LandRover had managed to sell one or two cars it would make the campaign more than effective.The results would seem to indicate that the iPhone has become a more effective means of targeted mobile advertising campaigns than regular phones; the integration with Google Maps and the display of video provides a richer experience for both the viewer, and for the company seeking to expose their product.
Paypal has launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, a web based widget that allows anyone to embed a store widget on a web site.
The Storefront widget offers a seamless e-commerce platform for those wishing to sell anything on their site, such as t-shirts, CD’s or other items
The widget (see pic right) includes:
An Index page that shows thumbnail images of all the items for sale through the widget
a product page that shows a larger view of the items/ products for sale
A shopping cart directly within the widget
About and policy pages mean that any conditions are also contained with the widget
Users can set the widget to “sold out” or “sorry we’re closed” from the central control panel, and comes standard with a sharing option; visitors are able to grab the html for the widget from the widget and display it on their own site should they so desire.
I spoke with Paypal prior to the launch and they emphasized that the product was focused on blogs and social networking sites. Paypal has a deal with SixApart that sees the widget being embeddable into TypePad blogs without the need to copy and paste, for everyone else though its no more difficult than any widget is to embed, presuming you know where to get at, and where to paste the html.
Initially there are some limitations with the service, for example you only get the choice of one size for the widget, and it currently only supports sales in US dollars. Paypal though will be seeking user feedback once the program takes off and they are open to expanding the options available in the future.
Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven’t been as user friendly as they’d hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.
I’ve had time to play with the setup features for the widget and there’s little doubt that Paypal got the easy part right. Drop down menu items for navigation compliment sample products to get users started.
There are some parallels to Tailgate, in that both are transaction on the page. The difference with the Paypal widget is that like any Paypal transaction payment is made on the Paypal website itself to guarantee a secure transaction; the widget is fully transactional only to the last purchase point. This is functionality usually delivered by often expensive merchant solutions where as Paypal is offering this service for free, except of course they get a standard cut from the sale itself.
I know when I first heard about Paypal’s Storefront Widget that my thoughts were: here we go, yet another widget offering, but this is impressive and quite unique in the marketplace. I’d think that this product will be warmly received by those with something to sell, or those who haven’t offered items for sale previously on their blogs or social networking pages due to the cost and technical knowledge required in doing so.
Hong Kong based Recruit.net, a job search engine we first wrote about in May, is expanding, and they’re still not interested in the United States.
Recruit.net aggregates job listing from partner sites for its main portal and also provides syndicated results for other sites, a model that sees the Recruit.net bringing in increasing revenues in a hyper-competitive vertical.
Recruit.net launched into Malaysia in September and will launch a New Zealand portal this week. Coming soon are sites for Vietnam and the Philippines in the first quarter of 2008. The company already provides sites for Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.
It’s an interesting corporate strategy, not only from the tech/ revenue viewpoint but from the complete lack of desire to enter the US market (I understand it, but others with a US focus may not). Recruit.net’s Maneck Mohan told me that the company sees a growing internationalization of web services, and that their focus on Asia is timely given the growing economic power of the region at a time when the US economy is in trouble. Countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines still have relatively low internet penetration levels (20% and 16% respectively) but this is changing as more people come online as both see a growing middle class. Even Malaysia, long considered to be one of the more prosperous South East Asian countries has only recently passed 50% internet penetration (52% currently) out of a population of 28 million; Vietnam and the Philippines have populations of 85 million and 87 million people. As Mohan said to me in an email: “why enter a crowded market like the US and compete with existing players, when white hot emerging markets like Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam are wide open and under serviced?”
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BlogCatalog
Ultimately any site is only as good as the number of users it is attracting, and BlogCatalog is pumping through some great numbers, with comScore reporting just over 2 million unique visitors a month for the site on 6 million page views for both January and February. As the chart shows, this is significantly more than Plaxo, who offer some similar services. Newer aggregation services (including Friendfeed) were either not available or too small to be recorded by comScore so could not be directly compared. Alexa does provide some size and influence comparison 
When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.
According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.
In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign 
Paypal has launched the 
Initially there are some limitations with the service, for example you only get the choice of one size for the widget, and it currently only supports sales in US dollars. Paypal though will be seeking user feedback once the program takes off and they are open to expanding the options available in the future.
Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven’t been as user friendly as they’d hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.
I’ve had time to play with the setup features for the widget and there’s little doubt that Paypal got the easy part right. Drop down menu items for navigation compliment sample products to get users started.
There are some parallels to 
