Say you need 30 percent of the search market...

You've tried the whole do-it-yourself method. You ordered the videos from the 3am infomercial, designed a search engine, promoted it via your quasi-monopolistic hold on the browser and operating system industries, but you're still losing market share to some weird people in China. Despite the fact that your name is virtually synonymous with the computer industry and have a long history of crushing anyone with whom you wake up one morning and decide to compete, most people are still searching with some dirty hippies from California who can't even correctly spell a fakey number made up by a 9 year old kid.

It's enough to drive anyone crazy, really. In a world of Coke vs. Pepsi, you're not even RC Cola. Fortunately, you remember you're sitting on insane amounts of cash and decide to just buy it instead.

With that, comes the news that Microsoft has made an unsolicited 44.6 billion simolean offer to current second place search engine, Yahoo! The offer was over 60 percent more than Yahoo's stock valuation the previous day. Nobody has said "deal", yet, but so far we're at the "all signs point to yes" stage. The boring financial details aren't going to be the centerpiece of the SEO blog world today. No, it will be the rampant speculation about what the search landscape will look like if the deal goes through.

So, without further ado, let us commence to speculating.

Everything Old is Still Old Again

One of the the core issues here is that Microsoft had, up until this point, attempted to compete on the same playing fields as both Google and Yahoo. Its Live search engine, AdCenter advertising network, and MSN /Live portals are all reflections of existing offerings within Yahoo. Yahoo search was, briefly, the king before those upstarts from Google entered the fray. Yahoo has their Search Marketing service, itself bolstered by the acquisition of Overture. It is perhaps best known now as a "portal" to the web at Yahoo.com. That creates a duplication of effort across the board in any merger.

It's a duplication that Microsoft is aware of, but one they aren't really providing any specifics for dealing with at this point:

"Microsoft has developed a plan and process that will include the employees of both companies to focus on the integration of the combined business. Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines."

They have a plan. Comforting, I'm sure, to everyone involved.

What Stays, What Goes?

The share of the search marketing being key to the reasoning for the buy, then it's reasonable expect the short, frail existence of the Live Search to come to an end. Ms. Dewey, we hardly knew ye... This is not to say that, eventually, elements of Live Search might not make it into Yahoo Search. If the development teams are combined to create one big mash-up of Yahoo and Live search, then, hopefully, the best features of each will make it into the end product. The resultant "Yahoo Live Search" could become the Google-killer that Microsoft so desperately desires.

From a purely selfish perspective, I'd prefer Live Search take over, if only because we do really well there, keyword wise. If only it actually gave us any traffic... Oh yeah, that's why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo in the first place.

Ad networks are little trickier than search. The barriers to change are much higher for ad networks. Users have accounts, preferences, billing info, and all their spend history tied up in those ad networks. Forcing them to change from one platform to another could cause distress at best, and exodus at worse. They certainly don't want to give customers any additional "incentive" to try AdSense.

Portals may seem the easier thing to integrate, but what of all the features behind those portals? A Yahoo or MSN account is more than just a way to customize your start page. They tie into numerous services that each company offers, from groups to social networks, photo sites, and sundry other services. What happens to my Yahoo Instant Messenger? Will it be integrated with Live Messenger, or will the networks simply be able to see and talk to one another? Questions like this abound, and all the answers are "wait-and-see" at this point.

The Block and the Bidders

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question in all of this is whether Yahoo will suddenly draw other bids now that Microsoft has opened the door. Microsoft's offer was literally "out of the blue." Even though Yahoo was going through some layoffs recently, they had not made any public overtures towards sales. Speculation about who might buy Yahoo over the years hasn't been confined exclusively to Microsoft. If Google decides it might not be such a great thing if MS sets up camp in Yahoo HQ, they could also offer to buy. Google has pretty deep pockets these days.

A Google Yahoo marriage would create a search monopoly that would be of, well, Microsoft Windows proportions.

The search landscape will change in a big way if this does go down. We will be living in "post-merger" world, where uncertainty abounds. At least until we get a lot more press releases. Should be pretty exciting, no matter what happens.

A few months ago I stopped going to my local comics shop. I had thought I would deal with the guilt of that decision for some time to come, but, it turns out I made pretty good call. They folded up shop not 2 weeks later. Why guilt? Well, if you're not familiar with the "plight" of the comics industry, and I know you're not, then the idea I would willingly abdicate my "responsibility" to keep local shops alive is virtually blasphemous to some die hards. The issue was pretty simple, though. They just weren't very good at the whole "comics" thing.

I've discussed the idea of subscriptions boxes in a previous blog. It's a great idea, and one that's pretty much an industry standard. It's even better if your shop can get the right books to the right people on a regular basis. There were very few weeks I would find everything in order in my box. Also, the strictures of gainful employment meant I would arrive in the early evening, virtually assuring I would miss out on some titles that were left out of the box, and others that I hadn't the forethought to preorder. They would "backorder" the missed titles for me, but these purported backorders never arrived. This is what I accepted for about two years.

Why?

It was too much trouble to change. They were the closet store geographically to me. The next nearest option is much farther away and located in a place you simply don't want to reach during rush hour traffic. The "local comics shop" is something of a dying breed, so it's not like there is another option just up the street, as one might have with supermarkets. Which leads to the guilt barrier. I was doing my part to keep this venerable American institution, the local comic shop, alive. Unfortunately, this is just a malfunctioning organ of that greater body, and my life support wasn't enough to keep it going.

So they closed, and there was no longer a barrier to change for any of their customers. As I said, I finally got fed up and stopped returning 2 weeks before. In passing, a co-worker mentioned they had closed, and I just wasn't all that shocked. Now I'm back to doing the online subscription thing via a comics shop located thousands of miles away from me. They get my order right every time, I just have to pay for shipping. I guess I'm still supporting a "local" comics shop, just one in New York.

So, the moral of my little story is that barriers to change can cause people to accept bad service, even gladly, perhaps, if they feel it's too hard to get out.

Barriers in Search

The search engine "marketplace" is a competitive one. All the revenue generated from those PPC ads littered to the top and left of the natural results might be a distraction, but they're one reason you see quality in the natural results. The engines continue placing a premium on the quality of natural results because they know it's one of the primary reasons users employ their services and, more importantly, continue to use their services. The more they use it, the more ads they'll see. That's math even a philosophy major can do, which is useful, because I was one.

Search engines are also in a battle due to the perception there are few barriers to change. After all, if you can type in "g's", "o's", "l's", and an "e", you can probably also type in "y's", "a's", "h's", "o's", abutting both with the proverbial ".com." If you're really lazy, you can type in ask.com. It's just that simple to do your search somewhere else, and be looking at someone else's ads in the process. The effort to keep your search business, and your eyeballs on the ads, drives the engines to keep their natural results as relevant as possible.

Each major engine is doing its part to erect some barriers, though.

Back when Google was basically just a white block with a box, logo, and "Search" button, Yahoo was undergoing its transition from web directory to "portal." It was quite the der rigeur move in the late 90's, with Lycos, Excite, and MSN (which was trying to be AOL at the time), all morphing from search boxes to big pages with news, sports, weather, and various other mostly useless fluff that made the actual search bar a little harder to pick out. Yahoo was also going about creating and acquiring other services, such as Yahoo Groups, that would eventually become part of their grand-unified login.

What started as portals evolved into customizable portals, and this was pretty much the root of the whole search engine "user account" system. If you wanted a custom portal, you needed a login so your customization could be remembered. So you signed up, with Yahoo or MSN, or eventually Google, who finally relented and created a home page portal with iGoogle. Perhaps to their credit, they didn't make it the default page.

After the portals laid the groundwork for search engine user accounts, then proliferated the services. Yahoo incorporated instant messaging, job search, free hosting via GeoCities, games, and much more. They would all eventually be integrated under a single master Yahoo login. Google's ravenous appetite for Internet properties is no secret now. Here's a selection of what I see when I click on my user account in Google:

• Alerts
• Analytics
• Blogger
• Docs
• Groups
• iGoogle
• Notebook
• Reader
• Subscribed Links
• Web History
• Webmaster Tools

As a note, I'm writing this in Docs right now. That list is just what I have, not an exhaustive one of all their services. Notable absences include AdWords and GMail, neither of which I use with my work account. They are available though, part of the whole smorgasbord of Google goodies you can add to your one Google login.

The Walls are Subtle

I know what you're thinking. Just because each side has a whole bunch of services that require you to "sign-up" and maintain an account with them, doesn't A, mean they're mutually exclusive, or B, mean you can't use the search function of any other website but their own. Both these facts are true. I could maintain a fully tricked out Google and Yahoo account, with all the trimmings, free or otherwise, accessed on the same machine, with the same browser, and they would not interfere with each other.

That being said, each company is providing wider level of services that keep you "within the family" while you go about your tasks. I'm sure Google "power users" are far more prone to using Google for search, to the exclusion of other options. Same with Yahoo power users. They want you become so comfortable with their services that considering alternatives becomes "too hard". It then becomes a barrier where no barrier really exists.

I'm not sure whether I could be called a "power user", but I do use a great deal of Google's other products beyond search. With search, I'll admit, I simply default to Google. It's the first thing I use and really doesn't "fail" me all that often. Even in cases where it does, I'm not quick to bother with alternatives, preferring to keep throwing myself at Google with different keyword combos, hoping to find just the right one that will give me the answer I need. Rational? Perhaps not, but it's what I do. I suppose when you're hitting thesaurus.com to formulate a search query (other than for keyword research) then it's really not rational.

Take my advice, there's no real barriers out there. Keep your searching mind open, and if you can't find something at your first choice, there's always a second, or a third. Then again, if you take that advice, you're taking the advice of a guy who just said he doesn't take his own advice. Is that rational? Take my advice: it is.

Should come as no surprise that I am quite the fan of online mapping applications. I've lavished enough praise on Google Earth to make that a foregone conclusion. My geomapping love is not monogamous, though. Google Earth is probably the best all around package, but I keep up with all the "competition". The main competition is Virtual Earth from Microsoft. Others are sprouting, though. The newest entrant on the field is EveryScape.

EveryScape on the Streets

Whereas Virtual Earth could loosely be called a Google Earth clone, EveryScape distinguishes itself in a number of ways. Currently in beta, EveryScape can most clearly be compared to Google Maps "Street View". Keep the "beta" part in mind, as, perhaps a bit unfairly, I will be comparing a beta to a production model. No doubt EveryScape will see improvements before it is considered finished.

EveryScape provides the user a street level experience in much the same fashion as Google's Street View. It's somewhat ironic that Everyscape's navigational map for selecting where in New York to look is, in fact, Google Maps. This isn't true of other cities, like Aspen, so they may be using it for convenience's sake while aseparate navigational system is developed.

The real meat of the system is the Flash based panorama viewer that provides the experience of standing on the street, or on top of a car, in the selected city. The visual experience provided by EveryScape is not just a flat 360 degree panorama "ring", but more like a sphere. Unlike in Google Street View, where your view is restricted to eye level, with EveryScape you can look up and see the sky and look down and see the street (with the car that mounted the cameras taking the photos). This gives Everyscape a more lifelike feel right off the bat. The virtually unlimited field of view gives a much better impression "being there" than Street View accomplishes.

More useful? Probably not. If you're looking for a store or landmark, seeing the way at eye level, as Google provides, will probably suffice. EveryScape's nearly unlimited field of view does help, and looks a lot more impressive, in areas with tall buildings. Since both Google Street View and EveryScape provide New York City, it seemed fair to compare the two based on the merits of their presentation of the same "source".

Traveling through the proverbial steel canyons of New York with EveryScape is the more enjoyable experience, as the ability to "look up" to see the towering buildings is impressive. Navigation is similar in both, withclickable arrows on screen to display where the next segment road goes. Street View ads the visual cues of a 3D trail following the street's direction. It does make picking up the way to the movement arrows simpler, and makes selecting streets at intersections easier. Google wins additional navigational points by displaying the "approximate" street address of the image the user is currently viewing. This makes it easier for someone looking up an address to determine if they are looking in the right place.

In terms of image quality, EveryScape's New York set is the more visually impressive. The quality of images across all of EveryScape's starter cities is uniformly high. In New York, Google Street View doesn't appear to have any high res imagery. At least, after trying a few locations, I didn't happen across any. There is a lot of New York to cover, so it's entirely possible they do. With Street View's higher-res imagery, users can zoom into the street scene and look "deeper" into the image. Currently EveryScape doesn't have similar functionality. What you see is what you get, there's no ability to zoom deeper.

There's A Scape In My Living Room

Purely in terms of street level views, the more mature Google product is still the more useful at the moment. Again, in a purely visual sense, EveryScape's experience is more pleasing, but you'll still be using Google to find stuff. EveryScape isn't a one-trick pony, though. It has an ace up it's digital sleeve for which Google doesn't have a response. Both EveryScape and Google Street View let you look at the front door of a business, only EveryScape lets you walk inside.

EveryScape's "scapes" aren't limited to street views. They can be applied inside as well, or in pedestrian areas, like a park or mall, allowing the user to "walk around" instead of just driving the streets. There are examples of this functionality on the site itself, such as a nightclub in Miami or a pedestrian walk in Aspen. The ability to get off the street is where EveryScape will have a chance to really shine. If you've ever tried house shopping online, then you're probably familiar with the idea of "virtual tours". EveryScape looks to be able to bring this kind of functionality to the world at large.

This kind of functionality appears to be how EveryScape plans to pay the bills. Having business and their websites linked off "walk-ins" from EveryScape is part of their revenue model. Not sure how well that will work out for them, as it seems it will hinge on the site becoming a popular webdestination first. Similarly , I'm not sure how well people will take to "searching" EveryScape for a location to buy products, "walking into" the store, then just clicking a link to go to an outside website. It would be a lot easier to just search, say... Google, and find that same website with many fewer steps.

On the other hand, EveryScape has just "gotten me into" a Miami nightclub, something that probably won't ever happen in real life. So the entertainment value alone could be worth it to a lot of people.

I found a rather interesting little blog / RSS feed a couple weeks ago. It's disappointing to realize, at the ripe old age of 32, that my memory is going, so I'm not exactly sure how I found it. Found it I did, though. It's by librarians. I know, you're already giddy with anticipation. Before your natural librarian prejudices take over, I'll mention it's also about free stuff. Free information stuff. The Internet is nothing if not a bastion of free information, whether the aforementioned information was supposed to be free or not.

Fear not, though. Resource Shelf provides only the finest sources of completely legit free info and is updated quite often. The nature of the free info sources they find ranges far and wide. Common sources are governmental and academic, though they hardly ignore free commercial information. Resource Shelf covered the recent decision by the New York Times to kill off it's Times Select subscription service, and the day before had pointers to a US Census Bureau report on why people didn't work in 2004. The information is wildly varied and eclectic, but it's all free. Virtually everyone will find something useful, like great sources for blog topics for the idea-challenged webmaster.

Which brings me to their highly useful entry on PanImages. PanImages is a multi-lingual image search portal that currently uses Google Image Search and Flickr. One might be thinking that Google already allows one to search in different languages with their Advanced Search features. That's true, but all it does is return pages from other languages with the same search string. Search for "cars" in Dutch and you get a list of pages written in Dutch with the word "cars" on them. Change the image search with that query and you get the same thing, Dutch pages with the word "car" on them. But in Holland, they call cars "autos" or "wagens." You see pages with "car" on them, but not "auto" or "wagen" on the Google search, even though they are relevant to the query. Perhaps more so than "car."

Enter PanImages. Panimages serves as a portal site that formulates your image query across multiple languages. If the word you enter exists in multiple languages, it provides the option of picking what language you meant. If your word has multiple meanings across multiple languages, you are offered not only the language choice, but a list of possible meanings from which to choose. Once you've specified the details,PanImages opens up Google Image Search and Flickr in a columned framed layout with a search query formulated using all the translated equivalents. For example, "car" becomes:

car OR سيارة OR 汽车 OR auto OR automobile OR coach OR "motor car" OR wain OR bagnole OR voiture OR automobil OR wagen OR 自動車 OR 車 OR coche OR "máquina colloquial"

Apologies for any text encoding issues...

The execution is simple. PanImages simply queries each service using the OR operator to include all the translated versions of the search term. Simple in execution, but powerful in it's formulation. You couldn't form the same query without a bunch of research. Only C-3P0 could do it faster, and his fingers appear to be fused together, so he'd have a tough time typing all those terms into the search box. I suppose he'd be relegated to the hunt-n-peck method of keyboard interface.

PanImages, as one might expect, works primarily with fairly broad terms that are dictionary friendly. Searching for "cars" is fine, but those trying out "1988 buick skylark" will be disappointed, much like said vehicle's owners. One must assume that 1988 Buick Skylarks are universal in language and culture, a true uniting force for the ages. Or perhaps there's simply no substantive difference in most proper names between languages. Not sure about languages with different alphabets. We didn't cover how to spell 1988 Buick Skylark in Cyrillic in my 1 semester of college Russian. Granted, that one semester was not the highlight of my academic career. Looking back, taking Russian was exactly as bad an idea as everyone reading this thinks it was.

Perhaps a more "meta" critique of PanImages is simply that expanding the search pool with such basic dictionary terms rapidly approaches information overload. The single default image search for "car" in Google Images returns 61,300,000 results. The above query, using all the translated terms, ups that to 197,000,000. Now, you can't get past page 100 either way, but it illustrates that you're getting more information than you know what to do with. It's a bit of a double-edged sword with PanImages. The whole point is to get more results, but when does the sheer number outweigh the usefulness of having those results.

A more nuanced use of PanImages might be to find those translated terms and break them out one by one, providing the information in smaller, more friendly parts. PanImages provides individual language searches in their "advanced interface" section, allowing you pick a single language to search in. The translation function works the same, thus you can search on "car" only in Bulgarian or a number of other languages. If you find your "universal" query is providing to much info, try the language by language results to get more manageable chunks.

PanImages will open up some sources you probably wouldn't find otherwise. Allowing you to find them without doing a lot of translation work is a welcome idea. Themarriage of translation software to image search probably didn't seem like an intuitive choice, but it definitely works. Only it's prototype stage, there's welcome room for growth. The basic feature set delivers what's promised even now.

Other News from Earth, Google

Since I managed to avoid it last time, I'll go ahead and mention the flight simulator recently found in Google Earth. I've toyed with it, and it's "kinda" cool. Honestly, the controls are a little too sensitive and the mouse / keyboard combo doesn't lend itself to flight simulation control in the first place. The way the terrain loads isn't all that different from the regular GE interface, thus you've got terrain graphics slowly popping in as you're zooming around in your digital F-16. I was a bit of a flightsim aficionado in the days of yor (Falcon 3.0, anyone?), so perhaps I'm predisposed to be hard on it.

I'll see how it develops, as I'm sure this early entry will probably grow a bit over time. Is Google gunning for "Flight Simulator X" territory? Unlikely, but it certainly provides an interesting little addition to the Google Earth program.

Recently I've been coming to you live (-ish) from Google Docs. Yes, the past couple blogs, and this one, and pretty much the next one, and the one after that... etc... will be from Google Docs. This comes from an individual who spent many a year in MS Word, from writing endless papers in college (don't double major in writing intensive disciplines, kids) as well as the odd, ill fated attempts at fiction. I even know how to use the really cool stuff, like indexes, outlines, table of contents, and quite a few other little bells and whistles that bloat MS Word so mercilessly.

Really, can't deny MS Word is a prime example of software bloat. Like many programs, it developed so many features that it virtually lost relevance to its core functionality. That core functionally, which most people use it for, is "typing stuff." Don't get me wrong, I'm not "anti-Word". I still like it and use it, but it is pretty much overkill to pound out blog entries. After the spell check, there's not much there that enriches the blog-writing experience. As one prone to those mistakes that commonly elude spell-checkers, even that doesn't do much for me.

Perhaps Word's bloat is just not really "cool", unlike say... Photoshop's bloat. Sure, you'll probably never use a quarter of all the stuff in Photoshop, but it's still fun to find buttons you've never pushed before and just see what happens. A similar experience is pretty hard to obtain with Word. Text is text. It's crisp, vector, and beyond font choice, there's little you can accomplish "graphically" that makes for an amusing way to pass the time on a slow afternoon. Well, the table of contents thing in Word is cool, but you actually need to structure your document beyond just adding extra hard returns around "headers."

In terms of feature-set, Google Docs doesn't quite approach the massive list upon which Word rests its laurels. That's the point, though. Basic formatting, indents, quotes, lists, justification, a handy spell check, and some styling choices (header, etc) are pretty much all there is. Can't even insert a table. But it works, especially for simple, direct stuff like this. My formatting needs for this blog don't run much higher than bold, italics, and the occasional hyperlink, usually to Wikipedia. Google Docs has all of that and very little more. Granted, the spell-checker in Docs, much like the one in Word, isn't fool-proof. I should know, I'm the fool using it.

The main plus to Google Docs is the portability. Basically, you aren't really porting around anything. Your Docs are saved on Google's servers and accessible via most any web browser. Just sign into your Google account from anywhere and continue to write and edit a document. In a world of portable flash memory, this might not seem like such a huge deal, but for most the convenience will be real. One doesn't have to worry about wither their saved version is the latest, since the only copy is on the server.

Haven't really tried out Doc's sister product, Spreadsheets. It appears to follow the same basic "less is more" design philosophy that characterizes Docs and a lot of other Google releases. Obviously, its use, like Docs, might depend on what kind of features you plan to use. Word is still a perfectly valid choice for advanced projects, as is Excel. It's the more common, everyday tasks at which these applications excel. The ability to work from anywhere is a plus, though I confess I'm certainly not planning on doing any blogging from the comfort of home. The option is there, though, should the unexpectedly dire happen.

Oh, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets are free. I suppose that might also spur someone to choose. That software bloat in Word does have a way of keeping the price up. Financial considerations aside, this comes down to a "right tool for the right job" situation. I was considering a graphical analogy comparing Google Docs and MS Word to MS Paint and Photoshop, but I realized that might actually be a bit of a disservice to Google Docs. Of course, a dirty little secret of mine is that MS Paint actually provided my first taste of the power of pixel manipulation, and I was hooked ever since. It's not something anyone really likes to admit, like saying your first ISP was AOL.

Ahem, which it was for me, but that's beside the point.

New Google Earth Developments

I really didn't want to mention this so soon after doing another Google Earth post, but they've got those little engineer hamsters running 24/7 over there, seems like. Google Earth finds it's place in the Universe with "Sky View." Now, any regular readers will probably have grasped by now that I'm something of a sci-fi geek, so I find this little addition to be exceptionally cool. Right now it seems like something in an embryonic stage that will grow into untold awesomeness. Even in this state you can 'browse' the night sky, see photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, and learn more about galaxies, star clusters, and other nifty things in the real, actual universe.

In interesting-but-slightly-less-than-awesome developments, they also added some real time traffic data and book search references. The book search feature is sorta cool, actually, though the books from which they draw seem primarily to be from the 19th Century and earlier. I suppose the general controversy surrounding the book project lends itself to some caution in the Google Earth implementation.