23 Musings

Troogle? TravGoogle? GooTravel? Whatever you want to imagine the name may be the thought of Google jumping into the travel arena has operators and agents either salivating with the thought of the traffic and sales it could drive or quaking with fear at the thought of them owning the customer experience. Rumours keep appearing of the intentions of Google, but up till now there hasn't been any obvious functionality leaking out of Googleplex which could support a serious move into travel. That is, until now (at least I've only just found it)...

There's a new(ish) beta on Google for a Merchant search (only appears when you're in the right place searching the right thing). This is basically a price comparison engine, currently only serving the loan market. My question is, could this power a travel price comparison engine and so switch users to this type of interface and functionality if they search for the right travel related keywords? Could Google then become an affiliate to travel companies? I'd imagine TravelSupermarket would hope not!!

This image from eMarketer shows just how sewn up the online ad world is by the big four...

When Google drops the branded terms rules on 5th May I reckon their revenue and share will leap as the cost of those terms in PPC rises!

The Google homepage rarely changes in anyway except for their tradition of adding themed logo's to go with the season, holiday or event. Japan though has had a treat and the homepage of www.google.co.jp.

The new design is not available in every location (I can't see it) but it looks much better with the addition of tabs (see below).

It really would be nice to see a redesign of the main Google homepage, I'm sure with all the services they offer it is about time they offered a better way for them to be accessed from Google.com. The tabbed design would allow them to make their services more prominent while keeping them easy to access.

It seems the mobile web is beginning to come of age at last. Could it be down to the iPhone? The greater occurrence of phones with wireless built in? Better mobile web apps? Increasing addiction to the internet so you just have to get at it everywhere you are? Well, personally I think it's down to our increasing need for data, connections with our networks and need to access email on the go. Definitely the iPhone has made a big difference but I believe it's social networks which will really kick start the mobile phenomenon. Just look at Japan and the iMode surge a few years ago, the majority of apps used were related to social uses and email.

Anyway, ZDNet are reporting that Google have seen a 20% increase in mobile search usage.

So says Tim Berners-Lee in this article on the future of the web, search and semantic technologies over on the Times website.

I tend to agree with him unless Google move into the semantic search space pretty quickly. With Yahoo announcing support for semantic mark-up within their search index Google will surely not want to be left behind.

I'd like to think the future of Google will embrace semantic technologies and make it a real 'discovery engine', surfacing links of high relevance to searchers through much stronger understanding of the content within.

As an aside; one thing I've been thinking would be a nice app would be a semantic web robot which you could set off to scour the web for content and with the added semantic features (rather than the more usual boolean profile based robot) it could learn as it went by allowing you to score results for relevance to you. The first really intelligent agent?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has come out as against the planned Phorm advert and tracking network today (more here from the BBC).

It was announced a couple of weeks ago that leading ISP's were planning to use Phorm as a platform to serve up targeted adverts to ISP registrants. It's been touted as a great way to provide more relevant ads to users and all the initial talk seemed like PR spin designed to mask any potential privacy issues.

Now at last the privacy issues are getting a good airing!

Personally I'm against my ISP using the data of my surfing habits for advertising purposes. I use my ISP for access to the internet, I do not expect them to share my data on surfing habits with anyone (unless asked to by the authorities...).

Other blogs are asking what the fuss is about this and comparing Phorm to behavioral targeting technologies in use on retail websites. I disagree with this completely as this is going to collect data at the ISP level and share it with any websites which serve adverts through Phorm, this makes it far more pervasive.

An interesting question has to be asked though; how does this differ to Google / Doubleclick? If Google starts to share behavioral search data with Doubleclicks ad serving platform isn't that going to be similarly invasive to users privacy? Potentially; although at least we expect that from Google as an ad revenue based business...

Interestingly, the BBC has just published a story that states that the Foundation for Information Policy Research has claimed that Phorm could well be illegal. They believe Phorm contravenes the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which protects users from unlawful interception of information.

This has the potential to get very interesting and could open up other networks and ad serving technologies to scrutiny.

So Yahoo recently announced their Open Search platform. Now more details are emerging and Yahoo have announced they will be supporting semantic mark-up and making use of the structured, meaningful data that can be applied to web pages to help them index better and serve up more relevant results.

This is a big step forwards and if released into the main Yahoo Search will surely help them in their fight for users with Google and Microsoft.

Relevance is king in the search engine world, being able to interpret results by more than just standard search algorithms of content density and link equity has the potential to deliver a much more relevant results set to every search. As semantic mark-up and web standards increase in usage this could give Yahoo and edge they badly need.


There hasn't been a major move to optimise relevance in search results for years, this could give SEO's something to keep them busy. Rather than following the usual tactics of copy optimisation and ensuring pages are well formed, developers will now need to ensure they use the relevant semantic tags to add meaning to their pages.

The one thing that will bring the users flooding in is if an engine finds a way to deliver highly relevant results. Returning three truly relevant links is far more useful than delivering one thousand arbitrarily ordered links. I for one would immediately switch to using an engine who gets semantic search right.

I hope to see this implemented asap if Yahoo have any chance of capitalising on this move. Google will be hot on their heels otherwise...

Looks like Google may get it's way and finally secure the acquisition of DoubleClick.

Will be interesting to see how this is handled and exactly what Google does to integrate tools and workforce when (if) if goes through!

I've used Google Calendar for ages, mainly for it's ease of use and access from anywhere features. However, I still use Microsoft Outlook for work and have an install of it at home too.

So I am ecstatic about this new launch from Google! Google Calendar Sync (catchy) allows you to sync your Google calendar to Outlook and vice versa. Fantastic! All my calendar views can now be up to date, no excuses for missing an appointment anymore...

Great comparison of the two online office suites here from ReadWriteWeb.

Certainly going to be an interesting battle as this arena hots up. I still side with Google for ease of use and true collaboration features, just want to see better integration with GMail and the arrival of a 'real GDrive' now!

Although having said that; some semantic understanding of my documents wouldn't go amiss...

Google have announced the launch of Google Gears for Mobile.

I'm a regular user of mobile web apps on my phone, especially when travelling by train, and there's nothing worse than finding your signal dies and you lose connectivity at a crucial point. Well no longer; now developers can make their mobile apps Gears ready which will enable you to keep working until a connection returns.

I can already think of some great ideas for it; an offline blogger mobile interface which allowed you to write your blog posts offline, then connect to upload. Or maybe an offline mobile email app. And better still a mobile download of Google Calendars (or other online office apps) with both online and offline synchronisation capability!

It's currently only available for Internet Explorer Mobile so you're pretty much stuck unless you have a Windows smartphone, but expect it to go to other phone platforms pretty quickly.

This could be a great addition to Android, imagine a phone operating system which allows full on/offline synchronisation with all your favourite web apps available. That would be very cool!

More here from Google Code, including the video below.

ComScore have come out to explain a little more detail behind the release from a few days ago which announced the decline in clicks on Google's paid search ads.

It seems that the reason for the decline in clicks is down to improvements made by Google to increase the click quality (such as only making text clickable instead of the entire ad unit).

One has to wonder whether a letter from Google has triggered this deeper analysis of the issue...

Anyway, with the recent news that click fraud is rising rapidly it's timely for Google to remind us of these improvements. It will be telling to see the Click Forensics data for the 1st quarter 2008.

Really interesting product launch from Google today! They've announced the resurrection of JotSpot (a company they bought some time back) in a new form as Google Sites.

Google Sites allows easy creation of collaboration based websites with wiki and team-site features. It's tightly integrated into Google Apps allowing you to integrate spreadsheets, docs, calendars and other features into sites with uses such as intranets, extranet team sites and company portals.

Looks very cool and is a real alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint in my opinion. The video below gives a really good overview.

ComScore have released some data showing that clicks on ads on Google were down 7% in January compared to December and flat year-on-year (actually down 12% qtr-on-qtr).

This is pretty astounding news after the growth Google has seen in ad clicks over the last few years. The thought is that this isn't anything fundamentally to do with Google or any competitor taking market share away, rather analysts seem to think this is a sign of the economic uncertainty we are currently seeing. Times are hard so people click less on ads....

What would be interesting is to see the search volume data alongside this click data to see whether searches have declined or stayed the same.

Needless to say Google's shares have taken a bit of a battering today because of this.

Some updates on the Microsoft-Yahoo approach:

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft Platforms and Services Division sent an internal email yesterday. The email was obviously designed to be leaked (and ended up on Microsoft.com after it got into the blogosphere) judging by the language in it and the mentions of looking after both companies employees in the event of the merger going ahead. Trying to stop people jumping off the ship? Or just a good PR exercise?


Yahoo are facing another lawsuit, this time from some pension funds who claim that by declining the Microsoft offer they are not returning value to shareholders and are actually risking their investments by dragging it out looking for other parties to strike a deal with.

Lastly, Sergey Brin has expressed his nervousness at the deal going ahead, saying that 'when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving'.

So no progress really, rumours still fly about Yahoo trying to find anyone else to deal with and Microsoft seem confident as ever that the deal will go through in the end.

Well, no it's not Sergey going ballistic over the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, rather it's Google's competition to find a team who can land a robotic rover on the moon and send pictures back to earth.

Story here from the International Herald Tribune.

But nearly...

Google has come in for the year at £1.3B of ad revenue from the UK alone. Estimates say that the TV channel ITV1 will come in at around £1.32B plus some £100M in sponsorship.

This is still pretty awesome from Google and they should take the lead next year as mobile expands and advertising moves to other platforms (and if they ever get DoubleClick properly into the fold).

More from the Guardian.

Lot's of Yahoo coverage in the blogosphere at the moment. Here's a few key pieces:

Yahoo are still launching new products and innovating. Examples include the News Globe mashup (via Mashable) and the exciting new mobile product oneConnect (an app allowing email IM and social networking to all come alive on your mobile phone, very promising).

The layoffs have started (again via Mashable).

Key players are leaving, Bradley Horowitz a key figure responsible for the area of Yahoo who come up with new and innovative products is apparently jumping ship to Google (via Techcrunch). This is a big loss, I've seen him at conferences and he's a very sharp guy.

Microsoft are still pushing for the merger to happen and rumours are that they may take their offer straight to the shareholders (again via Mashable).

And to top it all, Yahoo are said (via Techcrunch) to be in continuing talks with News Corp about a deal which could see them become a massive powerhouse with the properties to compete with Google (although not quite on eyeballs).

Where will this all lead? Who knows, but Yahoo need to resolve the merger issues and rebuild confidence in their employees and shareholders, losing key hires and all this talk of deals is going to begin to hurt them if they don't settle on a direction to follow soon.

The IDC have announced that the market for U.S. internet advertising grew by a massive 27% in 2007.

Interestingly though, while Google grew by 40% year on year in Q4 that was down on their growth a year earlier. That made their market share slip by 0.5%, but they do still own over 23% of the market. Something to do with the coming saturation of search marketing perhaps?

IDC says a merged Microsoft-Yahoo would command 17% of the U.S. online ad market, so still not enough to topple Google from the top spot.

One wonders if the figures for Google include DoubleClick yet??

I blogged last week about the rumour of an Android phone appearing this week and lo and behold more than one have, in fact there's been a veritable plethora of Android based phones on show at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The BBC have a report on it here, and Techcrunch have a video of an Android phone in use (see below).

It looks good so far but obviously these are all a work in progress so not that pretty and definitely not iPhone competitors as yet.