Clicker's guide to the unlimited-channel universe

One testament to the popularity of online video is the growing number of sites that serve as Internet program guides, helping people sort through the billions of available items to find something they might like to watch. The latest, Clicker, has its official launch at 10:30 this morning (it had been conducting an invitation-only trial since mid-September). Unlike most of the other guides, which direct users to videos available on their own sites, Clicker exists to help people find programming around the Web, including such sources as Hulu, YouTube or Revision3. And it directs users to legal content only, eschewing bootlegs and snippets posted on user-generated sites in favor of full-length content from the most convenient source. The goal, said CEO Jim Lanzone, is to be "the TV Guide for the next generation of television, whatever that evolves into."

Searching for an improved online shopping experience? Google has a new plan

Google offered this example of how an online store using Google Commerce Search could look, with searchable products sortable by category, color, size or price. Credit: Google.

Just in time for the holidays, Google Inc. took the wraps off a new business, one designed to help big online retailers make their websites easier to search.

With Google Commerce Search -- a service that will cost retailers $50,000 or more for an annual subscription -- the Internet giant will set up a search function on an online retailer's website, which Google says will dramatically improve user experience and drive sales. The product represents a challenge to Google's archrival Microsoft Corp., as well as to Oracle Corp., Endeca Technologies Inc. and other firms that run retailers' websites.

The main selling points are that everything that has made Google a dominant company -- vast computing resources, algorithms that provide right results, and even the ability to fix your typos and find what you're looking for -- will help people navigate clunky retail websites that cause a major stumbling block to sales.

"Search was the most important aspect of an e-commerce experience," said Nitin Mangtani, a lead product manager at Google. People go to a website looking to buy, say, a laptop, and they search the site for the item they want. "If the users are able to find that laptop easily, they are more likely to buy the product," Mangtani said. "If it takes them eight to 10 seconds, and they can't find it easily, they leave the website."

Whereas people have high expectations, websites weren't delivering, so Google saw an opportunity, the company said.

Search engine analyst Greg Sterling said...

Google launches music search with Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace

Google this afternoon began rolling out its widely rumored music feature, which lets users search for and listen to entire songs for free.

The search engine banded together with several music service sites that are responsible for streaming the songs on Google's search results pages. Searching for Coldplay, for example, will yield the band's album cover art, alongside four popular songs that users can play once for free. Once a song has been played by a user, they will only be able to hear a 30-second sample of tune. (The feature is being gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours, so some folks may not see the feature until tomorrow.)

Google itself isn't paying record companies for the rights to play millions of songs on its search page; its partners are. Those include Lala, Pandora, imeem, MySpace Music and Rhapsody, a subscription service from Real Networks. All have licensing agreements with record labels to stream or sample millions of songs online.

The Mountain View, Calif., search company said it's not interested in competing with digital music retailers such as Amazon and Apple's iTunes.

"We're not in the music business per se," said R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product for the music search project. "We don't license the music nor sell the music directly on Google. We are merely a music search feature."

But in steering millions of Internet users to these sites, Google is indirectly boosting their ability to compete with iTunes, which was responsible for 69% of U.S. digital music sales in the first six months of this year, and 35% of all music sales, including physical albums, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc. Amazon, the second-largest player, accounted for 9% of digital music sales and 10% of overall music sales.

Google says it's only interested in helping people find and discover music. Whether it can help revitalize the music industry is another question that Times editorial writer Jon Healey addresses here.

Millions of people already use Google to ...

Bing gains a 0.5% sliver of search share in July; Google loses a fraction

Microsoft's Bing won a tiny fraction of the online search market in July, capturing half a percent of the the pie shared by the "big five" search companies, as Google and Yahoo both donated about 0.3%, according to data from ComScore.

July was a slow month for search, with the total number of queries down 3.5% from June, although the 13 billion total searches was still a 15% increase over the same month last year.

In a note to investors that contained the ComScore data, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Benjamin Schachter displayed little enthusiasm about Bing's upward inching: "Although Bing took a bit of share from both GOOG and YHOO, we are reluctant to extrapolate this into meaningful long-term share gains, and note that GOOG still had its second-highest share of monthly queries ever in July [64.7%]." 

The ComScore data also show that combined, Microsoft and Yahoo gained 0.2% of the market, but their total search volume dropped 2.6%, pulled down by a 4.7% decrease in Yahoo searches.

Microsoft announced a deal to take over Yahoo's considerable search busines last month, though the partnership, if approved by regulators, is expected to take at least a year to go into effect.

-- David Sarno

Old Google vs. New Google -- the company wants your feedback

Google suddenly felt the need to tell everyone this week that it has been working on a "secret project: a next generation architecture" for its famed search engine, according to a company blog.

This was met with much speculation on the Web that the timing of the announcement was an attempt to counter recent news about Microsoft and Yahoo combining forces in search, as well as the debut of a revised search engine at Facebook.   

Be that as it may, Google is asking for your feedback on its in-development search engine, code-named Caffeine.You can go there, try a few searches and leave your reactions by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page that says, "Dissatisfied? Help us improve."

But don't expect any big differences between the old and new Google. The company seems to be avoiding the New Coke disaster by not much changing a tried-and-true product. 

You might get fewer or more hits on a search, and it might happen a tiny bit faster, but no huge deal in most instances. And the page looks much the same.

Google says the changes are mostly "under the hood" and aimed at power users.
For the rest of us, it will be, as The Who once sang: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

-- David Colker

Microsoft-Yahoo deal contains some cash payments, escape clauses

Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Wash. Credit: Kevin P. Casey / Bloomberg

When Microsoft and Yahoo announced their search agreement last week, many saw the deal as lopsided. Microsoft got the better end of the deal, while Yahoo either "mortgaged its future" or "committed seppuku," depending on which writer you asked.

The reactions were largely based on the fact that Yahoo would basically chuck its own search technology, replacing it with Microsoft's Bing search engine. In exchange, Yahoo would get to keep 88% of the revenue it generates from selling search ads.

That was a disappointment to investors who had expected Microsoft to also pay Yahoo up to $2 billion in cash. After all, the Redmond, Wash., software giant once offered to pay $45 billion to buy Yahoo. Instead, last week's arrangement came up as snake eyes for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company that once dominated search.

It turns out there is some cash involved, but not a whole lot, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission released online Tuesday. Microsoft agreed to pay Yahoo $50 million a year for three years to pay for "transition and implementation costs." It also agreed to guarantee a minimum level of gross revenue per search for 18 months.

The deal calls for Microsoft to hire 400 Yahoo employees, along with another 150 to "assist with providing transition services." Yahoo had 13,000 employees at the end of June.

There is some flexibility in the arrangement. After five years, Microsoft has the option to end Yahoo's exclusive ability to sell ads against Bing search results. If it does so, Yahoo would get to keep 93% of the revenue it generates from search ads on its sites. If Yahoo likes the arrangement so much that it wants to remain exclusive control over the sales of search ads for Bing, it would get to keep 83%.

But perhaps more than anything, the deal turns on how well the partnership's performance stacks up against market leader Google. Yahoo can walk away if the two companies' combined market share falls below a certain undisclosed percentage (combined, both had 28% of U.S. search queries in June; would the minimum cutoff be more than that, or less?). Yahoo can also bolt if the revenue per search on its pages falls below a certain (again undisclosed) percentage of what Google gets.  

Yahoo can also cut and run if the deal is not approved by July 29, 2010.

-- Alex Pham and David Sarno

After a month of hype, Bing's share of the search market barely inches up

Despite an onslaught of hype this month, Bing's performance is ringing hollow.

The new Microsoft search engine increased its share of the search market by just four-tenths of a percentage point, according to an unreleased survey by Web ratings firm ComScore Inc., rising to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Any expectation that the service was siphoning traffic from leader Google (65% of market share, unchanged from May), would appear to be unfounded. If anything, Bing sliced off a fraction of the traffic from second-place Yahoo, whose share dropped half a percentage point to 19.6%. 

The lack of any major uptick by Bing has been cited by other Web analytics companies. In its numbers, Compete.com found that Bing helped Microsoft increase its market share by three-tenths of a percentage point, pegging it at 6.5% (still less than the 7.2% Microsoft had in June of 2008). And HitWise observed a slight drop in Microsoft's market share in June.

Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. sprinkled a few more raindrops over Bing's parade, noting in a preview of Google's second-quarter earnings that, "we estimate that Google lost up to 120bps [1.2%] of US search query share to Bing, but expect these losses to be temporary."

-- David Sarno

Tales from the people who answer KGB's text-message search queries

Kid sends a text message to a friend. Credit: andronicusmax via Flickr

When you search for something on Google, the computers that process your questions aren't thinking about what might have motivated the inquiry. Nor are they sharing the bizarre ones with their friends. You punch in a few words and machines spit out a list of related Web pages in less than second.

But as workers for KGB, the people-powered mobile search service, field questions, they find plenty to laugh, worry and wince about.

For those who haven't seen the TV commercials, KGB isn't the Russian spy agency. It's a service that lets you ask questions by sending text messages from your cellphone and returns an answer researched by one of its volunteer laborers called agents (get it?).

Users are charged 99 cents per message, and agents earn 5 cents to 10 cents for every answer they serve up, depending on the amount of fact-finding involved.

People who already own Internet-enabled cellphones might wonder why they would spend a buck when they have Google at the ready. Surprisingly, half of KGB's users have smartphones or cellphones with QWERTY keyboards, according to KGB Chief Executive Bruce Stewart.

"People don't want thousands of links," Stewart said in a phone interview. "They just want the answer." Maybe there is something to Microsoft's "search overload" ad campaign for Bing after all.

But a better question might be: What would motivate these agents to answer our whimsical questions for less than minimum wage?

Yahoo adds Search Pad feature

At Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. Credit: Franco Folini via Flickr.

Yahoo says it will roll out a new feature tomorrow afternoon that automatically detects when users of its search engine are gathering research on a particular topic and saves their results in one place.

Called Search Pad, the feature is supposed to solve a problem that many researchers on the Web have -- how to keep track of those bits of information they dig up from multiple websites. Say you're planning a vacation to Hawaii and you're looking up car rentals, hotel reviews and flight information. Yahoo says its search engine will recognize what you're doing, save the search results on a single notepad, let you write notes on those sites and allow you to share your research results with friends.

Search analysts who have seen and used the feature say it's useful but not a game changer for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which is struggling to compete with Google for search advertising. In May, Yahoo's market share for Internet searches was 20%, second place behind Google, which claimed a 65% share, according to ComScore.

"For existing Yahoo users, it can be valuable," said Greg Sterling, an analyst in Oakland who reviewed the feature in February when in rolled out in beta to selected users. "But I don’t think it will dramatically increase their market share."

-- Alex Pham

Caterina Fake's Hunch.com, launching Monday, is already redefining 'decision engine'

Microsoft's megabucks advertising campaign for Bing.com couldn't have come at a better time for Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake's new consumer advice site, Hunch.com.

With much pomp and circumstance, Microsoft is trumpeting the notion of a "decision engine" -- an online service that helps users make the right choice on a variety of lifestyle and purchasing questions.  That description might loosely apply to Bing's approach to Web search, but it fits Hunch -- which launches Monday -- to a tee.

After a year in development, Hunch aims to supply users with computer-generated answers to thousands of lifestyle questions -- what kind of dog should I buy; what should I get Dad for Father's Day; which book by George Orwell would I like?

Rather than searching the open Web for answers, like Bing, or collating written opinions, like Yelp or Mahalo Answers, Hunch compiles personally tailored advice: First, it figures out what kind of person you are with a long personality test, then it offers a list of hunches about the choice a person like you would be most likely to make. 

The more people use the site and create data-rich demographic profiles, the founders hope, the better Hunch will get at guessing your preference.

"We’re nothing like a search engine," Fake said in an interview from New York.  "We’re more related to the answers sites."  (After Fake rode Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr into a position at that company, she worked on Yahoo Answers, where the idea for Hunch germinated.) 

"Bing is kind of doing us a big favor by popularizing the idea that people go online to make decisions. But I don't think we're competitive with them."

Still, Fake said, "they have this $80-million [ad] campaign that talks about decisions.  We’re kind of like, go Microsoft!"

-- David Sarno