John Porcaro: mktg@msft: Closest I’ll Ever Get to GQ Magazine
Glancing at my referrers logs, I see a search result from MSN Search, for “GQ July 2003.” I happen to be the Number 1 pick. Hmmm.
I don’t see why John wouldn’t be in GQ?
Anyway, I also have some interesting referrers. Yesterday I seem to have been linked to be a penis enlargement site… Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. Answers on a post card please (well comments anyway - keep t clean - ish).
I think my favourite search string is ‘government hack’…now what on earth is that about?
BBC NEWS | Business | Amazon seeks book-search boost
Searching for success
The key element in Amazon’s plan is the searchability of the database.
The intention is not that customers will read through books online, but use the search engine to target the right books via keywords.
The difficulty of the plan is to secure the agreement of publishers, who are worried by any attempt to post their copyrighted material freely online.
Any agreement will be restricted to non-fiction, and probably only to the sort of narrative non-fiction - history, biography and so on - where extracts are likely to whet a buyer’s appetite to purchase.
Amazon gets a new strategy. It feels like the idea for brick book shops where cafes are introduced to get you to spend more time browsing. Its interesting the comparison later in the article about Amazon losing trade through Google, as buyers search for books there and then find cheaper alternate sites.
It reminds me of the phrase ‘rational economic man’ from my Economics A level. Given perfect knowledge, a person will be rational and seek the lowest price for a similar (or same) good. Google provides that opportunity. So Amazon needs to prvoide a service which makes buying from its site worth more.
I generally do buy from Amazon as I find it easier to search there (never actually considered using Google) and I get other readers opinions of a book, which for non-fiction I find really useful. I’ve yet to find another site that allows me to do this easily without putting in some effort. Recommendations are also very handy and have given me some good tips of books to read.
Ultimately that’s all things that I find useful. However perhaps the one thing that I miss would be some form of loyalty programme. Since I spend a great deal of money on books (far more than I should), anywhere that rewards me for being loyal is going to win the day for my business. Of course cheap books and free delivery help.
Matt.Blogs.It
Deploying Google Viewer. Greg reports that some of his search results contain a “View results as slide show” link, presumably using Google viewer. Have you seen this?… [Google Weblog]
The interface has an interesting CD player like styling to it. But in IE6 I got a script error that prevented it from doing anything more than look interesting. Bummer.
Google Viewer worked fine for me (also in IE 6) - I searched on Broadband and Me (vain I know) and got a great taster. I actually thought ‘Wow!, that’s a great idea!’…(that’s 3 times this week…)
BBC NEWS | Business | Yahoo Japan heads for big list
More on the Search market - Yahoo Japan profits big time…
Scripting News in Manila
Feedster now can index your entire weblog if you have an RSS archive of it. I have one for much of 2002, and all of 2003.
Isn’t it obvious that either Google or Yahoo will buy Feedster so their search engine can understand RSS. Then the other guy is going to wonder why they missed the boat. After that, they can make their search engines understand OPML and throw out the antiquated centralized directories and let the amateurs compete to create the best directory for a given topic, the same way we compete for page rank. No more one guy controlling a category. That just doesn’t work. It’s cool that Google has competition from a highly regarded company like Yahoo. Now search is a market. Before it was a company town.
Dave Winer on the new search market. Will Feedster become a target. Part of me hopes so, at least if not in name then at least the development of alternative technology to do the same job. After all are we ever going to get to this semantic web stuff?
Probably but I don’t really understand it well enough. Another action to me - understand Semantic web.
BBC NEWS | Business | Yahoo pays $1.6bn for tech rival
A bold step by Yahoo.
Yahoo last week reported a doubling in profits, saying it was benefiting from the continued popularity of its sponsored web searches, which mention advertisers’ names in conjunction with certain search results.
This is the business that Overture specialises in, an area Yahoo said was “the most dynamic and fastest growing segment” of the market.
If sponsored searches are proving so popular then this looks like an excellent move in the long term.
The search arena is a very active one at the moment.
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