Google pubished 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist:
Google.com – Top Gainers of 2005 1. Myspace
2. Ares
3. Baidu
4. wikipedia
5. orkut
6. iTunes
7. Sky News
8. World of Warcraft
9. Green Day
10. Leonardo da VinciFroogle – Top Searches in 2005 1. ipod
2. digital camera
3. mp3 player
4. ipod mini
5. psp
6. laptop
7. xbox
8. ipod shuffle
9. computer desk
10. ipod nano
Henry Blodget writes:
Pay-per-call, as currently implemented, is a small business in part because it’s not a perfect solution. Most web searchers would probably like some additional information about a vendor before chatting with them on the phone, and Ingenio deliberately does NOT enable this (by, say, also linking to the advertiser’s web site; see this search on AOL as an example, and compare the top link–Ingenio’s–with the next few). The best experience for the searcher would be to be presented with all options–link to web site, click-to-call, 800-number, and direct number–and only the use of the 800 number will result in a revenue event for Ingenio. Unless Ingenio doesn’t mind the “leakage” that results from the user going direct–or can figure out a way to get paid for a direct call from the advertiser’s web site–it will offer searchers an imperfect experience.
Yes, Google will enter this business, and, no, it won’t kill Ingenio. The stronger Google gets, the more it will be in everyone else’s interest to support non-Google partners. Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN wouldn’t be caught dead using a Google Pay Per Call product, so Ingenio has three massive potential partners there–at least until one or more develop their own solutions.
John Battelle points to a paper by Vivisimo’s CEO, Raul Valdes-Perez, who says: “…. search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists. It may even give worse results…”
On a related note, Fortune writes how Yahoo is combining social networking with search: “Yahoo hopes it can trump Google someday by combining MyWeb’s shared bookmarking with Yahoo’s existing search engine. Users get conventional search results, with those that have been tagged brought to the head of the list. MyWeb 2.0 is still in its early stages.”
Charlene Li writes why Microsoft Fremont is likely to be better than Google Base:
First, a quick description of Fremont. It looks and acts like a classic online classifieds site. A list of linked categories is on the front page and users can browse or search through the listings. A key difference though is that the listings are turbo-charged – as the poster, you can control who can see them, from everyone to just a select group of people on your MSN Messenger buddy list. If you choose the latter, the next time one of your privileged buddies signs into Messenger, they’ll see a little alert that says you have a set of golf clubs for sale. The categories include the usual suspects – jobs, homes, apartments, cars, and one thing that caught my eye, tickets.
…
So I look at Fremont and I see a really nice service shaping up. The classifieds interface is familiar – each category has the expected search fields (number of bedrooms in housing, make and year in autos, etc.) and the opening page lays out all of the options in a simple manner similar to Craig’s List’s austere list of links.Now compare that to Google Base. Honestly, can you imagine your average user trying to make heads or tails out of it? Don’t get me wrong – I love Google Base because of the audacious potential it represents in terms of creating new content for the Web. But in terms of a classifieds service, it will take a lot of application development to get it to the point where the average Joe will be able to use it.
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