Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:53:00 GMT
It seems like it was only yesterday that I was loudly praising the bold moves Amazon was making in search, but now that is probably going to end. The head of Amazon’s A9 search service Udi Manber has jumped ship to Google. Bummer for Amazon. I guess Google is becoming the Microsoft of search, scooping up everybody eventually.
Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 22 Dec 2005 06:07:00 GMT
Jason Kottke had a really interesting point earlier this month about Yahoo’s del.icio.us purchase that I just read today (been catching up), when he says:
There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo! is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.
Spot on. It seems like Google has been focusing its efforts lately mainly on acquiring key smart people (even if that means buying their whole company), content acquisition (ie, Keyhole for satellite data, the sitemap protocol for deep web access), and advertising/advertising/advertising! Meanwhile, Yahoo has been looking for new talent with proven success to snap up. Their strategy could really be defined as platforms. Amazon has also been doing this to some degree through their internal Robot Coop front company, but I expect they might start buying outside sites as well if they prove successful (good luck there LibraryThing!). It’s nice for the big guys; someone else takes the risk of building the product and they can scoop it up – users and all – if it sticks.
This has been described as competing strategies of brains vs. hackers. Which is certainly true, but there are some interesting other dimensions to consider. I read an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google where he named the not invented here attitude as one of Google’s biggest concerns moving forward. And looking at their strategy, it seems like Google might be struggling with that problem now, preferring to create their own copies of existing successful products (Googlemaps and Gmail have done well, but what about Google Base or Orkut?). Of course, Yahoo is taking its own risks here (their strategy is essentially treating geeks like value stocks vs. Google’s growth stocks), but I ultimately feel they might succeed. A lot of radical web stuff lately has been done by the new people, the unknows (think Ruby on Rails or Del.icio.us), and Yahoo has been more poised to recognize it. Will their riskier unknowns best Google’s smart people with big reputations? I think so, unless Google’s hiding something really big up its sleeves to spring in 2006.
On a related note, John Battelle has published his industry predictions for 2006 and it’s an interesting read. Although he sometimes stumbles, he generally does a good job of being on the mark, as his review of 2005’s predictions shows. Check it out.
Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:42:00 GMT
I really must hand it to Amazon/A9/Alexa. They have consistently delivered more innovation to the developer than those two combined. Amazon started to impress me when they allowed any application to search their extensive database of product information. Directly they have earned nothing from this, but it more than makes up for itself in good will and inspired purchases. Amazon understands Web Services.
Amazon also has a search engine. But here they are not the market leader like they are for books. Poor A9, always ignored while Google and Yahoo and MSN get copious amounts of press and praise. But this has been good to spur on Amazon and Alexa (their search company) into creative new territory for their search engine. A9 has already received some attention for their YellowPages data that includes photos of storefronts; that’s certainly cool, but it’s just content. On the other hand, OpenSearch is a cool change to the spider-driven notion of search content. Google may have specified their sitemap standard for giving hints to spiders. But A9 did that one better with their OpenSearch RSS extensions, which allowed any site to package itself as a channel for A9.com. This allows sites to handle search requests dynamically at the time of request, rather than creating documents to then be spidered and cached.
To illustrate why this is a cool idea, suppose I had a site that did hotel bookings. I could create an A9 channel that could accomodate search requests for things like “nyc hotels” with actual hotels and rates from that moment. If people had date information, I could be more clever, but the key of this is that Amazon is handing over control of their search results to the end sites. As long as a user is willing to trust a channel enough to add it, A9 is happy to get out of the way.
Of course, there is nothing to make syndicated OpenSearch sites obey search rules in the same way A9 does, but who cares? As Google’s success with a single bar shows, people care less about all the little details of searching (boolean vs. web syntax, stemming, relevance scoring) than just being able to find stuff. Amazon gets this, but Google seems to have forgotten it.
But Amazon/A9/Alexa’s latest move has really blown me away. In recent years, a lot of search providers have found additional revenue in peddling search appliances to companies. Essentially, you sign a contract with a company Google and buy a local web spider that crawls content you specify. You then pay Google a price based on support, how many documents you plan to index, and how many users will search your index. There are limitations to keep you from turning Google against themselves and all pricing is set up front rather than growing with use, and prices can approach up to $2 million up front. More importantly, you are not actually using Google’s index, just recreating part of it independently. And while Google has much vaunted data centers across the globe, enterprise customers get only a single box or two to place in their own data centers if they have them.
Amazon has been interested in entering the enterprise market, but they did not want to be in the business of creating hardware servers for enterprise clients (Google will always be better at that). And that’s when someone at Alexa had the brilliant idea of opening up their entire search index data to the outside world. And what makes it additionally brilliant is that you install nothing locally (everything is done via Web Services) and pricing is set by consumption and not by contract, meaning even the most modest users can do something with the backend data. Users can write programs to process data sets, implement their own additional indices on top of A9’s basic web search, or even just analyze a massive collection of web pages for statistical goals. In some sense, Amazone allows customers to not just outsource spidering but also maintenance of indices they’ve built.
It’s a brilliant move, and I must applaud Amazon for the creativity of their vision. Forget Google and Yahoo, Amazon is doing more to turn Search into a utility than the any other company around.
Posted by harrisj Wed, 11 May 2005 04:44:00 GMT
If you want an excellent lesson in how web specifications can knock into modern DHTML interface design, check out this post at Signal vs. Noise on how the well-meaning goals of Google Web Accelerator have wreaked havoc on modern interactive web sites. Be sure to read the comments as well. I would post more commentary on this here, but I have already spent enough time following it up in the thread over there.Posted by harrisj Thu, 05 May 2005 19:11:00 GMT
Supergreg has created a great but possibly short-lived combination of competing web-services, combining Yahoo's Traffic Conditions RSS with Google Maps to make the best traffic conditions mapper I've seen yet. See if before it goes away (a cease and desist is probably on its way now) at Supergreg's Site.Posted by harrisj Thu, 07 Apr 2005 16:36:00 GMT
Yesterday, I was talking about Google maps and I mentioned using it for Virtual Tourism. Well, now someone has set up a blog for just that (Google Sightseeing). Check it out.
Posted by harrisj Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:00:00 GMT
Second day blogging and I am already late to the party in talking about the changes Google has made to the Maps program by incorporating the satellite imagery from Keyhole. The result is very cool, not just because it's neat to see things from space, but because the map functionality is overlaid right onto the satellite data as well (as John Park shows with his bike route). What I like about this is what I also like about people using the maps with Flickr's annotation capabilities to present memory maps or people doing "virtual tourism" of sorts to get a feel of geography from afar, in that there's a real sense of play and fun and hacking going on with Google Maps that I haven't seen with a web service for a while. I will talk more about this later, since I think it's the difference between a successful web service and a dud.
Nimble Code is the blog of me, Jacob Harris, a software developer living in Brooklyn and working on websites for the New York Times.
Oh yeah, I wrote a book too.
Contact me at harrisj at nimblecode.com
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Thanks to Damien Tanner for the iamrice theme of this site.
