Daniel Staemmler » Search Engines

Goolge – Search Goliath and Ad Network

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:31:48 +0000

Wow, have you paid attention to the recent earnings of Google? For the first quarter of 2007 “… Google reported profit of $396.2 million” (Source: washingtonpost.com) which is almost double from the earnings last year in the same time period. This booted out Yahoo’s profit which “… dropped by nearly a third from a year” (Source: CNET News.com). That is a lot of profit for Goliath under the search engines and most of the earnings are from online advertisement not only on the Google website but also on their partners sites.

Why am I writing about this? I stumbled upon a blog entry by Jeol Downs from Answerbag.com (Referred by: We are all end users…) with the title “Why Google doesn’t care about Search“. And even though I like a lot of the services that Google offers I think he makes a very good point in naming Google an ad network. Don’t get me wrong I use a lot of Google’s services and like them and I also understand very well money has to be made somehow. The recent acquisition of Adscape for $23 million by Google (Source: TechCrunch) also sends a clear sign into the direction of building a stronger and powerful ad network.

Update 5/25/2007: I found an article from Ionut Alex Chitu with the title “What has Google done is Search lately?” that is contradicting the above mentioned article from Jeol Downs and argues that Google does a lot to improve their search functions and results.

One question easily answered: What are you doing?

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:34:04 +0000

After a lot of things have been written about Twitter and it’s community that answers only one simple question: “What are you doing?” I checked this “… social networking and micro-blogging service“, that even has an entry at Wikipedia already, out. I have to admit that I have checked Twitter out a little while ago and was wondering what makes people interested in continuously post what they are doing right now. For example, are you interested who is having lunch right now. No problem. A visit at Twitterment, a Twitter search service, will reveal who is lunching right now (Source: Binaryplex.com ,Library Clips).Â Okay, now the question remains what are people doing right now and where geographically wise are they doing it? The answer is out there and Twittervision.com is a pretty neat mash-up application developed by David Troy that will show what is going on in real time at the Twitter community.
Alright, and for those of you who want to ban Twitter to their Apple Macintosh computer their is the free software application Twitterrific out there (Source: Twitter Blog). If you know of a similar application for Microsoft please add a comment to this post and let other readers know about it.

What makes Twitter so popular? I think it is very simple, we are always interested in what our friends are doing. A lot of times it is “… the first thing we ask when we call someone” (Source: Read/WriteWeb).Â A little snipped of text provides us with the real time information and a simple social need id fulfilled.

However, I have not decided yet for myself if I am going to use Twitter to keep my friends and readers up to date with my activities. If so you probably will see it on this blog in one of the sidebars.

Search the Web beyond Google

Daniel Staemmler — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:54:32 +0000

Usually I search the Internet with Google and tend to forget that there are other search engines out there that might return better results as Google does. Don’t get me wrong, I personally belief that Google is a great search engine that uses a very good (and very secret) algorithm to return an answer to a request. But there are a lot more search engines out there that do a good job and might be more specific for what you’re looking for. Charles Knight a search engine optimizer just publishes a list of 100 alternative search engines at Read/WriteWeb. Maybe you want to reconsider your personal search strategy after reviewing this comprehensive listing.

In addition to the top 100 alternative search engines there are many variations of search engines out there. For instance Alltheweb.com is owned by Yahoo and uses their database but represents the results differently. A good tool to compare search results from Google, MSN, and Yahoo is the search comparison toll from Dogpile. The nice thing about this tool is that the results are displayed in a graphic which illustrates pretty good how different search results can be when you fire up the above mentioned search engines.