I just spotted on TechCrunch that Fox Interactive Media has chosen Google to power Internet search on MySpace and its other Internet properties. Per the official press release:

The agreement calls for Google to power web, vertical and site specific search for MySpace.com and the majority of Fox Interactive Media properties. Google will be the exclusive provider of text-based advertising and keyword targeted ads through its AdSense program, for inventory on Fox Interactive Media’s network. Google will also have a right of first refusal on display advertising sold through third parties on Fox Interactive Media’s network.

Whilst interesting details of the deal, such as the revenue share percentage, have not been disclosed – there is a 3+ year commitment for Google to contribute an aggregate revenue share of $900M. This deal is obviously significant as it is one of the last major US search deals that was not yet Google’s. It seems to … Read more »

Left to right: Rick Segal, me, Brad Feld  Photo credit: Scott Beale.

Chris Pirillo had launched a few months ago a meta-search engine he named gada.be, now TagJag (see the most recent TechCrunch review here) and was wondering how he could bring scale to that business. One of the obvious solutions being external funding, he had the idea to do a VC pitch in front of the Gnomedex audience and asked VC blogger Rick Segal to lead that session. Rick in turn kindly asked buddy Brad Feld and myself to participate, and provide our candid feedback on the plan. Knowing how “candid” Rick, Brad and I are known to be, Chris’ decision to get feedback on his first ever financing pitch in public was gutsy. And the dude was clearly very nervous.

Chris did a brief demo of TagJag and explained the vision behind the product: be able to query … Read more »

Not to be mixed up with Wikia, Jimmy Wales’ new company, Wikio is the new startup of another Internet entrepreneur, Pierre Chappaz. Pierre is famous in France and Europe for having founded and developed Kelkoo – a European shopping comparison engine – to a half-billion USD exit to Yahoo a couple of years ago. After taking a year off, Pierre joined Index Ventures (the new star VC firm in Europe) as an EIR, and started Wikio – which has now a dozen developers and editors.

What is Wikio ? Topix.net meets Digg meets Memeorandum with a zest of Wink – sort of. And all in French – for now. The private beta-site just opened last night to 5,000 members of the “Francosphere”, but has an ambition to launch throughout Europe. No decision has been made regarding a US version according to Pierre, who has bootstrapped the development to date. Like so many consumer … Read more »

I was alerted by Thomas Hawk about the latest “news” building up in the blogosphere, and as such the top news on Memeorandum: Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance. My initial reaction was that this must be one of these quotes being taken out of a specific context, and the sensational aspect of the headline is leading everyone to pile in. To cut the commentary short: Bullshit. No way.

Google has by far the largest market share in the search market – in the US and Europe, and it will be difficult for Yahoo to catch up on pure algorithmic search. Asia is a completely different matter, and is fair game to both players – just listen to the end of Om and Niall’s most recent Podsessions on that very topic. It is also worth remembering that we are just at the beginning of the search game: alternate search mechanism are being developed … Read more »

The MIT Advertising Lab points to this picture of a building rooftop covered by the branding of the business occupying it (in the example: Target). It turns out, reading the comments related to the post, that this Target store is located next to O’Hare airport (Chicago, IL) – the busiest airport in the country, on the path of one of the runways.

The point though is that this kind of practice might become a new advertising mechanism, sort of the billboard-equivalent of satellite photos. With GoogleMaps and MSN VirtualEarth providing high-definition photos of cities, one could figure out some way of displaying advertising/branding messages on rooftops next to popular monuments or coordinates. As to whether this would overlap Google or MSN’s own advertising plans is another story.

Create any kind of new “real estate”, advertising will be one of the first leveraging it.

[via Search Engine Roundtable]

if you are interested in tracking the shopping/comparison engines market, I recommend the work of Brian Smith over at ComparisonEngines.com, where he mixes news with interesting analysis of that space. I discovered this blog when Brian wrote about client Kaboodle.

Brian recently commented on the move of Yahoo Shopping’s Rob Solomon to SideStep, a mature player in the meta-search engine market, and mentioned a number of interesting facts concerning the online travel space – a $60B market:

As for travel search (or travel meta-search engines), no one is releasing numbers, and total bookings are tiny compared to those from Online Travel Angencies (OTAs). However, there are a lot of factors which seem to be pointing to a tipping point in the industry: AOL driving traffic to Pinpoint Travel, Yahoo putting FareChase on its main travel page (as opposed to keeping it separate from Travelocity), Google working on travel search, established travel suppliers … Read more »

This post initiates a new consolidation series – about the Search market, similar to the one I have been writing about Social Media M&A. With the increasing number of search players, this consolidation is to be expected as large Internet companies (the famous GEMAYANI) look at acquiring assets to strengthen their own market position.

As it is often the case, I did not expect that Act #1 would actually involve one of my own companies: Truveo. Truveo, the little video search engine that could, had developed over the past couple of years pieces of unique technology that allowed the company to better any other search engine on discovering videos on the web. The company was started early 2004 by my friends Tim Tuttle and Adam Beguelin, who bootstrapped the venture for a year before raising a small round of financing that I was very lucky to get involved as an angel investor.

After … Read more »

As already announced before the holidays, we are looking forward to a great event for the first session of 2006 of the SDForum Search SIG, and hope that you will be able to join us.

The session will focus on “alternate” search mechanisms that have been developed over the past 12 months such as bookmarking, tagging, rating, sharing and any combination thereof – generally in a social context. These concepts have grown to being at the core of many Web 2.0 companies, and offer a different way of finding or discovering “stuff” online – as a complement or alternative to traditional search engines.

As usual with Search SIG events, we will have a panel moderated by the host of the session, followed by demonstrations from presenting companies. Our host for the event will be Charlene Li, from Forrester Research and will be joined by 4 founders of exciting startups:

Joshua Schachter – … Read more »

Before everyone disappears on holidays, here is a quick pre-announcement regarding the January session of the Search SIG, which should take place on Jan 10th (though the date is not 100% confirmed) and will be hosted by our friends from Yahoo at their headquarter in Sunnyvale.

The theme of the session will be Alternate Search, and will cover the mechanisms developed over the past 12 months to create new ways of indexing and discovering information: tagging, bookmarking,… shared amongst friends or communities.

Charlene Li has kindly agreed to be the moderator of the event, that will involve Wink’s Michael Tanne, Kaboodle’s Manish Chandra and a few other executives who have not confirmed yet.

Tags: searchsig

Michael Tanne, the CEO of Wink, briefed me a couple of days ago on the forthcoming public beta that became available tonight around midnight Pacific Time. Wink is a search engine that allows users to bookmark and tag search results sourced from other popular bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, etc. Wink has an implementation of the concept of leveraging user’s gesture of attention – in their case tagging – to  thereby altering the order in which results are going to be displayed, and somehow rank results internally, an approach already implemented by services like Digg or Tailrank. Wink also displays Google results  below its own, which  provides an easy mean to compare  Google and Wink on certain queries.

There are a couple of neat features that just got released in this version:

It is possible to seed one’s tag history by importing the content of a del.icio.us or MyWeb archive, which is a great … Read more »

This was quietly mentioned at the last session of the Search SIG, hosted by John Battelle, and has been discussed in the ranks of the searcherati’s (search engine specialists): what happens to the market the day a search engine index becomes available for free (or close enough to free), and so is an entire crawling infrastructure ? This is actually something that Inktomi had been doing for a while with its index – for a fee.

Mike Arrington just pinged the Web 2.0 Workgroup (the 4th top blog network according to this new ranking ?) about the announcement by Alexa (aka Amazon) that they did just that: making their index and crawling infrastructure available to anyone for free – OK not free, but very close to it. John Battelle (who else was briefed on this, and clarifies the “offering”:

In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat … Read more »

A couple of weeks ago, one of my most recent clients – Kaboodle – soft launched its collaborative shopping and research engine. The service allows users to collect and aggregate information about products, gifts, wishes, travel destinations,… on personal pages that can be shared with family, friends or the public.  Under the hood, Kaboodle automatically extracts key pieces of information from a web page selected by the user – including image, title, description, price and stores these nuggets alongside the URL of that web page. It just takes the simple installation of the Kaboodle bookmarklet, and a quick read of the tutorial, to get started.

What I found remarkable in Kaboodle, and got me engaged with the company, is the non-geek focus of the service, which is really targeting the average Internet user who needs support in her/his research of items to shop, plane tickets to buy, etc. Funny enough, my 8 year old … Read more »