Natural Search Blog

Marissa Mayer demos the iPhone at SES San Jose

At this morning’s keynote conversation between Marissa Mayer (Google’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience) and conference co-chair Danny Sullivan, when asked some questions about Google’s interests in mobile search and wireless applications, Marissa whipped out her iPhone and showed some features and user-interface aspects that she particularly admired by pulling up Google Maps and Google Voice Local Search service on the phone:

Marissa Mayer demos the iPhone
(click to enlarge)

As we recently highlighted Google’s mobile phone development project, they apparently have quite a bit of interest in the mobile space. Obviously, they consider the iPhone to have very good user-interface design, since this very nearly amounted to a product endorsement. From watching this, I’d predict that Google is likely to be in talks with Apple to see if they couldn’t partner with them in some major way in order to get prominent placement through the iPhone platform, or perhaps even to persuade Apple to develop the hardware for the Google phone on their behalf.

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Posted by of Silvery on 08/22/2007

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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Maps, Mobile Search, News , , , ,

Keynote Conversation With Jim Lanzone

In my presentation today at SES San Jose, I mentioned that I sometimes take photos at events and then share them with the news media – here’s one of the pix that I shot of the Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone. Jim Lanzone is Ask.com’s CEO, and conference co-chair Chris Sherman interviewed him for the Keynote.

Jim Lanzone keynote interview
(click to enlarge)

If you’re writing a news story about this keynote, I’d be happy to supply you with permission to use the photos I took of the Keynote, in return for a credit line and a link back to the photo’s page on Flickr. Here’s some of the other images from this sequence.

I’m tired of this camera with it’s too-slow exposures — I’m planning to ditch it for something that’s more flexible in settings and which performs better in low lighting situations.

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Posted by of Silvery on 08/22/2007

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Filed under: News , , , , ,

Google Browser Development Confirmed

At the end of July, I wrote that it looked like the Google Browser might actually be in the works after all, based upon their recent hire of a browser security expert. I now see this in this Wall Street Journal article from August 2nd about Google’s push into creating their own wireless phone that they are indeed working on a browser — built specifically for these proposed cellphones:

“Now it is drafting specifications for phones that can display all of Google’s mobile applications at their best, and it is developing new software to run on them. The company is conducting much of the development work at a facility in Boston, and is working on a sophisticated new Web browser for cellphones, people familiar with the plans say.”

Could this be what they’ll have that browser hacker working upon?

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Posted by of Silvery on 08/16/2007

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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Mobile Search, News , , , ,

Google News comments likely to be panned by major corporations

Google today introduced a new experimental feature in their News – they’ve added story participant comments into their listings of stories.

Google News

I think it’s a cool idea, since it invites more community participation in story threads – sort of an evolutionary step on the old threaded format of the old Usenet layout paradigm. If you’ve ever had a story written about you in news media, and were disappointed to see that the reporter made a mistake or neglected to mention something that you felt was important, this would be a convenient route to mitigating it.

But, from what I’ve seen commonly happening in the contemporary business community, I’d bet that most of the major, publicly-traded companies will not engage in commenting on stories about themselves. Read on and I’ll describe… (more…)

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Posted by of Silvery on 08/08/2007

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Filed under: Google, News , ,

News: Pat Marshall new Chief New Media Officer for Yellow Book

The Wall Street Journal reports that Patrick Marshall, Superpages.com veteran, has just been named as Chief New Media Officer for Yellow Book.

Yellow Book USA Logo

I used to work with Pat back when he was President of New Media Services at GTE, overseeing Superpages.com back when it was brand new, and I know him to be a fantastic businessman. Pat is well-known in the yellow pages industry and was the recipient of The Kelsey Group’s New Technologies Leadership Award in 2002.

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Posted by of Silvery on 07/24/2007

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Filed under: Local Search, News, Yellow Pages , , ,

Domainers Can’t Get No Respect

Last week the second part of my “Domaining & Subdomaining in the Local Space” pubbed on Search Engine Land, and I’m particularly pleased with it, although my friends can deservedly kick me around a bit for writing articles too long. I did quite a lot of research for the two-part series, most particularly for this second segment which was focused entirely on Local Domaining.

One of the main things that I’m pleased about was my effort to be as objective as possible in writing the article — not only did I want to report on what is going on in local-oriented domaining, and who’s involved, but also to provide some concrete conclusions and recommendations which people could take away. I was upfront in disclosing my past negative bias about domaining, and in the course of writing the article I found that I had to revise my assumptions a few times over – in favor of Domaining, actually. Working off and on, I wrote the article over the course of about two months.

While doing the research, I became aware that the Domaining industry seems to have a bit of “younger sibling complex” — as an industry, they wish to be considered a respectable, bona fide line of business. Unfortunately, they have a few things which have been hampering that aim to some degree:

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Posted by of Silvery on 07/11/2007

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Filed under: Analytics, Domain Names, News, Tracking and Reporting , , , ,

Top 10 Reasons Vanessa Left Google

Well, the search marketing industry was mildly rocked this week by the news that the much-beloved Vanessa Fox will be leaving Google where she was something of a maven, spokesperson, and technical evangelista for some years. The news has left me rather verklempt! I can’t help but suppose that we’ll now all get to see her less or not at all in her new role working for the real estate website, Zillow.

I’ll be missing her Sandman t-shirts and Buffy references at the conferences, and I fear the subject matter will end up being a lot drier overall for her lack.

Though I don’t know that she’d need any SEO help, I must say that I happen to know a thing or two about local search optimization, if she would like to call me in for advice at Zillow! 😉

In appreciation for Vanessa, with warmest regards, here’s a little list I composed of the Top Ten Reasons Vanessa Left Google:

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Posted by of Silvery on 06/15/2007

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Filed under: Google, News , ,

“Roofvertising” mentioned in the news

Greg Sterling and I were quoted in a news story in yesterday’s USAToday by Craig Wilson in an article titled “Shout a message from the rooftops to the world“, along with Google Earth’s Chikai Ohazama. The article is about how people are increasingly trying to use Google Maps and other online mapping systems to communicate messages or display ads through them. People place the messages on rooftops or other ground surfaces which may be seen via the satellite pix or aerial photos in those interfaces.

Rooftop Advertising
Rooftop Ads or “Roofvertising” is becoming more common

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Posted by of Silvery on 06/05/2007

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Filed under: Advertising, Maps, News , , , , , , ,

Misguided Science Fiction Writers Advise U.S. on Homeland Security

SigmaUSA Today has reported in “Sci-fi writers join war on terror” that a small group of science fiction writers have been contacted by the U.S. government to advise on new and innovative ways that security could be improved. The group, called Sigma, was formed about 15 years ago by writer Arlan Andrews and was specifically intended to advise the government on advanced technology issues.

Their motto seems ominous in context of recent-history political trends and frighteningly nationalistic: “Science Fiction in the National Interest“. I think their involvement is a bit horrifying, misguided, and more than a bit egotistically self-grandiose. Read on for more details.

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Posted by of Silvery on 05/31/2007

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Filed under: Futurism, News, Security, technology , , , , , , , ,

Not a Stumble – eBay to Acquire StumbleUpon

In yet another social media acquisition move, eBay has announced today that they’re acquiring StumbleUpon for approximately $75 million.
StumbleUpon purchased by eBay
This closely follows Fox Interactive Media’s acquisition of Photobucket and Flektor along with CBS Interactive’s purchase of Wallstrip.com and fm.com. If you recall, Google has purchased YouTube while MySpace is already owned by Fox. Yahoo! has been buying social media types of sites for quite some time now, what with their earlier purchases of Flickr, del.icio.us, and such.

All the exuberance and hefty valuations seem to smack a bit of the over-valuation and acquisition craze just prior to the dot-bomb i-apocolypse. Purchasing a social media web 2.0 site or two just seems so trendy at the moment. These sites have some undeniable amounts of traffic and associated marketshare, but won’t there eventually have to be a bit of fallout? Won’t users eventually migrate over to a primary dominator in any given type of site?

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Posted by of Silvery on 05/30/2007

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Filed under: General, News , , ,

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