Keynote speaker John Battelle (author of The Search, a founder The Industry Standard, an original editor at Wired, and author of an eponymous search blog) gave an excellent presentation on the impact of search on publishing. It was very thought-provoking because my mind wandered both across the topics he discussed and many related ones while he spoke.
While Battelle's book is nominally about search, it's really a thinly veiled work about Google. So I see him falling pretty squarely into the Google worship camp. As an enterprise software guy, I don't get Google worship because Google is Oracle without switching costs. So it's cool as long as it's cool, and it's dead the moment it's not.
Google has one primary revenue source (advertising) and a lot of science projects for PR (e.g., Google Earth, Moon, or -- believe it not -- Google Mars). This is just like Oracle which, for a long time, had one working revenue source (the DBMS) and numerous science projects of its own, such as nCube, the network computer (NC), or video-on-demand.
But the big difference is once you put Oracle inside your company it is very hard to get it out. If moving an IT department from Oracle to DB2 is a liver transplant, moving a user from Google to another search engine is a hangnail. The former requires re-writes of applications, reports, and queries. The latter requires a new bookmark and perhaps a thirty-second toolbar download.
So, by my analysis, Oracle's arrogance is at least warranted because they have established a very strong strategic position in their accounts. Google's is a mystery because they can easily tumble just as spectacularly as they rose.
Another idea that struck me during Battelle's speech was the irony of search engine optimization (SEO). In Battelle's book, he tells the story of BigFeet.com whose business was almost wiped out one Christmas season by a change in Google's spam-fighting algorithm. They did two things as a result: (1) hired SEO firms to help boost their organic search rankings and (2) started buying keyword advertising. The irony of the former is amazing. The marketing power of the second is scary. "Hey, we're not getting enough advertising from company X -- let's drop their organic search results for a few weeks!" It's hard to think of a more effective marketing campaign.
A more recent example of the BigFeet problem is the UK firm, KinderStart, who recently sued Google over a change in their organic search resuls. This is a predictable result in the US and there's no doubt that KinderStart can prove real damages resulting from decreased organic ranking. The question is can they successfully sue on freedom-of-speech grounds because they apparently believe their rankings decline was punishment for the use of gray- or black-hat SEO techniques?
I had some trouble with Battelle's assertion that the best websites are search-driven. First, virtually all sites have and need search, but to say that the best sites are search-driven is like saying the best companies have buildings. Yes, it's true -- but, then again, all companies have buildings.
When I think about some of the best sites that I use frequently, here's what I like:
- Bloglines (subscription/customization, web interface as opposed to desktop client)
- MyYahoo (customization)
- Amazon (search/taxonomy, product selection, recommendations, reviews, photos)
- eBay (selection, user ratings, payment integration)
- Wikipedia (the content)
- OpenTable (reservations, menus, maps)
- SeatGuru (the content, indispensible for a 6'6" startup CEO)
I agreed with Battelle's notion that the old publishing industry was about producing product in volume, controlling distribution channels and access to capital as entry barriers, and that the new world of publishing is all about the content, what you can do with it, the community around it, and the conversation created by that community. The Internet does indeed break down distribution control and access to capital as entry barriers and it enables community dialog like no previous medium.
Outsell's Chuck Richards gave an excellent presentation on a recent (seemingly complimentary) survey of advertisers. If you want to understand how the people who pay the bills for a large portion of the publishing industry think about advertising, then check it out.
There were several other interesting presentations that I won't cover in this post as it's getting long, even for me.
I will conclude by mentioning Marc Strohlein's presentation, "Where GYM is Headed and What's Beyond Search." (GYM = Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft.) One attendee quipped that Microsoft's first goal is to rewrite the acronym as MYG.
Marc has a great understanding of each of their philosophies, strategies, and directions. He also has a great handle on their technical capabilities, which I'll pull from his slides.
What GYM Does Well
- Simple search
- Communication and collaboration tools
- Cool technology
- Decentralized innovation (dk: Google Mars, pluh-ease)
- Rapid prototyping and development (dk: internally, of the software they run behind their sites)
- Ad-based revenue models
What GYM Does Poorly
- Vertical domain search (dk: the subject of a future post, I promise)
- Sub-document search (dk: long live MarkLogic)
- Workflow integration (dk: they can't, they're not a technology platform for building applications)
- Post-search content manipuation (dk: nothing beats XQuery here)
- Contextual search
- Deep web search (dk: think blocked crawlers)
- Subscription, transactional revenue models
All in all, the BrainGain lived up to its name.
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