This one's a surprise. Twitter will have turned a profit in 2009, a BusinessWeek report claims, citing sources. What happened? Search deals with Google and Microsoft brought in a nice chunk of cash for the company, which has raised well over $100 million in venture capital and has a paper valuation floating somewhere around $1 billion.
Considering the company has not yet put forth a long-term revenue strategy, this would be one of those Christmas miracles along the lines of a neurotic mom getting home to her stranded 8-year-old by fortuitously hitching a ride with a polka band fronted by John Candy.
So let's look at the details. Sources told BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante that Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft's Bing brought in $15 million and $10 million respectively, and that Twitter has managed to cut some of the high costs related to text-message functionality. (These costs were so exorbitant that Twitter temporarily had to restrict some international SMS codes.) OK, cool. Those numbers are decently plausible, and Twitter's strategic hire of a mobile business-development dude early this year likely had something to do with it. And Ante's article makes it clear that while sources have told him that Twitter will end 2009 on a profitable note, that doesn't mean it's going to be profitable next year.
But there's a difference between being cash-flow positive and being profitable, and it's also not totally clear as to what Twitter's other expenses are, or what they will be next year.
Ante writes:
Now that Twitter has become so popular, it has gained bargaining power with telecom companies and has managed to renegotiate so many deals with carriers that the company pays far less for the services. "Those used to be the biggest line item," says one source. "Generally speaking, those costs have gone away. Now people are the biggest line item."
People. Yes. Like the new office space they just moved into, and their still-expanding payroll, and stuff like that. Also: hardware, and other forms of defensive weaponry against evil whale attacks. The company also sometimes buys stuff, and continues to develop new features--like the current test of "contributors" accounts that it may end up charging for. So even with costs cut via a savvier mobile strategy, there are plenty of other costs that could be escalating simultaneously.
What's good news for Twitter is that getting $25 million out of search deals (if that's indeed true) shows that the company could expand that into a stronger long-term revenue strategy. Critics have been lukewarm on the possibility of Twitter attempting to support itself with advertisements or paid accounts, and nobody's really gone into depth on the question of whether the businesses currently raving about Twitter's power of "conversation" will cough up for more in-depth analytics.
Reports that Google is considering an acquisition of Yelp fit right in with an increased focus on local search.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Online reviews powerhouse Yelp might just be what Google needs to help rid the world of 40-pound tomes with yellow pages.
Throughout the second half of 2009, Google has had its eyes squarely on one of the last remaining online advertising markets it does not dominate: local. With a series of moves, Google has shown a clear interest in combining Google Maps, search results, and its small-business-oriented advertising technology into its next big source of revenue growth as offline local businesses come online.
However, Google management seems to have decided to step up the pace. TechCrunch and the New York Times reported overnight that Google is in discussions to acquire Yelp for $500 million or more. Yelp has grown into a huge destination for those looking for new places to have fun, turning it into one of the more pervasive brands among the digerati.
And it's not just bars and restaurants anymore: dentists, churches, and top-notch local golf instructors can be found on Yelp. That makes the site a huge repository of locally sorted data on how people are spending money, and that's the kind of thing that gets Google and its advertisers excited.
"We want to make search a way to discover things that are interesting about a place. A big interest of ours is helping you get to a place and also helping you identify what is interesting about the place when you're choosing one," said Carter Maslan, director of product management at Google and overseer of all things local. Maslan declined to comment on the reports about Yelp (as did Yelp itself) but he was more than happy to talk about the huge opportunity that Google sees in local search.
Local business listings have been available on Google since 2005 through the Local Business Center, which allows business owners to essentially claim their establishment on Google and add basic information such as their phone number, hours of operation, and a link to their Web site.
That operation has been expanded in 2009. Over the summer Google asked a list of celebrities to name their "favorite places" as part of a promotion for a Google Maps feature that lets users identify local businesses they enjoy. For instance, Kerri Walsh, the gold-medal winning volleyball player, added her thoughts to listing pages for Lake Tahoe's Lone Eagle Grill and the Pump Room at Chicago's Ambassador East Hotel, spotlighting two local businesses that aren't necessarily on the national radar.
Google followed that up by launching Place Pages, which the company described as "a web page for every place in the world" when launching the service. Place Pages are very Yelp-like in their design. They feature reviews, photos, and, of course, ads--far more than could be crammed into a simple listing.
Location, location, location
Just last week Google unveiled plans to send local businesses decals declaring "We're a Favorite Place on Google!" That's a clear nod to Yelp's strategy of handing out similar decals to business owners, although Google took it a step further by adding unique codes that could be scanned by mobile phones to bring up additional information about the business.
The motivation behind Google's recent moves and its possible acquisition of Yelp is simple. The number is squishy, but Google estimates that anywhere from 15 percent of 40 percent of all search queries have some sort of local intent. A large number of those searches are also done from mobile phones, a number that will only grow larger as sales of the devices themselves continue to grow. And, of course, maps are required to find local businesses.
That gives Google three ways to target someone looking for local information. They'll see an ad on the search results page for a local query. They'll see an ad on the Place Page for that business, which might soon be more attractive with Yelp content. And they'll see listings and ads on Google Maps when they try to find directions to that business, which might alert them to nearby businesse--which starts the cycle anew.
And to top it all off, there are still a ton of small businesses that have yet to build out a presence on the Web, giving Google an opportunity to capture that content itself by providing listings and Place Pages for small-business owners that don't want to deal with maintaining their own Web site. This is true "long tail" content, in that demand for any one search result is relatively small but it's almost impossible to estimate how many results will exist over time.
Yelp's unique brand of user-generated content would fit very nicely into that equation. However, owning Yelp would also expose Google to some of the more controversial aspects of Yelp's strong local presence, such as allegations of intimidation and pay-for-play reviews. Yelp has denied the charges, but given Google's position under the antitrust microscope, any sort of extra scrutiny will not be appreciated.
At around $500 million, Yelp would be one of Google's largest acquisitions to date and its second major deal since CEO Eric Schmidt announced the company was once again in shopping mode. Even if the deal falls through, it's a clear sign of the company's interest in expanding its online advertising empire to the local market.
But it's perhaps also a sign that Google realized it needed a little help in getting there. After all, every decision about expanding a business comes down to build versus buy. Sometimes it's just easier to write a check.
Sex, porn, and Michael Jackson were among the most popular items kids searched for online in 2009, as tracked by Symantec's OnlineFamily.Norton.
Symantec on Thursday revealed the top 100 favorite search terms among children 18 and under found by its free OnlineFamily.Norton service, which helps parents monitor their kids' online searches. Though innocuous terms like Sesame Street and "New Moon"--a popular movie in the Twilight vampire series--made the cut, sex showed up fourth on the list for boys and fifth for girls, following YouTube, Google, and Facebook as the three top terms.
For boys, the top 25 search terms focused on social-networking sites, shopping sites, and certain adult terms. Girls seemed to favor subjects related to music, TV shows and movies, and celebrities.
Speaking of celebrities, to no one's surprise, the late Michael Jackson was the most searched for celebrity, coming in at number 12, followed by pop singer Taylor Swift at No. 13. Other hot stars that made the list included Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Beyonce, the Black Eyed Peas, the Jonas Brothers, Eminem, Rihanna, and Chris Brown (who was in the news this year after admitting that he assaulted ex-girlfriend Rihanna).
Searching for celebrities online, however, may be hazardous to your PC's health. Symantec has found found that these searches sometimes draw people to dangerous Web sites, which spew out viruses, spam, and other malware.
Kids seven and under searched for items related to video games, while older kids were heavy into music, with 34 percent of teens and 27 percent of tweens searching for music-related topics. The Miley Cyrus song "Party in the USA" was the most-searched for tune among kids, while "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eye Peas took the No. 2 spot.
Tech terms that popped up on the list included MySpace at No. 8, MSN at No. 33, the iPod Touch at No. 98, and Bing last at No. 100.
To compile its top 100 list, Symantec tracked 14.6 million searches run by users of its OnlineFamily.Norton service and ranked the terms according to ones submitted most frequently to those submitted the least. The terms were collected anonymously, so none could be associated with any specific children or families.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Snigger as you will over Microsoft's decision to call Bing, its overhauled search engine, a "decision engine," but those giggles should dissolve when you start up Microsoft's brand-new Bing for iPhone (and iPod Touch). As a search app goes, Bing, which debuted Tuesday in the iTunes App Store, is the real thing.
The Bing app has a slew of expected features, including voice search, maps, directions, search suggestions, and location-awareness. That's no surprise. Besides these being features common to Bing.com and to the Bing application on other mobile platforms, they're also necessary to compete with Google Mobile App for iPhone.
Bing's stylish layout is a pleasant surprise, and one that adds up, screen by screen, to a cohesive search experience. Opening Bing, you see the image of the day as your background (this doesn't appear to be customizable,) with the search field and voice search button at the top of the app. A rounded, six-panel grid of buttons jumps you to Bing's image collection, movie listings, maps, directions, business look-up, and a news feed. A drop-down menu on the search bar lets you filter your searches in all those categories, save directions. The semitransparent navigation strip below has a Home button and back and forward arrows, plus a button to hide the button panel, and an icon that pops up settings to clear your search history, set your search filter, and so on.
Bing gives you directions for your car and for navigating on foot, but it doesn't yet include directions using public transit, as the Google Mobile App does. Bing, however, has a neat feature that lets you swipe a transparent ribbon to advance through each direction, which moves the satellite, hybrid, road, or shaded map along in turn. We like that tapping a search result on the map brings up a tag with ratings and with icons to call the business or launch into directions.
Another difference to keep in mind between Bing and its Google rival is that Bing smashes a map and search app into one, whereas Google's mapping program is also the iPhone's default map app. When you access maps from Google Mobile App, you'll wind up opening up the Maps app for the actual search.
The Bing app for iPhone still isn't complete. As far as we can tell so far, it lacks some of the extras of other mobile Bing apps, like the capability to lay down pushpins on the map and save locations, and the capability to view multiple locations on the map. The absent features in the iPhone app indicate the direction of Microsoft's plans for Bing's growth on iPhone.
While Bing's performance during our initial testing was good, individuals may notice fluctuations based on their data and Wi-Fi connections. There may be other areas where Bing might not match up: for instance, Google claims its iPhone app can detect British and Australian pronunciation in addition to U.S. and Canadian accents. Do our international friends notice parity with Bing's voice search?
Although Bing may not match every bell and whistle that Google Mobile App and Maps apps do combined, Bing 1.0 for iPhone does offer a viable alternative to Google's searching and mapping dominance.
Mark Zuckerberg should be proud: The top search term of 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, was not "porn," "poker," or "Britney Spears." It was, for the first time, "Facebook."
In 2008, Facebook had been the tenth most searched term on the Web, according to the traffic company's annual survey of search queries.
The rest of the list for 2009 is also made up of "navigational" searches, which Hitwise reps say actually always dominate top search queries despite the common wisdom that top searches tend to be for online gambling or racy pictures. In spot No. 2 is last year's leader, "myspace," followed by "craigslist," "youtube," "yahoo mail," "google," "yahoo," "ebay," "facebook login," and "myspace.com." If you add up all four Facebook-related terms in Hitwise's top 300 search terms, they make up slightly over a percent of all searches on the Web. The #1 term alone accounts for 0.67 percent.
Meanwhile, searches for "porn" came in at No. 16. Britney, unfortunately, didn't crack Hitwise's top 300, but the most searched for celebrity was Michael Jackson at No. 95, and "Twilight" hottie Robert Pattinson came in at #221. (Hitwise representatives say that they are currently reevaluating the data to see if recently beleaguered golfer Tiger Woods has moved up in the rankings, too.)
Update at 2:10 p.m. PST: So where's "Twitter" on Hitwise's list? It's hanging in there at #56, the company says.
Twitter-centric photo sharing service Yfrog released its top 10 searches of 2009 on Monday, and the results are not all that shocking; It appears most of its users are hunting for tween-heartthrob vampires, and/or famous singers. Below is the full list. I've linked each query with a search on Yfrog:
1. New Moon / Twilight
2. Jonas Brothers
3. Tiger Woods
4. Michael Jackson
5. Halloween / costume
6. iPhone
7. Adam Lambert
8. Kanye West / RIP Kanye West
9. Iran election
10. Miley Cyrus
To put this in perspective, Yfrog's list shares only the terms "new moon" and "Michael Jackson" with Google image's top 10 results of 2009, at least according to the recently-released zeitgeist. Also worth noting, is that Imageshack launched Yfrog in late February of 2009, meaning this list is more like the top 10 search results during the last 10 months.
Honestly, I'm just happy that image searches for the Iran elections beat out those for Miley Cyrus.
Previously: Yfrog gets Webcam recording for photos and video
TwitVid, a free video host for Twitter, is launching two new, useful features on Monday. The first is a real-time search engine that will let users sort through videos both on TwitVid and YouTube. The other is an analytics engine that lets video owners know more about who is watching their uploaded clips, and where they're from.
Between the two, TwitVid and Twitter users are likely to get more utility out of the new search engine. Similar to what OneRiot has done with its own real-time search engine, TwitVid's approach takes into account how fresh the video is, along with whether it's been popular on social sites. Recently popular videos then get better real estate on the results pages. It's a big step up for TwitVid users, who up until Monday had no way to search through videos other users had uploaded on the site.
As for the new analytics tools, TwitVid breaks down some very basic information, including when people were watching your video. This is charted out down to the hour, day, week, month, and the total lifetime of that video. The service also shows where your viewers are coming from--or at least the top 10 locations. Included as part of that list are links to the top referrers, which can show you if your video got picked up somewhere.
TwitVid made its debut in March and competes with TwitVid.io (not .com), TwitLens, Twiddeo, Twitc, Posterous, and Tweetube--just to name a few.
Previously: TwitVid app lets you send iPhone videos to Twitter
The new analytics features let video owners see where their videos are being played as well as information on the people watching them.
(Credit: TwitVid / CNET)
Yahoo is ready to integrate real-time results from Twitter directly onto its search pages.
(Credit: Yahoo)Not to be outdone by its rivals, Yahoo is getting into the real-time search business as well.
Days after Google announced its plan for integrating content from sources such as Twitter and blogs, Yahoo on Thursday plans to launch its own feature to integrate tweets into search results. Microsoft already displays Twitter results for queries placed on its Bing search engine, although they displayed on a separate page that is not directly integrated into the main search results.
Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the company. But in a crucial difference between the two approaches, Yahoo has not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query.
The thorniest problem with real-time search is relevancy. So much content is created every second on the Internet--from tweets to status updates to new blogs to new news stories such as this one--that it's a challenge to simply capture that data, let alone decide which sources of data are more relevant and authoritative than others.
Yet there's clear demand for answers to the question, "What is happening right this second?" And search engines are presumably in the best position to deliver those answers, but unless they are able to find a way to harness the flood of real-time information and make sense of it, these services are unlikely to be very useful.
For hot topics, such as Obama or Tiger Woods, Yahoo plans to use the Twitter tab it added to the News Shortcut feature already found in Yahoo search results. For other topics that are gaining traction but don't necessarily have a huge amount of news, photos or videos already associated with that query, Yahoo will surface three tweets related to the topic and chosen by its algorithms, Cornett said.
The main problem with Yahoo's approach is that it's not exactly real-time: the most recent results surfaced during a demonstration were 15 to 20 minutes old, and the user must manually refresh the page to get new results. Google's approach not only refreshes automatically due to its use of Twitter's firehose feed, but it also brings in content from sources other than Twitter.
The other major problem for Yahoo, of course, is that its search share is dropping, something Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz blamed on expiring toolbar deals during an investor conference Tuesday. While Yahoo says it is committed to remaining a player in the search market by coming up with new ideas for search presentation, this week shows just how easy it is for Google to take a similar idea (real-time search) and put out a similar-if-not-better take on the same idea.
It appears that the Google Goggles search-by-sight tool could soon work not just with mobile phones, but through Google's Chrome browser, too.
"I am working on a 20 percent project to facilitate the input of Web image searching," Google programmer Xiuduan Fang said in a post Tuesday to the Chrome Extensions mailing list titled "Chrome extension for Web Goggles. The 20 percent figure refers to a Google program that permits engineers to devote a fifth of their time to projects of their own choosing.
"We would like to have some browser extensions so that the user can drag a Web image and drop it in an input box on the toolbar...The search results of the image will be shown," Fang said, then asking for advice on how to write it up for Chrome. The original message isn't online, though a response with some pointers is.
Google Goggles currently is available as an application for phones running Google's Android operating system, but Google is working to release other versions, too. A Web browser interface would expand the service's availability beyond phones. Though there are plenty of situations where you might want to point your phone at a subject while out and about, there also are plenty of images on the Web that might provoke further inquiry.
The Goggles feature works by comparing an uploaded image to a database of billions Google has collected and analyzed. It can recognize landmarks and read the text of wine labels, among other things, but until Google works out privacy controls it doesn't make use of its ability to recognize faces. The effort is part of Google's unending effort to expand the scope and utility of its search service.
The new beta version of Google's Chrome browser adds support for extensions, though at present with some limits on user interface choices for programmers.
Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, takes a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. The Google Goggles feature successfully identified it during the Dec. 7 demonstration that was the feature's debut.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.
Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter's "firehose" of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.
Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called "Latest results" on the main search results page for a topic that's guaranteed to produce results. Google used "Obama" as its example, and searches for that query place a new box that automatically scrolls through recent "real-time" results associated with that topic from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Google News, as well as new Web pages--such as this story--as they are created.
The concept is hot in the search world: Microsoft's Bing also displays updates from Twitter and various blogs, although those results are not integrated with the main page. And Yahoo has also signed up with a company called OneRiot to throw its hat into the real-time search wars.
What's less clear, however, is how useful this technology will be unless Google and others working on the problem can bring the same degree of relevance and trust to real-time results that it brings to regular search results. Google News can already confuse the casual user who wonders how and why those particular headlines were singled out, so how will relevancy work when a stream of news can knock a particularly authoritative result off your screen in seconds?
"It's a very hard problem. Language understanding is still an unsolved problem," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and one of the key players in developing this product. "Not only do we have to understand what someone is saying, but we have to get to the deeper semantics of what is indeed true. We have to work through many issues. Truth ends up being a rather vague notion."
In a way, this challenge is right up Google's alley. The company is obsessed with speed when it comes to presenting results, agonizing over whether design changes that add tenths of seconds to page-loading times are worth the effort.
And now that seemingly everyone has a blog, a microblog, a social-networking profile, and commenting identity (or 29), new content on the Internet is being generated at an astounding pace. Google used to think it would be able to index all the world's information in about 300 years, but CEO Eric Schmidt told CNET in November that one of Google's greatest challenges in the decades ahead will be staying abreast of the explosion in content enabled by social media.
That's why it's a bit surprising that Google, the world's leading search engine by a wide margin, hasn't necessarily been a leader in this area. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google, admitted Monday the company could have moved more quickly to organize the vast amount of data produced by services such as Twitter. Anyone who has tried to use Twitter Search knows that real-time search at the moment is like the regular Internet was 10 years ago: a blast of information that's impressive in its scope but overwhelming in its usefulness.
But what Google is trying to do is leapfrog the notion of Twitter as the vanguard of the real-time content explosion. Twitter is undeniably hot at the moment, but new Web pages are generated constantly, especially as traditional media companies move online. One need only to think back to this summer when news reports of Michael Jackson's death sent millions online looking for confirmation, staggering services such as Google and Twitter under that load.
What will Google's real-time search look like the next time somebody famous dies?
(Credit: Google)Google said it plans to display all kinds of Internet content in its "Latest news" box. Google didn't pay Twitter an undisclosed amount of money for access to its feed for no reason, however; the speed at which real-time content is generated can be harnessed much easier if search providers such as Google have that information pushed to them, rather than having to pull it out of the Web itself.
That raises the question of just how Google will index and rank real-time results. The company needs to develop the real-time equivalent of PageRank, which evaluates Web pages by the number of other pages that are linking to that page. That's something Google "is beginning to experiment with," Mayer said in a question-and-answer session following Google's presentation.
There's definitely some way to do that, but it certainly is not a simple problem. Someone with 15,000 Twitter followers is not necessarily as authoritative in one area as they are in another, and Google will have to figure out some way to evaluate this information to make it truly useful.
Until then, however, news junkies can entertain themselves watching the Latest results section spin with updates on Tiger Woods' latest paramour or the glacial progress of Congress' attempt to pass health-care reform legislation.
In a roughly 10-second period Monday afternoon on Google's Trends page, where it is testing out the real-time service, the feed for "Pearl Harbor Day"--the second most popular trend on the Internet Monday behind the aforementioned Tiger Woods--produced a tweet about a Pearl Harbor Day poem, a news story on people who were in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and a gentleman celebrating Ruby Diner's 27th anniversary with a $2.70 Rubyburger. (He also happened to note in his tweet that it was Pearl Harbor Day.)
