Google's new teleportation, its search-within-search function, is getting mixed responses, at least from some site owners, who may be remembering occasions when teleportation in the Star Trek transporter went wrong. Earlier in the month, Google introduced the teleportation functionality as a way to better help searchers find information within a site by providing a search box below the snippet of the top listing, which performs a "site:" search on the domain of that listing using the additional search terms the searcher added in.
The "site:" advanced query is quite familiar to those within the search industry, but much less so to the average searcher. So bringing this functionality front and center for the searcher should be a well-received addition.
When I first saw this, I thought it was interesting--once I was able to get it to show up. It doesn't come up for every site, mainly big-name sites, nor does it come up for every search. One that it did come up for was searching for Amazon.com. After playing around with the teleportation search, I also began wondering how these big-name retailers would react and thought that some might not care for this new functionality. Why would they object?
Let me show you--except I can't use Amazon to do it anymore. According to the New York Times, Amazon is one such retailer that has already objected and asked Google to turn off this functionality for its site. It seems that most of the talk so far, like that happening at Search Engine Land (here and here), has been more about acknowledgment than anything else, but Rishi Lakhani's post at SEO Smarty shows that others have had similar thoughts as I.
Now, before we go much further, understand that I'm not suggesting ulterior motives here on Google's part or that this is even a good or a bad thing. For regular users, I think this will be well received, and Google pays a lot of attention to delivering the best user experience it can--but that isn't to say that there isn't going to be a potential upside for the PPC program as well.
So let's take a look at some examples of how this may impact results and get a feel for why some site owners may be less than thrilled with this functionality. Let's use national retailer Target as an example while we still can since its site is powered by Amazon. We'll try this on searches for plasma TVs.
Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google just for "plasma tv" which includes eight paid search ads.
Google search for "plasma tv."
Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google for "target plasma tv." Notice how there are no paid search results showing up, and not surprising, Target shows up in the top organic listing.
Google search results for "target plasma tv."
Then let's see what happens if someone searches just on "target." No surprise that Target.com shows up No. 1 again in organic results and still no paid search ads. What is different is the appearance of the teleportation, search-within-search, box showing up below the sitelinks in the Target result, labeled as "Search target.com."
Google search results for "target."
Then when we do a teleportation search for "plasma tv," we get the following search results. Notice that this creates the advanced search query "plasma tv site:target.com." Now the searcher gets Target.com specific search results in the organic area, hopefully relevant to the search, but also eight paid listings that Target is now competing with.
Google teleportation search results for "plasma tv" within Target.com.
This isn't all as cut-and-dried as this example may seem. The appearance of ads can vary widely from none to many. But for now it does serve as an example of at least one scenario that site owners need to be aware of.
So what does teleportation mean for the various players? Well hopefully, for the searchers, it does get them to what they are looking for faster and easier, but this can really vary as well and may or may not be more helpful than getting directly to the site.
For Google, it means that searchers will have performed at least one more search on Google, instead of clicking through to Target.com immediately. And it may mean that it has gained an opportunity to serve up more targeted (no pun intended) search ads that otherwise may not have been served up (as we can see from the other Target focused searches which yielded no ads). Even more subtle here is the fact that many advertisers may not have bid against a big brand name to begin with. Currently, advertisers can use a trademarked brand as a trigger word as long as they don't use it in the ad itself. As much of the legislation in this area continues to be formed and reformed, who knows whether this will always be the case--but it would seem that teleportation search may provide an additional means to serve up ads around another brand without even needing the advertiser to use that brand as a trigger word.
But how might Target feel about this? Well, if it does help get searchers to their destination, then it might be happy with this. But it also might mean that its natural results are competing against paid-listings that it may not have been competing against under the other Target related searches. It also means that it may not be able to cull additional search information from its own site-search. While the quality of on-site search may vary from excellent to completely worthless, some sites invest heavily in their on-site search to not only deliver good results, but also to serve as insight into what their visitors are looking for. Being able to follow the search path, which they may be losing because of teleportation, may help improve the site experience.
Needless to say, Target might prefer to get people directly to its site and have people search on-site, which at least in this example allows it to serve up a richer experience.
Target.com on-site search for "plasma tv."
Good, bad or otherwise, what this means to site owners is that SEO may be more important than ever. Now, getting to the top listing may not be enough. Defending your brand may not be enough. Securing multiple listings through blended search may not be enough. What happens to the site that has excellent search, but terrible indexation in Google? Now more than ever, site owners need to focus on creating the most search-friendly site as they can to make sure that Google and other search engines can spider and index the site as completely as possible. For some sites, this is a huge challenge, trying to overcome legacy CMS and e-commerce systems. Fortunately, there are solutions like Netconcepts' own GravityStream proxy optimization that can help many sites overcome these obstacles, but GravityStream isn't for everyone.
One thing this clearly means is that site optimization is more important than ever. Optimization will help to make sure that the teleportation results for your site are highly relevant and speak to the searcher, hopefully gaining the click-through from the searcher. If you are like Target and experience millions of searches a year just on your brand name, then you don't want to leave your optimization to chance when it comes to teleportation.
News sites carrying coverage of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation faced an onslaught of traffic Wednesday, but demand on the servers paled in comparison to earlier in the week when news of the sex scandal first broke.
Spitzer, who developed a reputation as a bulldog while attorney general for the state of New York, was a hot news topic on Monday, when allegations surfaced that he had hired high-priced prostitutes.
And on Wednesday, the former attorney general turned governor announced his resignation, a move that comes early in his term.
The New York Times, for example, faced a two-second delay in loading pages between 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (EDT), which came right in the middle of Spitzer's 11:30 a.m. press conference to announce his resignation, according to Web site monitoring company Pingdom.com. In the hours prior to 11 a.m., the average load time on the site was half a second.
But that 2-second delay Wednesday paled in comparison to the 11-second delay The New York Times site faced on Monday, according to Pingdom.com. That slowdown occurred from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
That had the IT staff at the New York Times juggling servers, said Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for the media company.
"NYTimes.com Web site traffic spiked after the Spitzer article was posted on Monday around 2 p.m.," McNulty said in an e-mail. "The hourly Web site traffic from 2 to 4 p.m. was 60 percent higher than the same time last Monday."
She added that The New York Times' mobile traffic nearly doubled during that time period. Traffic figures for Spitzer's resignation announcement have yet to come in.
Other sites carrying news of Spitzer's resignation include CNN.com, which offered live video coverage, as well as MSNBC News Service and Fox News.
Other New York news sites that carried the governor's resignation included the New York Post to Newsday to the NY Daily News.
And while traffic to news sites was heavy on Wednesday, it didn't compare to 9/11.
The New York Times Web site was overwhelmed by traffic on September 11, 2001, the day terrorists struck the city's Twin Towers. Readers had trouble accessing stories on the site, McNulty noted.
And two months later, when an American Airlines plane crashed in Queens after departing from JFK airport, the Times site had trouble dishing up pages, but not as bad as on September 11, said McNulty, noting the company has since increased its bandwidth by 10 times its previous levels.
UPDATE 5 p.m. PST with company confirmation
(Credit:
About.com)
About.com Chief Executive Scott Meyer is leaving the company after almost three years at the site and almost eight years at parent company The New York Times Co., the company confirmed on Wednesday.
Meyer's last day will be March 6, after which he will take some time off, he told according PaidContent.org.
A spokeswoman for The New York Times confirmed the report and said the company would be looking for a new About.com chief executive from within and outside the company.
In a memo to staff, Meyer wrote that Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations for The New York Times, will take over for now.
"After discussions with Martin, we've agreed that I'll be stepping down from my position as president & CEO of the About Group and leaving the Times Company," the memo says. "I am incredibly proud of all that we have accomplished together as a team at About. The About Group is in a very strong position. I will miss not being a part of About's future, but I'm confident that the Group's best days are ahead."
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The New York Times is looking for a few well-read engineers to join its ranks.
Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author of the best seller The World Is Flat, made the pitch while giving the keynote speech at an anniversary celebration for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare program.
(Credit:
Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)
"We are desperate at The New York Times for engineers. In fact, they asked me to mention it and make a pitch here," he said.
"For some reason, you people don't think we're cool. Come on. We're not Google, I know, but we're not that bad," Friedman said.
The Times columnist asked any interested students to approach him and give him their card. But there is just one catch: the leading newspaper is a bit choosy.
"Please don't come if you don't read The New York Times," he said. "Please don't come if you don't read at least three newspapers a day. We need people who can really imaginatively mash those things together."
Rupert Murdoch plans to give away the digital version of the Wall Street Journal, making News Corp. the latest company to give up on paid subscriptions.
"We are studying it and we expect to make that free," Murdoch was quoted by the Associated Press as he spoke to a group of investors in Australia. He said that "instead of having one million (subscribers)," the company will receive readers "in every corner of the earth."
Murdoch is banking that a free model for WSJ.com, which recently announced that it had topped the 1 million-subscriber mark, will send readership skyrocketing and that advertisers will then flock to the site.
According to the AP, the Journal's subscribers generated about $50 million in annual revenue.
Few online services have succeeded at making a go of paid subscriptions but the Journal was widely considered to be at the head of the pack. In September, The New York Times stopped trying to sell subscriptions to premium content .
The New York Times has finally given up on the Web-subscription model, announcing Monday that the newspaper's online site will no longer charge for any content.
The decision comes two years after The Times began charging $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for Internet access to premium content, such as pieces by columnists and archived stories, according to a story that appeared in the paper.
The Times said that the subscription service met targets, acquiring 227,000 paying subscribers and generating $10 million a year.
Executives at the newspaper seemed to suggest in The Times' story that the reason for scratching the paid service is that the company's projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.
With the Times opting out of paid subscriptions, it is believed that there are no other large general news providers offering a subscription Web service. The Wall Street Journal is the only major newspaper in the country still charging for content, and parent company Dow Jones is studying whether to drop its subscription service as well.
In what might be a boon to researchers, historians and librarians, The Times also announced that the newspaper is making available online the paper's archived stories from 1987 to the present. In addition, the company is also planning to make available stories from the years 1851 to 1922.
I grew up with The New York Times and still believe that for all its faults, real or imagined, this remains the best general interest daily newspaper published in the United States--in print and online.
When you're that visible, everyone's got an opinion. So it is that The Times gets it from the left, from the right and from the whack jobs who inhabit that bizarre netherworld beyond both extremes.
But anyone who thinks sensibly about the intersection of media and the Internet has to agree that The Times made the right decision when it announced today the end of the TimesSelect subscription service.
A couple of years ago, the newspaper put its primo content as well as its archives behind a cybergate. At the time, the decision raised a lot of hackles. Just another proof point for the critics that the "mainstream media" didn't have a clue.
That was harsh but it was hard to escape the conclusion that The Times' business managers were unintentionally about to push away potential new business. Turns out that TimesSelect only accounted for $10 million a year, not much in the larger scheme of things.
Apropos, check out this perceptive piece in Advertising Age about advertising spending trends:
"But there's something else going on that has nothing to do with the natural rhythms of booms and busts or the fortunes of Madison Avenue's biggest clients. Simply put, American companies are shifting more and more marketing dollars out of paid media."
With U.S. ad spending dropping for a second consecutive quarter, give The Times' management this much: They can read spreadsheets just as well as anybody. Compared to the sharp growth in Internet advertising, TimesSelect was a nickel-and-dime operation. It was time to reverse that mistake and change with the times.
So they did. Better late than never.
A friend sent me a link to the transcript of a talk that author Peter Wayner gave at Google last year.
It's basically about how Google could provide an incentive for newspapers and bloggers to do more original reporting rather than just rehashing previously published reports. (Yes, I know that's what I'm doing here-- but I've done a lot of genuine on-site reporting here lately, from Hot Chips, Zonbu headquarters, and Siggraph-- so I can see both sides of the issue.)
Wayner presents some interesting figures. He says ... Read more
Update: One of the biggest gotchas in the Web 2.0 world is getting caught editing Wikipedia entries that you have some relationship with. It seems it happens nearly every day, but it's still news when big names are discovered doing so.
That's why analysis suggesting people at Fox News and The New York Times are guilty of making such changes could be embarrassing to both organizations.
According to the political blog DailyKos, someone at Fox News--as identified by usage of a Fox News IP Address--has "scrubbed" a series of entries having to do with several of the service's personalities, including Brit Hume, Chris Wallace and Bill O'Reilly.
At the same time, The Times has allegedly been mucking with the Wikipedia entry on The Wall Street Journal, as well as about Rep. Tom DeLay, according to Media Bistro. And while the changes allegedly made by someone at The Times don't directly relate to the publication, they still would most likely be considered outside the boundaries of proper Wikipedia behavior.
Representatives of Fox News did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday afternoon. I will update this entry when I hear from the company.
But Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for The New York Times Company, told CNET News.com that, "The IP address listed is our external IP address for all Internet browsing. Therefore, we cannot tell who may have made a posting to the site."
To be sure, such conduct is often done by individuals using company computers and can't be attributed to the organization itself. But in this day and age, it is well-known that editing Wikipedia entries in such a way is verbotten.
Further, thanks to this new tool, which allows for easy tracking of articles on the free encyclopedia, it is going to be harder and harder to get away with it.
Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.
Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.
A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com." The representative did point out, however, that the Post had made an error: Sanders' article said that the number of TimesSelect subscribers had fallen from 224,000 in April to slightly over 221,000 in June. According to the Times, TimesSelect subscriber numbers have actually risen from 220,090 in April to 224,580 in June.
The demise of TimesSelect, which has been in operation since 2005 and puts archived content as well as popular opinion pieces behind a subscription wall, has been rumored for some time among New York media circles. Adding fuel to the fire is News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. When speaking about his decision to purchase Wall Street Journal company Dow Jones, he suggested that the Journal might free up its own premium content.
New-media pundits have typically been very critical of TimesSelect, considering it a disadvantage for the legendary publication to be locking up so much content, particularly opinion pieces by well-known writers. "By cutting stars like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich off from the rest of the Internet," Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider commented in July, "the Times has diminished its (and their) influence--and helped create room for upstarts like The Huffington Post to step in."
Currently, TimesSelect subscribers pay $7.95 per month, or $49.95 per year, for access to op-ed columnists, archives dating back to 1851, extra multimedia features, and occasional access to the Sunday paper's articles before they are made available for free or in print.
