The Social

Video might've killed the radio star, but the Web sure hasn't killed music videos. Less than a week after News Corp.-owned social site MySpace announced its MySpace Music Videos portal, video search engine Blinkx announced the debut Tuesday of "Blinkx Music," a search tool specifically designed to trawl through music videos across the Web.

"There are hundreds of thousands of music videos available on the Web today which makes it nearly impossible to navigate and find what you are looking for," Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake explained in a release. "Based on the success of blinkx Remote, our online TV guide, we recognized there was a need to help organize music videos and make them easily searchable on the Web. By leveraging our award-winning video search index, we built Blinkx Music to help our users find their favorite music videos quickly, easily and in one place."

Blinkx says that its search engine has thus far indexed more than 33,000 hours of music videos from about 10,000 artists. While it says that Blinkx Music will let users "post comments and interact with other fans, and also offers background information about bands and their work," the release doesn't say whether it will provide links to streaming or download partners, from which it could potentially rake in revenues shares.

But this is a tight space, and MySpace's music video portal won't be Blinkx Music's only competitor. Universal Music Group is still putting together Vevo, a Hulu-like portal for music videos that aims to bring artists and labels the revenues they might not be getting from YouTube (though the Google-owned video platform is providing Vevo's technology).

Also looming in the background is Google's forthcoming music offering, which the company plans to formally unveil in a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles. This could instantly run away with a huge market share in music video (and music download) search.

Some background on Blinkx: it's a publicly traded company based in the U.K. It merged with a search engine called Autonomy and then was spun off from it when it went public in May 2007. When rumors started to swirl last year that Google and News Corp. (which, coincidentally, owns MySpace) were interested in acquiring it, shares of Blinkx stock soared.

A correction was made at 11:31 a.m. PT on November 2: Blinkx has been de-merged from Autonomy.

SAN FRANCISCO--He wasn't on the program, but nobody was disappointed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon and agreed to sit down for an onstage chat with conference organizer John Battelle.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder

(Credit: Google)

Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."

But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previewed a new "social search" feature in Google Labs.

Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.

"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.

It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.

This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.

"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.

Updated 4:30 p.m. PDT with additional details from Google.

It was indeed a nonexclusive deal: Google is going to be indexing real-time Twitter messages in search results, in a deal announced just hours after Microsoft debuted integration of "tweets" into its own search engine, Bing.

A post on the official Google blog by Vice President of Search Marissa Mayer explained it: "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months," the post read. "That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

Google has "reached an agreement," but the search results have not gone live like Microsoft's have on Bing. Reports started to surface earlier this month that Twitter was in separate talks with both Google and Microsoft--which also has a deal with Facebook that will be launching down the road.

Google plans to turn on the service "soon," said Johnna Wright, product manager for Google Search, declining to provide further details. The company has been working on this "complicated" problem for some time, she said; Mayer said earlier this year that microblogging search was a priority for Google in 2009.

It's just way too difficult to manually crawl Twitter for tweets, said Jack Menzel, group product manager for Google Search. Google would have to bombard Twitter's servers constantly via its public API, and the result wouldn't be pretty for anyone. So, instead Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.

How will it be presented? Google isn't ready to talk about that yet in detail, but Wright said tweets would be presented within regular search results. "Relevancy is paramount," Menzel said, but it's also tricky: sometimes you might want the result from the guy with only 30 followers who knows what's happening on a given street corner, sometimes you might want the industry expert's quick take on a product announcement.

So will Facebook strike a Google deal, too? Onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook has "nothing to announce" regarding rumors of a search deal with Google.

Google wants to work with lots of different companies that are providing this type of information, Menzel said, although he declined to comment on any specific company. Following Google's announcement regarding Twitter, it announced a Google Labs product called Social Search for organizing streams of status updates and news feeds.

(Credit: Bing)

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft is indeed bringing real-time search results from Facebook and Twitter to its Bing search engine thanks to two partnerships, search head Qi Lu and senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced at the Web 2.0 Summit here on Wednesday.

The Twitter partnership, which will bring all real-time public tweets to Bing, went live in beta on Wednesday at Bing.com/twitter. The Facebook deal, which will access all information shared publicly on the social network, will arrive "at a later date," Mehdi said. It's all part of Bing's strategy to harness "the emerging hot area of real-time information," he added.

No financial terms were disclosed for either deal; in a talk later on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that "no money changed hands" in its deal with Microsoft.

"You have to do more visual things, you have to do more sophisticated things, and you have to have better access to data," Mehdi said.

This will also give Microsoft an edge on Google, which currently has no such deals in place--but both Facebook, in which Microsoft has a financial stake, and Twitter are rumored to also be talking to Google as well. (Editor's note: Separately, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter on Wednesday.)

The Twitter deal is nonexclusive, Lu said. He did not comment on Facebook.

Users of the Bing Twitter search can see tweets that match a search query listed in pure chronological order, much like Twitter's own search engine (which it built in with the acquisition of a third-party app called Summize). But you also have the option to see search results in a mode that Mehdi called "best match," where he explained that Bing's team will "apply a bunch of our search techniques and relevancy to improve the results." This will mean that popular tweets and heavily retweeted tweets are brought higher up in results, and spam and duplicate results (as well as adult content) will be filtered out.

The Bing Twitter search also aggregates information around hot topics that goes far deeper than Twitter's "trending topics": the most popular links shared on a given topic, for example, and a way to see where shortened URLs redirect. (R.I.P., Rickroll.)

The 'top links' feature in Bing's Twitter search.

(Credit: Bing)

It's still a work in progress, largely because Facebook and Twitter themselves are changing rapidly as well. "Facebook and Twitter, especially Twitter, are really emerging communication platforms, just a lot of growth and the dominant usage patterns...are still evolving in many ways," said Lu, who recently made the jump from Yahoo to Microsoft.

This post was expanded at 2:54 p.m. PDT.

Microsoft executive Qi Lu will reportedly make a big announcement onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning: that its search engine, Bing, has inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to bring real-time status updates and tweets into search results. That's something you can't find on Google.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, neither partnership will actually turn into a product for "weeks, if not months," and that both Twitter and Facebook have also been talking to Google about similar deals.

When asked about the deal announcement earlier on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft director of search Stefan Weitz declined to comment, saying, "I have no idea."

Facebook's mum, too. "We don't comment on speculation," a statement e-mailed on Wednesday morning by Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin read. "Later today, COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer will be speaking at Web 2.0 at which time they will be available to answer questions regarding Facebook."

Rumors started swirling earlier this month that Twitter was looking to make big search-results partnerships with Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft already has a stake in Facebook, which it obtained when it invested $240 million in the social network--allegedly beating Google to the punch then, too--two years ago.

While Twitter is far smaller than Facebook, it's already a step ahead in searchability: it acquired third-party Twitter search app Summize last year and built it into the powerful, real-time Twitter Search. Facebook used to keep all of its data behind a log-in wall, but two years ago started to make the first steps toward becoming more accessible to search engines when it gave members the option to let their profiles show up in "people search" queries on the likes of Google.

More recently, it's been making additional small moves toward opening profile content to the Web, like redefining its privacy controls so that members can specify which of their information and updates can be made public.

This post was updated at 9:53 a.m. PT.

Are Microsoft and Google hoping to get into Twitter's treasure trove of real-time information? Yes, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, citing sources who indicate that the two companies are separately in talks with Twitter about data licensing deals.

This would involve the exchange of several million dollars plus a revenue-share to "compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets of its 54 million monthly users," Swisher wrote.

What's unclear is whether either deal will actually come to fruition. More concrete is the likelihood that Twitter won't strike any exclusive deals, considering the company is (according to Swisher) "seeking to create a large open platform, which many could plug into, from search engines to marketers to publishers to developers."

Twitter, which just raised about $100 million at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, doesn't have a significant revenue stream in place yet. It's slated to launch a premium-services package later this year, but big search-data deals with the likes of Microsoft and Google could be a significant additional source of cash.

Something that could be complicated for Microsoft, should it choose to pursue this opportunity with Twitter: It has a stake in Facebook, which has been making moves to make its own stash of real-time information--potentially far richer than Twitter's, with 300 million active users posting links, photos, status messages, and what-have-you--more searchable and open. Facebook has gone a long way from keeping all its content behind a log-in wall, but Twitter still wins in the openness category.

A recent minor product launch from Facebook, the "Gross National Happiness" app, illustrates this by using keywords in status message content to track how "happy" the Facebook population is on a given day.

Google is upgrading its search infrastructure and it's being really shady about it.

In a post on its Webmaster Central blog, however, Google engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts insist that ordinary users won't even see the difference.

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search," the post reads, making it all sound vaguely like some kind of elf workshop. "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." The user interface is unchanged.

Developers are encouraged to try out the new technology on a "sandbox" page and then offer feedback by including the word "caffeine" in Google's feedback text field, secret-password-style.

The company acknowledged that "some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet." But the industry buzz is obviously a huge part of it: There's a legitimate new contender in the search engine market, Microsoft's Bing, which is fueled by heavy marketing dollars and has begun to inch its way up in market share since its debut earlier this summer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gives the impression that he isn't particularly worried about Bing. But it's hard to not look at a shadowy blog post about under-the-radar upgrades to Google's search index and not take it as a Googly way of saying, "game on."

Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt have admitted that when it comes to the public's thirst for real-time, up-to-the-minute news and conversation, Twitter's beating them.

This was reported by the U.K.'s Guardian, as the two executives took the stage at Google's Zeitgeist conference in London.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," the Guardian quoted Page as saying. "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."

Google acquired one of Twitter's onetime competitors, Jaiku, in fall 2007. Back then, it was still early enough in Twitter's ascent that a competitor with a better product could've come from behind and beaten it--especially with Google's powerful backing. But earlier this year, amid company-wide cutbacks, Google halted most development on Jaiku.

After the Zeitgeist event, Schmidt was asked by the Guardian whether Google might just go ahead and buy Twitter.

"There is a presumption that somehow you cannot have multiple solutions that co-exist," Schmidt said. He then indicated that perhaps a partnership was more likely: "We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the Web is people can talk to each other."

But don't expect Twitter to sign on as a big partner in Google's AdSense search ads service: Co-founder Biz Stone said earlier this week that the company does not plan to pursue an advertising-based revenue model.