It looks like another year has come and gone.  And, like in past years, here are the top 10 things I learned in 2009 (at least as I see them):

1. Specializing in ‘Local’ internet was one of the smarter career moves I ever made. Who would have thought that the sum of all the small dots would actually add up to such a big picture?  Trust your gut, sometimes it tells you the right thing.
2. The Internet business is much, much different in California than it was in Chicago.  Things here move a bit faster and carry a lot more weight.  Not to mention, the weather here is great.
3. Years later, most people still don’t really ‘get it’ when it comes to SEO.  This surprises me.  But, it does make room for a lot of opportunity.  I have been doing SEO for around 10 years now, and that makes me 2 things: a) a lot grayer than when I started, b) one of suprisingly few people who actually seem to understand what it takes to rank a website in the SERPs.
4. The way things are shifting, if you don’t know feeds by now you are probably doing something horribly wrong.  The Internet is made up of tubes, of course.  It is only now becoming obvious that all of these tubes connect to make money for people who are good at filtering/sorting/combining what comes out of them all.
5. PPC advertising is not dead, not by a longshot.  But, it sure isn’t changing fast enough to keep its market share of SEM.  Turns out that display advertising has a place in the budget of even the smallest of businesses, assuming you know how to do it.  Yahoo seemed to get this when they bought Right Media, Google has been scrambling to catch up with that one— DoubleClick is still not all that effective as a display exchange and OpenX seems doomed to be an ad server.  I have little doubt that Google will succeed in the end, and fear Yahoo won’t be able to fulfill the potential RM has because of politics.  I guess that’ll be for 2010 to see.
6. When is Twitter going to figure out how to monetize effectively?  Seems a bit overdue, don’t you think?
7. Facebook seems to get it.  As a result, Facebook will probably be the biggest IPO of 2010.  Its not a bad ad platform.  Now that the privacy concerns seem to have gone away (think Beacon).
8. Bing has kind of fizzled.  I don’t see enormous growth there, although they do seem to keep tons of pages in the index for a really long time.  That’s appreciated.  Of course, never rule them out.  The Yahoo-Microsoft deal will probably start showing within the next year.  I, for one, am still excited by the possibilities.
9. If it is a good idea, Google’s probably already thought of it.  I like to think that bar codes on small business window’s that could be photographed by cell phones and easily searched on a mobile search site was my idea…. but, let’s face it Google had time to already build it, so they probably thought of it before I did.  I’ve got a few ideas that I’ve got locked in a briefcase hidden under my mattress that I’m sure Google hasn’t thought of yet.  At least, I think they haven’t.
10. Lastly, thanks to an absolutely horrible economy and all the other awful things going on in the world, I once again have been forced to realize how truly fortunate I have been.  Real estate aside, I remain pretty insulated from all the bad things out there for yet another year.  I am blessed with a gorgeous wife, a beautiful daughter and a stinky dog.  I always get to work on things that are exciting and new, I work with scores of brilliant people, and coming to work has never been a chore for me.  How many people can say that?  Not many.

Here’s hoping everyone has a happy and safe New Year, and that 2010 is full of opportunity and joy!

Happy New Year

-Ari

Google quietly released a new product via its Google Labs page that quite possibly represents the most significant peek behind the curtains directly at the evil genius planning to take over the world that anyone outside of the Googleplex has ever had.  It is called “Fast Flip“, and to layman’s eyes– it is just a news reader.

Fast Flip provides a nice web page where a user can flip through new stories much like they flip through the pages of a newspaper.  Smart.  That’s what people want, clearly.  But, there’s a little bit more going on here.

Fast Flip takes a publisher website’s content and republishes it within Google’s own domain.  Elsewhere, this is called ’scraping’ and is heavily frowned upon.  Here, Google publishes content with full attribution to its source, and even links to the original publisher site.  But, the site republishes the entire page on the Fast Flip domain.  So, in essence, most readers will never have the need to visit the source publisher’s site at all.  What does this mean?  Take a look at BBC’s page on the exact story I captured in the above screenshot:

On BBC’s own page— there are multiple ads.  There’s an internal leaderboard across the top of the page and an advertiser’s 300×250 on the right side.  Neither of these appear within Google’s scrape of the content. 

So, when a user reads the story on BBC’s own site— these ads will generate some revenue.  But, when a user reads the same story, from the same source (BBC) from within Fast Flip, only Google ads have the chance to win that revenue (and, guess what?  Google does place their own ads next to the page they create for each story).

If I’m BBC, I’m not happy about this.  If I’m any publisher, I’m at least scared. 

Here’s a glimpse into what I see here… I see a world in the not-too-distant-future where Google search results pages for any search no longer take users to a list of links to publisher websites where those publishers stand to make money from showing ads to visitors for providing valuable content, but instead take users to scrapes of those same webpages (ever clicked on ‘cached’ next to a search result?– Google already stores all web pages it crawls) where users never leave the Google.com domain. 

In this world, Google stands to hold all the cards— and can determine which content is worth paying out to publishers to provide, and which content will no longer make money through Google referrals.

Of course, Fast Flip is just for news.  Of course, Fast Flip is just a beta.  Of course, those sites will only lose the ability to monetize a very small amount of their total traffic (even if Fast Flip takes off and makes it out of beta, those sites will still maintain all the revenue except that which starts with a click from Google news).

But, if I’m a publisher of any kind (and, I am)— now is the time I start getting a little worried.  Because maybe, just maybe, this means a whole heck of a lot more than just a nice news reader.

In June of 2008, I wrote about a new image search engine called TinEye that was claiming to do true image recognition search using pictures as queries.

At the time, the site was claiming:

“TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image.”

And, just as promised… the search engine is now publicly available and fully functional.  And, to at least my partial surprise, it works fairly flawlessly.  Here’s an example:

http://tineye.com/search/fd852df5478eb7eb9410ee9101bb364adf487fb0?page=1360

I searched the Google logo straight from their homepage using the image URL as my query.  By the end of the results, it becomes clear that Tineye recognizes the content of the Google logo and not just the color/shape attributes of the letters— there are some images where the logo is skewed/distorted in a way that TinEye must truly understand some of the fundamental aspects of the logo itself.

So, I give TinEye (and its parent company Idée) a big thumbs up for progressing things.  Now, if someone would just figure out how to monetize image search in this way.  That itself may prove to be more difficult than producing a working image search engine.

Over the coming days, weeks and months plenty will be written about what happened today.  Yahoo has officially entered an agreement to turn over their search engine (and all of the monetization of search results) to be handled by Microsoft using their relatively new Bing technology.

I watched Carol Bartz’s offiicial address this morning.  Although her demeanor was certainly polished and confident, I did sense a bit of resignation.  Afterall, Yahoo stood firm against Microsoft believing that the company was undervalued.  Now, it would seem, Yahoo has been distilled into what I have been saying it has always been— the most powerful destination site on the web.

But, there’s a second part to what I have been saying all along— and that is that no matter how good of a destination site Yahoo is, the revenue that comes with being a content site and not an advertiser platform is significantly smaller.  Thus, I expect it won’t be long before we see a leaner Yahoo altogether.  I feel for the staff who works to support search products, and the stress this must be causing you.

On a lighter note, in typical Yahoo versus Microsoft style, the homepages of each do seem reflective of the different takes on what is transpiring:

This morning, Bing features a bridge spanning two majestic and beautiful mountains (in Geneva, nonetheless).  I have no thoughts on what the dam might represent, except possibly Google:

While Yahoo has a lighter presentation on their homepage.  The image and story I was greeted with (sure it varies depending on the layout of your new Yahoo homepage) is about ‘armswinging’.  Saying that scientists have finally solved the mystery of why people swing their arms when they walk.  Well, Yahoo, that speaks volumes of the situation, in my opinion.  Microsoft is connecting mountains, and Yahoo is swinging arms.  I guess that would support what I thought I read as resignation in Carol Bartz’s presentation.