Search Engines, the twenty first century soft drinks

Let me start by saying: some companies inspire us to do better things, be better people and make the world a better place. This got me to thinking: search engines are the modern day soft drinks, in some ways.





Number one:
Google is the number one search engine, Coca-cola is the number one soft drink. Google is, in many ways, equivelent to search. Coke is the same thing, for those of us who worship the red can, for soft drinks & soda. It's the real thing, pure, refreshing...and it's biggest enemy is itself. New Coke was a failure, let's hope that Google doesn't try to become "new Google".





Number two:
Yahoo is the number two search engine. With their life engine campaign, they confirmed one thing: they've been confined to an era of time, a period where the term "engine" has meaning. In the past, it was "horse power"...and in the future, it'll be a "power source" or "flux capacitor"...by claiming synonym-ship with "engine" Yahoo has confined itself to an era. Pepsi, the number two soft drink, claimed it was the Pepsi Generation when I was growing up. Again, claiming a period in time, putting their stamp on some folks - and leaving eternity, everlasting dominance, to the number one player as a result.




Number three:
MSN (and Live) are the number three search engines. Mountain Dew is also the number three soft drink. I've never been able to fathom MSN search results...they seem capricious, unclear...not as murky as Google or Yahoo, but, with a definitely opaque, inconsistant and odd twist. Mountain Dew, I've never been able to understand, either. With it's almost but not quite citrus and X-games positioning...it'll never be The Real Thing (Google) but, perhaps, just being itself is OK.





Number four:
AOL Search is the number four among search engines, and in soft drinks, fourth place is claimed by Dr. Pepper. When I was younger, I had a certain affinity for the Dr. It was different, cola like yet with a certain special flavor that appealed to my youth. AOL is dominated by those new to the internet, who have yet to throw off their online training wheels & get a real ISP...or those who want a walled garden experience. With maturity, they leave AOL behind. However, there will always be those who are young and new...or young at heart. For those, then, AOL will remain.






Number five:
Ask, or as it used to be known, Ask Jeeves, is the fifth place search engine. As Sprite is clearly not a cola, nor is the experience confusing, so Ask has a simple mandate: get answers to your questions. Their positioning was clear, unlike a typical search engine, where the queries are ambigious and the results extraordinary. Ask is simple, efficient, and clearly, not a cola.




These five search engines have changed the world, and will continue to do so. Hasn't "have a coke & a smile" changed the world, too? Did you know somebody who was part of the Pepsi (Yahoo) generation? They grew up, and so, too, did their desire for something new. If you do the dew, then you definitely do MSN search...bold, different and unexpected, breaking the rules as it goes. When you had your training wheels on, was Dr Pepper (AOL) beholden to a special place in your heart? Last...if you need answers, is it a search engine, or do you just want to ask? For a minority, it's ask that's clearly the answer.

Amazon's Askville decides that SEO is the way to go

What else would you call this URL format?
http://askville.amazon.com/36329/SEOTopic.do?tag=electronics

:)

I rest my case.

Tags: askville, is it spam, or is it just good promotion?

Quantcast's related sites feature: hi squidoo, 43things

I've been watching quantcast stats for a long time now. It's been amazing to see Seth Godin's site (he's a former Yahoo, like me, though far more famous) Squidoo do incredibly well. Not only that, but now, http://www.quantcast.com/squidoo.com - FunAdvice is the 3rd most related site in the discussion / chat category.

Personally, I feel flattered. Then looking at 43things, which launched around the same time as FunAdvice, but had a far more mature product at launch...well, take a look:
http://www.quantcast.com/43things.com we're the most related chat / discussion site there. Which makes sense, given the Squidoo comparison.

What does all this mean? Well for one, we're sharing customers. People who use 43things are using FunAdvice, and people on FunAdvice are using Squidoo, etc.

This means, for me, a few things that we need to keep in mind:
1) product impovements are a must - if it bugs me, odds are, it bugs a customer
2) if it bugs a customer and we don't fix it, we lose them AND we look like idiots - not cool.
3) bugs need to be fixed regularly, as there is always something broken, for somebody, somewhere.

:)

How does the Yahoo & Microsoft Offer affect sites like FunAdvice?

First, we should say that Microsoft has merely bidded for Yahoo. The whole landscape could change.

Most of the chatter in the blogosphere has been about the financial side of the deal. I have not yet read about the thing that could torpedo Yahoo if its taken over by Microsoft.

See, Yahoo is an open source company.

What does that mean? Yahoo depends on open source and open standards to run their business. Internally, Yahoo is more like Google than Microsoft in that regard. And if Microsoft takes over, it will affect startups like ours in a substantial way.

Yahoo has contributed so many programming tools, from Mapping to my favourite -- Content Analysis. There's also the Yahoo User Interface Library -- YUI including Yahoo Grids. And they've really taken accessible websites to heart and gave people who build startups a lot to ride on. Oh, and they've also use REST in a whole-hearted way, thus moving the industry in general away from the heavier and less intuitive SOAP.

Not to mention PHP, MySQL, OpenBSD, Linux, Qmail and tons of other things.

That's incredible stuff that I can't see Microsoft maintaining. Since all they want is the pageviews, and likely Panama. But Panama's not worth much itself. Microsoft already has ad serving technology which is arguably better than Yahoo's but still light years behind Google's Adwords and Adsense simple-as-pie-that-gets-your-ads-online-in-15-minutes technology.

If I were a programmer at Yahoo, I'd be looking to the exits at this point. Despite the economy, there are still tons of programmer jobs out there that are oriented towards PHP, Java and open source in general.

Can you see Microsoft keeping the open source ecosystem that Yahoo has built and shared with startups like FunAdvice? Would you create your new startup with ASP.net given the availability of free tools like PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other great open source technologies?

Check out:
http://developer.yahoo.com/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Sutree are a bunch of spammers

So, our terms of service clearly prohibit somebody from signing up & posting, repeatedly, links back to their company website.

If the spammer wasn't international and was based on the US, I'd be emailing my lawyer instead of blogging this incident.

sutree

:) Have a nice day.

Comcast, traffic shaping, and FunAdvice: a scary 30 minutes

So if you haven't followed the on going net neutrality issue, you should. The US government has failed so far to pass legislation to make it illegal to discriminate via access to various websites.

In effect, it's not illegal, technically speaking, for Comcast to do as it's been reported which is fake traffic to various P2P networks to make them unreachable by customers. I'm fine with that, and in fact, I think it's a novel way to try to stem the tide of piracy. As an aspiring author (I dreamed about writing novels as a kid) I want if I chose to write a book, to be able to earn the expected reward.

However, earlier today, FunAdvice was unreachable by two Comcast customers. Both myself and my sister in law couldn't reach the site. However, our hosting provider (ServerBeach, in Texas) could, as well as Ericson, in Florida (co-founder and engineering guru), and even my in laws, in Geneva, Switzerland.

While on the phone with Comcast, they suggested I power cycle my modem. I refused, telling them that only made sense for general connectivity issues, NOT for being unable to reach a single website.

After about 25 minutes of arguing, FunAdvice came back. Now, they still haven't told me why, and insist that nothing was wrong. However, given their public history of traffic shaping, is it out of the question that they might be doing this to mid teir websites to save money on bandwidth?

They can't do it to Google, or Yahoo, because too many people would notice. And if they picked on very small websites with less than a few visitors per day, it wouldn't save them any money. But, if they selectively limited access to mid sized websites with audiences in the one million visitor range, they could effectively curtail some of their network traffic, and potentially not arouse much suspicion.

I'd rather be an optimist, and say this can't be true. However, with no logical explanation from Comcast, my curiosity is piqued.

If you run a website, please sk your customers if today between 2-2:30 PST, if they couldn't connect to your site if they use Comast Cable for their internet access.

Especially if they live in the bay area, in California. With enough data, we can get to the bottom of this, and make sure to hold Comcast responsible for it's actions, OR the unreliability of it's network.

On one hand, it could have been a "glitch"...but, if it was, there would be evidence, and Comcast has never been slow to admit network issues in the past. The only alternative is that they are indeed prioritizing traffic, which is evil, violates the 1st amendment, and must be stopped.

Ning is smaller than FunAdvice according to TechCrunch & Comscore

A picture is worth a thousand words. Ning, backed by famed entrepreneur, social networking platform 3.0, etc, etc...has less traffic than we did in October.

Per the chart, they look like they're about 10% behind us. What's $55,000,000 in funding get you? Not sure, exactly. They have a killer team and a killer product, imho...but, apparently, money isn't everything.

:) This made my day.

Quality versus quantity: Wiki Answers hits a million questions

Holy smokes batman, that's a lot of questions. Congrats, they've certainly increased the noise on the acquisition they made last year for a reported $2 million (I reviewed their SEC filings because at some point, we might be entertaining offers).

However, check this answer out bollocks as they say in the UK. Why is that?

The person who asked the question *never* got an answer. They answered their own with a follow up question, "I need an answer". Other answers in the same category boast similar quality.

One other thing about Wiki Answers, does this look like search engine spam to you? The small text, there at the bottom.

How do we do at FunAdvice? Sure, we miss it sometimes, and I'd like to do better. If you have any ideas on how we can improve, drop us a note and we'll look into implementing your suggestion.

When did Yahoo Answers launch related questions?

It's interesting that over the 4.5 years FunAdvice has been around (yep, we'll be 5 years old in 2008) we've been copied by:
Yahoo Answers
Answerbag
Yedda
Askville
Live QnA

Basically, all of the large well known Q&A sites have lifted ideas, user interfaces, and more from the implementation they saw on FunAdvice. Or, we all had the same idea, at the same time :)


So today, I'm in a very interesting position - who came up with related questions first, Yahoo Answers, or FunAdvice?

Not the Yahoo Answers implementation.


Now, take a look at the FunAdvice implementation.

What's interesting to me is that we both seem to have about the same number of links in the module, the same placement, etc. I know that we launched ours on August 25th to the public, and had the mock with this integration internally as of May, 2007. When did Yahoo launch theirs, did they copy us? Or was it serendipity?

Do companies always do the right thing? How do they decide?

This post goes out to all the former Yahoo's out there who've moved on from that crazy, sometimes wonderful, and all the time schizophrenic company. Or, for that matter, anybody who's worked at a company that had trouble making decisions & doing the right thing. I hope this inspires you to step it up, and do what you know is right.

Thing is, I worked there from April, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Then my wife & I received a contract to work with them as part of our new consulting firm for another year, until Jan, 2007. During that nearly three year period, I was part of a number of projects, reported to a series of bosses who almost but not quite understood what I was trying to do, and generally speaking, presented to more people at higher levels than anybody else with my title.

So, when reading this morning about Yahoo potentially selling Kelkoo I had to share a few thoughts on TechCrunch. That story has a lot to it, and one of the big deals I tried (and failed) to accomplish at Yahoo was getting them to use the right ccTLD.

Kelkoo, interestingly enough, had the same goal. From Christophe Odin to Pierre Chappaz, to Jean Fabrice, they all agreed that Yahoo should use yahoo.co.uk for their UK operations, same with Spain, Italy, France, and any other country they were involved in. Not just in Europe (though that was their primary concern, because Kelkoo is largely a European company, since shutting down their Brazilian efforts some years prior to the Yahoo acquisition).

How well did these guys sell Yahoo on doing the right thing? Not well, because Ash Patel couldn't justify the plan, (SVP Platforms) because he needed some crazy ROI figure to do the right thing. And the other high level folks (Geoff Ralston, former CPO) couldn't justify selling it either, for similar reasons.

However...what's the ROI on doing the right thing? It shouldn't need to be justified. Not only that, the ROI shouldn't be an issue, period, with the decision of doing the right thing or not. Doing the right thing is it's own reward, and any company that tries to put a profit on doing the right thing has it's priorities all mixed up.

We have those kinds of decisions, as well, at FunAdvice. Should we do this? Or not? Always, we try to figure out what the right thing is to do, and it's not revenue we look at first. It's people. Do people want us to do this? Would people like it if we did that?

Sometimes, that means executing projects that have no basis in increasing revenue, and projects that net - net, have a cost associated because of the lost opportunity of executing a project where the revenue could have been increased.

However, I'm a huge fan of Google, even though I worked at Yahoo for years. They say, in their mission statement & SEC filings, that as a company they try to "do no evil". That's not our motto at FunAdvice, but we always try "to do the right thing".

How do you like to run your business? Is it profit first, and all else second? Or is it like us, like Google, and like those companies that are trying to succeed and make the world a better place by doing the right thing?

It's Yedda week here on the FunAdvice blog

Recently, I've been pondering public relations, press, and how the word of things spreads. Did you see my question about how to reach out to pete cashmore of mashable?. The reason being, we (FunAdvice) have yet to be written up in Mashable or TechCrunch, or any number of higher profile blogs that write about the kind of stuff we do at FunAdvice.

So given Yedda's luck in getting written up on both, I thought I'd do a quick comparison.

In Google, when you do an advanced search, you find Yedda has 9,800 questions. And similarly, you find they have 3,800 members. Their URLs are unique, and by removing the "duplicates" to just focus on user profiles and question URLs, it's pretty interesting.

Given their coverage by Mashable, TechCrunch, PC World, the MIT write up...honestly, I thought they'd have been bigger. Much bigger.

Now, let's take a look at how FunAdvice is doing, by those same metrics, according to Google (can you tell we love Google? lol).

58,000 questions indexed. Not bad. Nearly five times the number Yedda has. How about people? 11,800...in this case, we're about four times the size of Yedda.

What do third party reports say? See this quantcast chart comparing FunAdvice & Yedda. So, according to Quantcast, we're way ahead. Take a look at what compete.com says for FunAdvice vs Yedda. Again, we're light years ahead of them.

The only metric I can find that suggests we're losing, is Alexa.com. However, any webmaster will tell you, get five people (ironic, that's how many staffers Yedda has on their about page) and have them install the Alexa toolbar, and your metrics will take off.

Why am I writing all this? Mostly because I'm competitive - anybody who builds a product wants to win in their category. And because recently, Yedda got 2.5 million in funding. I've been happy to beat them without knowning how much money they had previously, however, knowing that we're beating them hands down when they have a ton more resources than us, somehow makes it that much more special.

Don't you think? :) Technorati tags:
yedda, funadvice, social networking, qna, questions, answers.

Have you ever wondered what drives social networks?

We ponder what drives social networks often here. One of the core themes we've discovered is music even though it's not an intuitive feature.

FunAdvice doesn't have much in the way of Music...however, the reason we added the Music category was that of all the interests entered by real users, Music was at the top of the list. I like Snoop Dogg myself, how about you?


Speaking of Snoop Dogg, we have some interesting search results for Snoop:
Search results for snoop dogg


However, when I looked at Yedda to compare & even entered "snoop dogg" as my interest for their semantic clustering technology...nobody's interested in snoop there. You can't even search for "snoop dogg" and Google search only finds 3 pages (2 of which the content on the Yedda page is from their Omgili integration).

Interesting stuff. So, being curious, I decided to see what's related to Eminem on Yedda (another favorite of mine):


What do you know - eminem is related to aids...very strange. If all we did (and we don't claim much in the way of semantic clustering techology, even though we do have an autocategorization tool that we've trained with machine learning on the various tokens in our site)...if all we did was extract the most common words next to "eminem" in the site, and match those to the category, we'd get:

eminem, music, lyric, lyrics...very related, and very good.

Where does this aids bit come from? Hardly intuitive. And strange, given their technology has "semantics" but the site doesn't have content even related to music.

Still, if you know something we don't about eminem & aids, please let me know.

Back to the point: music to a certain degree drives social networks - myspace, hi5, bebo, etc, all have huge music components. Last.fm, pandora, mog, are all based around music. Ilike.com is also based around music. People love music.

Yedda funded earlier this month: competition is good

I was shocked & amazed to find out that Yedda.com was funded earlier this month. 2.5 million? And, nope, it's not a joke.

So the first thing I do is trot over to my favorite 3rd party analytics service, Quantcast.com. I type in their url to compare traffic, and low & behold - 3K daily unique visitors. WTF? 3,000 people visit their site daily?

After Yedda was featured in techcrunch, mashable, and a host of other teir one 'net publications, PC World, MIT's Technology review, etc...they're only getting 3K visitors a day? WOW.

FunAdvice, so you know, gets more than 200,000 unique visitors a month, and growing. Today, for example, we've had over 5K as I write this, and even though Quantcast does under report for us both...say Quantcast is off by 33%, that would only make Yedda's reach 1/2 what ours is. Interesting.

Tell you what: anybody reading this, you can buy FunAdvice.com (we have international domains, a killer product roadmap, and more) for the bargain price of $5,000,000. That's right, five million dollars & you can have the site, the code, the 15,000 users, eveything. A bargain, compared to the 30-40% stake the VC firm who invested in Yedda got for $2.5 million.

Use the contact form on our site, if you're interested.

And, if anybody reading this is a blogger, media professional, or other - I'm available for interviews, comments, and stories if you'll provide a link to FunAdvice. Tell us what we're doing right, wrong, and how we could improve as we love to get feedback. Thanks!