WatchMojo.com blogs - Google Borrows Page from MetaMojo.com (Really!)

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category: business

25 Oct 2006

Google Borrows Page from MetaMojo.com (Really!)

by: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

Being both an entrepreneur and a writer is hard. Sure, a lot of people do it. Not that I am even attempting to parlay my way into their category, but two that come to mind are Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban. The former took blogging to a whole new level - creating Weblogs Inc. and selling it to AOL Time Warner for $25 million - and the latter needs no introduction.

Credibility in the Blogosphere: Oxymoron?

Until you attain a certain level of recognition and reputation, just because you write something does not make it true (or believable even if it is true). Furthermore, when you have the added burden of being an entrepreneur, you have to ensure that your ever-growing readership believes that what you are writing is not driven by what you are building.

Of course, meshing business with writing makes sense, and sometimes, some readers welcome getting an insight into the every day obstacles of building a business: such as mundane tasks like replacing a crappy printer.

The point is, there’s a time and place - and method to the madness - to crossing the line from entrepreneur and writer.

You have to know when and how to cross it to leave your integrity intact.

Problems With Blogging and Company-Building

The first problem one encounters is that you can’t say that another company’s strategy is a poor one only because it might adversely impact your business. As well, you have to be honest about what you write even if the competition can use the information to their advantage.

The second problem is not divulging too much sensitive information, whether it pertains to you (say we were working on a major business or corporate development deal and I wanted to talk about it but the other company did not) or something that a famous businessperson might say to you the businessperson but not the writer.

So long as you have credibility and remain smart about what is fair game to write about and what is not, you can succeed at both.

Today I will not be addressing the second part (even I can only write so much in one setting - but I will soon…); I’ll be talking about the first component.

All right Prelude Boy… What’s the Story? Spill the beans

First Impressions…

Yesterday, Google came out and offered a new product that allows individual users and publishers develop their own custom search. It’s a great idea. You should believe me cause it’s the “big idea” behind our search product, MetaMojo.com.

Of course, major, major differentiation: we do not yet offer users the ability to build their own search cause our trials showed that 99.9% of users end up building very incomplete and almost crappy search engines. In other words, MetaMojo.com applies a human touch and goes through thousands of content providers each month, conducts testing and builds these best of breed, domain-specific search engines (side note, if you are a content provider and want to be listed, email me at ash[at]mojosupreme.com).

Google - on the other hand - gives you the tools to do it and lets you do the guesswork. It’s great for the 4% of the web population who are do-it-yourself keeners, but pretty useless for the remaining 96%.

My first inclination when I saw the news was great: if this does not validate our idea and reasoning for the need for MetaMojo.com, I do not what will? Check out my post here.

Frankly, not once did it cross my mind that this would be a negative for MetaMojo.com. Allow me to rephrase that: when you do anything in search, directories, navigation and reference, you can expect that Google is doing it, have thought about doing it, or will do it. It’s par for the course. Paid search is a $5 billion industry and set to be worth about $12 billion in 2010. There’s room for plenty of people but those doing it want as large of the market as they can. Google’s approach is almost the opposite of how we are approaching the challenge of domain-specific vertical search.

Defining the Competition

My intent in launching a search product is certainly not to take on Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com or Google, it’s

a) because I am fascinated by search ever since I worked in the industry and
b) to have proprietary search intellectual property in the company.

Our company however is not limited to search, we have over 10,000 pages of content, 3,000 original video clips and much more. As the company’s traffic and content grows, I maintain: I’d be happy with promoting MetaMojo.com within our network alone (an example of how can be seen here). Because of this rationale: I am more than content seeing MSN, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Google toss their hats into the fray and help me innovate. I love competition. I do not think I can beat them on the Web in general, but they’ll never beat me on our network. So as long as they innovate, we can improve our search to our users.

Short term, it would be simpler to simply partner with one of these companies, but looking out 1, 3 or 5 years, I am maniacal about my belief that MetaMojo.com can be an important player in the space. For more on MetaMojo.com, check out my comments upon the official launch here.

Second Impressions…

As I checked out Google’s product though, I thought: man, this is very anti-Google. Google thrives on automation. It thrived because of things like “I’m Feeling Lucky.” It removed any of the guess work in search and while indeed the Web’s has grown quite chaotic and the need for variations in the search problem has risen, 99.9% of Google’s users will probably not care much for this product.

Definition of Integrity

I did not want to write that, of course, because until people know me and realize that I say things like I see them, people might think it’s because I think Google, well… stole our Mojo and tried to duplicate MetaMojo.com’s appeal (I do not for one second think that, by the way… they took the “here are the tools, go do it yourself” method; we took the “we took the time to put this together for you… enjoy”).

If I tell you it’s raining, it’s cause it’s raining; and not, like most people in the world, because I sell umbrellas. I’ve worked with liars and backstabbers who will sit there in front of you and tell you that black is white and left is right because it serves them some purpose; they lose credibility, fast. Alas, I figured no need to point out the negatives in Google’s latest product because of the 1st Problem of Blogging and Company-Building I outlined above.

Today however, I read some feedback and it does, in a nutshell, spell out why Google might be remiss in their approach:

Mediapost writes:

The tool will allow publishers to put query boxes on their sites and also choose which sites Google indexes for the customized search engine. [A] Publishers can choose to only include their own sites, or can expand the index to any sites in their industry–including sites operated by competitors.

Ultimately, however, [B] the usefulness of [Google’s New Product] will depend on the work that publishers put into crafting an index, search industry watchers said.

David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning for search engine marketing firm 360i, said that publishers might inadvertently create a search engine that has little to no utility for their users. “When it comes down to it, it’s a great service that Google is offering, but it falls on the publishers to implement it well,” he said. “It’s very easy to implement this halfheartedly and create a disservice for your users.”

Indeed it would be.

Regarding A) - No publisher will want to create and add to their site a search engine featuring their competition. I worked in the men’s publishing space, never in a thousand years could I convince my President to add a search engine with content from Maxim, GQ, Esquire, etc., no matter how great their content was relative to ours.

And, regarding B) - unless I went out and constantly looked out for great underlying sources, it would not make sense to actually keep the search engine all that good. In other words, this has more negatives than positives for Google. It gives a tool to users without going the extra mile. It’s a bit - dare I say it - exactly what they have done with Gmail, Froogle etc., ie. throw something on the wall but fail to see if it stuck, and if it did not, help figure out what the wall is made of…

Yesterday I did not think it would be very gentlemanly to say so, but now, I’m just relaying you what others are saying and saying: I agree.

Of course, let me go one step further and add this:

Google should - gasp - hire editors and offer this as an add-on to their core, mass market search. But, guess what, that would go against Google’s mass automation philosophy. This is why I was expecting Yahoo! or Ask.com to do this, not Google. In fact, in many ways, when people would ask me what MetaMojo.com was upon planning for it, I’d tell them “think Looksmart done right.” But Looksmart went from the highest search valued company in 2000 to being one of the least valuable ones because it was too labor intensive to match Google or initially, Yahoo!’s margins. Oh, the Web also outgrew Looksmart’s directory approach and it paid for it dearly. That is why Yahoo! dropped the directory model as well, but for some odd reason, Yahoo! used Google’s search algorithm instead of investing in their own technology. After that strategic blunder, it bought Inktomi and Overture to make up for lost time. Yahoo! is paying for this to this day.

Connecting the dots now, the reason why I thought and think to this day that MetaMojo.com is defensible is that at a time of heightened competition between the mass market search leaders, it simply is not conducive for them to deploy labor and time to manage - or rather, maximize - such a product; it makes sense for them to release it and tell users to do it themselves (and that is what Google has done).

Of course, the danger for Google here is that if random surfer conducts a search on any given site and the results are not nurtured, Google runs the risk of generating a bad user experience and shooting itself in the foot, since technically Google is powering the technology.

Who am I for Google to listen to, but Google can add all of these functions and features to its search product, but to really justify and grow its market value, it should be focusing on:

- Google Base - its competition for Craigslist and eBay; which has all but disappeared from the radar.
- GMail - it’s a great service which I use exclusively, but it has failed to catch on as some would have expected. Why is that?
- Froogle - comparison shopping and Amazon.com “killer” which has done little to affect the leaders in the space.
- Integration of YouTube and Google Video (although what I would recommend to do is pretty radical compared to what they will probably do here…)
- Documents and Spreadsheets - this could really hurt MSFT and should be high priority on Google’s list if they want to catch up to MSFT’s market cap.

When you consider that Google just got orders from CEO and co-founder Larry Page not to release new products but add features, this entire move was going against the grain strategically and tactically. Of course, Google’s got so much brainpower that I will surely not be one to question them too much… but relaying what others say, that’s an entirely different story.

Disclaimer: Of the aforementioned companies, at the time of this writing, I own shares in Yahoo! and Looksmart; the former is dirt cheap and the latter is a good play on vertical search and its growth. Oh, and our video department has business relationships with Google, YouTube and Yahoo!

category: business

25 Oct 2006

Jack Welch Considering Bid for The Boston Globe

by: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

Apparently, Jack Welch is eyeing the Boston Globe, it’s a sign of the times, but check out how much the value of the paper has fallen since 1993:

The news was first reported on Wednesday by The Globe, which said JPMorgan had valued the newspaper at $550 million to $600 million. That would be far below the $1.1 billion the Times paid in 1993.

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