Entire Internet Goes Crazy Over April Fools
As usual, April Fools day was the internet’s Christmas, with many major and minor websites getting in the holiday spirit, most with unfunny fake news stories. A few were interest or stood out:
YouTube turned all the Featured Videos on its front page into links to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The video, already the center of the Rickrolling meme, is now the unofficial anthem of April Fools day, with multiple pranks involving it somehow. The video pulled 6 million views in just one day.
Phillip listed a ton of others from Google, including a retread “We’re going to space” joke from Google (this time with Richard Branson and Mars and YouTube videos, but even less funny than when they did it in 2006), scratch-and-sniff Google Book Search, Google Talk auto converting everything you say into acronyms, a paper airplane template in Google Docs, custom email time in Gmail, Google Calendar’s Wake Up Kit (which pours a bucket of water on you if you ignore the alarm) and I’m Feeling Lucky button (random blind dates), Orkut renamed Yogurt, and more.
Blogger launched “Google Weblogs”, essentially a look at what a blog service by Google would have looked like in 2002, before Google discovered UI design
Andy talked about a Google USB Search Watch. Yes, a watch, as in what you wear on your wrist.
Google Docs Finally Gets Gears Offline Access
Google Docs, the most obvious candidate for offline access, has finally been enabled to work with Google Gears. You can now access and edit your text documents (but not spreadsheets or presentations, yet) without an internet connection, provided you’ve installed the Google Gears plugin. Wonderful news, and hopefully the start of a wave of Google products taking advantage of Google’s offline platform.
Here’s a video about it:
Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets Google Spreadsheets has added a directory of Google Gadgets you can use to extend its functionality. It includes charts, new table functionality, pivot tables, maps, search results, organization charts, and many other features Spreadsheets lacks. It also now has email notifications, autocomplete and a new visualization API. Unlike Docs, Spreadsheets is one area where the majority of users won’t be satisfied with an underpowered Microsoft Word, and any way Google can get advanced features in there, the better.
Google’s Search Lead Continues To Grow comScore saw Google share of the search market grow in February (surprising no one), reaching 59%. Yahoo fell to 21.6%, Microsoft slipped slightly to 9.6%, and Ask added .1% to reach 4.6%.
Viacom Will Not Get Punitive Damages Vs. YouTube A judge ruled that if Viacom prevails in its lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube over copyrighted videos, it would not be entitled to punitive damages. Instead, Viacom will have to prove actual damages, with each successfully proven “willfull” violation costing Google up to $300,000, and other costing as little as $750. Gonna have a hard time getting $1 billion out of Google that way.
Easter and Purim Search Logos
The biggest search engines didn’t mark Easter at all, but Ask.com did run this homepage on Sunday (all screenshots via Barry):
Also, Dogpile:
And Cre8asite:
And Bruce Clay:
SER ran this on Friday to mark Purim, the Jewish holiday celebrating Queen Esther and crew saving the Jews from the evil Haman in long-ago Persia:
A Collection of Bad Google Interview Stories Silicon Valley Insider has another of those stories about Google job interviews, and the unique experiences candidates have had on them. This one features blown interviews, and at least one somewhat disgusting story where a veteran of the armed forces was asked an insulting question about how many people he’d killed, and if he’d done it efficiently. The general feeling is that Google’s famous arrogance is alive and well. This one was really interesting too:
They have a process which intentionally filters out people who are single minded and focused on a goal in favour of people who like to spread around and tinker with things. At some point in the process you end up in a room with gadgets and things. The room actually has either a CCTV camera or a double mirror (no idea what is the actual technical implementation). If you open your bag and read a book so that you do not lose concentraion at that point and ignore the shiny gadgets you are most likely going to fail the interview. If you tinker with the shiny trinkets around you, the likelihood that you will pass will vastly improve.
Also, Valleywag has an ex-Googler venting about the company’s recruiters being out of touch. Former employee Hans Cardinal says, like we’ve heard many times, that 20% projects are a fiction, Google’s new hires work mostly on ads, the new engineers are hideously unskilled, and the PMs are territorial and unpleasant.
Google Releases Search Plugin For Windows Mobile Google has released a very basic searching plugin for Windows Mobile devices. The plugin adds a Google search box to the device’s home screen, letting you run a search without first opening your browser. It doesn’t do anything else, but it is a convenience and can supplant a similar implementation by Microsoft in Windows Mobile 6. If you’re interested, go to mobile.google.com.
Google Updates Charts API Google has updated its API for free chart generation, removing the limit of 50,000 queries a day and adding new chart types. Now, not only can you use the API without worry (those using over 250,000 queries a day are only asked to call in, nothing more), you can also make cool new charts, like this one:
Seeking Alpha reports that Fox Interactive and Google are looking beyond their current advertising deal, with Google saying they regret making the agreement and Fox looking to Microsoft as their next partner. It is unknown what sort of termination payouts will be required to end the deal, but if Google wants desperately out of the sinkhole $900 million MySpace deal it made less than a year and a half ago, it’ll probably cost a pretty penny.
Then winner in all this should be Microsoft. If they can swing the MySpace deal, then make money where Google couldn’t, they’ll prove that their assertion that Google is a search ad company that doesn’t do brand and display advertising right will be seriously bolstered. Microsoft can do more than make money from this move, they can get the rest of the market to take them more seriously.
Alexa.com’s rankings of popular websites, never terribly accurate but always debated and used in arguments, have dropped Google from their number 2 spot all the way to #4. Passing Google.com are Google’s own YouTube, now #2, and Microsoft’s Live.com, now #3. Here’s Alexa’s traffic graphs of the top five sites:
Alexa’s data is based on installations of its toolbar, which skews it to a particular and not always representative audience. However, the audience would tend not to use YouTube or Live.com as much as the general population, which makes this graph all the more interesting. While Google isn’t dropping, its competitors are recording significant gains, and Google may need to watch its back (or front, depending on who you believe).
The last 24 hours have likely been the darkest in the history of Yahoo! Inc. as the company fired 1000 employees, some deserving, some who deserved a better chance. The company’s decision to fire just over 7% of its workforce was pretty much a requirement as the company attempts to transition to more profitable systems and a leaner, more productive and accountable workforce.
News of the layoffs and thoselaid off spread like wildfire thanks to social services like Twitter and Techmeme. We heard of Ryan Kuder, who Twitter’d every step of the way, from nervous trepidation, to getting the call, to clearing out his desk, having his computer and badge confiscated, replacing his company cell phone, and celebrating unemployment with a giant margaritas at Chevy’s.
No doubt, there are Yahoo who badly deserved this, and no one is sad to see them go. A floundering company like Yahoo is filled with some employees who collect a paycheck, talk a lot of bull, and do nothing but consume company resources. However, the majority of those who lost their jobs were just regular folk doing regular jobs trying to support their families, and that is the tragedy of the day.
Often, companies do a round of layoffs in order to boost the stock price and earn a decent profit for board members at the expense of the average worker. Yahoo certainly can’t be accused of that, as Wall Street barely touched the stock today, due to its already inflated price caused by Microsoft’s offer to buy the company.
It’s hard to see this happen and not want Microsoft to buy Yahoo immediately. This company is bleeding, and Microsoft is offering a very expensive tourniquet. Sure, a lot of people will get fired if Microsoft buys it, too, but at least it’ll be a colder and more sensible integration and redundancy layoff round, and not the firing of good people because of management’s missteps and mistakes.
No one wants to see this happen again, but who honestly believes that there won’t be a round two if nothing drastic changes?
At least Google did okay. A smart Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo’s Advanced Technology Division, jumped from the sinking ship to join the Goog. Bradley will reportedly work on OpenSocial, and should be a huge asset for Google.
The Wall Street Journal, after talking to sources at Yahoo or Google, reports that Google reached out to Yahoo and made an offer to help Yahoo avoid Microsoft’s takeover bid. Google can’t offer to buy Yahoo outright; it doesn’t have that kind of money, there isn’t a good enough market to borrow the money, and Google’s got close to $5 billion tied up in the FCC auction. Plus, the antitrust regulatory storm kicked up by a vengeful Microsoft wouldn’t be worth it.
Instead, Google is offering assistance in helping Yahoo find alternatives. Google can help Yahoo line up other bidders, or barring that, Google could form a revenue agreement with Yahoo to keep the company away from Microsoft. One scenario I’m hearing discussed is the “Yahoo sells its soul” scenario, wherein Yahoo outsources a significant part of its business to Google, ruining the value of the company for Microsoft.
If Yahoo takes the poison pill, giving Google full control of its search and keyword advertising programs, Microsoft would not be able to make Yahoo succeed without kicking a portion of revenues to Google. Alternatively, Microsoft could try to break the contract, the costs of which could also be prohibitive enough to kill the deal. One wonders whether Yahoo shareholders would be able to vote to stop Yahoo from enabling a poison pill, especially since most of them want the Microsoft deal to go through.
Google also released its official statement on the situation on the Google blog, telling media “This will be our only statement for the time being.” In it, Google touts openness a quality of Google and Yahoo, and calls Microsoft’s bid hostile. Google brings up Microsoft’s past transgressions with regards to monopolies and antitrust violations.
Let’s try to keep some perspective here. Google isn’t trying to “help” Yahoo or internet users, it is trying to do what is best for the future of Google. Yahoo is a weak company right now, and the longer Google’s competition stays weak, the better for Google. Put Yahoo and Microsoft together, Google might actually have to deal with a real open market, and that’s something Google will fight to the last minute.
That said, wouldn’t it be ironic if Google saved Yahoo from ending its run as an independent company, only to see Yahoo rebound eventually? Yahoo’s executives keep saying that things will turn around in 2009, and while the market is impatient, it is possible the company could rise again on its own. Imagine Google saves Yahoo, and Yahoo comes back and actually beats, or at least becomes a match, for Google? We’d be laughing at the irony, sometime in 2011.
Microsoft has made an offer to Yahoo’s board of directors, offering to buy the company for $44 billion. It’s a sweet offer, a lot of money to the company that some firms say has the most traffic on the internet, and would create competitor large enough to compete with Google. I have a detailed article on the deal at InsideMicrosoft, one of the longest I’ve ever written, and encourage you to check it out.
While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
Google stock is growing at a great pace, up 52.56% in 2007. However, Apple’s stock has been a market sensation, more than doubling and up 135.53% over the last year. Apple’s stock is so healthy, that Apple’s $174 billion market cap could easily top Google’s $219 billion in 2008. The chart above shows Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and for good (and far less spectacular) measure, Microsoft (MSFT) since Google’s IPO in 2004.
TechCrunch has an overload of charts showing the end-of-the-year numbers for Yahoo and Ask.com.
For Ask, Ask.com’s unique visitors increased for the year by 54%, from 29.8 million in November 2006 to 46 million last month. Ask may still be having market share troubles, but more users means a healthier company that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Ask’s other properties mostly enjoyed decent growth, with search results pages going up from about 20 million to about 30 million, Image Search up 91%, Spain and German up 2063% and 844%, respectively, AskCity up 548%, and the only down properties are Maps (really replaced by AskCity) and Weather (replaced by the same functionality in Ask’s 3D search results). Ask’s new search results are pushing traffic to its search verticals, growing them in a disproportinate way that Google wishes it had.
For Yahoo, TechCrunch had to run two seperate charts, showing the top growing properties and top declining ones, since there are so many. Yahoo’s U.S. properties are mostly on neither list, with small percentage raises (and a few small drops) leaving them stagnant. Yahoo Answers is one major exception, more than doubling its traffic. Yahoo’s biggest success was in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where search was up 7,452% and 6,763%, respectively.
As you can see, Yahoo Mail went slightly up and down, and finished 3.21% up for the year. On that same page, projections show Gmail topping Yahoo Mail at current growth rates by November 2010. However, that projection assumes you are an idiot, because it also shows Yahoo Mail with the same amount of growth.
Yes, growth is common, but Gmail can’t take over the market completely without Yahoo losing users. Plus, growth never continues forever, especially at rates like this. More likely, Gmail will take some users from Yahoo and Microsoft, both of its competitors will grow slightly, and this war will still be going on well past 2010.
A recent NPD survey showed that an overwhelming number of PC users either have never heard of web-based Office suite alternatives, or have no interest in using them. 73.2% have never heard of them, 20.8% heard of them but never tried them, and 1.5% tried them, and never used them again. In addition, 2.1% sometimes use them (with 1.9% using them in addition to desktop apps), 2% often use them alongside desktop apps, and a scant 0.3% often use them and don’t use desktop apps.
Well, it’s a start.
So, why is the online productivity app struggling to take on with consumers? Are people too afraid of not having offline access? Are the features in Google Docs and the like just not powerful enough? Is Microsoft Office too entrenched? If Office so cheap ($150, $60 for students) that free isn’t enough of an improvement? If Office so easy to pirate that free is irrelevant?
These are the questions Google is going to have to answer over the next year if it wants Docs to actually mean anything in the larger marketplace. I’d argue that if Docs doesn’t get the number of users who often use their product up from 2.3% to at least 10%, and those that use it exclusively up from 0.3% to 5%, and do it by the end of next year, then it just doesn’t matter, and it probably never will.
Google has reached 65.1% search engine market share, up .2% from the previous month and closing in on an amazing 2/3 market share, according to the latest stats from Hitwise. Yahoo fell almost half a point to 21.21%, Microsoft fell almost as much to 7.09%, and Ask fell a tenth of a point to 7.63%. Of course, Google won’t truly be satisfied until it hits 100%.
(via John)
It’s been 21 months since Google Finance, Google’s financial news, information and stock price site was launched, and that ComScore chart above shows that it doesn’t really have any more users now than it did a year ago. Google’s that hot pink line at the bottom, representing 1.5 million monthly unique visits, well behind leader Yahoo’s roughly 38 million, MSN’s 20 million, AOL’s 12.2, and CNN Money’s 6.7 million.
Why does Google have so little upward movement that in the last 12 months, Yahoo has gained as many users as Google has in total, seven times over? Google may promote its own Finance product at the top of search results, but it also links to Yahoo, MSN, CNN, MarketWatch and Reuters, giving itself no more real space than the competition. Plus, the Finance chart it inserts on certain searches actually discourages users from seeking further information.
Universal Search is useful for users, but it doesn’t seem to do any good promoting other Google services. In the long run, it may have more value convincing users to stick with Google search than convincing them to switch away from search verticals that are extremely popular at Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else.
On a related note, it’s been just over a week since Google removed the Google Video link from its search link bar, and it gets more annoying every day. I really miss having an easy way to get video search results.
You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much market share that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month. This time, Hitwise is reporting that Google now has 64% of the search engine market, up from 61% market share a year ago and up a point from last month. Live Search and Yahoo declined both from last month and last year, while Ask.com was up slightly.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Oct.-07
Sept.-07
Oct.-06
www.google.com
64.49%
63.55%
60.94%
search.yahoo.com
21.65%
22.55%
22.34%
search.msn.com
7.42%*
7.83%*
10.72%*
www.ask.com
4.76%
4.32%
4.34%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending Oct. 27, 2007, Sept. 29, 2007, Oct. 28, 2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Om Malik writes that Google is prepared to launch a beta test of its video game advertising platform later this month, starting with Bunchball Games. The ads will be of the pre-roll and mid-roll variety, that is ads that run before the game starts and in middle of the game (perhaps between levels), 15-second video-type ads (presumably Flash animation). Next month, Google will offer a free downloadable game, Psychonauts, with 30-second video ads.
Google bought AdScape in February inorder to enter the growing game ad market, a year after Microsoft picked up Massive, a similar, but larger company. Google paid $23 million, while Microsoft paid $200-400 million for Massive, which would seem to indicate that Google got a bargain, but that would be deceiving. Google is running intrusive ads in casual Flash games, a growing but smaller industry compared to the product placement-type ads Microsoft works with in the multi-billion dollar PC and console video game industry.
I’ve played Microsoft’s Crackdown, in which billboards appear naturally throughout the game’s environment, and every time I saw a billboard with a Dodge ad, I just thought it was cool. If my loading screen was interrupted by a 30-second video ad for the same car, I’d get pissed off. Everyone likes free games, but to ignore the fact that these are different models with very different levels of customer reaction would require pretending an apple is an orange.
Google’s ads may be enough of an annoyance that players will pay just to remove them, and that’s not supposed to be the Google style. Google delivered ads are supposed to be unobtrusive and positive, and these ads are not. Perhaps they need to rethink the model, otherwise yet another principle of Google’s Founders Letter needs to be stricken from the record.
Our goal is to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible–to do things that matter. We make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 97 languages and by providing most services for free. Advertising is our principal source of revenue, and the ads we provide are relevant and useful rather than intrusive and annoying. We strive to provide users with great commercial information.
Remember how Google stock brock $600 on October 8, and I said “Looks like Google might reach $700 in a year, maybe two”. Wow, was I wrong! It took GOOG just 23 days to surpass $700, a level it started yesterday at and never fell below, resulting in a market cap over $220 billion. If not for Microsoft’s huge increases lately, we’d be talking about Google’s chances at catching Microsoft and becoming the bigger tech company.
Look at what this does to my chart!
The old chart was so smooth:
Jeez, talk about your meteoric rises. Google stock’s milestones:
Google cracked $700 yesterday, 10.31.2007
It reached $600 on 10.8.2007.
$500: 11.21.2006
$400: 11.17.2005
$300: 6.27.2005
$200: 11.3.2004
IPO @ $100: 8.19.2004
Amazing.
In pre-market trading the stock was down $4-5, probably a lot of investors looking to lock in their profits.
Google is now the fifth-largest company in the U.S., beating out Proctor & Gamble, Bank of America and Citigroup in just the last few weeks. Up next: AT&T, $30 billion away, and Microsoft, $120 billion ahead.
Just so you know, in mid-2006, when Windows Vista was delayed again, Microsoft’s stock dipped low enough where it was worth less than Google is now. So it’s possible.
Just in case you aren’t reading InsideMicrosoft, you probably need to know that Microsoft beat Google in some tough negotiations for an investment in Facebook. Microsoft now owns a very small percentage of Facebook, and pretty much owns the right to sell ads on Facebook for the next four year.
Read more about it at InsideMicrosoft, including thoughts on why Google may have lost.
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Hitwise’s search market share stats for September, released last week, reveal that Google’s share slipped just slightly last month, falling from 63.98% to 63.55%. Yahoo slipped just about the same, MSN slipped about half of that, but Ask.com gained over eight-tenths of a percentage point, an over 20% jump for them.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
The Wall Street Journal, after talking to sources at Yahoo or Google, 
