Where Do We Go From Here?

Before I go off on another three day vacation (yep, no posts till Saturday night), I’d like to share some musings on Google’s future.

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of big news in the world of search. A9 was launched, and brought us a very complex interface that any geek has to love, and will certainly grow into something great. MyJeeves was launched, also bringing personalization of search and saved searches. My Yahoo has revealed a new beta interface. MSN Search is still being developed.

So what does Google have in store for us?

Nobody really knows. Is it the Google Browser, or personalized results, or instant messaging? When is Gmail going live? What exactly is Google up to?

Google has not yet gotten used to being a public company. They are keeping every single project under wraps. Companies do keep secrets, of course, even from their investors, but I have never seen a company that didn’t show any of its cards, at the very least in an attempt to boost its stock price.

Google’s stock price has risen steadily, despite no actual news. The strong search industry and all the announcements from other companies have probably helped. Most investors are hoping Google will reveal something big in the next few weeks, shooting up the stock 10-15%. A little mystery always helps.

There’s a flip side, of course. If Google doesn’t bring something new to market, investors will get antsy. They had better have something up their sleeves, or the stock can drop just as quickly as it rose.

That’s all till Saturday night. If anyone is interested in guest blogging next week Thursday – Saturday, let me know.

Google Executive David Scacco Tells All

David Scacco, an exec at Google, said some things at ChannelAdvisor Strategy Summit 2004 that give some insight into Google’s plans and policies. He explained how more searches are for products than brands, how AdSense reaches 80% of web traffic, the possibility of an AdSense inclusion list, and Froogle. Read more about it at Search Engine Lowdown.

Is Google News In Beta Because Of Lawsuits?

Adam Penenberg at Wired News says that he thinks Google News is still in beta after three years because if Google brings it out of beta and puts ads on the site, they may face lawsuits from angry content publishers. I agree that this is possible, but I disagree with any news site that thinks Google News is hurting their business. Google News is my news sites #1 referrer, accounting for more than half oof all outside traffic, and a lot of the other referrals come from Topix.net. Google News should increase traffic to any decent news site, and sites should be optimizing themselves for Google News. Google News is good for business, and news sites should encourage them.

Behind The Scenes At Yahoo Labs

YSearchBlog Gives the skinny on how Yahoo works on improving its search results, kind of a 21st century electronic focus group.

Google Goes Up, Up, Up

Google shares hit a new record high of $126.86, up over 7% on the day. Google continues to rise despite no major announcements, perhaps because investors expect Google to strike the next blow in the search wars any day now, and are hoping for a nice bounce.

Google Blog Speaks On China News Controversy

Google’s Blog has issued a statement on the recent controversy on Google News China blocking certain sites. Nothing new, but a blog post definetly is more personal and pacifies the masses better than a press release. Good for them.

Bloglines Web Services Aims To Solve Major Blog Problem

One issue operators of blogs face is that all those people out there accessing their RSS feeds can really eat up bandwidth and make your web hosting unaffordable. Bloglines has always been very good at helping ease the problem, by making it so that Bloglines accesses all the RSS feeds for all of its customers, meaning the thousands of Bloglines users only count as one user in terms of RSS scraping. Now, other RSS readers can access Bloglines RSS cache through Bloglines Web Services, further increasing the number of computers that aren’t downloading the same RSS feeds over and over again. Bloglines aims to have most RSS traffic go through them, instead of John Q. Webhosting. Great idea, and a great service, guys!

(via Geeking With Greg)

This Day In Google

You can use this handy applet to find out what happened today. The search returns three results about what happened to practically anybody on that given day, and you can add a keyword to restrict the search to a subject. Very fun. I found out that on my birthday, Andre the Giant defeated Kamala. Fascinating stuff.

(via The Presurfer > A Welsh View)

Free Hotmail – Outlook Integration Going Away

Miscrosoft is frantically revamping Hotmail in an attempt to retain users who may be lured by Gmail. The upgraded Hotmail is slowly being released, but Microsoft is taking away one feature: Free access of your Hotmail account from Outlook and Outlook Express. That is quite a shame, especially since it means users can no longer use Outlook to export Hotmail contacts, as many have in the past. I can’t blame Microsoft for doing it. It goes against their strategy of integrating products into Windows, but it is still a premium feature. Paid users will still be able to use Outlook.

(via Ars Technica)

Will GBrowser Spawn MBrowser?

Microsoft Watch wonders that if Google releases Gbrowser, will Microsoft respond with a standalone internet browser? Its an interesting idea.