Content Matters

People search engine Spock.com has opened up their beta to the public.

I previously described Spock as "ZoomInfo meets LinkedIn".  At its most basic, Spock is a vertical search engine focused on people.

Spock leverages existing social networks to build its database.  When you first register, it invites you to upload your address book from Plaxo, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL.  This helps them quickly develop a current database of people.

Spock automatically tags each entry, leveraging keywords which show up in your data.  Spock leverages crowdsourcing to improve its tags - users can vote tags up and down based upon relevance. 

While social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have garnered much of the recent attention, often you just need to find somebody - either by name, by company or job function.  Vertical search engines like Spock and ZoomInfo are incredibly useful for this task.  While you may not spend hours on Spock, adding apps and posting your favorites, it's likely you'll visit frequently when prospecting or recruiting.

Note: Spock.com apparently received more traffic than it expected today, on its first day of the open beta.  So, if performance seems sluggish, give them a couple of days to get things worked out.

Page 3 article in today's Sunday Times profiles Mahalo and the opportunities for human-assisted search.

Nothing new in the article; just a quick review of how valuable the search market is and that, despite its current position, there are still companies looking to challenge Google. 

I'm still not sure how Mahalo will scale, but it's a pretty interesting experiment and is worth watching.

Alacra launched its first vertical search engine, Portal B, almost eight years ago.  That was before Google became a household name and a time when Alta Vista was considered the best search engine.

While Google has driven great advancements in general search, it's still largely a consumer search engine.  For business users, there are many searches which Google can not easily handle, for example:

• What have UK consultancies written about backdating stock options?
• Which law firms are involved in asbestos litigation
• Which VCs have portfolio companies involved in social networks?

To help business users address these and other searches for which consumer search engines like Google are less effective, Alacra has created AlacraSearch, a vertical search engine which leverages Google Co-op's Custom Search Engines.  AlacraSearch is a free web search engine and is also included within Alacra Premium.

To access AlacraSearch, visit www.alacra.com/AlacraSearch.

For more information on AlacraSearch, read Steve's post on the Alacra Blog.

There’s little doubt that search has improved over the past ten years.  The jump from Alta Vista to Google in the late 90’s represented a seismic improvement.  Yet, in recent years, the rate of improvement has slowed and with spam sites, affiliate marketing and improved SEO, you could make a strong argument that the quality of search has declined.

Many are awaiting the semantic web as the next major shift in search.  But while semantic search holds promise, today its deployment remains limited to niche applications.  Having worked with semantic technologies for years, I believe that they are many years away impacting mainstream use.

Jason Calacanis has released an alpha version of Mahalo, a new search engine designed to bridge the gap.  Mahalo is a search engine that combines the best of search, user-generated content and old-fashioned editing.  To bootstrap Mahalo, the first 10,000 search terms are being hand-written by guides.  Mahalo result pages look more like a wiki than a Google search engine results page.  These landing pages are designed to help you navigate content, rather than just listing the pages that scored the highest.  Like wikipedia, search terms with multiple meanings are presented with options to help the user disambiguate the results.  Mahalo adds social software capabilities to the mix.  Users can comment on each page and Mahalo also offers a Digg-like “Top 7 bookmark” feature. 

Whether or not Mahalo ultimately succeeds, the human-assist model makes a lot of sense.  Tagging providers, like ClearForest, found much of their value came in combining human judgment with technology.

Using guides to build results pages is not a new concept; it was the basis of some of the earliest web search applications such as LookSmart.  The challenge of this model is to build the pages on a cost-effective basis.  Only time will tell if Mahalo can achieve that for the broad set of topics and search terms required for a general search engine.  But for content providers with strong presence in niche markets, the Mahalo model could be a compelling one.  While a general search engine will need to define results for hundreds of thousands of terms, within a vertical market, you may cover all the common searches with a fraction of that.  I have long argued that vertical search is a great fit for content companies, who typically understand niche markets and have editorial skills which can be used to gather and organize information.

Internet search, driven by semantic analysis may be the holy grail of information retrieval.  In the meantime, human-assisted search may provide a compelling user experience.

UPDATE: To accelerate Mahalo's expansion, Jason has created the Mahalo Greenhouse, which allows users to get paid for development of new terms.  Further details are available on Jason's blog.  SearchEngineLand adds their thoughts, including whether or not Mahalo is comparable to Seth Godin's Squidoo (along with Jason's compelling retort in the comments).

Ask.com, the perennial 3rd runner up in the search wars, has launched a completely new search interface today. 

Called Ask3D, the results page is split into three main panels.  The primary (center) panel lists traditional search results.  The left panel provides contextual links, based upon the type of search you've done.  For example, a search for singer Amy Winehouse offers links to narrow your search to Amy Winehouse Lyrics on the left panel, while a search for  Balkans lets you narrow your search to  Balkans countries, Balkans  Map and Balkans History; expand your search to the Triple Alliance or Triple Entente; or find related names such as Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the Austrian leader, not the indie band).  The right panel provides contextual links to images, news images, wikipedia entries, music clips (from iLike) and more.

In the new UI, Ask also moves the search box from the traditional center position to the top of the left panel.  This has a few benefits: first, you get more results above the fold, as you don't have a search box taking up a third of the space; more importantly, this enables them to use the left panel for the navigational links described above. 

Ask 3D also provides strong autocomplete capabilities, so when you type in a search term, you get relevant potential searches each time.  These autocomplete entries provide context, not simply a list of keywords.  For example, when I type "Franz Ferdin", I see options for Franz Ferdinand the band, Franz Ferdinand lyrics, Franz Ferdinand assassination and more.

Multi-paneled SERPs are not new.  A9 and others have offered these for a while.  But Ask 3D really embraces the idea of a new UI, providing unique functionality by type of content.  You can roll over images to see them enlarged or listen to a music clip directly on the results page.  While Google, Yahoo, Technorati and others have released recent changes, Ask's effort is clearly the most revolutionary.  Of course, as John Battelle points out, it's easier to take risks when you're #4 than when you're the leader.

With 5% of the search market, Ask has a long climb ahead of it.  While it will take more than a new UI to move up in the pack, the new interface may make Ask more suited for specific types of searches, such as entertainment.  Time will tell if this new interface helps Ask make more inroads.

People data has long been a solid niche in the content industry.  Multiple times in my career (particularly at Nelson and Leadership Directories), I’ve developed products built around people data.

While this segment has been changing over the past five years, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically during the past 12-18 months, and the traditional business models are quickly becoming obsolete. 

In recent weeks, there have been a few compelling new entries in this market.  For the traditional providers, the biggest short-term threat probably comes from the new partnership between Capital IQ and sister company Business Week.   The new Company Insight Center on Business Week’s website provides snapshots of both public and private companies.  The People section includes fairly accurate lists of officers and directors and also shows “degree of separation” relationships among board members for social networking.

In essence, Capital IQ is now providing for free a product that paid content providers have been selling for tens of thousands of dollars.  While the user interface of this beta version could use some improvement, that’s pretty easy to fix. 

In the longer term, the trend that’s likely to have a much greater impact is a paradigm shift to accessing people data through search.  Traditional providers have built proprietary (and often complex) user interfaces to view their data.  In an effort to address every potential user need (list building, views of complex organizational structures, sharing of user edits and more), vendors developed systems that were not intuitive and often required training of end-users.

But in today’s environment, users don’t want proprietary interfaces.  They don’t want to read documentation or sit through training sessions.  Users have already found a user interface which they like and it’s called Google.  I can hear the response of the traditional vendors - Google is too simplistic and can’t do all of the fantastic things which your proprietary interfaces allow.  Well, that may be true, but it’s the interface that the world has embraced and if your system is more complex, you’re going to be left behind.

The emerging providers are viewing this market as a vertical search issue.  ZoomInfo and LinkedIn were the first to take this approach.  New providers like Wink and Explode have launched compelling offerings.  Perhaps most interesting is a new site (still in early beta) called Spock.  Spock is sort of “ZoomInfo meets LinkedIn”, with a Web 2.0 interface which incorporates tagging and other community features.  When you first join Spock, it asks you for your ID and password to LinkedIn, Plaxo, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL.  It uses this information to scrape your existing network, adding that information to your Spock profile.  Spock automatically tags your profile, using term extraction to identify companies, titles and industry terms that represent you.  Users can “vote” as to whether the tags accurately represent the person, creating a tag cloud for each person. (Note: I will do a more comprehensive review of Spock in an upcoming post.)

The people data market is going through a transformation similar to that which affected news content a few years ago.  Contact and biographical data are rapidly becoming commodities and the next six to twelve months are sure to bring more disruption to this market.

Most of the traditional players in this market have built their business by identifying a niche which they can fill better than anyone else.  At Nelson, we knew industry specialties for buy and sell-side analysts; at Leadership, we could tell you which committee staffer had an interest in a particular subject.  But the dirty secret for most of these providers is that the core application typically accounted for only a third to half of their customer base.  The rest of the customers were just looking for lists for sales prospecting or recruitment.   While the emerging products may never be deep enough to steal away the core users, they are already getting good enough to pull off the ancillary user and will only get better.  So, if you’re trying to project 2010 revenues for one of the traditional players, there’s a pretty easy formula.  Just estimate about a third to half of their 2000 revenues and you’ll probably be on target.

Agree?  Disagree?  I'd love to hear.  Please post your comments.

Vertical search engine ZoomInfo relaunched itself earlier this week.  The company, whose primary focus has been as a vertical search engine for biographical and people information, has struggled to this point in identifying a profitable revenue model.

In its relaunch, ZoomInfo now describes itself as a more general business search engine.  Their new business model has a free basic service, utilizing Google Adsense for advertising revenue.  A premium offering, ZoomExec, provides executive profiles of more than 1.3M people, for $99 per month.  At that price point, they are clearly looking to take low-end market share from companies like Hoovers and Leadership Directories.

The new interface is clean and easy-to-use.  When you first land on their site, you see a (static) Tag Cloud, but it seems more an attempt to look Web 2.0 than to actually incorporate any useful Web 2.0 capabilities.

As John Blossom points out, one major change in the new UI is their default to searching keywords rather than companies.  The Company search is still available, but the default is keyword. 

A few test searches yielded fairly accurate results.  ZoomInfo also provides you the ability to refine your search using geographic or revenue information or by selecting related terms.  It's clear that they have invested some efforts in developing strong taxonomy and clustering tools. 

ZoomInfo's crawling and semantic analysis technology has enabled it to build a fairly sizable database of company and people data.  To date, they have faced two challenges.  First, is the issue of accuracy.  ZoomInfo claims to have continually improved their accuracy, but a quick search for Alacra shows they still have our old address (now at least 18 months out of date).  Of course, for many users, 70-80% accuracy at the right price is good enough.  The second and more significant challenge is positioning themselves to the market.  Their earlier incarnation, as a people search engine, allowed them to make strong inroads in the recruitment market, but not as a more mainstream application.  Repositioning themselves as a general business search engine might be a bit too broad in my opinion, but a freemium model, with free content supported by ads plus premium offerings, is certainly the right direction.

Monday afternoon at BSeC, we held a series of “Knowledge Cafes”.  This session was a new format, based upon a discussion format by David Gurteen.

The format of a Knowledge Café is to have a facilitator provide a brief (5-10 minute) introduction to a topic, then split the participants into small groups of 4-5 people each, to have their own discussion around it.  After 30-40 minutes, you then bring together the members of the individual discussion groups into a larger group to continue the discussion.

I had the pleasure of leading a Knowledge Café on Vertical Search, with about 15-18 participants.

We talked about how the quality of GYM search was diminishing, with shopping and spam sites dominating results.  While no one will likely displace Google for consumer search, there are many opportunities for vertical search, particularly topical search.

It was also discussed how publishers were well-suited to vertical search, as they can leverage their understanding of niche markets and their editorial expertise in site selection and tagging.

The group agreed that the biggest challenge to building an effective vertical search engine was in the tagging and development of taxonomies and ontologies.  It was suggested that those interested in vertical search should invest an hour or so building one using the free Google Co-op Custom Search Engines.  This will let them learn about the process, while also seeing some of the challenges.

The new Knowledge Café format seemed to be much more effective than the larger discussion groups of the past.  Thanks to Dick Kaser and David Gurteen for introducing the new format.

Last week, Shore Communications released the 2007 edition of its Content Industry Outlook.

The publication, available for free download, starts with a look back at 2006, then provides guidance for the trends they anticipate dominating 2007.  They note a coming shift in 2007, where the rise of social media and vertical search may begin to shift the balance of power slightly away from Google.  No doubt Google will still be the dominant player, but these new entries create new opportunity.

Shore describes their "Seven A's" for 2007: Answers, Audience, Aggregation, APIs, Alternatives, Acceleration and Asia. 
The Answers market has been building off the social media frenzy, with Yahoo, LinkedIn and many others getting into the space, even as Google has left it.  Shore describes the New Aggregation, where platforms that allow integration of internal, external and community-based content will find success, leveraging RSS and social media.  APIs and Widgets will also be critical in that path as content providers who continue to force their users towards closed, proprietary platforms will find new markets closed to them.

John Blossom and the Shore team always do a great job of staying on top of (and in front of) the trends.  The pace of change continues to increase, and some of the trends Shore talks about will certainly have bottom-line impact for content providers in 2007 and 2008.

Danny Sullivan, search engine guru and longtime editor of Search Engine Watch (acquired by Incisive Media this summer), has announced the formation of his new blog platform to be entitled Search Engine Land. 
While the name may conjure images of "Toto, I don't think we're in Sunnyvale anymore", the content itself will surely be top notch (and, let's face it, the available domains which include the term "search engine" are pretty limited by now).  Danny has partnered with "Paradox of Choice" author Barry Schwartz and SEW alum Chris Sherman to write content for the blog.
The official launch will be December 11.  In the meantime, if you can't wait to read Danny's thoughts, you can see his personal blog, Daggle (I especially like the Stonehenge pictures).
Best of luck to Danny, Barry and Chris with their new venture.