MarketMe 2.0

Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google’s heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.

The letter highlights the fact that, weeks ago, several privacy groups asked Google to play up the privacy policy on its start page. The search giant didn’t immediately add the link.

So Ask, the No. 4 search company, said Wednesday that it will take the step first.

“As of today, Ask.com has added a direct link to our privacy policy via a ‘Privacy’ link prominently placed right on our homepage…We’ve also made sure that the ‘Privacy’ link appears on the landing pages across most of Ask’s verticals as well, which cover almost all of Ask’s search traffic,” according to its letter.

The company put a fine point on the act, too: “We strongly encourage others in the search marketplace and online industry to do the same.”

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Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google’s heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.

The letter highlights the fact that, weeks ago, several privacy groups asked Google to play up the privacy policy on its start page. The search giant didn’t immediately add the link.

So Ask, the No. 4 search company, said Wednesday that it will take the step first.

“As of today, Ask.com has added a direct link to our privacy policy via a ‘Privacy’ link prominently placed right on our homepage…We’ve also made sure that the ‘Privacy’ link appears on the landing pages across most of Ask’s verticals as well, which cover almost all of Ask’s search traffic,” according to its letter.

The company put a fine point on the act, too: “We strongly encourage others in the search marketplace and online industry to do the same.”

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Google on Wednesday added a new factor, Web page loading speed, to the criteria by which it judges which text ads to place next to search results.

The search company, which makes almost all its revenue from the text ads, gives a boost to advertisers with better ad quality. Google announced Wednesday that quality now includes a measurement of the loading speed of the Web page users see when they click on an add.

“Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ quality scores,” Google said on its Inside AdWords blog. “Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower quality scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher quality scores and lower minimum bids.”

It may sound like a minor tweak, but a lot of money flows through AdWords, and minor changes affect a huge number of companies bidding for placement next to search results.

Higher-quality ads server a variety of purposes, Google argues. For one thing, it means somebody who clicks an ad–the action that triggers payment to Google–are more likely to be satisfied. In the long run, higher quality also means that users might be less likely to ignore ads as irrelevant or annoying.

Early in its history, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set down “10 things Google knows to be true,” and one of them is “fast is better than slow.”

Google warned in March that page-load speeds would factor into quality ranking and let advertisers see how they rated beginning in April.

For more details, see the detailed Google article for advertisers on page-loading speeds.

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.

During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., who chairs the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

Kohl has previously expressed concerns that the deal between two technology search rivals could affect competition and have ramifications for advertisers and consumers. He noted the antitrust subcommittee plans to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of the deal.

Sen. Joe Barton of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee also weighed in on the issue Wednesday, issuing a statement (PDF) that expressed concern about the deal’s effect on competition in search advertising.

While Barton was not available to meet with Yang on this trip, the senator indicated he would be available next week. And also on the meet-and-greet trip was Rep. Edward Markey, chair of the Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee for the House Committee on Energy & Commerce.

Google’s slice of the U.S. search market reached 68.29 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Yahoo’s share of the market declined to 19.95 percent from 20.28 percent in the at same time.

Yahoo, however, has previously said its arrangement is non-exclusive and does not require Yahoo to use any certain number of Google ads on Yahoo’s search results page, nor does it require to give Google’s ads preferential treatment on where they appear on the right-side column of Yahoo’s search results page, where the sponsored links appear.

Yahoo is hoping to benefit from serving up advertisements on its search results pages where there are few advertising links that appear on the right-side column with relevant ads. For example, conduct a search for Fresno and spa and eight advertisements show up on Yahoo, but only two are actually for spas in Fresno. Yahoo gets its advertising dollars only if a user clicks on an actual ad, so the more relevant ads it can post on its search results page, the better its revenues.

Yahoo is hoping to use Google’s ads to populate those search results where it tends to have fewer ads. Should Yahoo have a competing ad or ads on the same search page, may the most relevant ad that can entice a user to click on it win.

Whereas Yahoo is looking to bolster its advertising inventory by allowing Google to post its ads on its search page, Google is going in the opposite direction by scaling back on the number of irrelevant ads it has on its search results page–adopting the view that less is more. The search giant on Wednesday also said it is rewarding advertisers with fast-loading advertisements.

Yahoo is giving the U.S. Department of Justice three-and-half months to review its Google partnership, before it implements the search advertising partnership. Regulators, however, may find it more useful to evaluate the partnership after it’s been implemented when they can assess the before and after effect.

Yahoo, meanwhile, also addressed privacy concerns raised by the legislators.

“Yahoo is deeply committed to building on our established trust with users by continuing to provide clear, comprehensive privacy policies. We structured the agreement with Google so that Yahoo will not transfer any personally identifiable information to Google without user consent,” Yahoo said in a statement. “We have also designed this agreement so that both companies have stayed within each of their existing privacy and data policies, such as Yahoo’s policy regarding logs anonymization after 13 months.”

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Instant-messaging power users, rejoice: a barrier between two previously isolated realms of online chat is coming down.

A minor sidelight in the Yahoo-Google search ad deal announced Thursday is that the two companies “agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users,” the companies said. They’re not sharing further details at this stage, but it’s safe to bet that means people on Yahoo’s IM network will be able to chat with those on Google’s and vice-versa.

That’s a big step in the right direction.

IM is a useful if sometimes intrusive tool, especially in this day and age when the Internet has tightened ties among co-workers, family, and friends. But people and companies don’t always use the same networks, meaning that power users either must run multiple IM programs or try to bridge the divide with multiprotocol packages such as Trillian, Adium, Digsby, Kopete, or Pidgin.

IM today is similar to the early days of electronic mail, when users couldn’t send messages between incompatible services such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Happily, the Internet’s SMTP standard for e-mail emerged victorious, and now we only need one e-mail address (leaving aside the issue of personal vs. work identities, but that’s a story for another day).

A power user’s plight
I’m one of those heavy IM users tormented by today’s situation. I have to talk to people on Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Google Talk. It’s a pain having separate usernames for each service, but much worse is looking for software that centralizes IM for me.

I recognize I’m not a representative sample of the population at large. I have 797 buddies, many of them the same people represented on multiple services.

AOL said in a statement, in effect, that I am indeed an anomaly. “We have no evidence that interoperating with other consumer IM services is of great interest to AIM users,” the company said.

But I’ve seen the problem worsen in the years I’ve used IM, and I believe mainstream people will encounter this problem with greater frequency as they change jobs, graduate from schools, meet new friends, and otherwise expand their social horizons.

Walled gardens
There are signs that these days are numbered. As Internet companies race to build rich communities and services on the Web, “walled gardens” have become widely disparaged as a relic.

Yahoo, for example, has pledged to expose formerly closed parts of its business through its Yahoo Open Strategy. And AOL is opening up AIM some, for example, letting Meebo and eBuddy link up.

But it’ll take awhile to convince me that the IM walls are truly coming down.

For one thing, most of the progress to date has been through interoperability agreements that permit one service to link with another. That’s like CompuServe building a custom gateway to translate and route e-mail from AOL–helpful, but symptomatic of the larger problem. The more IM services there are, the more gateways each service needs to work with the others, and more services are cropping up as companies such as MySpace, Skype, and Facebook add chat abilities.

What we really need is an IM communication standard. The obvious candidate is the XMPP protocol on which Google built its service but that none of the other major players use.

Google, unsurprisingly, shares my view. “The Web is based on open standards and protocols so users can use any browser on any operating system to visit any Web site. We think the open Web model ought to apply to IM,” Seth Demsey, senior product manager for Google Talk, said in a statement.

Of course, it’s a lot easier for underdogs to endorse standards, and Google has 1 percent share of IM users worldwide, according to ComScore figures in April.

Interoperability isn’t easy
To be fair, IM interoperability isn’t an easy technical problem to tackle for mammoth services with millions of users and messages. There also are privacy issues when one service is sharing data and buddy lists with another.

More complicated are higher-level features and services that IM companies have added atop basic text chat: status messages, avatars, file transfer, voice and video chat, message forwarding to mobile phones. I think there’s still value to unifying basic text chat even if higher-level features remain fragmented.

Then, of course, there are business reasons to keep things separate. Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft all display ads on their services, and AOL is trying to make its service into a foundation on which programmers will create online applications. Opening up IM connections to other services means, for example, that someone using AIM might not see the ads displayed on the AIM software.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if a unified IM landscape might spur faster growth and more extensive use of IM services–factors that mean those people using popular chat software could spend even more time gazing at ads.

Other interoperability deals
There are some other interoperability deals besides the Yahoo-Google one announced Thursday. Most notably, users of Microsoft and Yahoo instant-messenger services can link up and chat if they’re using recent versions of the software.

And there could be more progress on this front: “Microsoft looks forward to continuing our interoperability reach to customers worldwide,” Brian Hall, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Live, said in a statement.

Users of Apple iChat can link with AIM and Google.

Google’s situation is complicated, in part because it has multiple IM options. The company offers Google Talk in two incarnations: client software that can be installed on Windows machines and a gadget that runs in a Web browser. Those versions can work with any XMPP-based chat service. (They’re not popular, so you probably haven’t heard of them.)

Google also has Gmail chat, which runs alongside the company’s Web-based e-mail service. It can work with AIM.

So tell me: Am I an anomaly because I use multiple chat networks? And how do you solve your IM needs? Does a single IM client suffice, or do you use two to cover the bases? Send an e-mail to stephen.shankland@cnet.com or share your opinion in the feedback section below.

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With the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google triangle taking a new shape as Microsoft exited and Yahoo and Google connected, the analysts covering tech industry sports are weighing in with their opinions.

Some Wall Street analysts believe Microsoft will take another run at Yahoo if the company can’t get back on track or Carl Icahn wins his proxy fight to control the Yahoo board. That may be wishful thinking. Kara Swisher reports that Microsoft is done with its courtship of Yahoo and nothing will bring them back to the negotiating table.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called the Yahoo-Google deal a massive destruction of shareholder value, employee morale, and the Interent balance of power:

Yahoo’s hatred of Microsoft runs so deep that they were actually, in the end, willing to destroy the future of their company just to keep it independent for a short while longer. They’ve ignored the wishes of their shareholders, employees and many now former key employees in killing that deal. And apart from Google, CEO Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker and possibly Tim O’Reilly, I don’t believe there is anyone in the world that is happy with what has happened.

In a further lambasting post, Arrington called Yahoo desperate and possibly neurotic:

Quite simply, it looks to me like Yahoo is effectively paying Google off to step in and (1) keep Jerry Yang, Sue Decker and the current board of directors in power, and (2) avoid a desperation deal with Microsoft for as long as possible, or longer. It’s not even clear to me that Google wants this deal, based on the terms. It almost looks like they’re just doing Yahoo a favor, and trying to keep them out of Microsoft’s hands.

At the other end of the spectrum, venture capitalist Fred Wilson thinks that Yahoo did the right thing by choosing Google over Microsoft as a partner.

Yahoo! finally woke up and did what they should have done years ago, cede search monetization to Google who simply does it better and will always do this era of search better than anyone else.

Now Yahoo! will do what it needs to do. Clean house, get lean, get out of businesses it shouldn’t be in. Focus on what it’s good at. And start making money and growing again.

They may need new leadership to do that. But selling this asset to Microsoft just because they had the wrong leadership and probably still have the wrong leadership is a mistake.

From my reading of the events over the last five months, Yang regrets that Microsoft walked away from the acquisition talks. “We all felt and understood a combination done right has a tremendous amount of power and leverage,” Yang said during an interview with Walt Mossberg at the D6 conference.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker have a challenging set of quarters coming up.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

As a founder, Yang preferred that Yahoo stay independent and that he have the chance to turn the company around as CEO. Microsoft historically was not the kind of partner that Yang considered for a marriage. And his board of directors, led by non-executive Chairman Roy Bostock, seemed to go along with that line of thought.

But the entire affair turned out to be mostly about the money, as Decker admitted. “We never got through the price door,” she stated during the same D6 interview. Yahoo’s board believed that the company was worth more than $35 per share based on future promise, and Microsoft wasn’t on the same page. In effect, Microsoft called Yahoo’s bluff.

It also wasn’t helpful that Yahoo was negotiating the search deal with Google at the same time Microsoft was pursuing its hostile bid. After months of rejection, Microsoft basically became less enchanted with the potential marriage, and despite the pummeling from the shareholders, Carl Icahn’s camp, and the press, Yang and his advisors held out for more money.

Unable to come to terms with Microsoft on a generous deal just for the search business, Yahoo took the less complicated, non-exclusive Google deal that allowed the company to remain in the search game.

As I wrote in my post “The battle for Yahoo’s soul,” Jerry Yang and Sue Decker have a short runway–about six months–to prove that they can “redefine” the essence of Yahoo in a way that yields more revenue, profit, and positive buzz. With the continuing board room distractions, employee defections, and morale issues that go along with being under siege by various parties, the duo have their work cut out for them.

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