Year: 2006

Search queries vs. search referrals

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

Don Dodge talks about discrepancies in reports of search market share. Apparently, Google has an estimated ~45% market share of search queries (according to ComScore), but many site owners see more than 70% of their search referrals coming from Google.

Why such a big discrepancy? Don speculates:

Search referrals are different than number of searches performed. Rich, Jeremy, and I are measuring search referrals to our sites, versus market share for the number of total searches performed.  You have to ask yourself, how important are searches that didn’t lead to a referral? Meaning, the searcher didn’t actually click on a result.

Sounds to me like a very Microsftian way to asking this question… isn’t the real reason this –

The quality of Google’s search results is superior to the other engines, thus for every X queries conducted a lot more clicks/referrals (=good search results) occur on Google than do on the competing engines…

Am I missing anything?…

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Yahoo, Newspapers and Quigo

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

Finally some good news for Yahoo… Today it announced a partnership with 176 newspapers. Coverage on TechCrunch, NY Times, PaidContent, and others.

From the NY Times:

A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology…

This sounds to me a little like the beginning of the "Switzerland Inc." that Tom Mohr (ex-President of Knight Ridder) described in his manifesto a few months ago (this very important doc is behind a password on Editor&Publisher… urrggghhh! No link love here!… see Greg Sterling’s blog for some snippets).

From it:

To win, industry
leaders must adopt a Marshall Plan embodying two key objectives: the
migration to common platforms, and the acquisition of the ability to
sell top-quality online product to our advertisers. To fulfill these
objectives, the independent companies of a proud industry must
aggregate into an industry-wide network. In this network, each company
must cede some control over its digital future into a “Switzerland”
organization that manages the network.

Seems like Yahoo is now tackling some of the pieces of the first part – offering common technology platforms for classifieds, maps, etc.

On the second part, Quigo (full disclosure: which I founded, and am employed at) is the undisputed leader. As the NAA recently pointed out in a research called "Online Newspapers’ Response to Google":

"…Quigo easily took the category, having affiliations with half the respondents."

With Yahoo handling the classifieds/syndication/maps areas, and Quigo handling the performance-based advertising, it seems like the newspapers are starting to put together those building blocks for creating a Switzerland Inc. that will survive (and hopefully thrive!) through the Google storm.

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What business are you in?

Yaron Galai2 Comments

I recently watched Michael Eisner’s show on CNBC (called ‘Conversations’, I think) in which he hosted Mark Cuban.

Mark had one of the best entrepreneurial sentences I’ve ever heard:

When I bought the Mavericks, everyone in the organization thought we were in the business of basketball. But we aren’t. We’re in the business of “Honey, what do you want to do tonight?”

Bingo!!

Photo credit: JD Lasica (link below)

It’s so easy to describe what business *you* think you’re in. The trick is to define the business *your customers* see you in. It’s not about what your product does, or which cool features it has. It’s all about understanding which piece of attention of your customers you’re fighting for, and who are the others trying to get that same slice of attention.

This has got to be the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make (and I’m speaking from personal experience…) – falling in love with their product/features and believing that the product is the business they’re in. This must be the silent killer of startups because it’s such a huge mistake that’s so easy to go unnoticeable…

Cuban, as usual, nails it.

{Image CC – JD Lasica. Thanks!}

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