It’s hard to resist writing about a piece of news like Danny Sullivan leaving Search Engine Watch. Danny is one of the "founding fathers", so to speak, of the search marketing industry - and Search Engine Watch was his brain-child. Although the activities at Search Engine Watch - blogging, article-writing and forum discussions - will continue forward under new management, the absence of Danny’s characteristic voice will certainly be noticed.
I’m far from the most qualified to write about this - I’ve never met Danny, so really I’m just going to point to a few other sources:
He’ll still be busy - the Daily Search Cast will continue at it’s new location, and it’s hard to imagine that he won’t either be snatched up by some search company or start his own. Watch Daggle.com for information on Danny’s new activities!
So, Google has taken one more step towards providing a full-service online application service. Now making Google Apps for your domain available, which includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator you’re looking at a branded site service enabling inter-office and extra-office communications, group calendaring, and web publishing within your organization - all very handy tools which are not frequently available at this kind of cost level.
Of course, their information pages do say that there is no premium edition:
Is there a premium version of this service?
Not at this time. However, if your organization has advanced needs not met by this free service, let us know and we’ll get in touch when a premium service is available for your organization.
But I think we can all pretty easily see the possibilities available with the expansion of Google Spreadsheets and Writely - or future related products. As has been observed by several people around the blogosphere, this project seems to be targeting the enterprise desktop market using a service business model.
It’s also very easy to see the appeal of a service model of office software. This could certainly relieve some of the burden on IT departments to maintain licenses, install and reinstall software, and maintain support for diverse products. Of course, many IT departments have gotten to the level where this kind of maintenance is highly routinized - nevertheless, the appeal can’t be ignored.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of takeup the service has - will this be primarily appealing to mid-sized businesses with undersized IT departments, large corporations, small business owners? Will the targeted education market like the idea? Who knows…in many cases, the lack of control of their own hardware and data centers may sway IT directors away from the product.
I can’t even guess, really…
Yesterday, Tim Converse wrote a very interesting article discussing the “>challenges of discerning the difference between quality aggregation of content and spam. This task can be a major challenge for search engines - what baseline decides the difference between a resource like Google News and your average feed scraper?
Google news provides excellent, high-quality results and has stringent requirements for news providers. Average feed scrapers scrape, well, whatever they can find. But can an algorithm tell the difference?
Tim notes, in particular, the interesting recursive nature of searching aggregators. Since many aggregators are scraping results from other search engines, it’s not impossible to have some very complex results.
As an in-between case ask yourself this: if you’re doing a websearch (on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, …) do you want any of the results to be … search-result pages themselves (from Google, Yahoo!, MSN)? That is, if you search for “snorklewacker” on MSN web search, and you click on result #4, do you want to find yourself looking at a websearch results page for “snorklewacker” on Yahoo! Search, which in turn has (as result #3) the Google search results page for “snorklewacker”?
Altogether, an interesting question - no really conclusive answers, however.