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Greplin’s Chrome Extension Now Makes Gmail Search Infinitely Better

Gmail is arguably the best web-based email client out there, but it’s far from perfect. Just navigating your inbox (particularly when it’s a big one) can be an exercise in frustration… and then there’s Gmail Search, which is just painful. Wait times of 30-40 seconds aren’t unheard of, to the point that it’s becoming the butt of jokes (what can you do in the time it takes to run a Gmail search?)
Enter Greplin, the Sequoia-funded startup that’s looking to search all of your online data from a single search box. Today the company is upgrading its Chrome browser extension to take that search box with you, and they’re starting with Gmail. Put another way: they’re finally making Gmail Search work well.
To get set up, you’ll first need to install the plugin and sign up for a Greplin account, then connect that account to your Gmail (and any other supported services you might use, like Facebook and Evernote). Next, log into your Gmail as usual and you’ll notice a subtle change: the search box will have a small, grayed-out magnifying glass. Click it, and you’ll activate Greplin search.
In my testing so far, Greplin search has bested the default results in almost every way. They’re faster (they take less than a second to pop up, as opposed to the 20+ seconds you can run into on Gmail). And once you’ve started searching, you’ll notice that tweaks to your query show up in real-time as you type each character, the same way they do on Google Instant. And it shows results for partial-word matches (“Tech” would match for both “Technology” and “TechCrunch”) — which Gmail doesn’t do. The one thing I noticed that Greplin doesn’t do yet is spelling correction, but partial matching is often more helpful, anyway.
This is Gmail search the way it should be.
Of course, there’s one possible issue for those of you who are concerned about your privacy — because Greplin needs to index your emails for quick searching, it has to actually store your messages. Most people probably don’t care about this, and the service has everything riding on its ability to keep your data secure, but it’s something to keep in mind.
I spoke to cofounder Daniel Gross and asked him how exactly Greplin could return these results so much faster than Google could. Gross said he didn’t have much insight into the way Google runs things, but points out that Greplin is focusing exclusively on search, while the Gmail team has to spread its attention across a much bigger product.
I also asked him how much delay there was before new email messages would appear in my Greplin index (which is an important factor when dealing with email). He urged me to take the ‘Greplin Challenge ‘and test it for myself. So I did — a message with 500k of attachments showed up in my search results within a second of receiving it. Not too shabby.
Greplin’s Chrome extension launched earlier this week, but this Gmail functionality is new — and it’s going to get even better. Gross didn’t give any specifics, but it sounds like Greplin users will be able to ‘replace’ search boxes on more services in the future.

MOAT: A Search Engine For Ads, And So Much More

If you work in online advertising, until recently there hasn’t been a very good way to find out which ads are running across the Internet. Search engines like Google index the underlying web pages, and strip out the display ads. But if you work at an ad agency or are a sales guy at an online publisher getting ready for a meeting with a big brand, it helps to know what display ads they are running. You could click the refresh button on a bunch of big sites a few dozen times, or you can go to Moat, which is a search engine for display ads.

Type in Apple, Android, or Blackberry, and it shows you all the creative ad units running right now across the web. It’s a pretty handy tool for anyone in the industry, or even casual observers.

But the ad search engine is just eye candy. Moat is working on so much more, including heatmap engagement analytics and a crowdsourced marketplace for display ad designers. The New York City startup is self-funded with $3 million from co-founders Jonah and Noah Goodhart (who are brothers), and Mike Walrath. All three were involved with Right Media, the ad exchange Yahoo bought for $850 million in 2007 (Walrath was the founder and CEO, and the Goodharts were investors).

“Part of the problem with digital advertising,” says Walrath, “is that we think we know what is happening with an ad and what makes it successful. Right now, all you have are clicks and conversions.” Walrath thinks the industry is measuring the wrong things: impressions on one end, and clicks on the other. Big brand advertisers care more about attention. (Walrath has discussed this before on Founder Stories).

Moat has a proxy for attention. It can generate a heat map of where people hover their mouse over an ad, and where they click as well. What you end up with is something like the heatmap shown above for HauteLook. An image of a woman in the ad, while more attractive, turned out to be too distracting, whereas an image of a shoe results in 2.6 times more clicks on the join button. Moat offers these heatmap analytics to brand advertisers, to help them figure out which display ads are the most engaging and to give them tools to fix the ones that are not working.

According to Jonah Goodhart, typical clickthrough rates on display ads are less than 10 out of every 10,000 visitors (or 0.1%), whereas about 500 of every 10,000 people (5%) spend at least half a second hovering their mouse over an ad, and 1,000 out of 10,000 (10%) touch the ad in some fashion without clicking on it. Moat wants to capture all of this data and deliver it to marketers so that they can test different images and wording in their display ads just like they do today with keyword search ads. The answer in display is to just make the ads bigger, instead of changing the elements inside the ad.

The final piece of the puzzle is a crowdsourced marketplace of designers that advertisers can tap to pump out different versions of their display ads. Each designer will be rated and ranked and placed into different categories. The marketplace for display ad designers was actually the initial idea for the company, but the founders realized that they first needed to provide a better way to measure engagement.

Yahoo Pointing Finger At Microsoft For Search Revenue Shortfall

Yahoo had another lousy quarter. Revenues were down 6 percent, profits were down 28 percent. What’s more, it’s search partnership with Microsoft isn’t going so great. And the finger pointing is starting.

In a very detailed analysis, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land charts the decline of Yahoo’s search revenues over the past two years. What he calls “net search revenues” (the money Yahoo gets to keep after paying off partners) is down 35 percent from a peak of $551 million two years ago to $357 million. He shows the decline in this first chart below.

During the last two quarters, Microsoft has taken over Yahoo’s U.S. search advertising in return eventually for 12 percent of Yahoos’ search revenues. The red line shows what Yahoo got to keep after paying Microsoft, and the blue line is what it makes off of search before paying Microsoft. That blue line is down 8 percent in the last two quarters You can see the gap between the red and the blue lines in the second chart below.

Remember, handing over search to Microsoft was supposed to come with all sorts of benefits like lower costs and more money for Yahoo.

But the deal is not working out as planned, and Yahoo blames Microsoft. It’s not quite where it should be yet in terms of its revenue per search. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said during the earnings conference call:

On the downside, however, adCenter isn’t yet producing the RPS [revenue per search] we hoped for and are confident as possible.

In other words, Microsoft is under-monetizing. And organic search results from Bing apparently are too good, which makes people click the paid search ads even less. Even Yahoo’s inflated search market share figures (due to slideshows and other forced search methods) weren’t enough to generate more revenues.

Human-Curated Search Engine Blekko Adds Facebook Comments To Its Search Results

Ever since its launch in November 2010, Blekko has been on a mission to eliminate spam and content farms from search results. The human-curated search engine, which is also known both for using actual mammals to edit search results and for its employ of slashtags for easy categorization, announced in March that it had banned over 1 million spammy domain names from its site. Using a new algorithm it calls “AdSpam”, Blekko investigates the quality of a doman’s content, as well as the type of ads it includes, to identify those of the lowest quality. Those that don’t pass muster get the boot — which should be music to any searcher’s ears.

Now, whether or not Blekko can compete with the Googles of the world in the long-term remains to be seen, but I hope so. You might say that Google has rested on its laurels for a bit too long, and, in the meantime, Blekko seems to have been taking the necessary steps to make search a more pleasurable and less spam-loaded experience. Search is desperately in need of a fresh and holistic approach. And, today, Blekko is further rounding-out its competitive engine by going social, announcing that it will be integrating Facebook comments into its results pages.

Considering that the Facebook News Feed has become an extremely popular source for link-sharing, updates, and social commentary — and Facebook Connect now practically blankets the Web — the social network is a logical partner for Blekko. And it gives it that much-envied social flair it had been lacking.

But, how does it work? Using Blekko’s Facebook integration is easy: You simply connect with your Facebook account on the Blekko homepage, and go about your normal searching. The major difference, though, is that when you type “TechCrunch” into the search bar, you’ll still the same search results you would otherwise; yet, now, all mentions of TechCrunch in your Facebook news feed (and thereby mentioned in your friends’ feeds) populate the right column. Look out!

You can also use a hashtag in the Blekko search bar (“/facebook”), and the engine will serve you with results from your Facebook comments and those of your friends. There’s also a box above your Facebook comment results in the right sidebar that allows you to post directly to your wall.

Blekko search was already pretty fantastic, if just for low spam counts, so why the integration? “The Web is increasingly a social experience and search has got to get more social too”, said Blekko Mastermind and CEO Rich Skrenta. “This brings the social graph and social commentary right to the results page. Because what your friend says about information is as important as any expert’s advice could ever be.”

I haven’t yet been totally convinced by the social recommendation evangelists that I’m better off hearing suggestions from my friends than a group of experts, but the social wave has crested, and it’s impossible to avoid. Get on the bandwagon, or get out of the way.

After all, my friends do know what kind of pizza I like, so if I happen to be searching for pizza places on Blekko, this will likely enhance Blekko’s search results. And, on the flip side, though my gut reaction would be to think that search results for something more obscure like, say, “translational research in neuroscience” might not exactly be augmented by the Facebook peanut gallery. But maybe one of my friends happens to be studying that very thing in med school.

Regardless, this is a smart (and logical) move for Blekko, especially considering that it began leveraging Facebook Likes in its search parameters earlier this year. Users who login to Blekko with Facebook can see whether or not their Facebook friends “like” particular search results. Users can also refine their results by opting to search only those sites that have been “liked” by their friends. At first glance, this idea seems fantastic, but it’s really only useful if your friends (in the former example) are actually using Blekko and (in the latter) if they are frequent users of the like button.

In the end, I applaud Blekko’s efforts to become more social, and look forward to (what I hope) is its inevitable integration with Twitter. Not that you asked. Combining actual human editors with intelligent anti-spamming algorithms is a dynamic combo for search. So, here’s to hoping that Blekko gets the kind of user adoption it needs to reach the tipping point and give Google (and Bing) a run for their respective monies.

IAB: Internet Advertising Reached $26 Billion In 2010, Display Grew Twice As Fast As Search

The Internet Advertising Bureau released its numbers for 2010 (PDF). Last year, online advertising in the U.S. grew 15 percent to $26 billion. After a 3 percent dip in 2009, growth resumed in 2010, hitting a record high. Industry revenue in the fourth quarter alone hit $7.45 billion.

Search still made up 46 percent of that total, followed by display ads at 38 percent.But display advertising grew twice as fast as search (24 percent growth versus 12 percent). Search advertising in the U.S. totalled $12 billion, with display closing the gap at $9.9 billion.

Video advertising (which is counted as part of display) now makes up 5 percent of the total. It jumped 40 percent to $1.4 billion. This was also the first year that the IAB is estimating mobile display advertising revenue between $550 million and $650 million.

Compared to other forms of advertising, Internet advertising surpassed newspaper ads in the U.S. last year ($22.8 billion) and is now second only to TV ($28.6 billion)

Here is the breakdown below

View the original article here

Peliculas Online

Take Out Slideshows And Other Forced Search, And Bing’s Market Share Isn’t Quite 30 Percent

A couple days ago, the headlines blared that Bing now has 30 percent search market share in the U.S. Not so fast. Those numbers were based on Hitwise estimates. Today, comScore came out with its own qsearch estimates, which is what Wall Street analysts following Google report. The comScore numbers tell a slightly different story.
If you include all searches, then the combined market share of Bing (13.3 percent) and Yahoo (17.7 percent), which is powered by Bing, is indeed 31 percent. But this “core” search number includes Google slideshows, contextual search in places like Yahoo News, and Google Instant. Every time you go through a slideshow on Yahoo, for instance, related search results appear below, inflating its numbers.
But ComScore strips out those numbers to come up with what it calls “explicit search” (you know, when someone actually types a query into a search box). When you look at explicit search, Bing and Yahoo combined only had 29.5 percent market share in the first quarter of 2011, which is up from 28.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. So Bing is making gains at the expense of Google, whose explicit search share in the first quarter was 65.6 percent, down from 66.4 percent in the fourth quarter, or almost a full point. But it hasn’t quite reached 30 percent yet.
Bing also keeps taking share from Yahoo, which ends up being a wash. Over the past nine months, Bing has gained nearly 3 percentage points in explicit search share, but half of that has come from Yahoo.
In March, 2011, Bing reached 13.9 percent, while Yahoo dropped to 15.7 percent, for a combined total of 29.6 percent share, which is actually down 0.1 percent from February. Google’s explicit search market share in March was 65.7 percent, up 0.3 percent from February, and pretty much flat with nine months ago.
The table below is courtesy of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney: