Google has revealed a 20 per cent growth in users clicking through to paid-for ads and a 31 per cent rise in profits to $1.31bn (£655m) – surprising many industry watchers expecting less encouraging growth.
The internet giant reported a profit after tax of $1.31bn (£655m) in the three months to March, with paid clicks rising by approximately 20 per cent on the first quarter of 2007, and 4 per cent over the fourth quarter.
Guardian.co.uk has agreed a deal with blinkx to make its video content available through the search engine’s website.
News, current affairs, travel and entertainment video content from the paper’s website will be searchable on blinkx.com.
The site has also announced a partnership with EuroNews – the multilingual pan-European news channel.
In a press release Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of blinkx, said the content deals were backed by the popularity of searching for news-related videos on the web.
Under the terms of both deals advertising revenue generated by the content will be shared between partners.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s Firefox archiving plugin WebMynd.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Patrick Buckley, one of three entrepreneurs from Cambridge and MIT who have a passion for helping people find the things they are looking for on the internet.
We make a Firefox browser plug-in called WebMynd. It creates your own personal internet archive that is searchable and visual. It is a way of extending your natural memory to include what you have seen online. You won’t ever lose track of a website again because it will be in your WebMynd.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
WebMynd is a great tool for anyone who does online research because it saves web pages as you see them, not just a link. The pages you see are indexed so you can use text search to find them again.
You don’t have to do any upfront tagging, bookmarking, organizing, cutting, pasting, or screen shots. This is especially useful for obscure webpages that may change, be taken down, or would be impossible to find again using Google (very obscure, behind paywalls or logins).
When you visit a website you get a personal copy of the page as it was when you saw it. Bookmarks fail in this regard because they only save a link to a page on the internet, link rot can ensue and the page may no longer exists the way you saw it. WebMynd saves an actual page and the content for you to see again.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We have many more ideas on how to improve the experience and we are literally releasing new features weekly.
We are working on a sharing element so that people can create collections of pages with their friends or colleagues, a “Collective Mynd” that people contribute websites to and which could be great for group research.
Another feature for journalists which we are about to complete and which will work with FireFox 3.0 when it is released, is a system to surf your internet archive offline.
Any page you have seen before can be viewed without an internet connection, great for looking up old internet references when you are on a plane or away from the internet.
4) Why are you doing this?
Because bookmarking and tagging are no longer good enough systems for finding what you have seen.
5) What does it cost to use it and how will you make it pay?
In the future we may offer a premium pay for service but for now it is completely fee.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google’s resistance to using ACAP is based on ‘wanting to control’ publishers information, insisting that it is strictly a technology issues.
Speaking to iTWire, Schmidt said: “ACAP is a standard proposed by a set of people who are trying to solve the problem [of communicating content access permissions]. We have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. At present it does not fit with the way our systems operate.”
According to iTWire, Schmidt went on to deny that Google’s reluctance so far to use the rights and permissions technology was because Google wanted as few barriers as possible between online content and its search engines. “It is not that we don’t want them to be able to control their information.”
Schmidt made his comments after a tit-for-tat exchange last week in which Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of World Association of Newspaper and ACAP CEO, reacted strongly to claims made by a senior Google executive that the search engine believed ACAP was an unnecessary system and that its function could be fulfilled by existing web standards.
Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello. I’m Kristoffer Lassen. I’m the co-founder of Imooty.
Imooty is an interactive compendium of news stories from across Europe. It provides direct access to the latest breaking media coverage from the most important newspapers and media organizations based in the European Union, Switzerland and Norway.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Imooty makes it possible for users to compare and contrast vast amounts of information.
By clicking the European map, readers may browse through a particular country’s major and minor papers and blogs in English and local languages.
One can easily search for a particular term across all European papers or simply navigate by the common news topics such as politics, science, or business.
MyImooty allows users to create their own media universe. By collecting and saving the most frequently accessed news topics, you may collect your favourite sources on a single customized page. Each time you return to your page, the news is updated and sorted by subject, search terms and titles.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
The technical and conceptual goal of Imooty is not only to provide access to the latest breaking news, but also to enable a convenient way to review news archives.
With its integrated search engine, users may find specific content located in several different databases and retrieve them through a single business transaction. We’re also in the process of adding Podcast and IPTV modules.
4) Why are you doing this?
I’m Norwegian and co-founder Blaise Bourgeois is French but we are both expats living in Germany.
We are both interested in commentary and analysis of current events; however, keeping up to date on both the media landscape here in Berlin, as well as in our respective home countries was unmanageable.
So we set out to create a platform that could solve this problem. We believe that as the European Union continues its development, more people will migrate and follow news and current events in different languages from nearby countries.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Access to the latest news is free and we simply redirect traffic to the newspapers. Reklama: Bene pigiausios auto dalys internetu svetainėje UAB ŠIAULIŲ AUTODOTA As mentioned, also archived news will be searchable on the platform and such content will be displayed in the same format as the latest news (headline with a teaser text below it). Access to this information is a premium feature.
6) How will you make it pay?
Our business model is based on a combination of sales commission and advertising revenue.
Google News has developed a new feature that enables searches for location-specific news. Users can now search for items by the name of any city, state or country, or by zip code in the US .
The service is currently only available for news items in English and will promote local sources for local stories in search results, a blog post from Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna says. Reklama: Sidabriniai žiedai https://www.silvera.lt/ziedai
“We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located,” write Rohe and Ananthakrishna on the Google News blog.
More publishers are moving into the world of vertical search it would seem, as William Reed Business Media announced the launch of a specialised search engine for the food and drink industry.
According to a press release, therightinfo.co.uk will provide over 60,000 contacts and details of 40,000 companies in the industry across 30 companies, incorporating all The Grocer‘s content.
The publisher will be hoping to replicate the success of Zibb.com, the business search engine produced by Reed Business Information, which attracted around 350,000 unique users last month.
The potential of vertical search engines to wrestle web traffic away from search giants like Google was a topic of debate at yesterday’s AOP forum.
The nature of vertical search, according to the speakers, points readers towards hand-pick sources and presents results in a more dynamic and user-friendly way than the major search engines.
These could be key advantages in the battle to reclaim web traffic from Google and its contemporaries, according to speakers Jonny Orange, media and publishing account manager at Endeca, Simon Baptiste, strategic product manager at FAST, and Daniel Pollock, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc., in the audio below.
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/google2.mp3]While agreeing that publishers can ally against Google and other search engines by denying them access to content – see clip below – Graeme McCracken, chief operating officer for Reed Business Search, said Google should be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers.
[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/google1.mp3]McCracken also announced that RB’s B2B vertical search engine had attracted 350,000 unique users over the last month.
Yahoo will let widget developers run riot over its new mobile web platform, according to the Media Info Centre blog.
It also reported that Yahoo! has also unveiled a redesigned home page for mobile phones that lets users decide the content they want highlighted on the page.
It also released an upgrade to its Go software to aid surfing on mobile phones and to enable Yahoo to show ads with graphics.