Report: Microsoft-Yahoo deal may go hostile Friday

Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported early Friday that the world’s largest software maker may be preparing to go straight to Internet pioneer Yahoo’s shareholders. An announcement was “likely” to come Friday, according to the report, though the newspaper said its sources cautioned that Microsoft may delay.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees in a company assembly Thursday that he knows how much he’d spend to buy Yahoo and accelerate his company’s Internet play.

“We’re willing to pay for that at some level, and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it. I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me,” the executive said. “I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”

But he didn’t offer a figure, and he didn’t say whether Microsoft is considering raising its unsolicited bid, worth $44.6 billion at the time it was made in early February.

The offer is currently worth about $42.4 billion, or $29.48 per share, based on Microsoft Corp.’s closing stock price Thursday. Yahoo Inc. has rejected the offer, saying it undervalues the company. Microsoft’s board has been considering whether to raise the bid to as much as $33 per share, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ballmer didn’t provide any new insight into the company’s efforts to buy the Silicon Valley pioneer during the meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, but he did indicate that an end to months of speculation was near.

“We ought to announce something in relatively short order,” Ballmer told employees.

His comments were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, an online technology news site, and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesman.

Ballmer added that buying Yahoo is just one of many moving parts in the software maker’s strategy to compete with Google Inc. in search and Web advertising, and that if neither a friendly nor a hostile deal “look good,” he’s willing to walk away.

Microsoft’s board met Wednesday but reached no decision on a next step, the Journal reported. The software maker had given Yahoo until last weekend to agree to a deal or face the prospect of an ugly proxy fight.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is exploring a possible advertising partnership with Internet search leader Google Inc. or a merger with the online operations of Time Warner Inc.’s AOL as possible defenses if Microsoft tries a hostile takeover.

Impressed by a two-week test completed last month, Yahoo could firm up a long-term deal within a week, according to the Journal. Any alliance between Yahoo and Google would face intense antitrust scrutiny, however, because the two companies control more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for search advertising.

Yahoo and Google hope to allay those concerns by structuring their deal so their rivals, including Microsoft, could participate in an auction-based system, the Journal said.

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Using search for analyzing social and cultural trends

The search engines have become an integrated part of our lives. Each and every day billions of searches are made all over the world, reflecting stories of work and leisure, strife and passion, and the interests of millions of Internet searchers.

If you could tap into this enormous amount of data, you could draw maps of fashion, cultural trends, political shifts and anything people are concerned about right now.

The search engine databases are kept under lock and key. The search engine companies hate the thought of loosing the trust of their users. Nevertheless, some aggregate data are available, and on this page your find links to some of the search trend sources found on the Web.

Google Zeitgeist and beyond

Google has a service called Google Zeitgeist that brings up weekly top 10 lists of the most popular searches in several countries and world wide.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time.

Lycos has a weekly top 50 list, while Yahoo presents various search trends at Yahoo Buzz.

Blogs, bookmarks and folksonomies

Note also that the growth of social networking and bookmarking sites has given as a new wealth of search trend data.

There are actually companies out there that monitoring and analyzing fashion and trends on the basis of social media such as blogs and discussion forums

Some statistics are free, though. The blog search engine Technorati will, for instance, give you a list of the most talked about topics in the blogosphere right now.

Site popularity

There are actually no trustworthy numbers on what sites are the most popular at any given time. Alexa, which bases its data on the habits of its Alexa toolbar users, may give you a certain indication though.

For these and other web trend sources, see the categories on this page.

Popular search terms in search engine marketing

Reading lists of the most popular search queries is entertaining. Social scientists ought to love the stuff. So far, however, it is the marketing people who has made the best use of this search information.

The search trends tell them what people find interesting right now, making it possible to adapt product and service development to what’s fashionable or upcoming.

This certainly applies to search engine marketing experts as well. Do you want to know what kind of affiliate program to go for and what product to sell? Look at what people search for and make sites and web pages covering these topics.

Search giant Google wants to push forward with a new, improved form of image search that’s based on visual characteristics, not just text. Last week, two of the company’s scientists presented a paper outlining a system they’re calling VisualRank. They’ve told the New York Times it could be as important for image search as the now-legendary PageRank paper was for normal text search.

Currently, image search engines (notably Google Image Search) locate and rank pictures based on the text describing them on a web page. This can lead to some very hit-or-miss search results — typing in “mcdonalds”, for example, gives you a wide range of images, many of them with little visual relevance to the McDonald’s fast food chain. (Irrelevant, that is, unless it turns out you actually are looking for photos of fat giraffes.)

The new system proposed in the Google paper ranks images based not on text, but on the common “visual themes” found in each search result. In the McDonald’s example, the VisualRank system would see that the company’s famous golden arches are a common visual theme, and prioritize pictures that feature the arches prominently. Tests of this new system returned 83 percent fewer irrelevant search results than Google Image Search, according to the VisualRank paper. (In the “search graph” below, the two large images in the center are ranked the highest because they feature the common visual themes in a search for “mona lisa” most prominently.)

If Google can deliver on its promises, VisualRank could bring a sea change to applications like product search, where customers are often want to find and compare specific products, but may not know the exact words to describe them. There are already product comparison startups, such as Like.com, that use visual search. But Google’s plan to the image ranking process is much more ambitious, which is probably why Munjal Shah, chief executive of Riya (which owns Like.com), told the Times that Google’s goals are “largely impossible.”

Whether or not that’s true is a debate better left to computer scientists. But wagering against Google’s search technology has been a sucker’s bet in the past.

AOL today revealed the logo for its Platform-A advertising division. Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A, said that the new logo “effectively communicates our distinct competitive advantage of scale and reach. And its bold and simple design fits with our mission of providing advertisers and publishers with effective, impactful and easy-to-use solutions to their digital advertising needs.” Complementary brand identities for companies owned by Platform-A will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

A quick question to Lynda, are you going to rebrand the name? It looks pretty half baked with the hyphen.

And why is the logo toppled? Get it up and running. It is high time.

This is interesting to note, in light of the new figures released by comScore show that AOL’s Platform A advertising network is the top advertising network in the United States by reach (unique visitors).

According to the figures, Platform A reaches 90.7% of all American internet users, ahead of Yahoo on 85.3% and Google on 80.9%. AOL’s figures include ads served from Advertising.com.

Just read Hints of iGoogle Turning Into Its Own Social Network on TechCrunch. That’s cool!

“Any developer who builds an OpenSocial app, for instance, can make it work as a widget (er, gadget) on iGoogle. So far, it’s been more of a personal home page. But now iGoogle is taking another step towards becoming a full-fledged social network in its own right.

It is a tiny step, but could be indicative of the direction iGoogle is going to take. Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.”

Some Background: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, Viadeo, MySpace, Friendster^, orkut and Yahoo!.

OpenSocial is commonly described as a more open cross-platform alternative to Facebook Platform. After launching Facebook Platform in late May 2007, the fast-growing Facebook has been widely reported as a challenger to Google in establishing and leveraging a ubiquitous web operating system. Compared to Facebook, which is ranked second by page views worldwide, Google’s social network orkut is ranked sixth for the same month, with more than half its members living in India. Reports on competition between the two companies increased with Facebook scheduling an announcement of an online advertising initiative (named Facebook Ads) the day after Google’s social networking announcement was originally scheduled. The intiative includes ad serving and targeting programs (named Facebook Social Ads and Facebook Insights, respectively) in competition with Google’s market-leading AdSense and AdWords programs.

Next Steps:

• Sign up for the iGoogle Sandbox
• Read the iGoogle Developer’s Guide
• Check out iGoogle Gadgets FAQ
• Get Started with iGoogle Sandbox

Google just announced a cool addition to Google News. “As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, we’ve been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.”

If you search for a person’s name on Google News, you can see statements where that person has been quoted by a news source. For example, search on Google News for [Barack Obama's quotes on Iraq] and you’ll see something like this!

This is very impressive application of natural language processing in Google News — it now extracts quotations from news stories, even handling things like “he said” and “she said” and resolving them back to the speaker.

I think this is still is “real” beta. The quotes can be a bit more deep in history. It only shows recent quotes. No Abe Lincoln quotes, sorry (as of now).

I am impressed. What about you?

In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be ‘the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines’.

For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: ‘For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML’. Nevertheless, directions like ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.

Among the possible wins for Google users is the ability to find pages within sites based on searches of those site. As the Google Webmaster blog explains:

For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made

The results of those crawls would then show up in your Google search results, potentially offering a faster, more direct way to reach the information you’re searching for.

Google’s all excited for Earth day, and just in time there’s a new version of Google Earth available. 4.3 offers up revamped navigation controls, 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities, and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises. Also new in Google Earth 4.3 is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just click any of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up. The sunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Fly to a location you’d like to see and click the “sun” button in the toolbar. That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit play or drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold.

The new beta version of Google Earth features revamped navigation controls and some slick new layers like 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises.

The new navigation controls take some getting used to, but once you have the hang of it they offer considerable more control over panning and tilting. Also handy is the new “North” button which quickly orients your current view by rotating until north is at the top.

See the new features in action below:

Sources: Wired Blog, Google Earth Website

It’s weird to see people talk about Google App Engine online because I think many people focus on minor details. Like, to make apps scale horizontally you do need a “shared-nothing” infrastructure, so that’s not really novel. The BigTable aspects are sorta interesting except there’s nothing there (in terms of application design) that you couldn’t have gotten out of the paper, and the App Engine API is so high-level it’s not that close to BigTable. It’s more like any other high-level flat-address object database, like maybe CouchDB. The Python thing is also pretty irrelevant; they just picked a language they have experience with (having Guido around helped), and it’s easier to launch supporting one API than n languages’ worth. A good engineer just solves the problem with the tools available, and Python is a pretty good tool to start with.

As for evil plans to steal ideas or code, that’s between you and your skepticism. Big companies are surprisingly good at doing shitty things, and Google is definitely big, but it’s also true that within Google people really try to do the right thing. I was touched to see a privacy-concerned friend of mine start using Gmail after he was hired, saying that only after he saw how seriously they take privacy inside the company could he feel confident about using it. But I can’t tell you anything that will change your mind about this subject.

I developed an internal application using Google App Engine on and off over a period of months (during its development I kept trying it out) and then finally rewriting a few weeks before launch (after the APIs had all settled).

Here are some real problems I’ve encountered:

1) All code runs only in response to HTTP fetches. So that means no cron jobs, and no persistent server-side processes. I know I just wrote above that you can’t really have persistent jobs if you want to scale, but ultimately real apps do occasionally need these. For example, imagine a timed test app that needs a consistent view of time no matter which server (or datacenter!) the user hits. A time server becomes a single point of failure but when it’s critical for your app it can be engineered around.

2) No long connections means no “comet” (server-push messaging).
My first thought on hearing about App Engine was to port lmnopuz but I can’t.

3) Playing around with your data is hard. Since there’s no way to perform operations on your data except by uploading code to the server, you’re often left creating a new URL per operation you want to perform. Hacks like the shell helps with this, but a lot of the time I want to be able to just run a local script and see the output. (For my project I found a decent workaround: make a URL that accepts Python code as a POST and runs it. Then your scripts just need to know to serialize themselves into strings and send them over the wire.) But see the next point.

4) Slow table scans. My app had ~1200 rows that it performs various analyses on and produces graphs. I can appreciate that such a query is labor-intensive, and so I had written it to cache the results of the graph generation (the rows only change once a day). But I can’t even seed the cache once because fetching 1200 rows is too slow to happen within a single query.

5) Bulk operations are hard. Say you want to delete all objects in a table (or class, I forget the App Engine term). The “delete” operation requires you fetch the object first, and then you’re back into slow table scans land. The best you can do is batch up your processing into multiple smaller stages, each of which write their intermediate output into the data store: either make a page that auto-refreshes itself with Javascript and leave a browser pointed at it, or make a command-line script that repeatedly hits a URL on your app.

6) No arbitrary queries. (If you haven’t read the docs in detail, you wouldn’t know this, but any query that involves multiple attributes [columns, if you're still thinking SQL] of an object must have an index exactly matching the query. They make index creation and maintenance trivial, and even automatic in most cases.)
Though everyone’s repeatedly shoehorned SQL underneath object-relational mappers, App Engine (and others) demonstrate that you can provide an object storage API and gain performance by not using SQL underneath. I argue the real utility of SQL is that it lets you quickly (in terms of programmer time, not machine time) perform queries that you haven’t done before and won’t do again. Say I learn about a bug where I built all of March’s data with the word “none” in place of where a column should really be null (None in Python terms) — that’s a line of SQL to fix but it’s a world of pain with App Engine due to the bulk operations thing.

As Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all wrestle with Microsoft ’s attempt to buy Yahoo , Google decided it needed some outside counsel. Google CEO Eric Schmidt chose none other than Frank Quattrone, who was cleared of obstruction of justice charges last year, to whisper sweet hostile take-over nothings into his ear.

For the last two-plus months, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others have been in a slow dance as everyone tries to get what they want out of the MicroHoo deal. Google wants to keep the two firms apart. Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo. Poor Yahoo just wants to be left alone, it likes dancing by itself. In the last few days, things have become more interesting, with AOL, and News Corp. joining the dance. Fivesomes rarely work out, though. Someone is going to come away from this dance empty-handed and disappointed.

If Eric Schmidt has anything to do with it, it ain’t gonna be Google.

The New York Times is reporting that Schmidt has turned to his old crony, Quattrone, for help. He has hired Quattrone’s new law firm, the Qatalyst Group, to provide legal counsel and help it strategize the movements of this dance. Schmidt and Quattrone have worked together in the past. Quattrone was one of the first investment bankers to consult with Google when it was but a lowly startup in the late 1990s. Further, Schmidt was party to the creation of Quattrone’s new firm.

Quattrone, of course, was beset by the U.S. legal system for years on obstruction of justice charges. After two trials, Uncle Sam gave up on one of the charges, and he was cleared of another conviction when the presiding judge misinformed the jury about how to interpret the law. Technically, he’s not a criminal. Are his hands clean? Who is to say.

Whatever happened in Quattrone’s past, he’s obviously looking to recapture the former glory of a life lived in the business spotlight. As the impact of this acquisition will reverberate around the Internet for years to come, any role he might play is sure to affect us all.