Businesses and landmarks are important because they make maps more in line with the way people think, instead of the way that computers operate. This change also means that businesses won’t have to resort to painting their rooftops to be easily identifiable.

There are two big challenges with what Google is doing:

• Names of businesses and landmarks change over time. The ballpark two blocks from my house has gone through three names following the telecom mergers (start watching at 2:20). Still, these new labels provide a good way to get oriented.
• Deciding which items help the user and which are just clutter. Google Maps shows the relatively obscure Powerset but leaves out Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus. I haven’t been able to figure out a pattern in what Google decides what to show.

We’ve come a long way from the early days of the Web when maps consisted largely of roads and a clunky user interface. We’ve seen the addition of aerial imagery, building outlines, photos, public transit, Street View, neighborhoods, user-generated content and live traffic. Google has driven much of this innovation, although to be fair MapQuest had aerial imagery first and A9 had a version of street view early on.

There is still a lot of work to do to improve maps:

• College and corporate campuses. Campuses such as Google’s and Microsoft’s buildings have numbers, but these aren’t shown on the map. If you were meeting someone, they’d probably tell you to go to “Building 43″. My friend Adam at Google keeps a custom Google map to show where his building is. (Oddly, Microsoft’s Bing maps show building numbers for the Microsoft campus, but don’t let you search for them.) The same thing applies for airport terminals.
• Controlled-access facilities. Businesses in controlled-access facilities should be hidden by default — few people are going to park and go through security to eat at an airport restaurant. On the other hand, if I’m in the airport, I want to know what businesses are in my terminal.
• Handling nonstandard locations. Databases are organized around cities and states in the United States. This works for most places, but is problematic in areas that don’t follow the convention like Hawaii or Las Vegas. Hawaiians talks about islands, but the local databases don’t know the concept of an island. This is made worse by the fact that the same town name is used on multiple islands — there’s a Waimea on Kauai and Hawaii and a Kailua on Oahu and Hawaii. Local constructs such as “North Shore” and “South Shore” aren’t understood either. Navigating using local search on my recent trips to Hawaii was error filled.
  In Vegas, hotels are a primary navigation construct and many of those hotels have more shops and restaurants than do a lot of American towns.
  Given how popular these destinations are, I’m surprised this problem hasn’t been solved.
• Parking availability. In a big city it’s rare that you can drive up to your destination and park right in front; finding parking can easily add 15-20 minutes to your trip. Companies like Urban Mapping are already collecting this information. I had a book called Park It Here! that showed street parking restrictions for every block in Manhattan. I’d love to see that data online.

More on: google, maps, local search

Bing, Yahoo! ads on Michael Jackson results on Google. Click to see full version.

Seen over the weekend: ads for bing and Yahoo! on Google search results for “Michael Jackson”.

The bing ad led to bing’s xRank page for Michael Jackson. The Yahoo! ad bizarrely led to a Yahoo! shopping results page for Michael posters, most of which had nothing to do with Jackson.

The bing ad appeared every time I reloaded the page. The other ads were much less frequent.

Update: AOL has joined the fray with ads for AOL Music, including a pitch to download a “Michael Jackson tribute toolbar” on the landing page.

• Unlock the content vault — AP content has typically been available online for no more than 30 days, which means that links to AP content goes bad quickly. AP could provide exclusive access to all of the content that it has. Not only does this provide a great service to users, it’s also great for search engine rankings.
• Exploit the photos –- One of my favorite things when I was working in a newsroom was to look through the AP LeafDesk. AP employs some of the world’s most talented photographers and the LeafDesk was my window to the world. From there, I would choose which photos would appear in our products. In the online world with infinite space, there is no reason to have editors limit the availability of pictures to what they can fit in print. Online access to AP’s photos would be a pageview goldmine; slideshows are incredibly popular. At the New York Times, 11 million of the 49 million pageviews on the day after the inauguration went to slideshows. (Bonus tip: talk to the folks at Cooliris.)
• Geotag the content — AP journalists are in the best position to include relevant geographic information in articles and photos. Geotagging would provide users new ways to explore AP’s content. Imagine browsing through a map with the latest photos and news. Or using geotags combined with archived content to explore a region in time. Google News tries to do this using algorithms, but often misses or adds irrelevant geotagging.
• Organize the AP’s information and make it universally accessible – Instead of letting Google organize the AP’s information, the AP should do it. This may be hard to do given the AP’s DNA, but it needs to move from generating disposable news stories to creating longterm news resources. There is a lot of information and judgment that goes into the newsmaking process that doesn’t make it into the final story. If embedded in a database, that information could be used to automatically generate timelines of the major stories of significant news events. AP’s obit file could become a reference source about newsmakers.
• Talk to NPR – NPR faces channel conflict similar to AP’s, yet they’ve managed to build one of the best news sites and they’ve done it under the NPR brand. NPR.org is frequently a leader when it comes to adopting new technologies, including open APIs, social media and search. Learn from their experts.

AP needs to do this under the AP brand instead of obscure local brands. It needs to focus on page performance, usability and searchability.

If AP does all of the above, it will have built an unparalleled news product. Maybe one that consumers would pay for.

More on: newspapers, geotagging

See also:

• AP is in the Classic Strategic Investor Trap (marksonland)

• Google News starts hosting wire service content

• Taking newspapers beyond tonight’s fishwrap

Screenshot of AP's iPhone app

As a member-owned cooperative, the AP has catered to its members, which includes newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets. Even now, if you go to AP.org, news is a footnote. Contrast that with the front page of Reuters. Instead of displaying AP content on the AP-branded site, you get AP content in obscure brands like the Lake County Record-Bee, High Desert Daily Press, Citizen-Times.com and GazetteXtra.com. AP is still hosting the content, but the strong national AP brand is subsumed by a large number of brands that have no meaning outside their region.

This might have worked if newspapers had assumed the role of the default home page and people sought out their local brands. Some papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times tried to create all purpose portals; those efforts have been abandoned.

AP also decided to license content to online media outlets. Yahoo! was an early licensee; Google struck a deal with AP more recently. Yahoo! was able to take the AP content and create a leading news destination site without employing hundreds of journalists.

Not only do Yahoo! and Google license AP content, they are doing a better job presenting it than AP. Compare this story on the AP’s site (branded oanow.com) with the same story on Yahoo! News. The Yahoo! story loads a lot faster and the layout is cleaner. On AP-hosted pages, I sometimes get pop up ads. It’s a much worse experience than Google or Yahoo! News.

The fact that AP doesn’t have a destination site presents another big problem in today’s PageRank driven environment: because the same story can be presented at hundreds of different URLs, they don’t rank highly in search results.

It’s not impossible for AP to get back in the game. But they have to play the game as it exists today, instead of trying to reset the calendar to 1995. They’ll need to focus on the things that any Web business needs to focus on today: simplicity, performance, community, analytics and search engine optimization. And they must do it under the AP brand.

One hopeful sign is AP’s Mobile News iPhone application. The app provides a solid user experience, incorporates photos and videos effectively, has acceptable levels of advertising and looks like it was designed this decade. You can even send in news tips. My only real complaint is that the AP brand is buried in favor of a generic “Mobile News Network” brand. (Probably to placate member companies.)

AP has a lot of assets that even now aren’t fully exploited by Google or Yahoo! With some creative thinking and Web-focused talent, they could use those assets to build a killer destination site. It won’t be anyone’s home page, but it can be successful nonetheless.

More on: newspapers.

Like a recent piece from Henry Blodget, mass inflator of the Web 1.0 bubble. He is at it again with a piece on Facebook being a Google Killer. He points to RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler’s “analysis” of Facebook’s incredible growth and comScore data on entries and exits.

This is the kind of incessant hyping that inflated the housing bubble we’re all suffering through now — assuming that extreme rates of growth will continue.

The 1427% growth cited for Facebook starts from an insignificant base. With Google’s 468MM uniques in 2006, the only way for Google to have grown 1427% would be to reach every man, woman and child on earth. And it certainly couldn’t sustain that growth into the future, even if a lot of couples got really busy really fast.

Blodget also points to comScore’s entry/exit data to bolster his case. Here, he falsely equates correlation with causation. comScore’s entry/exit report doesn’t necessarily mean that site A drove traffic to site B. It just means that after someone went to site A, they went to site B.

If you go from Facebook to Google, it counts as an exit from Facebook and an entry to Google. It doesn’t matter whether you clicked on a link in Facebook to go to Google or not. You just happend to do those two things. Given that a lot of people use both Google and Facebook, any big site will show up on both entry/exit reports for any site.

Blodget says:

Fully 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook, up from 9% a year ago.  At the very least, this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal at some point.

Nope. Those people are going to Google anyway, without any prodding from Facebook. Google would be stupid to pay for that traffic.

comScore’s entry/exit report is one of the most useless reports they generate and really difficult to interpret. The only real curiosity in the Facebook data is this: 6MM people go to Friendster after they go to Facebook?

Yet another issue with RBC’s graph is that it doesn’t take into account duplicated reach. The combination of Google and Facebook is not 99% of worldwide uniques, because there is a high degree of overlap between the two sites. RBC analysts evidently don’t know how to use the unduplicated reach feature of comScore’s reporting tools.

That’s three huge flaws in one report. Sadly, that’s not uncommon. Analysts and journalists frequently ignore methodology while chasing killer headlines.

Thanks to @carolalene for the pointer on the comic.

In this part, I’ll focus on why the conversational nature of Twitter makes searching it effectively a hard problem.

Consider this exchange:

@CherylHaas: Celebrating my newly purchased iPhone. w00t!!! No longer a Luddite. App suggestions, please?
@rakeshlobster: yelp and shazam and Facebook

This is how people interact on Twitter. Partly because we’re lazy, partly because a lot of the interaction is done from mobile devices where typing is hard and partly because of the 140 character limit on tweets.

Between these two tweets, we have an answer to the query “iPhone app”. But Twitter Search treats these tweets independently. As a result, if you search for “iPhone app”, you’d get Cheryl’s question. Not very helpful.

If you search for “shazam,” you’ll get back my response. But there’s no context for it. The meaning of my response is lost without the context of Cheryl’s question. The question could have been “what apps are causing your iPhone to crash?” This happens in ordinary conversation on Twitter; when people are slow at responding and I get a “@rakeshlobster yes,” I’ll sometimes have forgotten the context.

This problem could be alleviated if Twitter presented threaded conversations. But then Google could just as easily index the conversation, as it does with Yahoo! Answers.

Another issue is that people don’t write for Twitter the way they write for search engines. Compare my tweet above with this post I wrote on my favorite iPhone applications. That was written with searchability in mind. There’s also a lot of shorthand on Twitter. @maryvale shortened “Nikon D80″ to “D80″ in her tweet discussing my last blog post.

That may change if searching Twitter takes off, but it would also change the nature of Twitter. I’ve been experimenting with adding more keywords in my tweets. For example, when I dropped my laptop, I originally wrote:

“laptop hinge broken. argh. it’s pretty, sleek and light. and extremely delicate.”

But then I added in the “toshiba portege r500 is”. It’s more searchable, but it makes the conversation sound stilted and robotic.

Another challenge with searching Twitter for information is that a lot of the value in Twitter is not in the tweets, but in what the tweets point too. With the extensive of URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly, even the minimal keywords are lost.

Beyond the content difficulties in search, there are the related issues of search order and authority.

The results that you get back are sorted chronologically and are highly dependent on when you search. Although the “best” answer for a search can fluctuate over time (one of my criticisms of Google is that its algorithms don’t do enough to counter the effects of Web rot), for most searches it doesn’t vary dramatically over the course of a day or a week. A notable exception would be queries like “what’s a good party at SXSW right now?”

As with asking questions of the Twitterverse, searching Twitter doesn’t provide any guidance as to whose answers are better than others. Searching Twitter is in someways like stepping back 15 years in search technology, before search engines widely used off-page clues and link authority to rank results.

Some suggestions have revolved around developing authority rankings based on number of followers, number of tweets, etc. The problem with that is that no one person is an authority on everything. A search result from Om Malik (@Om) on telecom should be ranked much higher than a result from Om on migration patterns of birds in Africa. Review sites like Amazon and Yelp have devoted a lot of energy to helping people determine which results are valuable. Twitter will have to develop something similar.

Despite today’s issues, the immense amount of data that Twitter and Facebook are collecting could be used to build a better, more spam-resistant search engine. The marriage of search and social networks has the potential to get us better and more credible answers, while also increasing our connections to our friends.

More on: Twitter, Google

Disclosure: I worked with several members of Twitter’s search team at AOL Search. While I don’t believe in the current hype in the blogosphere about Twitter as a Google killer with the current technology, the guys I know are very smart and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

There are two scenarios that have been talked about with Twitter and search: using Twitter to ask questions of the Twitterverse and using Twitter search to search Tweets.

In the first scenario, you send out a Tweet looking for information. An example is a Tweet by Om Malik on Feb. 2 at 7:02 p.m. “suggestion for great Indian restaurant in or around Palo alto. needs to be authentic”. Within a few minutes, he got a bunch of responses. (I recommended Amber India in Mountain View, which was a frequent recommendation.) By 8:19 p.m. Om was “eating at amber India in mountain view.”

Wow! Send out a query and you can get answers from real people right away. Who wouldn’t want that?

Not so fast.

This reminds me of latenight TV commercials for miracle diet drugs. You see pictures of people who have: lost 75 pounds in 8 weeks! lost 10 pounds overnight! gone from a size 24 to a size 6 while eating cake and sitting on the couch! You usually see a line of fine print that says “results not typical.”

That’s exactly the case here. You get atypical results when you have tens of thousands of followers as Om (23,000+) and Battelle (11,000+) do.

I posted a Tweet yesterday “Looking for good wineries in napa. Focus on ambiance and red wines.” To give the Tweet extra chance of success, I posted it using Twinkle, an app that adds a location layer to Twitter. Given the nature of my query, my friend network and location in the Bay Area, I expected success. At 200+ followers, my follower count is well above the median for Twitter.

Three hours later, I got one response from a friend. By that time I’d already decided which wineries I was going to visit. Hardly a Google killer.

Suppose for a moment that I just picked a tough query. What if I’d gotten a dozen responses?

Then the problem becomes how I decide which of those responses are better than the others. Many queries have qualitative components: “What’s a good winery in Napa?” “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” The value of the answer depends on my needs as well as the expertise of the answerer.

With a typical search result, you have a number of clues as to quality of the answerer. If something appears on the first page of Google, presumably a lot of people have found that resource valuable. If I get a page from dpreview, I can see that they’ve reviewed hundreds of other cameras, so they probably know what they’re talking about.

With Twitter answers, I get limited information about the source and limited content.

In some cases, this is OK. I did a Tweet a while ago wondering if it was sunny at the Beach Chalet in San Francisco. You’d have to be a jerk to lie about the answers, there’s not much expertise required to answer the question and the answer fits within 140 characters.

But a query like “Is the Nikon D80 a good camera?” is tougher. If @maryvale says “yes, absolutely” then that’s all I need. I know her, I love her photography and I know she knows a lot about cameras. That doesn’t hold true for most of my other followers. And it certainly doesn’t hold true for people I don’t know at all. Someone may say “D80 is a piece of crap” because they would never consider anything less than the $2,000+ D700 or because they aren’t very technically savvy. A Tweeted answer doesn’t provide that context.

Part 2: Challenges of searching Twitter

More on: Twitter, Google

Here are two very different approaches:

GateHouse Media is suing The New York Times Co., whose Boston Globe has been linking from its hyperlocal site to stories on GateHouse’s Wicked Local site.

Wicked awesome Hulu is co-opting archrival YouTube’s traffic. If you do a search for Simpsons clips on YouTube, you’re likely to see clips uploaded to YouTube by Hulu. Here’s one I found:

Rather than try to rewrite more than a decade of Web practices (if not copyright law), Hulu is working the system to reach a lot of interested users where they are. It’s a brilliant move and the kind of thinking that is virtually nonexistent within the newspaper industry.

The clip promotes Hulu as the destination for premium content on the Internet. Users have a clear choice: watch excerpts with an annoying Hulu ticker on YouTube or go to hulu.com where they can watch the full video in higher quality without the ticker.

In the short run, this helps Google by providing content for popular queries. In the long run, hulu is the big winner.

More on: hulu, newspapers, YouTube

If I could award an Emmy for outstanding performance in television, I’d have a clear winner: Hulu. The video site from NBC and Fox is my leading choice for product of the year. Hulu allows users to stream television shows from NBC, Fox, Comedy Central and select other networks. Most shows are available the day after they air on television. There is also a decent collection of classic television; I recently finished watching the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. A small collection of movies rounds out the offering.

I wrote about Hulu when the partnership was announced last year:

The networks have many of the assets they need to deliver a compelling product — one much better than YouTube for copyrighted content. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And  I wouldn’t hold my breath on NBC and News Corp. making the summer launch date.

Although I was right about Hulu not making its launch date, I was wrong about its inability to deliver a compelling product. Unlike the music industry, which still refuses to acknowledge the turn of the century, the television networks have responded forcefully and credibly to the threat posed by YouTube.

Over the summer, I spent at least triple the time on Hulu as I did on YouTube. That will be even more skewed when the fall TV season kicks into high gear this week. The quality of the video is much better. Searching is also easier: unlike YouTube, you won’t see the same piece of content 12 times in search results. You also don’t have to weed through content that was taken down due to DMCA claims.

To be sure, there’s nothing truly innovative in Hulu. But the execution of what they do is great. The site is visually elegant and easy-to-use. You can subscribe to your favorite shows. You can embed videos on your blog. My favorite feature is the ability to create custom clips by dragging sliders.

Hulu does a good job (perhaps too good) of helping users discover content they might be interested in. There are some feeble attempts at social networking.

The networks are using Hulu to promote the fall season. Some shows, such as Knight Rider, were made available on Hulu before their television debuts to drum up interest.

Hulu is also doing some interesting things in advertising. More on that later.

As much as I like Hulu, I have a long wishlist:

• Hulu on my TV. It’s hard to beat watching TV on a TV. A laptop display doesn’t cut it. Although my TV has a VGA input, that still means using the laptop to control playback. Hulu should seek to be on as many platforms as possible: Xbox, Tivo and Apple TV for starters.
• Hulu on the go. There are times when I want to watch Hulu on my laptop. But those are also times when I’m disconnected — on a plane or a train. NBC offers downloads of many of its shows through NBC Direct; Hulu should do the same.
• Local buffering of videos while watching. Unlike YouTube, you can’t buffer content. This deteriorates video playback quality by causing stuttering when you have inconsistent bandwidth. It also means that if you want to rewind, that video has to be restreamed. (This is more expensive for Hulu.) Even a two minute buffer would dramatically improve the experience.
• More consistent content licensing. Hulu is at the mercy of its content providers for when content is made available and has to expire. Although many shows are available next day, shows like Monk and Psych are delayed eight days.
• Fewer restrictions on embedded clips. Hulu clips expire along with the content, leaving holes in Web pages that embed videos. Although I wouldn’t expect full embeds to remain available, it would be nice to see exceptions for short clips.
• Better descriptions in search results. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, Sep 18, 2008″ isn’t very helpful. The guest names should be included.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans puts Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at #13 and #14 with a net worth of $15.9 billion for Brin and $15.8 billion for Page.

That’s a bit less than the $20 billion I estimated for the U.S. newspaper industry as whole. But I was being generous and not subtracting out non-newspaper assets.

For example, only 21% of The Washinton Post Co.’s revenue comes from the newspaper division. (Despite the name, it’s mostly a test prep company.) More than half of Belo’s revenue comes from television operations. Belo’s television segment also generates more than double the income. Gannett also has significant broadcast operations.

If you take out those assets, it’s safe to say that each Googler is worth as much the entire U.S. newspaper industry.

Bill Gates could buy the industry several times over with his $57 billion net worth. As could Warren Buffett. He already has a head start: Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 18% of the Washington Post Co.

Disclosure: I went to high school with Larry. He was talking about googol even back then.

More on: google, journalism, newspapers