John Battelle's Searchblog

Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. Via BeetTv, thanks Andy.

Talk about web meets world....this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.

Update: Apparently Google does not own the satellite, just the data....

I agree with Rae!

Update: Matt Cutts responds here.

The spam issue is a real one for all social applications, which includes search, of course. But I hate the baby with the bathwater approaches. I think we need to get to the next level of validation with social media - we need to start getting more granular. As humans, we're pretty good at weeding out who is a normal person worthy of whuffie, and who is a skeezy slimeball out to take advantage. Can't we do the same on Twitter?!

In the past two weeks nearly every press outlet on the planet has called me asking for thoughts on where Google is going and how Google got to where it is. The reason? Google turns 10 years old, according to most estimates, this weekend.

I've talked to as many folks as I can (after all I was a journalist covering technology for quite some time) but I did have to turn down a few given how busy life gets after the summer holidays. In any case, I'll post links to all the Ten Year stories I find here, starting with the Daily Telegraph in London:

Ten years of Google - Telegraph

Spin Around Google's Decade - BBC

Google Looks to the Next 10 Years - Also BBC

Google reigns as world’s most powerful 10-year-old - Boston Herald/AP

Happy Birthday, Google - Marketplace Radio

Wither Google As It Turns Ten? - CBS Early Show

Google Ten Years From Now - Guardian

An Anthropology of Google's Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course).

Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog:

At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes - and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! - and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.

I was wondering what data was sent to Google from Chrome users. Matt has the answers, and so far, seems innocuous.

Make no mistake about it.

Why launch Chrome (Google's new "browser") when Firefox, Google's favored son, is doing so well? Because Google needs its own. Using a comic book to introduce it is fun, and certainly, there's always room for new approaches to platform and interface, and Chrome looks to have a lot of neat new features and a fresh approach. But what this really tells us is that Google is dead serious about the distribution business, for one, and dead serious about the operating system business, for another. Reading through the book, I am struck by how similar the language is to traditional operating system overviews. Multithreading, stable development platforms, etc. etc.

With the IE 8 in beta, and Firefox going strong, it looks to be a good season for innovation on the Web.

This latest post is some sketching for a longer riff I'm eager to dig into. I love the fact that I can do sketch out loud thanks to American Express. Here's the first few grafs:

Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation, and media in your business. While not explicit, each of these posts was about one thing: Marketing.

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood practices in business today. For most of us, marketing is about convincing potential customers that our product or service is worth their money. And while that’s certainly party true, it never struck me as the whole narrative.

Where does marketing really begin? As management guru Peter Drucker stated it, “Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with your business can and should be seen as marketing.

I’ve argued elsewhere than a truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing – if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.

It’s easy to know if you’re succeeding while having those conversations – we’re all pretty good at sensing when customers are happy as we directly interact with them. But we often forget a crucial ongoing conversation that usually occurs beyond our personal presence: The conversation between the customer and our products.

Brady reprises the Google Alphabet (the first word auto-populated by the newly integrated Google Suggest for each letter in the alphabet).

Friday linkday:

Via Churbuck, a nice walkthrough of how to use Google search tools to understand site acquisition and traffic patterns.

As long as we're in a learning mode, here's a post on using FriendFeed as a business tool.

The IE8 beta is out. I need to grok this. It's got some stuff in it that effects the advertising ecosystem in serious ways that I have yet to grok, and am not seeing much coverage of. More at Forbes and Ed Bott.

Mashable reports on a bucket of money for JumpTap, a competitor in the mobile search arena, an area I am increasingly finding interesting.

Like reggae? Me too. Given it's Friday, check out Steel Pulse via BBtv.

I am.

Perks defined Google for years, and defined most Silicon Valley culture as well. Microsoft has been famous for its perks since the early 90s, in fact. So when a number of posts, sparked by a NYT article (now nearly two months old) claim that the era of perks is over at Google, it prompts musings such as this one in ComputerWorld, claiming Google has lost its mojo.

I'm not sure that's true, at least not yet. Perhaps amongst IT managers, that's true (ComputerWorld being an IT publication, after all), but I am not sure IT managers ever had more than a passing interest in Google's "mojo" to begin with.

The piece is entirely anecdotal, so the conclusion must be as well. For now, the jury is out.

I hear you all. What is Battelle on about, all this music stuff, all this non search stuff? I am sorry, but you have to trust me, it's going somewhere. I'm following a hunch, of a sorts.

Today some bankers from Piper Jaffrey came by, and they asked me the same question I was asked by two or three reporters who were writing pieces on Google's 10th anniversary. (When is it, anyway? I am sure it's this year, depending on how you count...).

Anyway, the question is this: So what's next? What might unseat Google?

I find the question interesting, mainly for its lack of historical perspective. The answer, I think, is pretty damn easy.

No company will unseat Google (though ultimately, one company will get credit).

Culture will. Unquestionably, inevitably, Google will be surpassed by a cultural shift it will be incapable of exploiting. And that will be OK.

Why am I so certain of this? Well, history, for one. And my own experience, for the other.

Allow me to explain.

It's my theory that world-changing companies occur when one and only one thing happens: Our culture shifts its relationship to technology. It's a complex set of parameters that allow for such a shift, but it's happened three times in my professional life:

1. IBM and DOS. This is when computers became accessible to determined early adopters, and a democratized culture of digital information storage and retrieval began.

2. Microsoft and Windows. As much as I'd like to give this to Steve and the Mac OS, the winner was Gates and Windows. This is when we went from speaking the arcane language of computerese (.exe? .bat?) to the language of "hunt and poke" via a visual interface. A major step forward in how culture relates to information, and therefore, to itself.

3. Google and search. As I have argued many times, search is our latest interface to information, and it's one based on natural language, albeit typed words, rather than spoken.

So, what might be #4?

Isn't that the hundred billion dollar question?

I have (my own) pretty clear answer to that. Happy to tell you. But I have to write the post I promised here first. Damn. I really miss having the time to write....

(photo Jeff Kravitz)
I have to ask. After seeing them live, I have to wonder. They did rip my head off, as did Metallica at Bonnaroo. They have this way of being both ridiculously tight, as well as totally psychedelic. Not easy to pull off. What do you all think? Are you Radiohead fans? Why?

Google launches Ad Manager to the public and Google Suggest. Meanwhile, Street View keeps pushing the big question in our society: Where do we end and the public begins?

Here's the streaming output of CrowdFire:

You can grab your own here.

AFP coverage here.

CrowdFire was consuming. It will take me some time to get back in the groove. I have to say, I'm really, really floored by what our teams did on site at Outside Lands, and what CrowdFire has the potential to be. Check it out, here. And here's my shooting, I'm not even close to finished uploading stuff....

I will be at the festival today, helping to light the CrowdFire. So stoked.

I am a fan of PhotoSynth. I hope Microsoft gets some traction with this. Brady's take here. My earlier coverage.

I find this tidbit, gleaned from coverage of SES, fascinating. Apparently Bill Gates is still engaged at Microsoft, at least on one issue: Search. From a piece covering the integration of Powerset into Microsoft's search index:

However the news isn’t all bleak, as Microsoft believes strongly in the potential advantages provided by Powerset. And they’ve got another ally, too: Bill Gate[s]. Scott Prevost, Powerset’s general manager, was quoted as saying that "Bill has definitely not retired for us". Gates, who has stepped down from day to day operations, has said that he planned to continue to work on search.

I wonder why this is so. Is it simply that Gates hates losing to the Google duo? Is it a legacy thing?