broadstuff

Silicon Alley Investor asks why Google Knol hasn't been culled in the current Googlekrieg on bits of the business that burn cash:

This weekend, Google announced a Knol contest with $1,000 for the best entry and some cross-promotion with dummies.com.

We're not sure what the thinking here is. We're still not even sure what Knol is for. For a how-to, like performing car maintenance, we'll go to a site that's run by car-fanatics. For general knowledge, Knol can't come close to touching Wikipedia. If anything, Knol seems to have a reputation for nothing so much as plagiarism, ignorance, and self-promotion.

We admire Google's willingness to experiment with new ways to build cool (and potentially profitable) features onto their existing service. And we admire Google's willingness to realize when their experiments have failed and shut them down. So why still back Knol?

This brought a rapid response from Google's Matt Cutts, arguing that it is still alive and kicking. He notes 4 things we need to know about Knol, as possible reasons for sparing its life:

- Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings
- The conventional wisdom changed from “Google will give Knol unfair boosts in ranking; it will dominate the space!” to “Oh, Knol gets so little traffic that it’s not a success.
- The Knol team is not standing still.
- Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it

Not exactly compelling reasons for continuing life - a biz model shift from wiki-paid-here to deli.cash.us.

When it was launched, we couldn't see how Knol would work in its current format (see analysis here) but I suspect that it hasn't been around long enough yet to be on the chopping block, would guess its probably in a set of projects that have been given X (say 6) more months to prove their viability.

A quick search on Knol brought up a direct-ish entry for Turkey, but none for Guillotine

Was reviewing the various presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, when I came across this response by Tim O'Reilly about Andrew Keen (from a question by Nancy Williams)


Tim O'Reilly on Andrew Keen from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

To refresh - the day before, Keen had written a piece predicting the death of the $0.00 business model - this is his basic argument:

In his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, MIT behavorial economist Dan Ariely suggests that most of us are irrational when it comes to determining the value of our labor. I’m not sure. I may not have Ariely’s grasp of behavorial economics, but I’m pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice.

So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue. "Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

In other words, a lot of the "free" work to date has been done by people making money elsewhere, and when they lose their jobs or benefits this will stop. (What Nick Carr calls "Digital Sharecropping" is currently being funded by benign employers or national social security systems)

I was also quite surprised that Tim called him out as "an idiot, and flat out wrong", as Tim said not that dissimilar things in his own presentation at the Expo event the night before - ie that startups will need to think of ways to make money, the funding for frivolity wasn't there, and value needed to be added. Not only that, he gave me the stage at the conference to point out things not dissimilar to what Keen was saying about the economics of $0.00 business models (see my talk here). In fact, I was talking at his conference at the same time as he was talking in the above clip. He also put the very sensible but possibly optimistic Martin Varsavsky on and took the devil's advocate position. In other words, Tim is doing more than his fair share to get the message out as well, and I think his recent posts pulling people back to the original meanings of Web 2.0 are a great step in the right direction - its was never all about social media esoterics, useless widgets and rivers of user generated cr*p.

So more to the point, whats going on when two guys seem to be diametrically opposed, yet in fact are saying much the same thing?

The quick take is that maybe both are parsing the credit crunch from their own positions and moving to a similar endpoint without realising it, like those movies where two protagonists are backing up and bump into each other, only to turn round and recognise the other - Aaaaargh!.

The longer take is no more subtle, but it is more brutal - its the race for the high ground going forward. To an extent, both needed the pre-Crunch world to hold the poles apart in the polemic. With bubblenomics gone though, the more silly excesses of Web 2.0 are going / gone, but so therefore is the ability to gain kudos by lampooning those same excesses, because the underlying Web trends are very real. What will the "During and Post" Crunch Tech Meme look like. Will Web 2.0 look like another spent force lying among the fallen dot.com daisies - or will Keen look like the sort of guy who called the falling sky with every breath, but now it has fallen people will say "OK now what have you got - is that it?"

It is at this time that new voices will emerge, as the Zeitgeist shifts, and this is the risk both sides' A list protagonists now face. I suspect that those who have been beating either too fluffy, or too pessimistic a drum, will both be seen to be part of "yesterdays story", their pages yellowing on the interwebs as people pass them by. (I think this was what Dennis Howlett was really getting at - the big picture has changed, but some people's narratives haven't)

But what shall replace these Old Tales then?

I have remarked a number of times on this blog on how hard it's been to hold an analytical middle ground in the last year or so - the hypemonkeys are so far off the planet ( heads up in the Cloud - don't get me started....) that just being realistic makes you look like you are a hopeless pessimists, while the pessimistic counterpointers have been able to scare the cyberchildren with their tales of the bogeymen in the digital woods. I hope the time for more reasoned council returns.

We need it.

(I do predict far fewer companies with silly names with 2 "oo"s in them going forward thank heavens - in fact my first recommendation to any VC is NameChange in these more sober times)

This article on CNet UK featuring Jason Calacanis's views on Web 2.0 startup survival sparked (among other things) a thought on something I wanted to write about re industry consolidation:

Calacanis explained it wasn't Twitter, Digg or FriendFeed, for example, that would suffer, but rather the sites imitating them. "It'll be the 'me too' companies; the fourth and fifth versions of Twitter, the third, fourth and fifth versions of FriendFeed, the sixth, seventh and eighth version of Digg -- the ones the world doesn't need. They won't hit critical mass and they won't get advertising."

Not so sure Friendfeed has the volumes, but it is recently funded so should still have lots of cash on board. But overall he's right. In most mature industries where there are not specific (usually artificial) barriers, you typically get 2-3 players standing after the shakeout. Smaller players - the "Long Tail" of me-too businesses - go to the wall, get bought, or become specialised.

So, if you are the No 4 downwards in any product space, and don't have a lot of funding onboard, its probably time to think about getting specialised or getting out. (This applies as much to say Tech Blogzines as anything else by the way)

Its not just startups who go through this winnowing, Calacanis predicted that even large players will start to winnow down their own service stack:

"You're going to see a bunch of these groups inside of companies either be sold or shut down," Calacanis said. "We're seeing it already with eBay [selling] StumbleUpon and Skype. I would look for Yahoo to sell off five or ten companies, as might Google."

...The bottom line for the cash-rich companies during the economic downturn is that industrial panic isn't the solution. Rather, a quick syphoning off of less profitable parts of the business, along with the speedy acquisitions of potentially lucrative ones, will keep companies such as Google and Microsoft at least afloat in the violent waters of falling stock and failing investments

What was interesting as well was his thoughts re Google Knol, a service we also don't "get":

"I think they're going to downplay it and probably get rid of it. I've had people at Google tell me they don't understand why this product was launched. They don't agree with it and they think it's too overarching. I've heard from multiple people at Google that they regret the product launching."

It may need retuning to something else, but it can't go on as is - a Hits 'n Ads based user generated knowledge system is a recipe for scamsters.

Update - interesting article on BoomTown, Angel investor Ron Conway (who was one of those bringing the startups to heel last week) interviewed a year apart and explaining his recent thoughts in more detail. Net Net - everyting we've said in spades, and even if you are Nos 1 - 3 in your market, prepare for a hard time - one year's cash minima.

Google Blog Search has changed - it used to be a less-than-OK version of Technorati, its now trying to copy Techmeme / Memeorandum. Looking at the Tech section vs Techmeme, three observations (here's a copy of the output)

:

(i) Its not clear how priority works - this is from the front page, note the rise in No of Blogs talking about a subject from 13 up to 17 up to 25 as it goes down the page (rather than receding), and a seemingly random no. of hours selected.

(ii) One think I like in Techmeme is you see all the blogs commenting on the front page, and you can see their headings by clicking on an expansion button, thus not having to leave the page. This is because I have specific people I like to read, rather than the standard "clamp on" tech news blogs all reporting the same story. Here I don't get that visibility without a click through

(iii) There are only 10 stories per page - one of the good things about Techmeme is you can scroll down a load of stories without leaving teh page, makes it much easier to use - especially on small screens or slower connections like many mobiles

TechCrunch points out the nub of it:

at this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if its even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility - a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.

- and as a number of people noted in the comments (and I found vs Technorati) Google seems to picks up the blog posts far later.

So far, not so good then

But the bigger issue for me is why is Google copying all these things (Wikipedia with Knol, Firefox with Chrome, MS / Open Office, etc - and here, initially Technorati and now Techmeme with Google Blogs) ? Clearly Google is looking at every service that has high traffic and thinking "we'll have some of that" as the benefit to them is they sell Ads to their own pages. (There are no Ads on Blog Search yet, but no doubt they will come). Not only that, it captures extra user data for a spot of mining.

The issue is this potentially distorts competition as badly as anything Microsoft or IBM ever did in their heydays - the fear that Google will build an X the minute one succeeds in anything, and subsidise it via its other operations so the original player can't succeed, must be an issue.

I wonder which Googlestraw will be the last one before the anti-trust camel is backed?

Afterpost - Fred Wilson I think articulates a key point, in that aggregation is not good enough, you need filtering and insight:

But it's like a lot of Google's services. All algorithm and no "voice". It may attract a mainstream audience the way Google News has and that's fine. But for me, it's not close to the value that I get from aggregators with an angle. It's like a mainstream newspaper versus a blog. On one you get the news and on the other you get insight.

I also saw this related post, that the algorithms are already being spammed by pay for post blogging.

When I first looked at Google Knol, I felt a pay-the-writer-via-Ad-clicks was the wrong game theory / biz model for an information service. At the time I reckoned the following would happen with the system as it currently is:

- people will write about topics that are highly trafficked regardless of cultural value
- they will write content that aims to drive traffic - ie it will be sensationalist, not factual
- because anyone can put up a soapbox, it will be far harder to discern fact from fiction, opinion from reality.
- voting and other feedback will be largely irrelevant as people vote for what they like, not what is correct or valuable

Add to this is another one which in hindsight is obvious - given that the money comes from traffic driven advertising, why bother to keep content current and accurate at all, in fact why bother with your own content when you can just lift it from Wikipedia and make money yourself?

As the Technologiser blog notes when they looked at the copied, pasted and non-current data on Knol article they surveyed:

Much of the power of Wikipedia, of course, comes from its collaborative nature. And within moments of news breaking such as McCain picking Palin, you can be sure that someone will add it to the appropriate Wikipedia entries*. When someone makes a mistake in a Wikipedia piece–and it happens all the time–there’s a good chance someone else will come along and fix it.

Knol is fundamentally different: It’s designed to hold entries written by individuals. “[No] one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic,” states the Knol entry about Knol. Which means that information that’s inaccurate or stale may stay so forever–you gotta think that if the person who added the Knol on Sarah Palin hasn’t gone back to update it by now, there’s a strong chance that he’s lost interest.

The article goes on to catalogue a series of poor performance practices on Knol, showing examples of all we mention above plus wholesale lifting of (out of date) Wikipedia articles. Tom Lehrer would be proud

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.

Not only that, but the rating mechanism for one of the articles (surprise surprise) had 5 stars. No idea of how many votes, of course.

This system must have just about the worst set of "game" rules to deliver useful content that one could imagine devising, in fact its sort of hard to imagine how one could consciously design better rules to design cr*p content. The thing is, Googel is full of very smart people so you either have to believe that (i) it really is meant to be this way, (ii) they are not as smart as we imagined, or (iii) - and my fron-runner - is that internal politics drove all sorts of compromises from various internal power holders, as Wenka Booij noted in discussing KPN's web redesign (see our previous post about that here)

So how to fix it?

The thing about Wikipedia is reward for writing (in karma) is positively linked to content quality, and reward is at least neutral in terms of topic chosen. Knol however rewards with ads based on hit volume (assuming a % of hits = a % of clicks), and volume is driven by "pop" content value and volume, not quality. Rewarding people based on "user rating" would just lead to gaming of the system, so thats a non-starter.

The only way to make it work is to treat it the same as all other webpages (there are suspicions that Google favours it in searches) and Google also use it's considerable "spam analysis" arsenal to at least warn writers when they are spam-blogging that they will be removed. And then do it. That gives a carrot and a stick to at least write quality material. Getting people to write on less popular items is still an issue, maybe a declining % rate of payout as traffic rises will reward more obscure topics?

How to make them keep their stuff current is another matter - maybe a "last updated" signal on the page or something like that?). Maybe make writers authenticate themselves via having an "about me page" so that they cannot hide behind clearly anonymised names like "Jean Jacques Frapsauce"

*Or before even - see here.

Very interesting post by Jeremiah Owyang on the impact of a "big audience" blogger dissing someone far lesser known. Essentially, a very well known blogger called a person who had minimal online presence an "a-hole" after they had a disagreement. The blogger blogged, digged etc and as Jeremiah notes:

Today, if you do a search result and examine the first search engine results page (SERP) you’ll notice that as of today 9/10 results are tied to Simon being an “a-hole”. Perhaps most importantly the first two results are of Thomas (we know most clicks start there), the only one that’s not is Simon B’s Facebook profile, which has very little info.

Simon had very little online footprint to start with, and now it will be dominated online by all of these social media elements. Even if Thomas chose to change the title of his blog and flickr, the Twitter, tailrank, and many other online echos will forever be archived –Simon’s online reputation is forever linked to this incident.

Regardless of the wrongs and rights of this case, its an interesting issue, made worse in this case (as I understand it) by the attacked person holding down a professional role and thus not really able to respond in kind in any way (They have now responded - see update 4). I was interested in what various people thought should be done in the comment section - most of the suggestions being to blog back, or leave comments on the attackers' blog, or buy Google ads in some way to redress the balance (maybe he should write a Knol, it seems to get instant Googlejuice).

But, as Jeremiah responds, this won't really help due to the asymmetric reach of blogs of different sizes. He has some practical thoughts:

# Anyone is susceptible to brand damage, even if you’re not in this space (Simon is not in a web professional)
# Bloggers with large social media platforms are incredibly powerful, and must recognize the long term impacts of their actions.
# Businesses should assume every customer (and employee) is capable of impacting an individual or company’s online reputation
# Companies should already have a crises plan ready to deal with online criticisms, read this article from CBS on outsourcing brand damage experts

This issue - in essence its how will we define & handle Online Defamation & Slander* - is something I've been increasingly interested in, as it is very clear that you can (still) say things in the blogosphere ( which is far more persistent ), that you cannot in more traditional media without getting sued. Also, its one thing for bloggers to have a flame war, its another thing to have a go at a person in a post where they cannot respond in kind. I suspect we will start to see legal tests being made in this area in the next year or so. (In fact, it will be interesting to see if this one is tested - I think under UK law there is just cause, not sure about US law)

Its also an issue for the proponents of social ranking systems (Whuffie etc) - if a "high status" individual can ruin the reputation of a low ranked person without (i) being in the right* and (ii) any recourse, you have not created a happy smiling meritocracy, you have created a vicious feudal hierarchy.

Update - a related NYT article on Congress getting more interested in Web Privacy (seen on Techmeme today)

*I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this case, more the general principle that the "big blog" will by definition get to write history, as it were.

*Technically, this case is Libel as Rachel Clarke points out in the comments (but if you look at what others have blogged/said now, it looks like slander too).

Update - 2 other interesting posts on the mob mentality of this episode, and how it may be mediated from Hutch Carpenter and Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Update 3 - just had to share this from The Onion (hat tip Confused of Calcutta)

"We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment," Mylenek said. "What better way to take advantage of this incredible technology than to log onto the Internet and insult a complete stranger?"

Update 4 - The non-blogging party's employer has issued a statement, over here. It would appear the blogger/photographer had been indulging in a bit of downblousing and was ejected for it......

We wrote earlier about our concerns about Google StreetView's impact on privacy, especially in the light of the Google defence of Streetview which was in essence "you don't have privacy - get used to it". Thus it is with a certain wry amusement that I read in El Reg today that:

....the National Legal and Policy Center has exposed countless Google Street View pics that detail what are likely the home, cars, and daily commute of top Google executive [ ].

Responding to Google's addled defense of Street View in an ongoing Pennsylvania court case, the privacy watchdog just unleashed a seven-page PDF that hoists [ ] by his own petard - without actually mentioning the name [ ].

Compiled in "less than 30 minutes," the report reproduces Google Street View photos that appear to reveal [ ] cars, [ ] license plates, the name of the landscaping company [ ] uses, the name of the home security company used by [ ] next door neighbor, the distance from the street to [ ] front door, and [ ] likely driving route to Google's Mountain View headquarters.

[ ] In this case being one Larry Page, Esq - but it could have been you. And you. And you. And definitely any Slebs who read us !

I wonder who will write the first Knol on this then

Sometimes I think things like this have to be done, (i) to bring home to people what the impact of their decisions can be, and (ii) to bring home to the rest of the world that "this could be you". I hope the UK ICO, who this week gave the go ahead, is watching. Maybe someome needs to do it there too, so the message is clear.

Last week I attended the Wealth of Nations conference - my talk was in the new media infrastructure panel, which I will write up a bit later, but I also attended the very interesting panel on Diginomics. Its taken a while to write up as (i) it needed a bit of thought and research and (ii) I have been a bit tied up on "real" work this week.

The core pieces of the session were output from (i) Thierry Rayna on the inefficiency of Web 2.0 economics (a theme that ties to our issues around Freeconomics), and (ii) a paper on the changing economics of media - especially regional print papers - by Gary Graham. There was a very interesting discussion afterwards. I've split this post into 3 sections - firstly, a discussion around Thierry's talk and a sbsequent chat with him, secondly Gary's talk about Media, third about the other issues discussed:

Web 2.0 Inefficiency

The core of the argument is that because of the non monetary nature of Web 2.0 services (ie its all given away free ) then inefficient "adverse selection" choices are resulting - of technologies, services, etc. Secondly, that because of the very low values of most of the content it is very difficult to adopt a simple market scheme for Web 2.0 output.

There are 3 main causes of adverse selection (from my notes - other can chip in if they have a different view of what was said):

- Skewed Incentives: Most contributors do not benefit from their contributions, as they become public goods very rapidly. Thus the rational decision is to "free ride", hence the huge skew between creators and consumers. Open Source software exhibits similar properties, but has avoided the consequences largely because of other benefits to the contributors.

- Search Costs & Cost of Production reduction - the "external" element of search costs (using Google) has dropped, but the "internal element" - winnowing the increased amount of chaff generated by Web 2.0's easier access to more stuff - has risen. Thus there has been declining overall net benefit in search transaction costs. Due to the lower production costs, too much crap is being produced, increasing the noise" and thus leading to a net decrease in social capital. In other words this has led to a "reverse tragedy of the commons" - instead of overgrazing we are over-polluting the commons.

- Unaccounted Externalities - the cost of this crap is by and large not being borne by the producers, it is being borne by the rest of the value chain - as there is so much crap, its increasingly hard to find the good stuff, and in effect it is being forced out the market. This is leading to Akerlof's Law in spades - Akerlof showed that in a market where quality is had to discern, crap drives out quality every time, which reduces overall value of the market. (And if you pay for the crap as per Knol, rather than just make it free, it is exacerbated)

In summary, too many of the wrong people are producing too much of the wrong stuff because it is all being subsidised to the nines.

However, it is extremely hard to actually price and thus monetise Web 2.0 content because of its low unit value and digital format. There is a "perfect storm" emerging from this format as it is:

- nearly instantly public (owing to the copy facility and near impossibility of maintaining copy control)
- infinitely durable (perfect copy every time, keep it so long as there is storage available)
- experience goods - you cannot find out the value until you try it.

Very few people will buy digital goods before sampling them, so they have to be sample-able to sell. In practice the digital format means that if I buy X, I lose nothing if I let you copy it, so there is no incentive for me to keep you from copying it, and because it is so easy, lots of copies inevitably emerge - so price collapses. Sadly, micropayments are not an answer as the rest of the transaction cost is still quite high, so pay per use is not viable yet for much of this content. (In fact, the only way much of this stuff can work is if you make it free to user because of this)

The Future of the Media

Traditionally, a newspaper did 2 things - it informed you, and made money from that. Increasingly however, the "inform" and "making money" bits have been separated. What the media has found is that people are willing to subsidise them (aka advertise) if they entertain, rather than inform. Hence free papers etc.

The economic discussion above demonstrates the theory of what is happening to the media. In the print world, infinite reams of blogcrap and sleb filled free papers are drowning out the quality content. In music (and soon video) the nature of the digital good reduces price of any social wealth producing (aka desirable) content to near zero. Owing to the resulting pricing and externality inequities, people adversely select and the result is that poor quality drives out good quality over time.

Gary's view is that the Internet Generation "News"paper will have to do what the craposphere does not - produce quality content, and charge reasonable prices for it.

So what will occur - the trends imply that two main trends will emerge in the value chain:

- Firstly, there will be customised printing close to source, done to order to try and reduce the distribution costs of paper products. This can push the economics of non subsidised (typically higher quality) products back within view of the free stuff.

- Secondly, there will probably be more customer involvement - from selection through to interaction - to create a more unique experience and compensate the customer in that way. The issue with this will be how to (i) get serendipity and (ii) prevent people from selecting such narrow/ easy to digest content that they become effectively uninformed.The final thought was to find ways of using "Internet Ju-jitsu" - use the nature of the web to create new incentives for people

The Q&A Session

There was a good debate on:

Micropayments - it was claimed that the transaction cost for each Paypal transaction is $2.35. That sounded high to me, and our analysis shows transaction costs of iTunes for eg is more than an order of magnitude lower than that. But the point stands - today, its hard to make money on something costing much less than an iTune, so that bundling methods (eg subscription) are the only way it will work. But with so much Freeconomic subsidy money in the system tight now ($150bn + if Chris Andersen has got it right) , the adverse selection bugbear rears its head.

Patents - good discussion on this, I loved Ludmila'a observation that a patent is merely a right to fight in court, and if you don't have money to fight the well funded incumbent its largely valueless (read our own Paul Lancefield's views on this - and why some trolls are your friends - over here).

Scalability of the "T Shirt & Concert" model for music, Thierry pointing out that ticket prices for concerts had to get very high to make up for lost recorded music sales owing to lower volume. And of course the higher the ticket price, the lower the volume of attendees.....

Should Incumbents just weather this - it is irrational economics, it will collapse, and the best is to stay out and let it run its course, surely. But what happens if they are wrong, or it is too big for one industry to avoid (or, as in media, it destroys far more value than it replaces it with).

An interesting start of a discussion around moving to services that are too complex to be offered by the "give it for free" startups (it was observed that many of these do not offer services, just subroutines as a main product), and these can be charged for. Another option was to package services up as cultural goods, and charge for increasing access (the Freemium model used by Flickr for example). A third discussion was to charge for the stuff that is not available for free today - privacy, quality, etc.

(In)Conclusion

No answers, lots of fascinating questions etc. Harsh though the piece on Diginomics is to the Web 2.0 faithful, I think the point about Web 2.0 potentially having a "reverse tragedy of the commons effect" and for the resulting FreeConomic based adverse selection to drive out quality for crap is a serious charge that needs addressing. Similarly, if there is a limit to micropayments that will impact Web 2.0 long term viability - and produce a huge benefit for anyone who can solve it!

Update - interesting corollary article by Kevin Kelly, arguing that people actually do want to pay:

I recently came across a UK survey, sponsored by British Music Rights (that means they represent musicians and music publishers) which suggest fans want to pay. According to this study what the respondents appear to want is an unlimited download service free of DRM that could be legally accessed for a monthly fee-- a way to pay that doesn't yet exist.

They are happy to pay if it is easy, fair, and beneficial.

News from TechCrunch pointed to the long awaited launch of Cuil (nee Cuill), pronounced "kewl" ( or "cool" if you are from the US ) a new general search engine out the blocks - with 120 billion pages indexed apparently. This couldn't come at a better time given Google's emerging propensity to bias results to favour its own content. Thus, it was time for a road test. I chose 3 topics:

- Buttermilk Pancakes, the subject of Dare Obasanjo's Knol test.
- Freeconomics, a subject dear to the heart here
- Rosicrucians - why not.

Buttermilk Pancakes

The first thing to notice is that Cuil's search page is black (as is that on our real time search engine design - clearly they have good taste . The next is that the results page is not top to bottom linear, but presents a page of results, with picture thumbnails if they exist:



Two things hit me - firstly, that there were no Knol based entries on the Cuil front page. Secondly, my Google results, although deliberately searched on "The World" and not "The UK" setting, looked nothing like Dare Obasanjo's search, mine had far more BBC and other UK based pages served. There were only 2 common pages between my Google page and Cuil. I had to manually switch over to Google.com to replicate Dare's search - so clearly searching "the world" from the UK is still very UK focussed - why is that?

What was more interesting after that was that the difference between the Yahoo, Cuil and Google search pages were fairly negligible apart from the Knol entry on Google. (In fact, my most delightful discovery on this journey was the Yahoo drop down context menu when you enter a search term).

Freeconomics

Google did the "Right Thing" here and brought up our blog article on this on the front page I couldn't find our article on the first 3 pages of Cuil, and the only one I did find, on page 4, is a far less trafficked or referenced article. Yahoo found our article top of page 2. As to the other articles on the 3 engines, there is clearly not a Knol yet ( ) and the results were similar, but not the same - I must admit to some surprise seeing Cuil record The Evangelical Outpost twice on this topic:



(I was reading Cuil down each column at a time to define order......)

Rosicrucians

I was looking it up anyway, so tried all 3. Google and Yahoo's first 2 posts were sponsored, and then they got straight down to business - an article on Rosicrucianism on Wikipedia. Cuil couldn't quite bring itself to get the Wikipedia article on "Rosicricianism" but opted instead for the article on the Ancient Order of the Rosicrucians on No 3 - sans any sponsored pages.

Privacy

Cuil tries to set itself apart from Google here, its policy stated as:

.... our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

My name

Searched for my name, didn't feature in Cuil till page 4 (where it brought up my Twitter account). Yours truly is on page 1 on Google and Yahoo via Broadstuff. I note my Indiana artist, Australian and Argentinian namesakes are still there on page 1, so Cuil clearly does not love blog based links very much.

(Update - a few other things....)

- If you mis-search for Coase's Laew (as opposed to Law) Google knows what you're after, Cuil gets totally confused, Yahoo thinks you are after Case law.
- "Apple" got not one record on page 1 of the actual fruit on Cuil.
- when I searched for the Tuatha de Danaan on Cuil, the graphic was a planet of the apes type monkey - thats not the fair Faerie people, its the Fir Bolg

Conclusions

Well, any search engine that can't reference our blog is clearly a non starter for the cognoscenti! Apart from that glaring omission, I think its search is "mostly harmless" - it doesn't bias for Knols, and it comes up with roughly the same stuff as the others (though not as much or as often as the 120 billion links may imply). The question for Cuil is - whats the differentiator here? I don't think pretty pictures helps that much, and the layout leaves me largely unmoved.

Privacy could become a competitive issue, but I think its still a minority sport - noting how little care the munchkins have with Facebook and Google privacy today, I (sadly) conclude its one of these things that exercises the digerati but few others.

In fact, the biggest aha for me from this is that Yahoo has come on apace since the last time I looked at it.

(For the record - I've used Dogpile for 10 years very happily)

An aside - David Kelly notes that Cuil say their name in theory means "knowledge" in Irish. Um - that bit o' me that is forever gaelic tells me that Cuil means corner or recess or rear. If it's Cuill (the original company name) then that's straight out of Irish legend (the coming of the Tuatha De Danaan) where Mac Cuill was named after a tree, the hazel (or Coll) which in Celtic Mythology gives you wisdom from eating the nut, which the Salmon of Knowledge did. So, a bit roundabout, but in some recess of the name Cuil is the concept of knowledge, though it'd drive you nuts to find it and it all seems a bit fishy

Update thought - catching up on all the comments on this blog and elsewhere (try typing Cuil on Summize), I am left scratching my head as to why Cuil launched now (when it would seem it was too early) and why not go "beta". After all, you only get 1 shot at the launch mojo. Still, to be fair, people were moaning about Google vs AltaVista et al as late as 2002 if I recall correctly.

We reflected earlier this week on the potential conflict of interest Google's Knol throws up as it turns them into for-profit content aggregator as well as search company, amongst early evidence that it favours Knol results over others - now more grist to this mill today. Aaron Wall copied an article onto Knol that he had previously published, essentially a duplicate of his Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com).

The result was, a day later, the Knol version of this ranked highest in Google searches despite the other 2 articles being around a lot longer. To say this is unlikely unless Google favours its own content is putting it mildly. As he notes in a fairly restrained way:

Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.

You can see what's going to happen - reverse tragedy of the commons - because Knol will reward you via Adsense, its a clarion call for the fast buck crowd. We predict we are going to have open season on other people's stuff being stuck into Knol by new authors, who have proclaimed themselves experts in their field. As Mahalo's Jason Calacanis notes:

It seems that Google, the greatest web-business ever created, is not satisfied with owning over 70% of search--now they want to own the first couple of pages in their search results.

(By the way, Jason's advice - forget your own stuff, get into that Googletent)

Now if he can see this coming............ but is this the thing that will make people disbelieve the "Do No Evil" mantra, which has already been put under some pressure?

Seductive though Knol clearly is to Google, I think if it is biassed, Google risks reducing trust in its core search business, and that is a huge risk, as from that the bulk of the Ad revenue still flows.