An online article from WebServices Journal by Paul Cowles: “As the Semantic Web gains momentum, it’s important for Web service developers to keep abreast of its technologies and prepare for a change in their industry. This article from a recent issue of Web Services Journal looks at how the Semantic Web applies to Web services, including what specifications are under development and how you might prepare for integration with future semantic applications.”

For Google fans, a year in review for AdSense, tips, tricks, features and more.

More at http://www.google.com/adwordsreview04

The State of the Union Parsing Tool is an interesting way to analyze major addresses by President Bush and others. You can visualize the frequency and juxtaposition of any two phrases across these addresses. For example, try searching for saddam and nuclear in President Bush’s recent addresses..

From Marketwatch - On Google

Late Tuesday, Google said fourth-quarter profit rose to $204 million …
Google also said quarterly sales shot up to $1.032 billion from $512 million a year earlier. Excluding the payments Google makes to other companies to acquire Internet traffic, the company generated sales of $654 million, more than the $590 million analysts expected. Google is benefiting as companies spend more of their advertising dollars online and as the prices paid for keyword search results rise.

From CNN - On Yahoo

Five years of stagnant online advertising ended in 2004, according to jubilant executives at Yahoo Inc., helping the Web giant nearly triple its fourth-quarter profit and boosting its financial outlook for this year. The Sunnyvale, California-based company … earned $373 million, or 25 cents per share, for the three months ended December 31.

From MarketWatch - General Trends of online advertising

TNS Media Intelligence forecast a 5.1 percent rise to $150.5 billion in 2005 on top of last year’s estimated 10.6 percent bump. The first half should see the strongest rate, with rise of 6.9 percent; that will tail off to 3.5 percent in the second six months of the year. Media categories that stand to benefit the most include online, expected to gain 11.2 percent …

Online Ads and Search Engines are hot! Search engines make most of their income from paid advertisements. They get paid based on number of advertisement clicks by users. As per my understanding some companies commit a preset amount of money(over a duration of time) to paid advertisements and some don’t. So a search engine’s income largely depends on how many clicks it can get to advertisements on its search pages and on other pages on the Web which explicitly display content specific ads.
One obvious way for search engines to exploit the latter to increase their revenues would be to skew results so as to rank pages which display their advertisements highly. This way the number of visitors to these pages increase resulting in a proportional increase in advertisement clicks.
This raises some interesting questions. Can search engines come up with optimization algorithms so as to maximize their overall income with the following constraints:

1. Income from individual companies do not exceed committed boundaries.
2. Search ranking skew towards pages displaying paid advertisements are not so as to effect search users significantly.

I don’t believe Google or Yahoo dies or would ever consider doing this, but they are not the only search company and their success will build a market in which other companys will offer similar services. There remains a risk that an unscrupulous company might be tempted to skew its search to increase profits.

(Jan 31, 2005) Christopher Payne, Corporate VP, MSN Search, has announced the official release of MSN Search . It is completely different from the ugly version we have seen in the past; instead, it now looks much like Google. They claimed that “1.5 million Instant Answers� can be pulled out from “more than 40,000 Encarta encyclopedia articles and associated media�. They also provide web, image, and news search as well as desktop search.

Source1: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/31/364278.aspx
source2: http://www.expressnewsline.com/1005/fullstory1005-insight-Microsoft+Search+Google-status-18-newsID-6.html

Via Richard Waters from Financial Times - In Search of More: The ‘friendly’ engines that will manage the data of daily life. Richard discusses possible search engine directions in quite a length.

May 2008. Google launches G-Life … November 2008. Yahoo!’s new MobileBuddy .. January 2010. 10 years after America Online bought Time Warner, Google acquires Walt Disney.

Most of the content is hypothetical, but is fairly obvious and trivially predictable. Interesting to note was the point on the need of meta-data to augment current search technologies - something which is being talked about and used(Technorati) quite regularly now.

The internet has also introduced an important new layer of context. Led by Google, web search engines interpret the meaning of information based on the meta-data attached to web pages, as well as analysing the links between web pages to assess its relevance.

Meta-data promises to bring other forms of visual content within reach of the search engines. Some digital cameras already encode information on a picture, such as the time it was taken. Global positioning sensors built into camera phones could add location information. Using the voice capabilities of a camera phone, the user could also append commentary when taking a snapshot, then use keywords to search for the picture later, says Adam Sohn, marketing director of Microsoft’s MSN unit.

Ultimately, all the random, unstructured information contained on web pages and other data-repositories could be subjected to a form of structuring that made it more intelligible to machines. This is the idea behind the Semantic Web, a vision of the future internet promoted by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.