Ask.com, the small rival to Google Inc., aims to tap the collective search habits of its 50 million users to improve the relevancy of Web search, its chief executive said on Tuesday.
Jim Lanzone told an Internet marketing conference that his company, a unit of Barry Diller’s e-commerce conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, was looking to merge technologies that unlock the collective insights of its broad audience.
“What Ask becomes is a collective search engine where 50 million users are leaving bread crumbs,” Lanzone said.
In an on-stage interview at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Silicon Valley, Lanzone contrasted Ask.com’s more social approach to improving Web search to the industry’s current push to offer greater personalization.
He said attempts at automated personalization often fail in practice to give users what they want.
Instead, Web search can be improved by understanding the aggregate behavior of different types of users. This collective approach means users stand to benefit from what users with similar interests have gleaned from previous searches.
“Collective search is something that Ask really believes in,” Lanzone said, adding that personalizing what different users see is only a small piece of further improving search.
To be sure, the changes are one of degree, rather than an absolute shift. All major Web search systems rely on algorithms that analyze the collective surfing habits of their users in order to determine what is relevant to the biggest audience.
This affinity-group approach means users who work as Web marketers might see searchers that other marketers found useful, while baseball fans might see a different range of search results, Lanzone said.
Lanzone downplayed the potential threats to personal privacy that can be gleaned from understanding the aggregate behavior of different types of users.
“In 15 years, search engines have had one mishap in this area,” he said of the threat of major Internet companies exposing data on consumer Web surfing habits. A year ago, AOL researchers caused a huge privacy uproar when they released data on the surfing habits of hundreds of thousands of users.
Ask.com revealed in April that it was working on a new project to merge its different search technologies under a combined service.
The project, known as Edison, will combine its Teoma ExpertRank technology for automatically gauging the relevance of Web sites to particular searches with its DirectHit technology, which calculates the popularity of different searches based on the number of clicks users make.
Ask is looking to build on improvements it introduced in June with its new Ask 3D search service. Ask 3D combines the classic text links to Web pages with links to images, videos, dictionaries, blogs and other ways of refining searches.
Separately, Lanzone said his company has begun talks on a new, Web search advertising deal worth multiple billions of dollars to replace an existing three-year deal with Google that is set to expire later this year.
In 2002, Ask.com, then known as Ask Jeeves, struck a $100 million deal with Google. A renewed deal from 2005 to 2007 was for undisclosed terms. A third such deal would start in 2008.
“We are in negotiations today,” Lanzone said in an interview following his speech. “Whether we renew or not, it is going to be a multi-billion deal,” he said earlier, during his conference presentation.
He declined to specify whether Ask.com was in talks with Google or potential rivals including Microsoft Corp or Yahoo! Inc..
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YouTube will introduce advertising into video clips today for the first time as the world’s most popular video- sharing website tries to justify its $1.65 billion (£832 million) purchase price.
The Google-owned site also hopes to reinvent video advertising on the web. YouTube believes that its approach is as unobtrusive as the classifed adverts placed by its search-engine owner. Twenty seconds after a clip begins, a transparent advert appears in the bottom fifth of the video for a further 15 seconds. Clicking on the image overlay plays the advert, but if ignored it simply disappears.
Eileen Naughton, YouTube’s director for media platforms, said: “We are trying to be respectful of the YouTube community, whilst working with marketing partners.” She cited statistics that “less than 10 per cent of users choose to close the image overlay as soon as it appears” as evidence that it does not bother people watching clips.
The model was chosen in preference to traditional forms of television advertising, in which programme-watching is interrupted by a commercial break. Testing by YouTube showed that the approach did not find favour with internet users.
Shashi Seth, group product manager, said: “Our experiments with preroll advertising [a short advert placed at the beginning of a clip] showed a very high abandonment rate.”
Not all videos are eligible for advertising at this stage. YouTube has chosen to work with established media partners, such as Warner Music, in the first wave. Twenty advertisers, including BMW, the car group, and MGM, the film studio, have tested the service.
YouTube is charging about $20 per 1,000 views, with the revenue split between the website and the provider of the content. The scheme will be available only in the United States at first, but an international deployment, including in Britain, is expected within months.
The website is keen to manage who can accept advertising to ensure that household-name brands do not find themselves appearing as an overlay to pornographic, violent or other controversial content. This month Facebook, the social networking site, became embroiled in a dispute after its technology allowed well-known brands to appear on a page produced by the British National Party.
Only YouTube’s 1,000 content “partners”, including the BBC’s commercial unit and Chelsea Football Club, will take commercials initially. A few of those content partners include ordinary people who have become some of YouTube’s most popular providers of clips, such as the British pensioner who goes under the name Geriatric1927. His “channel” has been viewed about 1.95 million times.
Google rapidly developed from a successful search engine into one of the largest sites for classified advertising on the internet and is eating into newspaper revenues in America. Google’s acquisition of YouTube last year, at a multiple estimated at 100 times its then revenues, was seen as an attempt to augment its $15 billion-plus annualised turnover with advertising linked to video clips.
If the approach takes off, it is likely to be adopted elsewhere and become the default form of advertising in video. YouTube, founded in 2005, has rapidly become the dominant video-sharing website worldwide.
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A fantasy plague that accidentally ran amok in the Internet’s most popular game world, populated by nine million flesh-and-blood players, may help scientists predict the impact of genuine epidemics, according to a study released Tuesday.
Virtual playgrounds such as World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, could soon become testing grounds for the all-too-real battle against bird flu, malaria or some as yet unknown killer virus, one of the authors, Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey, told AFP.
Discussions are underway, she confirmed, with the game’s California-based manufacturer, Blizzard, a unit of French media giant Vivendi, on how future updates might yield useful scientific data.
“As technology and biology become more heavily integrated in daily life, this small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and humans could become highly significant,” she said.
The unlikely path to a collaboration between hard science and hard-core gaming began in late 2005, when Blizzard programmers introduced a highly contagious disease — dubbed “Corrupted Blood” — into a newly created zone of the game’s Byzantine environment.
World of Warcraft is a “multiplayer online role-playing game” in which players — numbering in the tens, or hundreds of thousands — use computer-controlled avatars to fight battles, form alliances, and dialogue simultaneously on the Internet.
At first the “patch”, as new elements such as the disease are called, worked as expected: experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars.
But then things spun out of control. As in reality, some of those carrying the virus slipped back into the virtual world’s densely populated cities, rapidly infecting their defenseless inhabitants.
The disease also spread — much like real influenza or the plague — via domesticated animals abandoned by players for fear of infecting their avatars, leaving the sickened pets to roam freely.
Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored. Finally, they resorted to an option not available in the real world: they shut down the servers and rebooted the system.
“This was the first time that a virtual virus has infected a virtual human being in a manner resembling an actual epidemiological event,” said Fefferman, whose co-author, epidemiologist Eric Lofgren from Tufts University in Boston, was playing the game when the plague struck.
The authors had already discussed the possibility of using online gaming to study the spread of disease, and thus immediately recognized the opportunity.
To date, epidemiologists have relied heavily on mathematical simulations to forecast the spread of contagious diseases across large populations.
But crunching numbers has limitations, says Fefferman. “There is no way to model how people will behave” in a pubic crisis, she said.
“How many will run away from a quarantine? Will they become more or less cooperative if they are scared? We simply don’t know.”
Which is where the virtual netherworlds come into the picture. They can help scientists to “feed appropriate parameters into existing epidemiological models,” she said.
Some skeptics have suggested that gamers are more willing to take risks online than in the flesh, and Fefferman acknowledges there is a difference.
But most players have invested a lot of time and energy into strengthening their avatars and forming alliances. For many, psychologists say, their virtual creations have become alter egos.
“We don’t mean to suggest that people’s reactions in this game would exactly mirror their reactions in real life,” she said.
“But I think it is the closest thing we have to something that people really do become emotionally invested in protecting.”
The researchers are working on a proposal for a new patch that would be a “compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful,” she said.
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