Tag: google

YUI Grids CSS

Head over to the Google Homepage. Log In using your Google Account. Make sure you’re at your Personalized Homepage. Take a look at the source CSS file ig.css included on the page. There are a few peculiar lines of code that I recognized from another source, the Yahoo User Interface Grids CSS file.

heh. why not come out and admit it? YUI is one of the few things out of yahoo that don’t suck

Micropayments Pipe Dream

I think that Google needs to nurture the paid information ecology and find a way to support the creators in what they do. They don’t need to abandon the free ecology or even favor the paid over the free. But the world will be a richer place if more people are given several ways to fund the shoe leather it takes to create content.

oy, micropayments as a solution for the death of newspapers? what is this, the 90s?

The end of federated search?

Google’s move away from federated search is particularly intriguing given that Udi Manber, former CEO of A9, is now at Google and leading Google’s search team. A9, started and built by Udi with substantial funding from Amazon.com, was a federated web search engine. It supported queries out to multiple search engines using the OpenSearch API format they invented and promoted. A9 had not yet solved the hard problems with federated search — they made no effort to route queries to the most relevant data sources or do any sophisticated merging of results — but A9 was a real attempt to do large scale federated web search.

is opensearch in trouble?

Google Pay Per Action

Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network. Advertisers flock to volume, which drives average pricing up. When prices increase, publishers flock to the new platform because they’ll earn more. Look for serious publisher leakage from the big affiliate networks over time as this new product scales up. If you want to argue this point, note what happened to the stock price of Commission Junction’s parent company, ValueClick, today. And that’s even though the market has largely adjusted for this news already – this move to add PPA ads has been rumored for some time.

good riddance to affiliate spam, hopefully