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GOOGLE ACQUIRES WEB ANALYTICS COMPANY URCHIN

AP Newswire

Google is to acquire Urchin, the California based web analytics software company. This is yet another example of Google's strategy of expanding its activities into new, but search engine related, types of activities.

Urchin sells software used by webmasters to track activities on their web server. Urchin will, for instance give you statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and hits and show you how visitors navigate through your site.

Urchin will also analyze visits made by people finding your site through search engines and give you an overview over their queries. This is all very useful information for webmasters trying to fine tune their sites in order to maximize the number of visitors, sales and ad click-throughs.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," says Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google.

"This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

And indeed, the main reason for Google taking over Urchin is the overlap between the Google Adwords pay-per-click text ad program and Urchin's ability to measure the success of a given web page. By using Urchin advertisers may more easily find out why some pages and some ads are nor performing as well as expected.

If Google decides to make Urchin part of a larger Adwords package, that could also be a useful way of keeping Adwords customers.

There are other possibilities as well. Urchin delivers data on search engine traffic, and these could easily be combined with ranking statistics from the Google database.

Google has so far been very reluctant to let ranking and optimization tools use the Google database to develop search engine results overviews. Google has no reason to stop a Google owned Urchin from doing the same.

N.C. NEWSPAPER TAPS THE POWER OF BLOGS

By Ellen Simon, AP Technology Writer

It's a journalist's job to ask questions, but they're usually aimed at outsiders. At the News & Record, a 93,000-daily circulation newspaper in Greensboro, reporters and editors are asking tough questions about the paper itself. The biggest questions: If the paper needs to change to survive, what changes should be made? What can it do, especially online, to make itself the electronic equivalent of a town square?

Seeking the answers, the paper has launched an audacious online experiment.

The News & Record's Web site features 11 staff-written Web journals, or blogs, including one by the editor that answers readers' questions, addresses their criticisms and discusses how the paper is run.

That puts the paper way ahead of even much larger news organizations. The News & Record's blogs range from "just-the-facts, ma'am," to slightly spicy.

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually newfangled newspaper actually exists."

Other papers are watching. The Houston Chronicle, The (Portland) Oregonian, (Raleigh) News & Observer and USA Today have all called News & Record editor John Robinson to discuss what his paper is doing.

Why the interest? Declining circulation, vitriolic criticism of everything from the media's obsession with celebrity trials to its coverage of the 2004 election, plus a series of scandals involving reporters who made up facts have led to industry-wide soul-searching.

Readership has also eroded, especially among young people. According to futureofthenewspaper.com, a project of the World Association of Newspapers, 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds read a newspaper in 1967. By 1999, that number had declined to 42 percent.

The News & Record is tracking the blogs' page hits and seeing impressive numbers. Still, Robinson said he has no sense that more than 100 people are daily readers of the papers' blogs. Most of the paper's blog posts get only a handful of comments.

Still, "as more people go to the Web, fewer of them buy the paper," Robinson said. "You go hunting where the ducks are flying; right now they're flying on the Web."

Still, the News & Record's work on the Web is seen as essential to the paper's future.

Alexander, the editor spearheading the effort, said, "I don't know for a fact that what we're doing is going to get us to the goals we have, but continuing what we were doing certainly wasn't an option."

FIFTH ANNUAL SEARCH ENGINE WATCH AWARDS

Danny Sullivan, Search Eninge Watch

The Search Engine Watch Awards recognize outstanding achievements in search via the web. The winners for accomplishments during 2004 are:

Outstanding Search Service
Winner: Yahoo
Second Place: Google
Honorable Mention: Ask Jeeves

Best News Search Engine
Winner: Google News
Second Place: Yahoo News
Honorable Mention: MSN Newsbot & Topix

Best Blog/Feed Search Engine
Winner: Bloglines
Second Place: Feedster
Honorable Mention: Technorati

Best US Shopping Search Engine
Winner: Google's Froogle
Second Place: Yahoo Shopping & Shopping.com
Honorable Mention: PriceGrabber & Shopzilla

Most SEO/Webmaster Friendly Search Provider
Winner: Google
Second Place: Yahoo
Honorable Mention: MSN Search

Best Search Ads Provider
Winners: Google AdWords
Second Place: Yahoo/Overture

VERTICAL SEARCH ENGINES BECOMING WEB NORM

Verne Kopytoff, SF Chronicle

In a quest to provide Internet users with more relevant information, a proliferation of companies is creating search engines that are focused on narrow topics.

Job seekers, shoppers and teens all have new search engines devoted to their interests. So do people who want to find where someone else works.

Driving the search industry's niche evolution is the reality that the general purpose search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN fail to find relevant links for many queries. The theory is that vertical search engines, as they are often called, will be more effective in connecting users with the information they want.

"There are times when you are looking for something discrete and, from an efficiency standpoint, a vertical search engine may help you find what is essential to you," said David Hills, chief executive for LookSmart, a San Francisco company that introduced five vertical search engines last week.

They include Teenja.com for teens, 24HourScholar.com for college students and GoBelle.com for moms on the go. Much of the information they offer comes from articles culled from FindArticles, a LookSmart Web site.

What's happening now is a dramatic acceleration in the number of engines rolling out, according to Internet industry analysts and executives. During the past six months, many new engines covering a broad spectrum of subjects have premiered. Many of them are by small startups like Indeed.com, a Web site for scanning job boards. Another, Answers.com, created by GuruNet, is for reference material. Become.com is for shopping. Ziggs.com helps locate professionals.

Craig Donato, chief executive for Oodle, which searches classified ads on several Web sites, casts his service as a convenience for consumers. No longer do they need to visit multiple Web sites to shop local classifieds, he said.

"When I approached this about 18 months ago, I found that online classifieds were very fragmented," Donato said. "I was checking eBay, I was checking Craigslist, I was checking the newspapers."

Oodle, based in San Mateo, started as a beta last week. It serves only Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia, but Donato plans to expand it to other areas.

To use the engine, visitors enter their location and what they are looking for. They are then given links to the relevant listings from the original source.

By going vertical, search engine companies hope to reduce extraneous results for users by better guessing users' intent. A query for "great white" -- the name for an '80s rock band and a shark species -- can get very different results on Google compared with an engine that specializes in academic material.

Vertical search engines also can ask questions more quickly. Shopping search engines, for example, can ask up front the color, size and manufacturer of what you want to buy.

Vertical search isn't just for startups. Web giants Google and Yahoo are intensely interested. Both have their own engines for local information, shopping, images, video and news. At the same time, each is trying to outdo the other with more unusual offerings. For example, Google, in Mountain View, recently released Google Scholar for academic publications.

Yahoo's latest effort, unveiled last week, is an engine that searches material licensed with the so-called Creative Commons. The text, books and educational material retrieved can be reused by others without violating copyright law.

Amazon.com is trying to outdo them all by making dozens of vertical search engines available on its nascent engine, A9, in Palo Alto. Last month, the company started inviting vertical search companies to make their engines available on its Web site.

A9 users can choose among the dozens currently available. They can then get results from them listed alongside those from A9's general purpose engine, provided by Google.

A strong online advertising market has a lot to do with the interest in niche search, according to analysts. Executives can run targeted text ads next to the results from such companies as Google and Yahoo, a strategy that has proven to be a financial boon to the overall search industry.

"People believe that there's money to be had," said Bill Tancer, an analyst for Hitwise, a firm that measures online traffic. "The challenge is to build enough brand equity and get enough users." That is especially true for the startups. Many of them have only a trickle of traffic and limited marketing budgets.

Furthermore, the quality of their results can be mixed. Some of the engines search a very limited number of Web pages and therefore return only a small number of links for some queries, judging by the results. Granted, many of the services are still in beta. Executives promise that improvements and new features are on the way.

Niki Scevak, an analyst for JupiterResearch, a market research firm, believes that vertical search engines specializing in shopping, financial services, media and entertainment, and travel have the best chance of survival. Advertisers are already spending large amounts of money on those sectors.

Hills, from LookSmart, is nevertheless confident that his new search sites will survive, even in the face of potential competition from bigger companies like Google and Yahoo. Users will flock to Web sites that they believe are essential to them, he said.

"You can't wake up in the morning afraid of your competitors," Hills said. "You have to assume that you can do something that they don't do or do something better that they do."