Author: Daniel Tunkelang

OK, for those of you who don’t recognize the Pearl Jam allusion, here are the lyrics and video. But most of all, congrats to Jeremy Pickens for jumping in to the blogosphere with his new blog: Information Retrieval Gupf.

Most readers here who read the comments (note to RSS readers–you can and should also read the comments feed via RSS!) know Jeremy as Google’s outsourced conscience. So it’s not surprising to see him blogging about Google’s attitude towards competition in his most recent post, entitled “One Click Away“.

I’ve of course added Jeremy’s blog to the feeds I read. While I realize he’ll now be splitting his time between commenting at The Noisy Channel and posting to his own blog, I’d like to think that I’m not losing a commenter but gaining a blogger. Jeremy, welcome to the dark side!

Like many bloggers, I learn which topics are “hot” from aggregators like Techmeme–which in turn automatically aggregate news sources from around the world (though lately they’re also receiving help from human volunteers). I’ve always thought this fell under the doctrine of fair use.

But apparently neither the Associated Press nor the courts think so. As Joe Mullin reports at The Prior Art:

A New York federal judge ruled Tuesday that The Associated Press can sue its competitors not merely for copyright infringement, but for a “quasi property” right in the news known as the “hot news” doctrine.

As Mullin points out, this doctrine seems broad enough to cover any instance where one news organization covers a topic after being “scooped” by a competitor. Surely no one would dream of applying it so broadly, but stranger things have been known to happen.

Intellectual property law is crazy enough without entertaining a world where me-too coverage–or even mere citation–is considered theft. I hope that this lawsuit established a sustainable standard of fair use. I shudder to think that Techmeme could sue me for writing this post–if Mullin didn’t sue both of us first!

The top story on Techmeme as I write is Randall Stross ‘s New York Times article, “Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big“. As Stephen Arnold notes, don’t read the article expecting to learn something new. Still, not everyone who reads the New York Times is current on the search industry, and the article does sum of the state of affairs neatly.

In particular, there’s a nice point by Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research:

“Whether we’re slightly ahead or slightly behind Google in core relevance is not a game changer in search,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s chief search strategist.

Yahoo’s best opportunity, Mr. Raghavan said, is to offer radically new ways of presenting information that will help users finish whatever it is they started before the search, like finding a job or buying a plane ticket. “People don’t want to search; it’s a digression,” he said. “They want to complete a task.”

Yes, I told you so. And so did Prabhakar, among others. I just wonder how long it will take for the rest of the world to figure this out. That’s why I’m happy to see this discussion making it into the paper of record.

Just wanted to let readers know that I’m attending Times Open, learning about how the New York Times is opening up its APIs to better engage the developer community.  Follow the day remotely (or non-remotely) in real time on Twitter!

If you’re not in the  public relations industry or have not been emailing me your story ideas for The Noisy Channel, please feel free to skip the rest of this post.

To those of you who have been sending me pitches for your companies or your clients, this post is for you. I’m flattered that I make it onto your list of target media outlets–I can’t deny it’s cool to be so valued when I’ve been blogging for less than a year. And I’m sure my readers are flattered that you value their eyeballs enough to seek them out. But your approach–well, it just isn’t very effective.

Like most bloggers, I’m pretty quick to tune out press releases, or similarly fluffy sales / marketing pitches. It’s pretty easy to identify them from their tone, from the immediate sensation that someone pasted “Dear Daniel” onto a message that was sent out in bulk. As soon as I detect that impersonal tone, I conclude that you have no idea what might interest me, and that you are talking at me rather than with me. While I used to feel guilty about not responding to email with my name on it, I don’t feel the same qualm about ignoring–or even reporting as spam–emails that clearly were sent to a distribution list I didn’t sign up for.

Moreover, bear in mind that blogging is not my day job–in fact, this blog generates zero income for me. Perhaps some reporters are grateful to be spoon-fed content that they can use to fill empty pages. Not me–I’d rather go dark for a week than post content that would annoy my readers. My credibility is my coin.

So please, if you are one of the folks who has been filling my inbox with PR pitches, unsubscribe me from your lists. If you think that I or my readers want to know more about you or your products, write me a personal email to persuade me. I can tell the difference. If writing a personal email is too much investment for you, then reading an impersonal one is surely too much investment for me.

Finally, I can relate to your challenge. When I started this blog, I sent out scores of emails to let people know about it. But I didn’t email in bulk, and every message I sent out was clearly meant for its recipient. It took me much, much longer to write those messages than if I’d simply written one and sent it out to everyone. But the success of this blog is a testament to the human approach.

The other day, I was shocked to hear that Google was employing a pay-per-post stategy in Japan–precisely the sort of strategy they’ve historically condemned. I was certainly among those crying “hypocrisy”.

Well, to his credit, so was Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. In fact, he didn’t just complain–his team did something about it. Via “Google Penalizing Google” at Google Blogoscoped:

head of Google’s anti web-spam team Matt Cutts via Twitter writes, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.”

Matt Cutts blogged about it himself today, saying “To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize that this happened.” I haven’t met Matt yet (I’m looking forward to meeting him at the SIGIR ’09 Industry Track!), but I’m delighted to see this preview of his integrity.

OK, I’ve just started reading it–in fact, they’ve just started writing it! But, given the quality of comments on this blog from FXPALers Gene Golovchinsky and Jeremy Pickens, I’m expecting great things from the FXPAL Blog.

Check out their recent post about “Recall-oriented search on the web“.

Whatever else you might say about Google, they understand how to engineer web-scale systems. Check out Greg’s notes (or Michael Bendersky’s via Jeff’s Search Engine Caffe) about Google Fellow Jeff Dean‘s keynote at last week’s WSDM 2009 conference.

Here’s the teaser from Greg’s notes:

Jeff gave several examples of how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. They have x1000 the number of queries now. They have x1000 the processing power (# machines * speed of the machines). They went from query latency normally under 1000ms to normally under 200ms. And, they dropped the update latency by a factor of x10000, going from months to detect a changed web page and update their search results to just minutes.

This is no small feat, and it gives you a sense for the bar that Google has set in the web search market. Students of the Innovator’s Dilemma take note: if you want to beat Google, you’re not going to do it by stuggling to incrementally outdo them on their own turf. For the use cases it addresses, Google is surely good enough. And damn fast.