[Update: In a repeat of the Dictionary.com acquisition five years ago, Answers.com was the first to reach a tentative agreement, but Ask.com closed the deal.] I have fond memories of the Mining Company, which changed its name to About.com. They may have been the first big quality reference site on the web. They also may […]
“To not believe in Patch, you have to believe that consumers in a town don’t want local information, they don’t want local advertising or commerce, and they don’t want a platform they can engage on.” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws Trouble, WSJ I don’t know whether Tim Armstrong’s […]
I gave this presentation at SMX Israel. Rewritten after Google launched Search Plus Your World a few days before the conference. “I’m so excited that our personalization works so well that people are creating dystopian fantasies about it.” “How stupid would your friend think you are if he asked for the bus schedule and you gave […]
[Dear reader: A funny thing happened with this post. I wrote it to show how it’s OK for eHow’s page to rank on “how to pour a glass of water” since it will only be found by people searching for that information. But then I was surprised to get a lot of search traffic to […]
What a week for content farms! Here’s the brief overview: On Friday Matt Cutts acknowledged some influential bloggers’ criticisms that Google had a faustian deal with Content Farms that were making Google worse. IMO Matt’s statement boiled down to: You’re wrong, Google is getting better, not worse, and we keep trying to keep up with […]
A few weeks ago I asked people to chime in on whether Google search results were getting better or worse. Well, Matt Cutts just did. Here are his key points: Google results are getting better. “The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search […]
Give Business Insider credit on their coverage of Demand Media. They’ve published insightful analyses, ranging from highly critical to extremely bullish. The best by far was Suite101 CEO Peter Berger’s Hater’s Don’t Understand Demand Media which provided useful insights into the model Demand and Suite101 employ. [Disclosure: Like Berger, I work at a company (Answers.com) […]
After almost a year of hype and speculation Demand Media finally had to release some numbers in order to file for their IPO. In case you didn’t have time to read all 269 pages, here are the 5 numbers you need to know: [Reminder: I work at Answers.com, which is in some ways a competitor] […]
Excellent recent articles in the New York Times, TechCrunch, and All Things D have brought some clarity and insight to the issues surrounding large-scale content-creation sites. Here’s an industry overview: Who? Demand Media’s eHow, Associated Content, New York Times’ About.com, Aol’s Seed.com, Yahoo! Answers, and Answers.com’s WikiAnswers (where I work). What? These sites create thousands […]
Recent reports of quality content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The importance of quality content is going to increase, not decrease. If Answers.com (where I work) and Demand Media succeed, it will be because we succeeded in following Wikipedia’s model and creating high quality content that matches what users are looking for. What content does […]