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Try this trend out for size: Google is abandoning search

(Credit: iStockphoto)

There has been a huge maelstrom about Google integrating Google+ into its search links. And it all misses the point.

Twitter and others are complaining that Google is throwing its massive 65% plus market share weight around and quashing smaller competitors. The reason Twitter and others are so threatened is that the pattern of shared links within Google+ provides a decent enough indicator as to what links are interesting. What's important is what's trending, and algorithms can get a sense of that with just a subset of everything that's getting shared on the Web.

The most interesting aspect of Google's move, however, is its tacit acknowledgement that its stalwart search links are largely irrelevant and might as well be replaced with social results. Google search results are essentially gamed results produced by search optimizers.

In other words, the search results that we supposedly value so highly are themselves paid placements, just like Google's keyword ads. It's just that in the case of search results, link owners have paid for SEO (search-engine optimization) to get Google's attention instead of paying for SEM (search engine marketing) to make Google give their links prominence. Either way, though, searches are mostly just producing ads by any other name.

In addition, Google's famed PageRank algorithm carries less and less weight these days, since fresh news and results inherently don't have as many inbound links as older content. (If it helps, you can think of PageRank as a kind of paleo-social search--just one that moves way too slowly for the modern Web.)

(Credit: Peter Yared/CNET)

As I've written in the past, Google well knows that its search results suck, and over the past few years, it has started to short-circuit those results by putting more and more direct "answers" at the top search pages. That, of course, makes the search results themselves less and less important.

As the screenshot to the right (click for a larger version) shows, ads and answers have started to push Google's quintessential search results below the fold into the netherworld of the Web. As it turns out, in many cases the actual "answers" to searches for airline flights or products are actually much more monetizable than ads.

At last year's D conference, Google chairman Eric Schmidt presaged the shift from links to answers, stating that "we're trying to move from answers that are link-based to answers that are algorithmically based, where we can actually compute the right answer." More and more, Google is simply going to answer your questions. Last month, it acquired predictive search company Clever Sense to accelerate this transition. New mobile search engines such as Apple's Siri also dispense with search links entirely and simply return a single answer.

So why not replace increasingly gamed and lame search links with socially curated links? The search results were increasingly irrelevant anyway.

IT IS going to be a great opportunity—but whether an opportunity for business innovators or for rent-seekers and scam-merchants depends on whom you ask. On January 12th ICANN, the body that regulates the naming system of computers connected to the internet, starts accepting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). There are currently just 21 of these (22 if you count .arpa, used only for managing the internet's technical infrastructure), and most are reserved for specific users: .edu for American universities, .aero for air-transport companies, the recently-launched .xxx for pornography purveyors, and so on. Only four—.com, .org, .net and .info—are open to anyone. Website owners with global pretensions often prefer them to country-code TLDs such as .uk, .ru and .cn (though some of those, like Tuvalu's .tv, have become internationalised). And they are getting a little crowded.

So now anyone with the money (at least $185,000 up front, plus maintenance fees starting at $6,250 a quarter) can apply for a new top-level domain like .beaches, .porn or .tango, from which the owner can then license the subdomains (mexico.beaches) to other people. There will be safeguards to protect trademarks like .canon or .siemens; generic domains like .lawyer or .bank will be reserved for organisations that can prove they represent substantial parts of the community of lawyers and bankers; and someone who wants a geographic name like .london or .berlin will need to have a green light from the local authorities.

There is a mad rush: up to 1,500 applications are expected in this first round. ICANN, a bureaucratic non-profit body which set the fees on the basis of what it cost to process ten gTLD applications in 2003, is going to have to scale up fast. (Expect the fees to come down as it does so.) America's Federal Trade Commission stopped short of blocking the gLTD expansion but sent ICANN a stiff letter warning it that it is opening the floodgates to a tide of legal disputes, racketeers and technical snafus that it is ill-equipped to handle.

But even leaving those problems aside, it is still pretty unclear what the benefits will be. Here are some of the purported ones, as described by Theo Hnarakis of Melbourne IT, a company that has snagged over a hundred would-be gTLD registrants as its clients:

• Navigation. People will remember addresses like ipad.apple more easily than ipad.apple.com. This means they are more likely to type the address straight in rather than searching for "Apple iPad", which is good for Apple because if they search, they might click on another link or on a sponsored Apple link which then costs Apple money.
• Search. Search will work better, because ipad.apple will come in among the top results for "apple ipad".
• Security. It is easy to send people "phishing" e-mails from plausible-sounding addresses like info@citibank-cards.com or info@invest-hsbc.com, which dupe them into clicking on links and revealing passwords or other information. But if you see an e-mail ending in .citibank, you will know that only Citibank could have sent it.
• Geographic specificity. Your favourite restaurant's website may well be something like janesmithnyc.com. If it could be janesmith.nyc, then Jane Smith's in London could be janesmith.london, and so on. Moreover, the new gTLDs can be in non-Latin script, adding to the diversity.
• New business models. A company—British Airways, for instance—could buy .holidays, and license its subdomains (caribbean.holidays, etc) to other travel companies—or keep them all for itself, so that it bags all the search traffic. According to Jason Rawkins, an intellectual-property lawyer at Taylor Wessing, investment funds have already been created to buy portfolios of gTLDs for licensing.

It should be obvious that there are a lot of untested assumptions here. Does taking off a .com really make web addresses easier to remember? After all, the .com hardly varies; it's the rest of the address you have to guess at. Things could in fact get more complex, not less. Right now you can guess that a company's web address is probably companyname.com, but .companyname alone can't be a web address. So will Microsoft's home page be home.microsoft, www.microsoft, main.microsoft? Will Air France choose home.airfrance, accueil.airfrance, vols.airfrance?

On the security front, is educating people to trust only e-mails from info@cards.citibank really any easier than educating them to trust only info@citibank.com? For a small business, a website like janesmith.nyc may be a boon—but does the Nobu restaurant chain, with branches in two dozen cities in over a dozen countries and growing, really want the hassle of buying and maintaining separate subdomains from the registrars of each one just so it can have nobu.miami and nobu.moscow (to say nothing of nobu.москва and нобу.москва), rather than managing them all through one website as noburestaurants.com/miami and so on?

There is clearly lots of scope for abuse—such as cybersquatting, the practice of buying up domain names in advance and forcing those that really want them later to pay through the nose—though ICANN has tried to pre-empt this with its dispute-resolution procedures. But there is also scope for plain old aggressive business practices that smack of anti-competitiveness. (Why should other companies that sell Apple products be squeezed out of search results in favour of Apple? Why should one airline nab more holiday-makers than another just because it bought .holidays first?)

A lot of these problems can be fixed, of course, with a bit of work. Registrars can create lots of variants of a web address that will redirect to one of them (home.microsoft). An intermediary can offer Nobu a one-stop service for managing all its geographic domain registrations. Lawyers will handle the dispute-resolution and the negotiations over licensing second-level domains. Which is why Esther Dyson, a technology entrepreneur who was the founding chairwoman of ICANN, launched a broadside at the idea last summer. It will, she wrote, "create lots of work for lawyers, marketers of search-engine optimisation, registries, and registrars. All of this will create jobs, but little extra value."

It is true that opening up gTLDs is probably unavoidable: just think of all the Jane Smiths, Mohammed Husseinis and Li Wens out there who will be wanting websites in the future. But Ms Dyson may well be right that the chief beneficiaries will be those who profit from untangling the mess.

New York Real Estate Activity Is In And Around New York

Metro Mover Index: 0.49
• Only half as many inbound searches as outbound searches
• Most home searches in New York are made by New Yorkers for New York homes
• New York remains slow-growing, with many New Yorkers looking to neighboring, cheaper and
less-dense metro areas
 Inbound vs. Outbound:
• Only 12% of home searches in New York are made by house hunters more than 500 miles away

Falling Home Prices Fuel Demand In Hardest-Hit Markets

More than a seasonal desire for warmer weather during winter months, nearly
all the top longer-distance home searches from New York and Chicago at the
end of the summer were to major metros in South and Southwest.

Get your own copy of  Trulia's Metro Movers Report - Q3 2011

From zero to 27+ million online house hunters each month — what can we say, people loveour inside scoop on real estate!

Source: Based on Trulia's web traffic from 2006 through 2011. The map illustrates where house hunters are looking for homes (property views) while the bar chart shows you how many people are visiting Trulia.com each month (monthly visits).