Google Content Network and the AdSense Trojan Horse

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 30th, 2008 1:08am

Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted a tip on Twitter tonight to a New York Times report on Google's planned Content Network, in which they'll distribute video and video ads through their installed base of AdSense publishers. This a big deal reflective of how Google's integrated ad capabilities can in a single stroke shift an entire segment of an industry, and a reminder of the power, scale and reach the AdSense network gives them. Online video's in for a big shake-up. Some first impressions and questions: Very cool, very smart, tons of unknowns. What will publishers with their own video content think about this? Will there be an opt-out setting for publishers who still ...

Trusting Human-Powered Search

Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 2:22am

Jason Calacanis today writes that Mahalo's challenge is breadth rather than depth. Fair enough, but to me currency, and by extension accuracy, are of even greater importance for their sustainability. In search, accuracy = trust = user retention1. Google's trust model is based on a broad acceptance that their crawlers do a good job of finding pages and that their indexers and ranking algorithms are likely to lead you to the most relevant results for a given search. Certainly there are flaws in the model and room for improvement, from which the category (of one?) of human-powered search draws its raison d'être, but ...