In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.

I maintain that these guys are sitting on one of the greatest domain names in existence.

So, what is the next Google? A search for “the next Google” returns 122,000 results. So, 121,999 to go.

This will cannibalize sales of their Google Mini, since it’s the same functionality at a fraction of the cost […]

Well, I was wrong. I assumed it was “hosted Google Mini.” It’s not. At all.

We implemented Google Custom Search Business Edition for a client, and I’ve come to understand that I had completely unrealistic expectations for it. We’ve done two Google Mini implementations, and been more or less thrilled with that. But this product isn’t the same thing at all.

First, you don’t get your own search index. You use a subset of the public Google index of your site, just as if you appended “site:mydomain.com” to your search term. This means that you’re at the mercy of Google to index your site and remove old pages from your index. New content won’t appear in your site’s search right away, and old content will stay for some time before it disappears.

Second, since you’re the public index, there’s no way to bias search results. You end up doing SEO on your own site to get the search results to come out how you want. If someone searches your own site for one of your products, you need to fiddle with the page content to make sure it comes up at the top of the results. Since Google has famously ignored META for years, you have no way to influence the search results beyond standard SEO.

This can be a frustrating thing since — as we mentioned — you’re at the mercy of Google to re-index and re-score your site at its leisure. If your site’s search isn’t coming out how you want, you need to fiddle with your content, then wait a few days or weeks for Google to re-index.

Third, you get just a subset of Google Mini functionality. For instance, you can’t get META tag values back for search results. You can’t search META either, for that matter, using “inmeta:” or “requiredfields” or any of the other really spiffy tools you get with the Mini.

Again, it needs to be said that I had unrealistic expectations for the product. Google never claimed this was a “hosted Google Mini” — that was my assumption, which sadly turned out wrong.

That said, Google Custom Search is still a handy way to get Google results on your own site. You get XML access to the search results, which means you can (and we did), swap your own site search for Google results without your end users ever knowing about it.

Additionally, you get spelling suggestions, which is huge. In the three cases now where we’ve turned to Google for client’s site search, the driving force has always been “our users expect spellcheck because they can’t spell a damn thing…” Google has spoiled the world with spellcheck, and now it’s completely expected.

So, lesson learned for us. If you want “hosted Google Mini,” there are scads of options for that. Google Custom Search isn’t the same thing.

The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

Another post discussing this has a very telling title: Google Runs Out of Content to Monetize; Wants You to Build More

Some people are arguing that since the PR drop is not generalized, it must be a slap from Google due to practices that conflict with its guidelines. Andy Beard suggested that the sites that got penalized were either selling links or exchanging them inside large blog networks.

The Gadgetopia home page has dropped from a PR6 to PR3. Ouch.

Join an experiment and you’ll see that feature whenever you do a Google search. Your selected experiment: You have joined the experiment. Note that you can only join ONE experiment at a time.

Google’s widely anticipated — and top secret — GPhone mobile phone project could trump Apple’s glitzy iPhone — by going low cost and low tech, tech analysts say.

That scenario gained credence last week after the search giant announced its acquisition of an obscure Finnish start-up, Jaiku, holder of key Short Message Service patents. SMS is text messaging, the technology that enables the exchange of short messages between billions of ordinary cellphones.

What’s really interesting about this whole GPhone thing is how everyone is just assuming it’s happening, and Google is making no attempt to disabuse anyone of the notion. A Google cell phone is apparently just a foregone conclusion by now.

Everyone knows that Google Analytics was based off of Urchin, but if you go to Urchin today and try to buy it, you’ll find that it, well, sucks. None of the coolness that went into Google Analytics has made it anywhere close to the original product on which it was based.

[…] Urchin’s core customers have been ignored, product development has stopped on everything but Google Analytics, and companies are wondering why Google took the money and, well, ran.

The problem stems from the apparent fact that Google’s interest in Urchin Software Corporation was limited to its SaaS offering. Google has since developed Urchin On Demand into a real powerhouse analytics suite, and given its ease-of-use and cost (“free”), it’s amazingly popular. The problem is that Urchin’s other analytic tools have been ignored since the acquisition took place, but they weren’t supposed to be.

I found this out because an intranet client of mine wanted Google Analytics for their intranet. Knowing that wasn’t possible, I got the idea that I could just get them to buy Urchin. Sadly, Urchin hasn’t moved an inch forward since Google bought it.

I think the Urchin team is a little bitter about it too. I was looking into this right after the cool update to Google Analytics was announced. I wrote Urchin to ask them if the new UI was in Urchin as well. They responded sheepishly with something like, “Well, you can look at a demo of our stuff here…” It seemed like they had fielded this question before, and they knew the sale was already lost.

I wonder if they’ll ever update it, or if essentially releasing Google Analytics codebase to a purchased product is too much of a leap for them.

My client ended up using Mint.

We write a lot about Google here (as do lots of others), and I think it’s a rare day that I don’t touch something associated with Google. But, I’m still trying to decide if Google’s quest for world domination (if that’s what it is) is a good thing or not.

With all the insanely great things Google has done (or should that read, “… Google have done”?), like Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, Google Video, etc…, should we be concerned about Google encroachment in our web browsers, on our desktops, and even the real world? Or should we welcome it?

This isn’t the first time a search engine has tried to understand simple English, but Powerset has drawn more attention because its natural-language technology is being licensed from the Palo Alto Research Center.

Better known as PARC, the Xerox subsidiary is renowned for hatching breakthroughs — like the computer mouse and the graphical interface for personal computers — that were later commercialized by other companies.

PARC’s top natural-language specialist, Ronald Kaplan, is now Powerset’s chief technology and scientific officer.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” […]

At CitiGroup’s Technology Summit in New York this week, Google’s Business Product Manager for Ads Quality Nicholas Fox said the company will be moving ahead with integration of video and image ads within sponsored search results. Does that mean you will soon be seeing TV commercials at the top of Google search results page? Maybe.

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That’s great news, because it historically hasn’t been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like “iphone_review.html” Googlebot couldn’t “see” the words iphone or review.

With this, you pay $100 per year for the basic plan, but you can get the results in XML, which means you can completely integrate the results into you own design, plus provide pre- and post-processing of the results.

This will cannibalize sales of their Google Mini, since it’s the same functionality at a fraction of the cost — both sales cost and TCO of having to host the appliance.

Here’s why: people are searching for crossword clues for that day’s major newspaper crosswords.

[…] more than one-eighth of Google’s Hot Trends resulted from a single puzzle!

The Hot Trends changed while I composed this post, pushing some NYT crossword clue phrases up, down, in, or out of the list. Some of the new phrases in the list look like crossword clues – perhaps from another major online puzzle.