This week we talk to Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves and admitted 43 Folders slacker.
1. You were written about in The San Francisco Business Times as having an “unhealthy obsession” with Bloglines. Is this true? What do you think makes it so appealing to you and others like you?
I’m someone who needs to stay on top of all kinds of news and information. Without a tool like Bloglines to aggregate and filter that information, I’d drown. Instead, I tell it what I like, and it tracks those things and brings them to me in a timely manner. In some ways, Bloglines and other aggregators helped build the blogosphere simply by making it manageable to consume.
I look at Bloglines as a first cousin of search. With search, I’m finding. With Bloglines, I’m organizing and keeping track of what I find as it changes over time. At Jeeves we think this user need is going to continue to grow exponentially. But it’s also becoming more than that. We envision Bloglines as the homepage of the 21st century: ‘the Universal Inbox’. With recent rollouts like Weather and Package Tracking, you see it beginning to move beyond news and blogs. We’re going to follow this to its logical conclusion. Watch out, My Yahoo!
2. So we know about Bloglines, but what are some other blogs, sites or web services you can’t imagine doing without?
As for me, SearchViews is the only site I really need. But other than that, here are some faves out of my 200+ feeds:
- Defamer is like blogcrack…or in my case, In-n-Out burger. Actually, this reminds me of an upcoming feature of Bloglines: Celebrity Blogrolls. One click subscriptions to the blogrolls of people of note, from the notable bloggers to TV stars who double as geeks. Stay tuned.
- I’m winning my fantasy baseball league this year, much to the dismay of Kevin Kwan, and I couldn’t do that without Rotoworld. It’s no Rotoball, but ever since that site folded, I’m a Rotoworld guy. It’s the best, free baseball news.
- I track other top search blogs, of course. ResourceShelf, Search Engine Watch, WebmasterWorld, John Battelle, Search Engine Lowdown, SEO Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, Research Buzz, etc. [Editor's Note: All of these can be found on the SearchViews Blogroll] I also read guys like Nathan Weinberg – even though the site is called InsideGoogle, it has good overall coverage.
- Then there are the blogs on blogs and technology in general, such as Doc Searls, Joho, Kottke, etc.
- I use Bloglines to track feeds for lots of major pubs like NY Times, WSJ, and the SF Chronicle.
- 43 Folders. All kinds of ideas to organize your life. I don’t follow through with many of them, but hey, I read about it and make all kinds of resolutions. Then I feel shame.
- Taquitos.net. Snack reviews. Word.
- Zack Braff’s Garden State Blog. I liked Life Aquatic more, but Zack is an insightful guy with great taste in music.
- GreenCine. Great for movie afficianados.
- Coba’s Photos on Flickr. Killer pics.
- Winged Pig. Some dork named Mark Fletcher’s blog. He says some good stuff sometimes. [Editor's Note: We think he's more of a "dweeb" than a "dork"]
3. Earlier this year you made a trip out to Mountain View to meet with the guys at Mozilla. Can you tell us a little about what was discussed and what this means for the possibilities of a Jeeves branded, Firefox-based browser? What do you mean when you say Mozilla is “open-minded but non-committal”?
We think we have some good ideas for plug-ins that would make for a useful browser for Ask Jeeves users. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to build a browser from scratch when you have a great open-source app like Firefox. But on top of Firefox, we can do some great stuff. In their effort to “Take Back the Web”, Mozilla is very much behind anyone who wants to distribute versions of its browser. They’ve encouraged us to do so as well. The part about being non-committal just means we haven’t agreed to work together on anything specific. We’re involved in their community but still talking.
4. There’s a debate going on right now in vertical search. Guys like Danny Sullivan are saying ‘Vertical search is going to take over’, while others like Tom Evslin feel that an engine has “nothing to gain” and “everything to lose” by only indexing select parts of the web. Who’s right, in your opinion?
Over time, I believe that the “general” engines will still own the majority of the traffic in each vertical, but vertical engines will attract some traffic, both organically and through advertising. Vertical search engines are doing some great things to push search forward on everything from product search to event search to video search. This is valuable innovation. It’s not like the big four engines can do everything ourselves.
On the other hand, we’ve found that users want fewer options, rather than more, when it comes to search. This is why Smart Answers was developed: we needed to bring vertical search results to the user, because they weren’t using tabs to navigate our site. All the engines have found this to be true. These tabs are used, just not by a majority of users. That one white box is just too easy and attractive, and users make the mental trade-off of simplicity vs. specificity. They figure they can just iterate their search if they don’t find what they want.
Does this mean vertical search is useless? No, quite the opposite. The trick is just getting users to adapt to getting beyond the “10 blue links” of core web search. We’re not there yet. It’s still kind of like the remote for your DVD player. For the most part, people are using only the play, rewind, fast forward and stop buttons.
5. Jeeves has done a great job of gaining traction with consumers, but your core ad product still comes from Google. Is AJ Interactive going to make a push to entrench itself within the search marketing community? If no, why not?
I can’t say much here at this point. Despite our competition for users, we have a great relationship with Google. We both feel that it’s such a big pond, and in our cases we mostly have differentiated technologies, that there’s room for both of us. But that doesn’t mean we’ll rely 100% on any one revenue source in the future. Today, about 30% of our ad revenue is generated by our internal products and sales force, and we believe there’s a lot we can do ourselves in this space over time.
I like the idea that you understand the value of giving people fewer options, instead of presenting them with dozens of knobs to twist. Most just want an answer to their question and that’s it. Sure, salvos to the alpha users are fine, but if you want to be #1, it’s going to have to appeal to John and Jane Q Public. Can’t wait to see what you come out with next.
I know this is a quite old post, but this is the first time I read it. And I’m a bit disappointed. From theese answeres AJ doesn’t seem to be a powerful, strong company which has great ideas for the future. I have to tell you I do not like Google very much: I use Google ’cause it works. But I hope somebody will come and and gives a new taste of searching. Companies like AJ can be able to do this. I hope….
That one white box is just too easy and attractive, and users make the mental trade-off of simplicity vs. specificity.
Search for a particular data you should have strong command for selective keywords.
“The more powerful bloggers become, the more money and accesss are thrown at them. Bloggers are just as susceptible to the problems of mainstream media; they just haven’t had the opportunity until now. Lets see how they use it.”
Do you believe your blog has been read and are you attempting to influence people with your blog?
Can blogging become an influence in politics, culture, sports issues, religion, etc., or are bloggers a bunch of loose cannons just sounding off?