Germany’s parliament today passed the highly controversial “Leistungsschutzrecht” which is an ancillary copyright that requires payment for excerpting from and linking to content in some instances. When I walked around in a slight daze at Chicago O'Hare this morning after an all too short red eye flight, my Twitter feed was full of German friends and others outraged about the bill (just look for #lsr). Jeff Jarvis – who spoke out strongly against the law at this year’s DLD conference – i...

Bijan has a good post up today with “Some Thoughts on the Future of Search.” This is a topic on my mind following Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search and my upcoming appearance on Monday at DLD on a panel titled Next Generation Search, together with Philip Inghelbrecht (Rockmelt), Wolf Garbe (Faroo), Thomer Kagan (Quixey) and moderated by Henry Blodget. We have several investments that deal directly (Duck Duck Go) or indirectly with search (eg foursquare). The intersecting and sometimes c...

Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious types of searches: people based on interests, places, movies, books, music, etc based on people. This is of course what Google has been fearing and why Google has been doubling down on Google+ at every turn ...

Evan Williams apparently recently said that there is an issue with all of us being stuck in a kind of “continuous present” on the web (ironically, I can’t find that quote right now). I am certainly stuck in that all powerful present many days. There is so much new output hitting the web every day that one can barely scratch the surface of it, let alone delve into the past. Google has only aggravated this problem by tilting their search algorithm more heavily towards recency. Techmeme – one of...

Last July I had predicted that Google would go all in by bundling Google+ aggressively with search and that is exactly what was just announced yesterday with Search, plus Your World. The “plus Your World” part right now refers “your world on Google” as only Google+ profiles, posts and shared images are included and not content from Twitter, Facebook or others. John Batelle’s capture this well in his aptly titled “Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World.” Also worth reading are Dann...

There are a lot of posts worth reading about the potential impact or lack thereof of a possible deal between Microsoft and News Corp (and maybe other news sources as well), including Danny Sullivan, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Parker and others. But one thing that I have missed from everything I have read (and it may well be that it’s there and I missed it) is what this is truly all about: the immense competitive pull of Google’s amazing profits! The big challenge for businesses with network effects ...

Something big may be happening to user experience. Bing and Google will soon be showing tweets as part of the search results (they have both licensed the full Twitter firehose and Marissa Meyer yesterday demoed a version of “Social Search”). Google is already returning videos from Youtube as search results and apparently will soon be offering music. Bing video results can be played right on the results page. Facebook just announced music gifts that can be played right inside of the news feed ...

A while back, I wrote that display advertising is too complicated. Today Google announced their entry into the display ad exchange business. Both in their announcement and in this conversation with Neal Mohan from Google, the idea of bringing simplicity to the market is cited as a major driving force. Google also describes the system as if it were the first display ad exchange ever. Of course the reality is a bit different, with Yahoo/Right Media and others having offered exchange capabilitie...

The top link on techmeme right now is yesterday’s post by Jason Calacanis titled “Yahoo committed seppukku today." It is worth reading because it powerfully (and hilariously) lays out the position that handing over search to Microsoft is a huge mistake for Yahoo. It is a position I am very familiar with, because I made much of the same argument (although in a less entertaining fashion) last May. But it is more than a year later and I am not sure the logic still applies. First, Yahoo has lost ...

On Friday evening the much anticipated WolframAlpha launched publicly. It is great fun to play around with, not only because it has some hilarious easter eggs, but because there is a renewed sense of exploration. At least I found myself coming up with ever new queries to see what it knows (computes) and what it doesn’t. For instance, here are two queries that show off the range of WolframAlpha:how old is Barack Obama? area under x^2 between 2 and 4?One thing is for sure – a lot of homework wi...