Given the overwhelming, ever-exponentially-growing flood of information in the age of the Internet, being able to perform sophisticated searches is becoming so important that it isn’t too far-fetched to call it a literacy issue. Without these skills, you are in a sense in danger of becoming functionally illiterate in this brave new world.

Those individuals (and by extension businesses) with advanced search skills will be running circles around those without, because it saves so much time to search intelligently, and because a lot of answers can be found that are simply impossible to find otherwise. In a way, this separation into the search haves and have-nots has already been occurring over the last 5+ years.

And by the way, all of this isn’t simply about Google. Not at all. In a moment, I am going to walk you through a number of examples of advanced searches, and some of the tricks and techniques underlying them. But before I do, let me stress one other thing:

Even if you do only the most simple of "everyday" keyword searches, you are already going in the right direction. In fact, if you aren’t doing it already, make it a point for the next two weeks to stop yourself at every turn and ask: "Could I be doing a search right now to speed this up?"

I think you’ll find that the answer is almost always YES, and that it will be well worth your while to develop this as a new habit (a habit takes about 30 days of repetition to form).

Simply search for everything, and avoid using "manual" searching, i.e. avoid scrolling through documents, web pages, and lists both with your mouse and visually, asf. to find passages/names/etc. you’re looking for. Search options exist in Word, in your browser, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Yet often we don’t use them, and the authors of software/Web tools don’t put sufficient front-and-center emphasis on search capabilities/ease-of-use.

For example, in your browser, never again manually search through long Blog comment threads or other large pages/articles manually, use your browser’s "Find" function and type the first few letters of your name or keyword, etc.

Granted, Gen-Yers on average are likely far ahead of all older generations when it comes to matter-of-cause use of Google, etc., however I doubt that even they know in large numbers about the kind of in depth, advanced search I am about to show you.

General Search Operator Considerations

Let’s first consider the most important search techniques by way of the so-called search operators. These may sometimes be accessible indirectly through a Web form under the heading of "Advanced Search", but originally they represent a kind of mini-programming language for telling the Search Engines what you want them to bring back. (Search Engines from here on shall include the "Search Function" in Web services other than stand-alone search engines.)

These are the "logical"/Boolean operators you may remember from math class or Logic 101 (fun, I know, but you really want to know a leetle bit about this, at least in these practical applications). Why know about these when you could also get most of the same results from using the Advanced Search forms?

Remember, this is about LITERACY. You want to become fluent in a secret language of sorts, and true command and mastery only come from truly delving into the heart of the matter. Plus, you will find that it is almost always faster to type queries into one search box than typing bits and pieces into Advanced Search forms which tend to look a little different for each service.

So let’s get started. I have made all of the examples clickable links, so that you can study the results. All results should be very similar on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live):

1) Nearly any search engine will assume by default that any separate words you type into the search box are meant as a logical AND, as in "show me all results matching BOTH this word-1 AND this word-2", though it may be in any order, and the words may be quite a distance from each other in the actual text.

You can usually place an AND operator without making a difference, e.g. for clarity in reading your search query, but mostly it will just look like this:

personal branding tips

2) To get a true phrase, a FIXED sequence of several words to match, you have to use ” ” (quotes) around the multi-word search term. Note that some search engines including Google will often bring a direct hit for a phrase to the top of the results heap, even if you didn’t use the quotes. But it’s not guaranteed, so using quoted phrases is much more precise, assuming that is what you are looking for. E.g.

"personal branding expert"

vs. personal branding expert

You can verify for yourself that this is more precise, by clicking both the quoted version and then the non-quoted one in Google, and comparing the number of results returned, in this case about 12,500 vs. 10 Million results (the count is in near the upper right corner in Google):

3) To get a logical OR (also called "inclusive OR"), as in "show me ALL the results matching this word-1 OR this word-2 OR this word-3", you simply type in "OR" between the keywords, or between keyword phrases in quotes:

"personal branding" OR "social branding" OR brand

Some search engines like FriendFeed’s Search also use a "," (comma) to represent an OR. (Either way, be sure to distinguish this OR from the so-called "Exclusive OR", which in essence says: Find only those results that have either Word-1 or Word-2, but not both". As far as I know, none of the search engines support this. Basically it would be like running to separate searches.)

4) Many search engines have an exclusion function using the "-" (dash/hyphen) operator followed by the keyword, phrase, or sometimes additional operator that you want excluded from the results. This in essence says: "Find all of the results for this word-1 except for those also containing word-2". E.g.

Yahoo: branding -"personal branding" -skin

Google: branding -"personal branding" -skin

would find all results containing branding, but not those also containing "personal branding", or those likely referring to skin branding instead of the marketing related kind. This would be a good search to narrow down results to those talking about corporate branding only (though you might find more exclusion terms to refine it even further).

By the way, there is typically no limit to the number of exclusions, though there may be a limit to the overall length of the query string you can submit to the search engine.

OK, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the finer details of various key search engines or search functions on key services. Let’s start with Twitter, since it currently has the most buzz around its "Real-time Web Search" possibilities:

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is for now referring to search.twitter.com, as the Twitter Web interface integrated version is currently still somewhat limited/buggy in the result sets it returns. You are basically searching over every single public status update ("tweet") by any user, starting from the current moment and going backward over Twitter’s timeline. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter or Twitter Search, read up on it here.)

Twitter Search allows all of the search operators already discussed, and additionally for the following:

1) "keyword(s) filter:links" – will seek out tweets containing the keyword or phrases and 1 or more links only. Nearly the same can be accomplished by searching for “http://”, though that will miss the few live links that Twitter recognizes from “www.domain.com/extension” type links.

It can largely be assumed that a tweet containing a link is more useful than one without, more likely to be chatter, unless the tweet is so sharp/witty/deep/inspirational that it would qualify as a quote (of course sometimes you may want to specifically look at the conversational chatter only – example of that further down):

"personal branding" filter:links

2) "from:username" and "to:username" – both of these can be very useful to query over your own tweetstream by topic/keyword, e.g. to find old tweets that you know you wrote, you know you wrote to somebody (containing certain link resources, etc.). Of course you can put any username you choose, and can therefore in principle back-trace all conversations between two users (each can only be used once in a given query).

You can also see if two users have been talking via Twitter’s so-called "@ replies" at all. If there’s no result returned, there was likely no direct communication, or at least recently:

from:unmarketing to:missive

As long as Twitter keeps back-data fully available in Search (currently, Twitter is unfortunately only letting you search back anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on server loads), you could also use Twitter as a natural form of personal bookmarking this way. Nearly all of the “tags” are applied without extra work, simply as part of your tweets. A workaround to this problem of the backwards time limit is to also use FriendFeed and import your tweets there. FriendFeed currently places no such limitation. More below.

3) Searching for so-called hashtags – a keyword prefixed by "#" (pound sign) – is a way of detecting additional intentionality about tweets. Either it serves as a point of emphasis/visibility by the author (since a common keyword like "#branding" or "#quote" would still show up in a search results even without the specific # prefix), or more commonly, if the hashtag is a unique abbreviation, it serves as a sort of code to be specifically searched for by those that know about it.

This is most commonly done for conferences (recent examples are #140tc and #twtrcon), for ongoing weekly Twitter-based discussions around a given topic, e.g.

#journchat

is for journalism discussions on Monday evenings U.S. Time, or as a meme that becomes self-replicating enough that people participate, and the hashtag gets into the Top 10 "trending" keywords/phrases on Twitter for a while.

Either way, the authors of tweets using hashtags went to the trouble of using the # symbol and/or created a hashtag to highlight something. Use that knowledge to your advantage when searching.

4) "since:timestamp" and "until:timestamp" will allow you to segment out tweets from a specific day or number of days, as needed. This can be useful if you wanted to e.g. view only those tweets for a conference that were actually sent during the duration of the conference, and leave out the chatter before or after, which is e.g. less likely to contain "twitter-casting" of the actual conference panels.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17

5) "near:city-name" – this operator will find tweets that originated from a user account that Twitter thinks is the city name you are referring to. Since this is going off of users’ self-reported location field in their profile (and NOT off of some precise geo-tagging a la iPhone location, though Twitter is reportedly working on that), which is free text, and for some contains things like multiple cities, "everywhere", "The Interwebs", asf. this is not particularly precise, but it can still work in aggregate. E.g.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17 near:sf

will find all tweets about the TwtrCon Conference that were placed by users based out of San Francisco, though Twitter has no idea (yet) whether they were at the conference in New York or just talking about it.

5) To bring it all together, and for a special tip, we should also consider the so-called Retweet convention on Twitter, a format which allows one to quickly copy & paste a given (useful, funny, etc.) tweet from another user, and forward it on to our own Twitter network of followers, while giving credit to the original author. E.g. I tweeted

"RT @mvolpe: New Blog Post: Are Your Compelling Offers Actually..Compelling? http://tinyurl.com/mlbzw4"

giving credit to user @mvolpe, and used the "RT" prefix to signify the retweet. This is actually a convention that spontaneously arose from the user base (another format uses "via @username", used most often if the tweet text is sufficiently altered, but credit for the find is still meant to be conveyed).

What this means for our searches is that we can either search specifically for "RT OR via" to find tweets that were deemed worthy of retweeting (there are actually entire third-party services set up keeping track of these counts, and thereby surfacing tweets according to their presumed repetition popularity), or, we can exclude those tweets to avoid a lot of duplicates!

So here is a great way to cut down on overly large result sets, taking out most "link-less" chatter and Retweet duplications, as well as "psychology jobs" related postings:

psychology filter:links -RT -via -job -jobs

[As an aside, though still search literacy/awareness relevant:

I use this very example query above, and then pipe the RSS feed from the result into a somewhat more permanent receptacle such as FriendFeed or a Tumblr mini-blog. Remember, Twitter might (and currently does) cut off the backwards reach of your result sets, currently during heavy daytime loads it’s at most about 7 days back. This presents a real problem for your own research/archiving purposes.

Part of the reason may be that Twitter is thinking about making long-range backward data mining a “for pay” feature that large corporate marketing agencies, etc. may pay them a lot of money for (obviously not if they could access everything for free through Search.twitter.com). Only time will tell, though I think it is definitely important for the community to be aware of this possible issue.]

Or, here is another complex example to search for the term "mashable" while excluding tweets from the username "mashable", any @ mentions (or replies to) username "mashable", and tweets with links. Remember how I said earlier that you could do exclusions on some operators? This is an example of that:

mashable -from:mashable -"@mashable" -filter:links

This could be used so that you see what people are saying about Mashable, the blog, that is NOT one of the countless retweets of @mashable, not a tweet from "@mashable" himself, and doesn’t include links to further content. In other words, what people are saying about that brand the most raw and unvarnished form.

FriendFeed Search

OK, upon writing this section on FriendFeed power search, I realized that this post was getting to be really long. So rather than overload everyone, I figured I’d push this and the section on Google search tricks into a follow-up post in a few days.

I hope you found this enlightening, and that you take the time to practice advanced search. To become "fluent" and fully "search literate", you will need to practice. I know that saying this in our ADD world is somewhat of a bummer, but the payoff, especially for your business, can be tremendous. Remember, running circles around your competition and all of that…

I consider this a must-read to get yourself back up-to-date on everything that has transpired over the past 3+ months behind the scenes, while we were all busy watching something else, the global financial melt-down, say.

It is almost precisely 1 year and 1 month to the day that Microsoft first launched its unsolicited buy-out bid, and you know the endless back-and-forth that ensued. What stands out is that as of today, while Yahoo’s stock has fallen from its pre-offer price of about $19 on 2/1/2008 to about $12 (and Jerry Yang was so maligned for not taking Ballmer’s offer that he ultimately resigned a few months ago), Microsoft’s stock has gone from $32 to now around $17 during that time!

If you do the math, that’s worse than Yahoo’s stock has done. So who still wants to argue that Ballmer would have really been much better at steering Yahoo (or really worse: the combined Micro-hoo “Franken-carrier”)? Which brings me back to the headline, and this quote from Blodget’s post that sums it all up very neatly:

Another six months of Microsoft Internet futility.  Last summer, Microsoft had been struggling to succeed online for 13 years, and it had only managed to run a distant third.  Now it has been struggling for 13 and a half years.  The company’s Internet branding, strategy, and organization is in its usual chaotic disarray.  Perhaps the new search head, stolen from Yahoo, can cut through the bureaucracy and fix everything.  After 13.5 years of a lot of talent and money being thrown at this problem, however, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

So the saga continues. The patient (Micro-hoo) indeed isn’t completely dead yet… but Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz now appears to have the upper hand in any negotiations from here on…

Note: In case you don’t recall how badly Microsoft’s branding in particular has been going, refresh your memory here. Branding is where it all begins, after all, how can you know what you should be doing if you don’t know who you are?! And hoping that an engineer like Lu, however talented, is going to fix branding and related woes is simply delusional.

You might also enjoy this post on complexity, and why even the 800 Pound Gorilla such as Microsoft cannot avoid it’s pernicious effects.

Such as the fact that Yahoo’s stock has been declining dramatically over the last few weeks, falling through a relatively steady support level around the $19 mark that it had stood at on January 31 of this year before the beginning of the "Micro-hoo" attempted hostile take-over saga.

Having already slid a few more dollars from a range around $21 after the regulatory headwinds to the Yahoo-Google search ad serve outsourcing deal started picking up, it then fell through various support levels all the way down to as low as $15.50 (settling at $16 for the week). I don’t mean to bore you with stock market speak, this is only to get across the increasingly precarious situation that Yahoo finds itself in:

1) I have argued repeatedly that the entire Micro-hoo saga would take a severe toll on the productivity at both Yahoo AND Microsoft, and judging from the dearth of useful roll-outs and even mere announcements (and I doesn’t take much to keep Wall Street happy with announcements) from either company, I was right.

Steve Ballmer has claimed that the Yahoo purchase attempt had been just a tactic, and that Microsoft could go it alone, but since then he really hasn’t said much of substance that could be construed to be a credible Internet strategy for Microsoft.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I just looked up the beginning of year prices pre-bid (1/31/08) again:

As of 10/8, YHOO has lost 26% from $19 to $14, but MSFT has lost almost as much: 25% from $32 to $24! Sign of superior management skills and credibility at MSFT?

Check out what David Einhorn said today in his letter to his hedge fund clients (via AlleyInsider):

… Since then, management has acted in an overaggressive and almost panicky fashion regarding its online offering. First, it sought to acquire Yahoo! and then after that failed, it announced extremely high internal investment requirements to pursue this “huge” opportunity (read: “Google-envy”). We doubt the opportunity is what they say it is and wish MSFT focused on its core strength: software.

The CEO is a very smart and very wealthy man. Perhaps, he is so wealthy that he has bigger ideas and aspirations than making MSFT’s shareholders wealthier. We’ve given up on MSFT for now…

2) I said it would take a massive effort by Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Co. to get the ship righted at Yahoo after all of the distractions, and the deteriorating economic conditions haven’t helped. I guess I had really been hoping for Jerry to jump into full-scale survival mode and ride on a wave of adrenalin from the Micro-hoo negotiations.

But it now looks as if Yahoo is drifting helplessly, with consulting firm Bain apparently hired to set up major lay-offs in the coming weeks.

3) The stock price mentioned above is almost exactly half the offer of $31 per share that Microsoft had launched (though that number was partially in non-price-guaranteed Microsoft stock, which was already moving down after the announcement).

So that puts the speculation of Microsoft buying all or part of Yahoo back on the table. (Not to speak of the continued rage that most Yahoo shareholders have been venting toward the board over the failed/prevented deal for months.)

I have written several posts worth of arguments on the lack of soundness of a simple buy-out plan, and could write several more, but thankfully I don’t have to:

Henry Blodget of the Silicon Alley Insider has written a very concise, yet thorough post this week on why the original plan was never a good idea, and why an alternative proposal, a spin-out of Microsoft’s own foundering Internet division into Yahoo plus cash, would be a much better idea.

I have participated in the discussions on his blog for months, and so feel that at least in some small measure I have contributed to various points made in the post. Here a quote that rings of my repeated arguments about the Internet going against Microsoft’s corporate DNA:

At Microsoft, the Internet will always play second fiddle to the Windows and Office cash cows. At Google, every idea that will disrupt Microsoft is rushed into production. At Microsoft, every such idea will be buried in politics and bureaucracy. This will make it very hard for Microsoft to attract and retain the best talent… 

If you have any interest in the future of either of those two companies, the competition against Google for domination of the Internet, or simply the business strategy examples inherent therein, the post is absolutely worth a read. Here the link again:

"Microsoft Smart Not To Buy Yahoo… But Now’s The Time To Do The Better Deal"

Best wishes during "interesting times"

- Alex Schleber

But beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess as to what will happen next:

Is it a case of "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" that will allow Yahoo to move Jerry Yang and Yahoo forward less distracted by Microsoft’s various advances and the joint Icahn-MSFT proxy threat?

Or is it just the overture to a renewed round of negotiations that could still lead to Microsoft buying Yahoo outright?

Given that last week’s developments had seemed to indicate Microsoft growing weary of Icahn as an intermediary, and that some observers had previously bet on a renewed MSFT offer before August 1 to bolster the chances of unseating Yahoo’s entire board in a proxy fight led by Icahn, the latter possibility appears increasingly dim.

But given the now nearly 6 months history of the Micro-hoo saga, who really knows at this point. What we do know however is that if negotiations continue at whatever level, it would continue to serve as a distraction for both Yahoo and Microsoft from what they should be concentrating on:

Innovation.

The three-way "negotiations" between Carl Icahn, the Yahoo board, and Microsoft turned up another non-starter offer for MSFT to cherry-pick Yahoo’s search assets, which in turn led to much finger-pointing, and general acrimony.

The result is that Icahn may now be out of the picture, and that Yahoo will survive through its August 1 shareholder meeting. Unless Microsoft comes back with a last minute complete buy-out offer at a guaranteed, cash-equivalent price that is ($29 per share would seem like the absolute minimum in this regard).

But it all seems increasingly unlikely, leaving Microsoft without a strategy, and Yahoo desperate to get past the distraction of the entire episode, and its operation back on track.

Jerry Yang is apparently begging his troops to keep working (for the second time in two months), and as I previously pointed out, for good reason. And even though we don’t hear similar exhortations form inside the Microsoft bunker, there is little doubt that Microsoft is not similarly affected:

During the entire first half of 2008, the only news out of Redmond other than the Micro-hoo botched deal attempts, has been the announcement of the "Live Search Cashback" (LSCB) attempt to sort of buy search query share using a rebate gimmick (that had failed to work before). That MSFT and some commentators touted this as a "game changer" proves the depth of their dilusion.

I have been working on a detailed post for why LSCB was such a bad idea in many (technical) ways, but the end-result is much easier to ascertain through some simple tests: I occasionally have been checking LSCB price quotes against Google search results for identical items, and the FREE(!) product listings at the top of Google Universal Search beat the LSCB prices with the "discount" (that MSFT is kind enough to hold in escrow for you for up to 2 months) MOST OF THE TIME!

I expect ComScores due out this week to tell the tale that Live Search Cashback has caused nary a blip on the search share radar screen. Even Microsoft seems to not be talking about it anymore…

During the same time frame, Google has had major announcements regarding their OpenSocial, GoogleGears, Google App Engine, and Google Android (Google’s mobile phone) software kits, all the while honing their core search and search ad serve in the background. Even Yahoo recently announced a relatively substantial opening up of their search toolkit to developers for third-party applications.

Back to Yahoo’s Serious Issues

In recent weeks, high level departures and reorg moves by the Yahoo board’s Sue Decker, have highlighted again how deep the rot of bloated hierarchies and excessive middle management has gone inside Yahoo. I had previously reported some signs of the same thing on this blog.

The question is if this can be turned around in any meaningful way. And by the way, there is a huge question as to whether MSFT/Steve Ballmer would be doing any better, they are not exactly masters of nimbleness and have ZERO credibility when it comes to making a profit on the Internet.

Yes, Yahoo still has reach and scale, but what is really needed is a clear vision and marching-order on what Yahoo is supposed to stand for going forward. Their lack of focus has been their achilles heel the entire time.

While Google has built "Google = Search" brand in a (mostly) disciplined way, which is one of the key reasons for why they have been able to monetize better on search (people come to their site with a relatively defined mindset), Yahoo = what?

Yahoo’s portal strategy has been an albatross around their neck almost from its beginning.

Add to this the slowness in response due to the excessive hierarchies, and that is all you need to know as to why they haven’t been able to compete with Google. It’s a simple focus and positioning issue.

(The argument repeated again in a comment on Silicon Alley Insider by supposedly a Yahoo employee that Google monetizes better vs. Panama due to larger query share is simply false: It is about the average user mindset/context gap. Remember that Yahoo once had a lot larger share of search. So that’s not it.)

The only thing that Yahoo can do now is to decide how they want to position themselves, ideally in a new category instead of as an also-ran, and then stick with it and execute. But that decision must come first.

I for one see a lot of potential in making Yahoo into one gigantic open social network from the inside out, and among other things leveraging their user base to create a supplementary user-generated/rated search a la Mahalo and Digg.

Plus open up all of the spickets to leverage open source development assistance. If they still want to be in search and search ads, outflank Google by opening up the kimono to advertisers and become the "transparent search ad platform" vs. Google who like to keep things close to their vest.

At this point, they need to create an undeniable, compelling reason to get the advertisers back and hence the monetization up. Also, if they can begin to create context-targeted "social ads" a la Facebook (only better) inside of a newly created "Yahoo as Social Network" (see above), they could leap-frog Google search because Google still knows very little of real substance about the individual user at this point.

It’s all about proof of concept right now, and the more radical the better, as only that can have a chance to generate mindshare and get people to start using the new services. Everything must be on the table. I hope Jerry and Co. are seeing this on the inside.

But this time even usually stalwart Micro-hoo cheerleader Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is saying that Microsoft may be going too far in its Machiavellian machinations to want to feast on Yahoo’s carcass.

Meanwhile David Kirkpatrick, senior editor of Fortune Magazine, argues that Microsoft will inevitably buy Yahoo, making the case that it has gotten personal for Redmond ever since Google wrested the crown of perceived "greatest and most powerful tech company" away from them.

But in arguing that Microsoft desperately needs Yahoo’s scale, Kirkpatrick falls into the same "scale will solve things" thought trap that is deluding Microsoft, and plenty of commentators throughout the blogosphere in both posts and comments as well.

Currently Google’s monetization advantage vs. Yahoo (confirmed, and likely similar vs. MSN/Live Search), that comes from their focused execution is somewhere around 50-100%. And it has NOTHING to do with "scale".

It has everything to do with the advertisers being able to afford higher average bids due to higher average conversions. Period.

Conversion is the only thing that ultimately matters to an advertiser. Scale is a straw-man. If YHOO or MSFT had equal or better conversion numbers for the same keywords, then advertisers would jump on that. The individual advertiser could care less about the total query share numbers, or total number of clicks, they only care about their ads converting when they are being shown and clicked on.

If you mail a direct response ad, do you care what total percentage of the region or nation that mailing list reaches? No way. You care about the conversion numbers, because if an ad doesn’t convert you can’t long afford to mail/run it. In search ads, if you fail to convert the clicks you get, as a small business you can be bankrupt before you know it. It’s that simple.

The total volume of searches or even clicks for a keyword on Google, Yahoo, or MSN/Live has little or nothing to do with it. It’s simply that at lower conversion rates on Yahoo or MSN/Live, advertisers have a harder time making the economics work for them.

Steve Ballmer should change his tune at the next Microsoft company meeting:

Conversion, conversion, conversion…

Few people in "big business" understand direct response models, but that is what search advertising ultimately is. It is NOT image advertising, because Google text ads, whether served with search results or on websites and blogs as "Adsense" ads, do not lend themselves to branding exercises like display (image) ads or TV commercials.

The old adage of marketers – "I know half of my advertising is wasted, the problem is, I dont know which half" – does not hold true for the direct response model that pay-per-click ads served with searches or with content are based on.

Any advertiser with a basic understanding of the Adwords campaign management backend can tell EXACTLY which half is not working, then tweak the keywords, ad copy, asf. and turn off non-performing ads/keywords in short order.

Myth #2: "Affluence Gap"

A similar oft-repeated myth is the following statement taken from an Alley Insider comment:

Google has [...] the most affluent search users. Therefore, ad buyers want their ad to be shown on Google, and the price is bid up.

It isn’t about the supposed greater affluence of the Google users at all, otherwise Yahoo could not outsource THE AD SERVES (NOT the searches) to Google and instantly get 60-80% higher returns. Note that we’re talking about the very same (Yahoo) search users as before.

It’s about Google’s superior monetization that is due to their fanatical refinements of ad serves and the search results themselves, AND the higher conversion rates that the advertisers are experiencing.

Now there is one other side to this that is in fact branding/positioning related: The context in which an ad is served. With Google, since Google = search, users are in a "searching for a solution" mindset much more so (on average) than on Yahoo (or MSN), where people may be for any number of reasons (social, email, IM, news, etc.).

This is the real draw-back of the portal strategy that Yahoo and MSN embraced, which by definition leads to brand dilution: You have no idea about the exact user mindset, and many if not most of the pages you serve create contexts that are counter to anyone clicking on ads.

How many ads have you personally ever clicked on that got served with your free online email? Your chat? Your Yahoo groups, etc.? Chances are, none. After a brief period of mental adjustments, you likely started to completely ignore those ads.

Even Google had to learn this lesson, when they found last year that the social networking inventories for Adsense ads (e.g. on MySpace) were monetizing far lower (because converting less) than expected: People just weren’t looking to buy when networking on-line. It’s two different things.

From the point of view of the advertisers, all that matters to them is per-click cost and conversion. That alone determines whether their PPC campaign is viable past a few days. If Yahoo could allow them to get workable numbers, they’d be more than happy to bid higher on Yahoo’s search inventories.

So it is this mindset context differential rather than any affluence disparity, or the vaunted "search share" scale myth, which gets even usually smart and tech savvy people like Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget to drink Microsoft’s Kool-Aid on why they need Yahoo’s search division.

As long as this myth persists, there will likely be no peace for Yahoo.

Today, Microsoft apparently walked away from a Yahoo deal more thoroughly than they previously had, which in itself makes little sense and proves how much Ballmer and Co. have kept themselves in suspended animation during this ongoing saga.

Now, as far as Yahoo was concerned, we knew that they wouldn’t get a lot done given the continued wheeling and dealing by billionaire investor Carl Icahn. Despite Jerry Yang’s pleading with the troops to keep their noses to the grindstone, there is simply no way that Yahoo has not been deeply affected:

I was at Sprint in a former life at the time when the proposed merger with WorldCom was going on, which ultimately, and it turns out mercifully, was blocked by the DOJ. And I can tell you from that experience that very little of substance beyond basic maintenance mode happened inside Sprint for well over 6 months.

All eyes, minds, and water-cooler conversations were cued on the proposed deal and its ramifications. And that was under relatively amicable circumstances mind you.

So, with the pronouncements by MSFT today, Yahoo’s stock taking a big hit, and Yahoo in turn announcing that a deal to outsource search ad serves to Google may be happening as soon as today, someone might be tempted to say: The nightmare is over.

Or Is It?

Despite all of the "titillation", the Icahn back-and-forths, the rumor, the innuendo, and the inflated/bruised egos, let’s take a step back and look at the fundamentals of this:

MSFT + Yahoo = Still Can’t Compete

As Henry Blodget of the Alley Insider has previously argued (and I agree with him on this), the Micro-hoo deal as originally proposed does preciously little to make the combined entity more competitive against Google. MSFT has amply proven as much recently by having to resort to touting their "Live Search Cashback" gimmick as a "game changer." NOT a good sign. (I was in the middle of putting the LSCB discussion into this post but will save it for later).

You see, entrepreneurship is fundamentally concerned with arbitrage, that is, putting resources towards their highest and best uses. And combining MSFT’s money and inferior technology together with Yahoo’s inferior technology and user eyeballs does NOT a winning combination make. Period.

If you combine money with eye-balls, what have you got? A waste of $ and a combinatory nightmare.

I previously said that

joining the two juggernauts into one operation is the equivalent of having two huge battleships collide at about a 45 degree angle and hoping that somehow during the collision they will weld themselves into one aircraft carrier. Ain’t… gonna… happen.

And MSFT has proven with each of its Internet moves in 12 long years that it is very adept at actually driving AWAY eyeballs despite all of its supposed and real advantages (its installed browser base, money, influence, etc.).

Part of this is their extreme misunderstanding of branding and the resulting branding mess that I have been reporting on here several times already, and their failure to understand the internet at a fundamental level.

So if Yahoo moves to outsource the ad serves for its search to Google, in entrepreneurial terms, they are doing the right thing. Take the money now and gear up to fight another day on NEW battle-fields where it can actually WIN.

Remember that Google’s monetization advantage is somewhere between 50-100%. Now that is a combination that actually makes economic sense: Leading eyeballs to instantly higher monetization, something that Micro-hoo might well have never achieved.

While it is true that Yahoo shouldn’t completely get out of the search game, instead of playing also-ran, they need to innovate on a massive scale. Keep the R&D going in the background, and use the newfound money to do something worthwhile.

Which is by the way what MSFT should be doing rather than continue to try to throw its weight around. It hasn’t worked on the internet in 12 years. In this context it is ironic that MSFT might now be trying to push for regulatory protection against a Goo-hoo outsourcing deal. THE monopolist of the late 20th/early 21st century crying foul… that would be so rich…

Even more ironically, if MSFT hadn’t been able to stop the DOJ proceedings against it through the arrival of the Bush admininistration, and had been broken up into say three smaller, more nimble, more hungry units, both those resulting companies and all the rest of us might well be better off today:

Vista might have been less of a failure, the Office company might have actually innovated in the "productivity" space, and the Internet division would have been free to "get" the internet unencumbered by other interests.

Back to the Goo-hoo outsourcing deal

Critics of this scheme are right that this can only be seen as a short-term fix to boost Yahoo revenues. If it’s not accompanied by very serious efforts to innovate and therefore outflank Google or create new markets that Yahoo can take a leadership position in, then it does hurt them in the long term. Their capabilities would definitely erode.

This was described in some detail by Mahaney in the TechCrunch interview, where he recounted the developments at AOL. (The full text of the interview is really a must-read for anyone interested in this entire situation.) But of course it would be up to Yahoo with how they spend that money.

If they invest it in serious innovation instead of mee-too projects, they might have a shot. As it stands now, there is very little in terms of core competencies that they have really kept even or led on.

Whatever they have going for them up to now is largely a hold-over from its successes during the Web 1.0 phase. That is predominantly the user eye-balls, people who became accustomed to using Yahoo services circa 1996-2000. They have since bungled almost everything else they touched, from search ads (where they should have led with Overture), to the rise of social networking and web video (where they largely missed the boat).

So again the critics are partially right in that Yahoo’s search share will likely keep declining over time (not rapidly though), simply because they will fall further behind in search development as well. UNLESS they make a very serious effort to come up with a next generation of search that somehow bypasses what Google is currently doing. Otherwise, they would of course be more and more dependent.

Of course, it’s Google that is hard at work figuring out the next steps in search… while MSFT and Yahoo just wasted another 4+ months on this diversion. And who knows, maybe Ballmer or Icahn will do it all over again in a few months.

Facebook on Tuesday announced "fbOpen" as its competing OPEN standard for building Facebook compliant social networks. I would expect that a competitor to Google’s FriendConnect for accessing Facebook’s (and other compliant social networks’) social graph information, if not already included, is soon to follow.

How nice of them to be complying with my recent prediction so quickly… as for the other shoe to drop and Microsoft buying them, we’ll see.

Here’s what I said May 16 on Microsoft’s options:

… Buy Facebook and VERY QUICKLY throw weight behind Facebook’s API as a competing standard to OpenSocial in opening up the “walled garden” of Facebook in strategic ways.

Given Facebook’s recent loss of developer energy and possible setting in of some user boredom, in reality this move is not much of a surprise per se, but the speed of the reaction is. This goes to show that mind-set and mind-share are everything in this new Attention Economy of Web 2.0 and beyond.

Facebook just couldn’t afford to let Google own the "open social network API" category and run away with things. So they had to reverse course and open up their social graph. We’ll soon know if Microsoft thinks it can afford being without a credible stake in the social networking space as a whole. (And no, their "Live Spaces" offering is NOT a credible stake.)

My bet is on them buying Facebook, and quickly.

I was reminded today that Rupert Murdoch did the MySpace deal in one weekend back in 2005. And despite the recent MySpace plateauing (at least in the U.S.) until about the beginning of this year when they made their moves on MySpace apps and a more solid API footing supporting Google’s OpenSocial, the then $580M price tag must appear like the steal of the century now that Facebook might go for $15B+.

Given that Micro-hoo negotiations appear to have more thoroughly collapsed for the time being (both sides have made statements in the last week or so that things were never as close to a deal as assumed before Ballmer’s pull-out, with both Bill Gates and key Yahoos presumably holding serious reservations), Microsoft does have a lot of cash burning a hole in it’s pocket.

More on that continuing saga later. I still owe you "Micro-hoo: The Post-Mortem Post Part II", only the developments are moving faster than I can write… intelligently…

Today, some not so minor controversy erupted in the blogosphere in reaction to the news that Facebook had just shut down Google’s FriendConnect on its platform. There were a lot of details being discussed re: data privacy vs. data portability between still largely "walled garden" social networks, all of which are quite relevant to a larger discussion on the future of the Web.

And Robert Scoble of Fast Company and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch got into a bit of shouting match on Twitter, a "GillmorGang" teleconference call, and their respective blogs.

I am not going to get into the finer points of the data issues here (but you should by all means read the above posts and commentary if you are into this sort of thing). But once again it appears that some larger strategic issues are being lost in the shuffle.

Check out what I wrote in a comment on a Silicon Valley Insider Micro-hoo post about a week or so ago:

While nothing is certain, this [Microsoft-Facebook deal idea would be] already a much better idea than the Yahoo deal. Given what’s going on right now with MySpace adopting Google’s OpenSocial, and making deals with Twitter, Yahoo, et al. to use MySpace data/resources in their systems, MSFT could actually try to preempt Google from running away with social networking:

Buy Facebook and VERY QUICKLY throw weight behind Facebook’s API as a competing standard to OpenSocial in opening up the "walled garden" of Facebook in strategic ways. Facebook apps are starting to lose developers from what I hear, many of which may be moving to OpenSocial API app development. Such a move could stop the slow-down/bleeding, if developers had a sense that big MSFT dollars were now gearing to put the pedal to the metal…

The longer term question is not IF social data will become complete openly exchangeable on the Web, but when. There is no need to have the same things stored/replicated in 1/2 dozen or more places/systems.

Alternatively, MSFT/Facebook could just adopt OpenSocial, and then look to gain more influence on the standard, trying to out-flank/out-innovate MySpace/Google. No good if MSFT let’s Google run away with it in yet another area.

(I took the liberty of adding a few links and minor grammar improvements into the quote.)

And this, in a nutshell, has been exactly the underlying dynamic of what has been playing itself out since yesterday. Leave out MSFT for a moment (though they are certainly lurking in the background), and the Facebook vs. Google/OpenSocial/MySpace battle lines were clearly being drawn…

This shut-down of Google’s FriendConnect application on Facebook, for which both sides have already offered various rationales, justifications, and rebuttals as to the true facts, is just the first salvo in what is sure to be a prolonged war, with Microsoft’s next actions being the potential wild card.

Not that their entry into the fray would guarantee anything one way or the other, but $45 Billion in mostly loose cash can have interesting effects to say the least, especially if Microsoft could get over themselves on this one and make a true attempt at unbridled innovation for once.

The social network issue in itself is very telling by the way how far Yahoo has been falling behind, and how Micro-hoo would have been far from a sure bet to getting any traction in this area: Go check out Yahoo’s two in-house social developments, Yahoo 360, which is hanging in limbo (view their more or less orphaned developer blog here), and Mash (their dev blog also apparently abandoned).

And as I mentioned before, I have it from inside sources that Yahoo also killed another very innovative social-cum-wiki type project (presumably different from Mash) in its early alpha mock-up stages just before the MSFT bid occurred, apparently that was too forward-thinking as well.

Facebook has certainly built up a lot of sophistication in their platform, there is a lot more there technically for those with the eyes to see it. I am not arguing that anyone should therefore like/love Facebook, but they deserve at least a little credit for things they have innovated.

Also, in regards to the Micro-hoo visions of better competing with Goolge in the ad serving realm, Facebook social ads do have quite a bit of potential as there are so many more demographic targeting angles available. In throwing up ads with social properties or (YouTube) videos, context is everything.

Get the context just right, and someone might actually click on an ad. And the key to the context outside of search (which in itself gives you an idea of what the querent wants), is to have the demographic and other semantic context. And that’s where social networks in principle have the chance to shine.

If Microsoft wants to be in ad serves at all, which they clearly still do, it would be better to figure out how to do it right on Facebook instead of a smaller stage. So, all in all, a Microsoft-Facebook play could be a decent idea, though it would all be in the execution… and MSFT not trying to rename things "Windows Live Facebook".  :)

Several times last week I was tempted to write this post, only to hold off for a while longer because I wanted to write something for my readers that would go well beyond a news rehash.

As I said in previous posts, it is easy to lose sight of the essentials in the dizzying onslaught of "Steve said, Jerry said…" titillation, investor and market timer stock price considerations, and "what’s the next step" agonizing. Instead let’s go back to Business Mind Hacks basics:

I have argued that the deal was never a good idea in the first place, and that this should have been the first and foremost question on anyone’s mind. Even now, there appear to be major Yahoo stockholders such as Carl Icahn, who are attempting to employ corporate board machinations to force the deal after all.

And of course there has been plenty of speculation that Microsoft would come back with the same or lower offer after having Yahoo’s stock price pummeled for a little while (incidentally, it didn’t go down quite as much as some had predicted, possibly a sign that the market viewed the deal was as in fact much less of a clear winner).

None of it would really matter as far as the fundamentals of the deal: That Google is the uncontested market leader in search and paid search ads, that neither Yahoo nor Microsoft have been able to compete effectively, and that they are falling further behind every day. (Notice recent earnings data showing Google’s search revenue is on track to surpass Microsoft’s flagging Windows/Vista revenues some time in 2009!)

There are several reasons for this, some technical, and some Branding/Positioning related and hence much more basic than the complex issues relating to e.g. paid search optimized monetization. I will further discuss the latter in another post. Let’s go with the branding issues for today.

A recent article in The Economist picks up on the same theme I have been "hammering" in a few recent posts:

Mr Ballmer [...] has invested billions trying to make Microsoft an internet and advertising superpower. But it seems not to matter. According to Danny Sullivan, a web-search analyst, Microsoft “literally has no brand” when it comes to its online services—nobody has ever been advised “to Live” or “to MSN” a recipe or a cute classmate.

But it gets better. While The Economist article was an overview piece on the break-up of the negotiations, ReadWriteWeb wrote a post entitled: "Microsoft’s Brand Confusion Runs Deep". And I couldn’t agree more with the tenor of it, and if you care about branding/positioning issues at all you should by all means read the full post. Here is a sample:

[...] slight differences in design may not be a very substantial issue, it is indicative of the confusion Microsoft has created around their Live brand. [...] Live was sometimes used to brand services, sometimes to brand desktop products, and sometimes destination sites. Worse, at times single products have had multiple names and sometimes the Live branding resulted in very clumsy product titles, such as "Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile."

And in all of this, ReadWriteWeb didn’t even point out the widespread but perennial corporate sin of brand dilution: While it is easy to see how large, powerful companies would prefer to engage in a sort of "brand hubris" and try to spread their brand-around to everything in sight, this just isn’t how things work at the level of the customer’s/consumer’s mental circuitry.

Ries & Trout made it abundantly clear in their seminal works on the matter, and data of decades’ worth of branding studies back it up: Once you have been lucky enough to establish your brand in a category/niche, you should avoid trying to stick it on other categories like the plague.

Because it confuses people, it quite literally messes with their mental mapping of names and what they stand for. It is quite noteworthy in this regard that the ReadWriteWeb post mentions that even Microsoft’s own employees appear at times confused about what "something-something-Live" really stands for!

If you think about it, as far as catching Google is concerned, Yahoo hasn’t been able to do it with moderate resources, but even worse, Microsoft/MSN/Live hasn’t been able to do it with nearly unlimited resources. Why?

Because the Windows/Microsoft brand acts as an albatross around the neck of any Internet play that they have attempted: Henry Blodget over at the Alley Insider already pointed out the unfortunate renaming of Hotmail into "Windows Live Hotmail", and they were even seriously considering ditching the Hotmail brand alltogether.

Horrible idea… and it truly makes you wonder about what might have happened to the (not perfect, but still much preferable) Yahoo brands in the case the Micro-hoo deal had gone through (or still might in the future).

Again, Ries & Trout point out that large companies are always in danger of, from the inside out, hastening their own brand dilution. This is because of the fallacy of the "we’re a big/strong/important brand" mindset, which makes "add-on-naming" things with your existing brand so seductive and almost impossible to argue against in say a company meeting. Nobody wants to be seen as arguing against their own brand, their own "tribe".

As I said, unfortunately it is wrong from a psychological perspective of how brands work in the minds of the consumers. It’s all about "tip-of-mind awareness" for a category. Simply ask "What is a ____?" If the answer is unclear, your brand is already diluted.

Kraft is a good example of this form of brand dilution. Incidentally, their only #1 brand is the one that they resisted naming "Kraft": Philadelphia Cream Cheese (by Kraft). Everyone knows the answer to the question "What’s a Philadelphia?" (in a food context). But "What’s a Kraft?" has no such clear answer.

A company that has done it right is Proctor & Gamble. Each one of their products tends to be built up as its own brand, and typically is the category leader commanding a serious premium: Tide, Dawn, Bounty, Duracell, Gilette, etc. (see the full list of P&G brands here). 

Test it, you’ll likely know the answer to almost each question: What’s a ____?

So Microsoft should create a new internet product that is for once NOT named MS or Windows, because frankly, the internet thing has little or nothing to do with Windows. It appears that it’s their built-in (maybe even unconscious) resistance to the internet that is always at play.

Which is another bad idea. You can’t let your ego get in the way.

What became the leading Web video site? "YouTube", and NOT "Google Video", and even less some theoretical monstrosity like "Windows Media Player Web-Edition Live Video Sharing… Site". :)

But Google had the good sense to let it go and simply acquired YouTube, while resisting the temptation to meddle with the brand. Their reward: A brand name that is already firmly anchored in the minds of consumers as THE video sharing site. "What’s a YouTube?" has a crisp and clear answer. Which is as it should be.

I rest my case… for today… more to come soon.

This is from an interview by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington with Citi Bank analyst Mark Mahaney in regard to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal:

MA: [...] I heard that they commissioned an outside study sometime last year [that] suggested that they would have 85% plus increases in cash flow from outsourcing search to Google. [...] I think you said that they would go from 4 cents to potentially up to 9 cents per search — is that right? Sort of, 40-90 dollar RPMs on searches?

[...]

MM: [...] they actually said that they thought they — they didn’t name Google but it was obviously Google — that the difference in the monetization gap was 60 to 70%. That’s the first time we’d heard or seen Yahoo sign off on this specific gap.

No wonder that Yahoo has been flirting with outsourcing at least some of their paid search ads to Google: It’s instant money in the bank, to the tune of potentially 25-50% higher TOTAL cash flow! (TechCrunch rightly pointed this last one out, but omitted the underlying cause in their write-up.)

I came to a similar conclusion re:"the monetization gap" a week or so ago, just by looking at the respective search shares reported by ComScore, as well as the Q1 earnings numbers by Google and Yahoo.

Obviously, the numbers reported by Mahaney from an in depth study (that was apparently commissioned by Yahoo itself!) are much more authoritative. And to me, they therefore are the true bombshell out of this interview, though Google Q1 earnings were obviously enough of a bombshell to send their stock up over $100 in a few days.

Now beyond this very key admission, the further question obviously is how this portends for the proposed buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft. And here again Mahaney is pulling no punches,  and comes to a conclusion very similar to what I wrote here. Even though the TechCrunch summary of the interview again inexplicably omits his dire predictions.

I realize that it’s easy to get caught up in the complicated and "titillating" mechanics of the negotiations (or lack thereof), but at the very end of the day the only questions that should matter are:

Does any of this make sense from a business perspective?

Will this make a difference in terms of Microsoft-Yahoo being able to compete with Google in earnest?

Will they together be able to change these dynamics that have led to what amounts to an admission by both companies that they haven’t been able to compete? (By Microsoft in that they are seeking out this deal, by Yahoo that they likely cannot avoid it, and have even been considering outsourcing to their main rival in a weak attempt to try and avoid it.)

Here is what Mahaney had to say:

MM: [...] The open question and really the last area where they could have an impact on Google is just by creating a larger second place, or second tier, search engine. [...] That would be an intriguing possibility here on how Microsoft/Yahoo! could have a negative market share impact on Google and search. We’re not going to know that for a year and a half or two years from today, assuming everything goes to plan. In the mean time, [...] Google is starting to attack more and more aggressively [...] on the display advertising market. I think it’s a reasonable bet that Google’s share of the total US advertising and the world Internet advertising is the same or maybe even a little bit greater over the next two years.

Sounds pretty open and shut to me, especially if you’ve been paying any attention to how methodically Google has been honing their search monetization.

More so because they were veering head-long into serious "Business Mind Hacks" psychology issues related to Branding and Positioning.

In response to Henry Blodget’s focusing on the admittedly titillating details of the current negotiations, while mentioning only in passing the likely pernicious effects of the deal in its currently proposed form on both Yahoo and MSFT, I said this:

Why would Henry say "but that’s a different story"?

That is THE story… forget about the short-term, short-sighted, Wall Street angle… none of it will matter if Q1/2009 shows that Micro-hoo has fallen even further behind Google in search/paid search due to all of the distractions that are sure to ensue if this goes through.

Not to speak of the large-scale incompatibility of the two cultures, the potential losses in user bases for "synergized" services, etc. (especially if MSFT tramples all over everything with their typical "adroitness").

If Henry truly believes that this will be a disaster (and obviously I share his view), wouldn’t that mean that the MSN-spinoff-to-Yahoo-plus-cash option should be seriously brought into view, instead of as an after-thought?

A "friendly deal is best for all involved" ONLY IF it avoids the Micro-hoo "listing super-tanker" trap. More bulk will not solve the issues that MSFT’s and Yahoo’s respective bloated empires helped create.

In MSFT’s case, in my view they would have been so much better off if the company had been split up 8 years ago into 2-3 more agile/ nimble/ aggressive/ focused units. Who knows how well MSN (with different name) might be doing today in the internet space that MSFT despite all of the posturing is only an also-ran in?

And Yahoo’s portal approach was dead when the Web 1.0 bubble burst, they just didn’t know it yet. It goes directly against your basic Ries & Trout "Immutable Laws of Positioning": Don’t dilute the brand!

Ask yourself this question: "What’s a Yahoo?" This is the reason that Yahoo never made it into everyday language the way that Google, Xerox, etc. have.

* End of 1st comment. *

Then someone tried to say that the "as for Yahoo! never becoming a verb, it was an early decision specifically not to push that for fear of diluting the trademark", to which I just had to respond because it represents such a deep misunderstanding of the phenomenon:

Dan, the "verb usage" is not something that is decreed from up high, it is a question of the meme spreading through a language/population. And that only has a chance to work correctly if the new term (e.g. Yahoo) takes a "tip of mind" position for a whole new category. Which if "Yahoo" ever did, was diluted so quickly that it had no chance to stick in this way.

Notice BTW that similarly every new venture Google tries under it’s Google brand tends to merely slog along, because a "Google" is a "search engine". So Google Video as a brand loses out to "YouTube". Focus. Simple.

Of course Google was smart enough to recognize this and buy them. "What’s a YouTube?" has a clear answer in a way that "Google Video" never did.

Yahoo BTW just violated this again by adding video to flickr, which evoked predictable groans from the "photography purist" heavy-user set. Now it’s "a flickr is a photo sharing site plus a sort-of video sharing site, like a mini-YouTube"…

Instead of trying to compete with Google in areas that it has already locked up (and "just google it" is merely one component), MSFT and Yahoo should innovate and create entire new categories of search and/or ad services, instead of saying "we sort of kind of have an Adwords too…"

Problem is, as an even bigger/more bloated juggernaut, the chances of that happening, and even in the event that it does happen, it getting "past committee" through the ever increasing layers of bureaucracy, are slim to none.

* End of 2nd comment. *

It is well worth studying your Ries & Trout on these matters, it’s all laid out clearly and supported by reams of real-world examples for all that wish to see clearly.

Back to more titillation :)

Granted, the negotiations and prospect of either a walk-away or proxy battle by MSFT including "poison pills" can be mesmerizing and mind-boggling to people interested in these kinds of industry developments, or their stock market angles (also note the new Yahoo board proposed by Microsoft, for the event of a proxy battle – this came via TechCrunch).

But none of this has much to do with the most basic questions: Is this deal a good idea? Will it work? As you know, I already placed my bet.