PlayerSearch Blog

…bring your search to users. According to a study completed by ComScore, MSN, AOL and Yahoo had search market shares of 39.4%, 50.0% and 46.2%, respectively, in a certain market as compared to their overall market shares of 10.3%, 4.8% and 27.8%, respectively. What was that segment of users? It was the segment of users that purchased internet access from ISPs that had partnerships with each of these companies.

The moral of the story…if you make it easier for users to use your search engine than it is to open a new browser and go to www.google.com (assuming it isn’t already their home page, which it is for me), then you can gain significant search traffic. This is a big reason why Toolbars are critically important and why Microsoft just struck a deal with HP to get their browser/search box installed on every PC by default (Google has done this with Dell for many years).

While Google continues to increase is market share in search (68% and growing; second place Yahoo is at 20% and falling), ROI Research for Doubleclick reports that more people use CNN.com to search for news than Google.  users still use many other sources to search for news.

Here are the top ten sites, with the percentage of participants who use them for news search:

1. CNN - 57%
2. Google - 53%
3. MSNBC - 41%
4. Yahoo - 40%
5. MSN.com - 31%
6. Foxnews.com - 25%
7. YouTube - 22%
8. Google News - 18%
9. Aol.com - 15%
10. Google Video - 14%

The report has more statistics, but it is interesting to see how different the market is for news search than it is for general search.

Derrick Eckardt of RotoNation recently came across sports scores included at the top of Google Mobile search results (sports scores searches are dramatically higher on mobile phones than from desktops on a relative basis, so it makes sense Google would experiment with these results on their Mobile version first).

This is great for the user as they save a click (and the time required to load a new page, which is significant on mobile phones) to get their answers.

ESPN clearly loses out as they have the top ranked result and would have garnered this traffic.

Google is clearly becoming more and more of a destination site…to the detriment of ESPN and other sites.

Quick write-up available at ReadWriteWeb. Not going to change the search game, but an interesting effort to improve the UI of search results (not the ranking, just the UI). The real question is how many people are going to install these customizations…my guess is a tiny fraction of people unless a killer app comes along (adding the yelp logo to the results for local searches is not a killer app and not worth the effort in my mind). This is just a start and it is open, so I hope to see this grow. I know we could improve the search results for sports players with content from www.playersearch.com.

Good coverage at TechCrunch as well. Same analysis…a lot of potential, but not there yet.

I have to agree with this blog post on Mashable.  Search and aggregation are keys to PlayerSearch.  We have not added the conversation piece yet (we are still in alpha), but that is a logical next step.

They cover the search, aggregation and conversation components of some of the most popular and fastest growing web apps: facebook, twitter and friendfeed.

All of these services would probably consider the conversation piece to be their most important, but search and aggregation are still key components to making these web apps more useful.

According to MarketWatch, Google has overtaken Yahoo as the most popular web destination in the US. Google used a blank white page with a search box to take down the number one portal on the internet. Web users that know what they are looking for on the internet go to Google.com to find it; if they simply want to read headlines to find out what is happening, they go to Yahoo.com. This change means that there are now more web surfers in the US that know what they are looking for on the internet and simply want to find it fast than there are people who want to browse headlines.

Google attracted 141.1 million unique visitors in the U.S. last month, up 18% year-over-year. Yahoo, meanwhile, attracted 140.6 million uniques, up only 7% year-over-year. Microsoft took third with about 121 million uniques.

This is a great trend for a site like PlayerSearch. If you want to read sports headlines to see what athletes are in the news, there are better sites to go to (ESPN being the #1 site with 20+million monthly visitors). But if you know what player you want to find information on, PlayerSearch.com is the only sports focused search engine. At this point, there are more people doing the later than the former. We just need to make the 70+ million visitors to sports sites aware of PlayerSearch!

Powerset, one of the most hyped “Google Killers”, has finally launched a beta version of their Natural Language Processing search engine. I am very impressed with their user interface, navigation and drill-down features but after further investigation this is far from a Google Killer. Here is a quick video overview of Powerset:

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

I was impressed (mainly with their UI, navigation and drill-down) after watching this video. I didn’t expect Powerset to provide great results for sports players (no search engine that I have seen does…except PlayerSearch of course!) and after testing it I was actually amazed at how poor the results were. They currently only search Wikipedia and Freebase, which is a significant limitation at the time.

One of the top sports headlines is of Sergio Garcia winning the TPC yesterday. Here is a comparison:

Google News search on Sergio Garcia: Top article covers Sergio’s win accurately. The first page of results includes 4 good articles on Sergio’s win, two recent articles discussing Sergio prior to his win, and two articles on people with the same name as Sergio Garcia (one Sergio Garcia, Jr. was robbed and shot; another Sergio Garcia scored a goal in a Madrid vs. Zaragoza soccer/futball match). No video’s.

PowerSet search on Sergio Garcia: No mention of his win or the TPC. Very poor results. These results only come from Wikipedia at the moment, so some day they may have better news, video or stats from other sources…but that day is far away (sports content is not a focus of general search engines).

PlayerSearch search on Sergio Garcia: News coverage of Sergio’s win at the TPC from sources such as Fox News, CBS Sports, the New Zealand Herald, the BBC, Taiwan News, and Sportsblogs. The best content in my opinion is the video coverage from NBC Sports (televised the event), ESPN, MSN, the Golf Channel, Yahoo Sports, Fox Sports and others. For more information, there are web links to Wikipedia, ESPN, PGA Tour and Yahoo (one of the five web links is incorrect).

I did other searches on Powerset for Roger Clemens and Brett Favre that proved equally poor. The results for Clemens were extremely weak with no mention of the accusations of steroids use or adultery despite extensive coverage on Wikipedia (over 1,100 words dedicated to these topics; to put that in perspective, the 12 years he spent with the Boston Red Sox is covered in about 300 words). The Brett Favre results had a lot of information from Wikipedia that was interesting on first glance, but after searching around on the drill-down links wasn’t as good as my first impression. There was no sign of video or stats.

TC comments unanimously harp on Powerset. I have never seen so many comments on a TC post that are almost all negative. I think expectations were set way too high as there are some things to like about Powerset. The real goal of a beta release is to demonstrate that you can solve a problem. It was certainly a good financial decision to limit their Natural Language search to just Wikipedia articles, but according to the comments on TechCrunch it still appears that a Google search of just Wikipedia still provides more accurate and relevant results then Powerset’s natural language search does from the exact same source…that is not where you want to be after spending $20 million!

Powerset is taking on a huge huge challenge with a fraction of the resources of Google, Yahoo and MSFT. I personally hope they continue to innovate (I do like some of the improvements that they have made with the user interface, navigation and drill-down). However, they will need to raise an enormous round of financing ($100million+) to begin scaling their natural language search to the rest of the web (natural language search is more expensive to scale than keyword search as they need to capture/determine/index the relationships among words instead of just the words). More likely, they will try to sell what they have accomplished to date to a larger search engine that can provide the scale.

Matt Mullenweg was a keynote speaker at the recent Web 2.0 conference. He founded the company that created WordPress, the blog software that I use and that you are currently reading. He shared some stats that I love as a developer and entrepreneur. Matt’s company (which apparently still does not have office space - they all work remotely) has a small number of employees yet their product touches a huge amount of people. Here are the employees and visitors count that Matt shared during his speech:

March 2006: 5 employees; 2 million visitors

March 2007: 11 employees; 43.8 million visitors

March 2008: 20 employees; 168 million visitors

These figures include visitors to all WordPress blogs which number in the millions (99.999% of which are under 10,000 pageviews a day). With a great internet application and only 20 employees, WordPress is able to touch the lives of a significant percent of internet users worldwide. Know of any off-line company that ever reached 168 million people monthly with only 20 people and $0 in rent?!?!

This should be one of the goals of every Internet business model. Every new member that joins Ning brings in two additional users compounded daily. The compounded daily part is the key that makes their customer growth virtuous and exponential. On average, every user that joins today brings in two new users tomorrow…those two new users bring in four new users the next day and so on. After 10 days, that one new user has brought in 1,024 new users. The graph above is a depiction of the growth in customers from a single new user.

We are working on some virtuous aspects for PlayerSearch and the Draft Analyzer which, if done right, will be a key component of their success.  MySpace and Facebook are great examples of the power of virtuous circles (Geocities had similar features as these sites but didn’t have the social networking aspect that creates the virtuous circles and therefore is no longer around).

This move by Yahoo has the potential to change the fantasy sports world. At least it would if Yahoo allows people to develop applications outside of www.yahoo.com. I have heard Yahoo state that they are opening up their sites and services, but I have never heard them mention opening up Fantasy Sports. There are dozens if not hundreds of small companies/developers that would immediately begin developing advanced fantasy tools for Yahoo to have access to the 5 million+ fantasy sports players on Yahoo.

As industries mature, companies evolve from (i) competing on features to (ii) competing on complete offerings to (iii) competing on ecosystems. If Yahoo opens up its commissioner services, it would be the first company to begin creating an ecosystem around its fantasy sports offerings. This is simplifying things a little, but looking back on Geocities (purchased by Yahoo) it never became anything more than just a feature (user created profile pages) and was quickly trumped by MySpace which had similar features as Geocities but added social networking to create more of a complete offering. Now Facebook is beating MySpace by creating an ecosystem of 10,000+ developers building applications for Facebook. If this applies to fantasy sports, which I believe it does, then Yahoo is taking a huge step in the right direction.

Yahoo gained its foothold in fantasy sports by being one of the first companies to provide a free and easy to use service (Yahoo is well known for being the site of choice for casual office pool leagues while SportsLine is the site of choice for more engaged players). Yahoo has been losing ground as of late to ESPN which has recently taken up the 100% free model to catch up with Yahoo; All else equal, Yahoo won’t be able to compete with ESPN’s brand and unparalleled presence in the sports world…oh, and ESPN currently has a more complete fantasy offering with several games, good features and unbeatable content (they have hired many of the top writers in the fantasy sports world). Unless something changes, it is only a matter of time before ESPN surpasses Yahoo. Yahoo’s best hope of maintaining its lead (worth millions in advertising revenue) is to trump ESPN’s more complete offering with its own ecosystem. This would empower hundreds of small companies/developers that are passionate about fantasy sports to create the robust features that are lacking with Yahoo’s fantasy games while still keeping the core features simple and easy.

This is an exciting concept…could bring down the walled in garden mentality of the industry.  I hope it is more than just an announcement to fend off Microsoft.

Update:

As the commissioner of the Wisconsin Fantasy Football League for 8 years, I would move my league to Yahoo in a split second if they had a handful of really useful tools that were portable and improved the fantasy sports experience for me and my league members.