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On Sunday, Web Guild spread fear around the internet by ‘exposing’ Google’s quiet layoffs, which were said to be upwards of 10,000 employees. And Google was supposedly getting away with it through secretive loopholes that only corporate lawyers know about. They were hiring workers and not paying them benefits.

Actually, those people are called independent contractors and they knowingly enter into those agreements.

Google is reducing its contractor workforce, but it’s something they’ve had planned for a long time. Of course, the timing of implementation couldn’t be worse. Especially since contractors generally don’t get unemployment benefits once terminated. Independent contractors are essentially self-employed.

Related Reading:
Google Q3 Revenue Increases 31% Year-Over-Year, Up 3% Over Q2 2008
Google Pulls the Plug on Lively

Over the summer, Google launched a Second Life-esque 3D chat product called Lively. It seems Lively is not exactly living up to its name. Google is killing Lively at the end of the year.

While Lively is certainly not the first Google product to head to the chopping block, its shelf life did seem a bit short. Still, Google says it needs to focus on its flagship areas of search, ads, and apps.

While the rest of the world was distracted by the launch of Chrome, Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman - definitely a woman who “pulls rank” - was covering the nofollowing of links over at Twitter at the behest of Google.

Her argument is powerful and once again challenges Google for pushing sites to do what they want. As she asks:

“If Google is the one who wants that web link nofollowed because some twitter profile pages may be automated bots or spammers, then it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity, by a method other than demanding that other websites and social networks change the ways they do business to help Google stop links being used as a form of currency and to manipulate their algorithm - an issue Google and Google alone created and profited from.”

This should be read by everyone in our industry. Leave the shiny new browser alone for a few minutes and see where our futures are going. Thanks for not being distracted by Chrome.

Newsflashr.com launched a new type of search engine for news stories today. Users are prompted to enter keywords and the search results are polled and displayed in real-time from many of the leading news services such as MSN Live, Ask Big News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSNBC, Digg and Twitter to name a few.

Newsflashr will also feature the Techmeme Leaderboard.

The site is the first to add a social twist to news reporting, in an attempt to leverage contributions of citizen journalists and the collective intelligence. For the first time, we’ll be able to determine whether Twitter is actually a news source. Plus, Digg - one of the key drivers of searches on Google Hot Trends - will be featured as a news source.

The sites is shooting for a hip, ironic image. The front page graphic is no Google Doodle. It’s a pic of The Joker superimposed on nuclear missiles, with the caption the Joker’s line from The Dark Knight, “Why so serious?” (see below)

“As a small company, we think that we can challenge the big guns with our new approach that pulls from all their results and pushes them on to a single results page. Say someone is really thirsty for any news updates on a given person or company, using Newsflashr, they’ll never miss a beat,” said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com, in a statement.

The new service complements Newsflashr’s existing free news portal launched in February 2008. The existing portal is a news interface that highlights keywords (topics) representing the “collective intelligence” of hundreds of the top news editors as it updates throughout the day for a wide variety of mainstream news and blog categories.

Apple is releasing the next generation of its popular iPhone today, and users of the first gen phone (including yours truly) get a software upgrade that enables downloading of applications available for the iPhone 3G. Of course, search has made its way onto several applications, so let’s take a look at what’s available.

Straight Up Search

First up, Google is the only one of the major search engines to offer up an iPhone search app. Suggest and My Location are utilized and you can also use Google search to query your iPhone contacts. The app is free.

The generically named Web Search pulls queries from search engines and presents them in a iPhone friendly format. The idea behind the app, which costs $1.99, is that not all search sites are optimal for browsing via the iPhone’s Safari browser, so Web Search takes the results and formats them for better usability.

Going Local

A whole host of applications are making local search easier. Some are the iPhone versions of popular web sites. Others are designed just for the iPhone. They make use of a user’s location and several include reviews and ratings, which are popular among searchers. Here’s a list:

• YP Mobile - developed by Yellowpages.com
• Yellow Pages - developed by Avantar
• Local Picks by Trip Advisor
• Where to Go
• UrbanSpoon
• Places
• Yelp
• Vicinity
• Where

YP Mobile vs. Yellow Pages iPhone apps

Media: Images, Video, Music and Movies

Both Flickr and Photobucket are offering apps for their popular photo sharing site. You can also browse public photos on their sites. Meanwhile, Truveo developed a video search app for the iPhone. YouTube (complete with search) comes packaged with the original iPhone software.

Midomi allows users to hum a song and the app will search for the song that’s hummed. I plan to make great use of this service.

Box Office, OneTap Movies, and plainly named Movies help you search, you guessed it, movies!

Travel

So far, the travel search apps (or lack thereof) leave a lot to be desired. I mean, this is the iPhone! People use it while they’re out and about and, you know, traveling. But for now, here’s what users can download:

• Travelocity - find flight times and nearby hotels
• British Airways - find flights with the airline
• Transit Guides - mostly just for NYC, San Francisco, and DC right now

Etc. and So On

Here’s a couple more apps, in case you didn’t have enough.

• People - a white pages directory
• CareerBuilder - search for jobs on the go
• Pulawai Real Estate Search - maybe not prime time for this app with the housing crisis, but useful if you’re house hunting, especially if on a relocating trip

There are also several apps which deliver information, such as news and sports scores. They kind of take search out of the equation.

Make no mistake, the iPhone is in the process of re-defining search (whether it meant to or not), and mobile search advertising is a space you need to explore.

Priceline CMO Brett Kellner joined us this week at Google’s New York headquarters (via conference call) to chat about travel trends in vertical search, the robust health of paid search (PPC) campaigns, and integrating online and offline advertising campaigns.

Last year I predicted 2008 would the year CMOs “get search.”

Brett, who leads one of the world’s most successful online pureplays, “got search” years ago. His leadership in vertical search is one of the reasons why so many of his peers have started to see the value of search-driven branding and direct marketing campaigns.

While many CMOs are only starting to ask their VP or director of marketing how search works, Priceline has already started testing Google audio ads and Google TV ads. The early results? All good.

Brett didn’t try to sell us anything at Google. He didn’t even mention the upcoming launch of Priceline’s new vertical search innovation: Inside Track. So when HotelMarketing.com broke the news about Priceline’s Inside Track “search agent” we thought Brett and William Shatner deserve a plug.

Priceline has launched Inside Track, a new tool that allows users to create a personalized airline ticket “scout.” You can see the top 50 biggest savings routes for Priceline’s Name Your Own Price.

The tool also provides analysis of best days to travel as well as notifications of increases in decreases in airline prices in a given city. This will allow users to act on price changes as they occur instead of being tied to submitted travel terms.

SEW Blogger Nathania Johnson visited Inside Track and found it not unlike a financial services Web site with stock tickers (with the exception of William Shatner greeting Nathania upon arrival).

Clicking on a city pulls up a list of destinations served by that city. Next to it are up and down arrows showing whether prices to that location are rising or falling and by how much. Very cool dashboard that shows price changes and trends by top city pair.

Here’s Brett’s official statement: “With Inside Track, priceline.com delivers the kind of comprehensive market-wide price trend functionality consumers have come to expect from Web 2.0 travel applications, plus the savings that are unique to priceline.com due to our elimination of booking fees on published fares and our Name Your Own Price airline ticketing service.”

For the business traveler with flexibility, vertical travel search engines now provide ultimate transparency into the yield management systems of airlines.

We really do set our own prices. Online travel is a 24/7 real-time auction - and the forerunner of Google’s paid search algorithm and Yahoo/Overture’s innovative keyword auction.

The launch of Priceline’s Inside Track comes on the heels of an announcement by Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Charter, a vertical search engine that is targeted towards high-end corporate and last-minute airline customers.

There are a lot of strange and funny things on the Web, but as of this week, there’s one less place that showcases them; Yahoo Picks has been shut down.
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