Eric Auchard (Reuters) profiles a new social search engine, Kaboodle (sort of like Jeteye but simpler). It looks very interesting, but what will be its fate?

One has to ask the broader question (with all the new launches recently): What will happen to all these new engines and tools, and where will they ultimately wind up in a marketplace that is dominated by Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL? The needle isn't really moving.

As A9's Udi Manber has said, "Search isn't a solved problem." Yes, that's true. But even he can't get much consumer traction at A9 (backed by Amazon), despite doing lots of innovative and interesting things.

These many small companies aren't going to grow up to be Google or Yahoo! because Google and Yahoo! simply won't let that happen. And consumers have limited attention and capacity to use all these new tools, regardless of how cool, interesting or even effective they may be. Ironically, the more new tools that proliferate, the more that (in my view) reinforces usage of the incumbents.

The more confused I am, the more I do what is familiar and tried and true. I notice this in the way I now consume news online. I used to go to tons of news sites. Now that more and more information and tools are available, I'm using fewer sites. It's kind of paradoxical.

In verticals there is still opportunity (e.g., Healthline) and, I would argue, in local too. But the plan (and hope) for many of these novel applications in blog or general search can only be to be acquired by the incumbents.

This town isn't big enough . . .

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Re Kaboodle, specifically, Om Malik has some extensive comments and sees it primarily as an online shopping aid.

AOL wisely starts marketing AIM to younger audiences, where it has brand and usage strength.

Also, another area of AOL strength, the company beefs up Singingfish and AOL broadband video search with RSS feeds.

There are three dimensions to local: "where I am," "where I'm going" and "where can I buy it?" The new Yahoo! Trip Planner seeks to leverage a number of Yahoo!'s locally oriented applications and information, including search, maps and user-generated content (ratings/reviews). The app also lets users share their trips with others (per Yahoo!'s overall FUSE/community strategy).

That aspect of things is perhaps the most interesting. I can see, hypothetically, where others have gone before and discover places to stay, etc., that I might not otherwise have known about. Watch out TripAdvisor.

This appears, in my cursory overview/instant analysis, to be a really nice packaging of existing tools on Yahoo! (sort of like an art museum presenting elements of its permanent collection in an interesting and fresh way).

The Yahoo! blog has more.

Noteworthy . . . from the folks at PaidContent:

Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis, is being bought by America Online . . .The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full-time employees . . . AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site . . .

More from Reuters, including the estimated terms.

AOL also recently added a number of new features and enhancements to its search functionality. Here's Chris Sherman's overview. In addition, business networking site LinkedIn is integrating AOL IM into its service to facilitate "real-time communications."

HousingMaps, Yahoo! Apartments, HomePages, Trulia and now Google may be seeking to combine real estate listings and related data with Google Earth and/or Google Local. (Thanks to John Battelle for pointing to the article on the San Jose Mercury News site.):

Commercial real estate's largest data provider is working with Google to integrate its vast stores of building information with the Google Earth interactive satellite mapping service.

Newspapers must (MUST) get into this game (dynamic maps + real estate listings) in a bigger way. Some of this is novelty, but much of it is about true improvements in the user experience. HomeGain (owned by KRD, Gannett and Tribune Co.) will probably be the vehicle. But we'll see.

There are simply too many things going on. Here are a few quick hits with some thoughtful remarks (hopefully) to come later:

• MapQuest to Publish (Real) Books (taking online offline; they've got the brand to do it)
• Yellow Pages Group Launches HelloYello Enhanced DA (automated, should be a big improvement on current, inept human operators. This is a real opportunity for directory publishers if the implementation is user-friendly and effective)
• NY Times to Publish Free Weekly Classifieds Tabloid (free to readers, not advertisers apparently)
• Vonage Will Hit 1M Subs by Year's End (VoIP has profound implications for directory publishers over time)
• SBC-Yahoo! Reduce Price of DSL to $14.95 per Month (Broadband will be ubiquitious. This is a land grab. Makes me want to switch my service; I pay $61.90 with Comcast)
• Newsweek Does TV, IPTV, Video Search (extensive converage)
• Google Stock Inches toward $300 (Yikes! What about price to earnings?)

Whew!

The recent earnings' results from BellSouth, SBC and Verizon all show that their growth is coming primarily from high-speed Internet and wireless. Accordingly, we believe that the FCC's recent decision will enourage more investment in DSL by the RBOCs. Since all three RBOCs have historically high debt levels, now would be a good time to consider spinning off their Yellow Pages subsidiaries to generate cash to facilitate their investment objectives.

Our view is that the Yellow Pages businesses would be worth more in the private equity market if they were broken up into bite-sized contiguous chunks. There certainly is no lack of interest in the Yellow Pages business as an investment vehicle. And the success of Dex Media and R.H. Donnelley in managing incumbent Yellow Pages publishers suggests that a well-managed sale will be hugely successful.

Today next-generation news aggregation site Inform unveiled itself. I spoke to CEO Neal Goldman a couple of weeks ago and got a demo of the site, which was very impressive. I don't have a great deal of time this morning to run through the site's features, but here's what makes it different:

• Comprehensiveness: Algo + some human editorial selection of sources (especially for blogs).
• Dynamic navigation and contextual search. The contextual search and refinement capabilities are extremely advanced and impressive. One can do much more exact and refined news-related searches than on general search engines.
• Personalization: There's a lot now and more coming. You have to register for the personalization features, which include the ability to save articles and create a personalized directory of content or sources/feeds. There's no Furl/MyWeb capability, however, which would be a very nice feature.

The blog content aggregation is much more limited than the news content right now. It's not a blog search engine per se. However, it does contain considerable blog content from top news-oriented blogs. And users can add any site/feed they want so it becomes, effectively, a substitute for a newsreader.

Stories that span multiple pages are presented in their entirety in a single window (the site doesn't send readers back to the original source sites). Ads appearing on those sites also appear with the news content. (Subscription/registration required content is gated and presented as it would appear if one navigated directly to the content site.)

How does this affect newspaper sites?

Inform would argue that it is going to surface a great deal more newspaper content pages (and related ads) than would otherwise be the case and gives newspapers more distribution accordingly. But there's also the chance that this takes existing news agregation (i.e., Google News, Topix, etc.) to a new level, to the point where I never need to visit a newspaper site again. (That's true for national but not local news necessarily.)

(There's a long digression here that I won't go into about the value of newspaper brands and how to maintain them over time.)

Goldman disagrees with my "devil's advocate" position and believes this helps news sites and news content gain exposure (and page views) they might otherwise not get. It's another instance of the same debate that came up last week when Craigslist barred Oodle from scraping its listings (aggregation vs. destination).

This is a very powerful tool and, in a way, the real fulfillment of the "personal newspaper" that was discussed hypothetically years and years ago, as the way people would be reading news in the future.

What's the business model? There will be some premium services, and the site has its own advertisers for pages that it "owns" (as opposed to those where the news content and associated ads appear).

There are critics who think it's too complex and confusing (paidContent.org, for example). I might agree that's there's a lot here and it's not fully intuitive for mainstream consumers. But I think these guys wil get that — I had a discussion with them about duplicative personalization elements — and simplify over time.

The newspapers (or other news media) are going to ultimately be compelled to buy this site. It's just a question of how long do they wait.

Craigslist (CL) has been the proverbial poster child for friendliness, openness and online cooperation. However, as John Battelle reported first yesterday, CL has apparently blocked Oodle CEO Craig Donato's classifieds aggregator from crawling and indexing CL's listings. Currently, the local marketplace accounts for a large percentage of Oodle's listings (haven't done the count, but it's significant).

It's a bit of a surprise that CL, rather than Cars.com, for example, would do this. But, on the other hand, consumers need not visit CL if they can get CL + everything else from Oodle. This is the central dilemma for all "destination sites" that permit their content to be scraped and presented by aggregators. Indeed, this is the dilemma for directories and newspapers in pushing their content out to search engine results.

Does it represent more traffic for the destination and its advertisers, or does it ultimately reinforce the value proposition of the aggregator/engine and thus "disintermediate" the underlying content/destination site? The answer is "yes" to both questions. It does deliver more traffic, but it also reinforces the aggregator's consumer value proposition, to some degree, at the expense of the underlying site.

It's quite a dilemma, but it's one that must be negotiated by any site that doesn't have enough "organic" traffic to satisfy its advertisers or that needs to build awareness and usage (almost everyone). CL is in the enviable position of having an extremely strong brand and huge traffic in its major markets. In other words, it doesn't need Oodle. So it decided to make CL the only place users could access its listings (notwithstanding Housingmaps, which is more about fun than money).

So this is a blow to Oodle but potentially not one that is insurmountable for the site. Travel site/aggregator Orbitz, for example, is widely used but doesn't include Southwest or JetBlue flights. So Oodle could well continue and succeed (ultimately, I believe it will be acquired by the newspapers)/

The larger issue here is openness versus the "walled garden." America Online abandoned the walled garden (and is in the midst of a big ad campaign telling the world). But a stealthy new version of that model and thinking — what I call the "invisible walled garden" — still widely exists at search/portal sites (i.e., comprehensive feature sets intended to keep users within the system). There's also the example of the Yahoo! and MSN IM agreement, but one could argue that was defensive.

There's a philosophical debate and also a power struggle that are text and subtext here. Defining Web 2.0 (now something of a cliché), people argue that it's about openness and interoperability. But the real politic of the Internet is still about who's got the eyeballs and who needs them, who's got the advertisers and who wants them.

The whole MSN-AOL-Google-Comcast courtship dance falls into this category as well.

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More dialogue and debate from the Oodle blog.

I'm stuck in the Phoenix airport waiting for a plane that is delayed. By now, you all know that Google made a lot of money this past quarter. Here's the low-down from the official release:

Google reported record revenues of $1.578 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2005, up 96% compared to the third quarter of 2004, and up 14% compared to last quarter. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. This quarter, TAC totaled $530 million, or 34% percent of advertising revenues.

Reactions:

• This is about their market share
• This can't continue can it?
• Ohmigod!

And this, this a.m.: (per Reuters): "First Albany and Lehman Brothers went further, upping their price targets to $450 a share."