Diego Basch, a former Senior Software Engineer at Inktomi, who is now Director of Engineering at LinkedIn explained why on his personal blog.

He outlines the major signs of the fall of Inktomi when he noticed most of the engineers at Inktomi using Google to find content, instead of Inktomi. But why? Why did Inktomi fail? He feels there are many reasons but the core reasons include:

• Inktomi didn’t control the front-end, they feed results to their partners such as Yahoo who controlled that search results experience.
• Inktomi didn’t have snippets or caching despite his efforts to do so, he was shot down by the executives.

Basch explains:

In short, Google had realized that a search engine wasn’t about finding ten links for you to click on. It was about satisfying a need for information.

Why comScore Numbers Matter So Much

In today’s world of digital content powered by online advertising, advertisers and publishers alike keep a close eye on the numbers. Web measurement services such as comScore, Hitwise, Compete, and Nielson track the number of visitors to web sites.

In turn, these numbers are used in board presentations to demonstrate growth, by sales teams working to convince advertisers to make big campaign spends, and by advertisers deciding where to spend ad dollars. Venture capitalists make investment decisions based on traffic numbers related by these services. Google might choose to include particular sites to power its “OneBox” results based on this data.

We use the numbers to monitor industries and consumer behavior. Is Bing starting to gain on Google in search engine market share? Are consumers increasingly interested in watching video? What social networks are losing ground?

The stats on these questions can change how and where businesses spend their advertising budgets and where they spend time engaging customers.

Are the numbers accurate?  Well, no. They’re not accurate, but they generally are useful for looking at trends over time.

As these numbers gain value, it becomes more enticing to game them. And if the traffic numbers are being gamed for an unrelated reason (someone needs to hit particular numbers to get a good bonus, advertisers won’t buy unless the site gets more traffic, someone decides to boost ad revenue by injecting the site with more page views), the numbers reported by these measurements services can end up inflated as a potentially unintended side effect.

So should we trust the numbers? Mostly, yes. But it’s important to look at traffic sources, and not just traffic alone.

The Stats on Food

For over two years, allrecipes.com held a fairly comfortable lead in food-related web traffic according to comScore. As you might imagine, this gave them a powerful story to tell advertisers. It might have gone something like, “we’re the number one food destination on the web. Advertise with us for the best visibility to your target audience.”

“Target audience” is key. It’s the reason online advertising is so powerful. It’s why a company like Dole or Kraft would advertise on a food site rather than a car site or a general news site. Advertisers don’t want just any views of their ads; they want views by potential customers who are highly motivated to buy their products. And how much more targeted can you get if you sell food than to someone who’s making a grocery list of what to make for dinner?

When the comScore numbers for May 2011 came out earlier this week, Food Network had gained 3.4 million unique visitors month over month (an increase of 26%) and had taken over the number one spot.

Comscore: Allrecipes.com vs. Foodnetwork.com Traffic (May 2010 – May 2011)

The other measurement services had All Recipes still at number one and didn’t show the traffic spike that comScore reported. So what happened?

Hitwise: Allrecipes.com vs. Foodnetwork.com Traffic (May 2010 – May 2011)

Looking more closely at the data, nearly all 3.4 million new visitors to foodnetwork.com landed on a single page – a video page that autoplays continuous video and video ads.

Land on the page and the videos start playing. And keep playing. The intent behind this ad buy seems to be to increase views of their video ads, which have become big business.

Nearly all of the incremental traffic to this video page came from sites owned by a single network – sites that drove no traffic the previous month. In fact, comScore showed 92 sites driving traffic to foodnetwork.com in April and 196 sites driving traffic in May. (In contrast, All Recipes went from 93 sites to 91).

At least 77 of those new sites were affiliated with a single network: AdOn.

Buying Traffic: How the AdOn Network Works

The AdOn network works like many other ad networks do. They match ad inventory to publisher demand. AdOn (like many others) generally don’t work with publishers directly. Rather, they work with aggregators, who have publisher space available and are looking for ads. AdOn delivers the ads to the aggregators, who in turn display them on publisher sites.

The AdOn network has a click counter showing “clicks delivered today”. They’re dealing in high volumes of clicks.

They pitch their services as:

“We produce high traffic volume via a broad range of categories including cost per click (CPC) search, domain/toolbar, email, pop-under, TQ and conversion. Our advertisers get immediate access to our global partner network consisting of more than 1000 publisher sources, 1 billion search queries and millions of visitors. Our scale will help you satisfy your volume requirements.”

1 billion search queries? Wow. That’s nearly half of Bing’s search volume. Who are all these searchers and where are they searching from?

I talked to AdOn to find out. Robert McDaniel, VP of Product for AdOn, told me that they don’t own any of the sources of traffic. They work with aggregators who have pooled the “more than 1000 publisher sources” who are looking for ads (this would include parked domains, toolbars, popups, and popunders). When AdOn get a request for an ad, they call this a “query” (hence the 1 billion search query number mentioned on their site).

(Update: since this story was published, the AdOn website has been edited to say “over 1 billion queries for ads per day, and millions of visitors and ads served per day”. And AdOn provided us an additional comment to clarify that some of their traffic originates from search.)

Rather than send ad-generated clicks directly to the advertiser, McDaniel says AdOn redirects ad clicks through one of their owned search engine sites and then to the final advertiser destination. McDaniel told me that these owned sites have the look and feel of a search site, but are really just intended to process the traffic, not originate it. This implementation causes the traffic referrer to be one of these search sites, rather than the actual origination of the click (such as that parked domain).

In essence, it works like this:

1. A person clicks on an ad (which typically might be on a parked domain or on a popup that was spawned from a toolbar).
2. The click leads to one of the search engines in the AdOn network, which redirects to the advertiser site.

So while it looks to a measurement service like comScore that all of those clicks are coming from an AdOn search engine, they really aren’t. And those 1 billion search queries are really just non-search clicks redirected through one of AdOn’s search engine sites for processing.

Which makes more sense than actual searchers using these search engines, which have names like chillcow.com and happythat.com and all look suspiciously similar.

If you try to do an actual search on any of them, you’ll find that they return a very similar set of sponsored search results no matter what you search for.

Looking more closely at other Scripps-owned sites in Hitwise, it’s clear that HGTV, for instance, is also newly making use the AdOn network to generate additional traffic. The HGTV traffic also seems to be funneled to a single video page that autoplays videos and video ads.

Below you can see May 2011 Hitwise data for HGTV. The circled sites are AdOn search engine sites and the arrowed sites are parked domains; you can see they sent no traffic the previous month.

This traffic is boosting HGTV’s comScore numbers as well.

But Traffic is Traffic, Right?

Buying traffic is how advertising works. There’s nothing inherently nefarious in it. If you want a lot of new visitors to your site, you might buy ads to get those visitors. But the key again is “targeted” traffic. Traffic based on misleading people into clicking, from untargeted audiences who aren’t actually interested in what you’re providing, or that is automated doesn’t help anyone except someone looking solely for a graph to move up and to the right.

And buying untargeted traffic to view ads on your site (when the advertiser is paying for your targeted audience) might make you money, but the advertiser isn’t really getting what they paid for.

If Kraft is buying ads on the Food Network, they want to advertise to the Food Network audience, not to a random audience brought in from another source just to view those ads.

And if the ad network that the Food Network is buying traffic from is funneling the traffic through intermediate sites, such as these search engines, then the Food Network has no visibility into where that traffic is actually coming from and if the audience is really even interested in food.

(After this story was published, AdOn provided an additional statement that “we make the originating HTTP-Referer that we see as well as the keyword that generated the click available to our advertiser if they would like it.” They also stressed that they believe their traffic is targeted, telling us “We do geo and keyword based targeting like most other CPC/Text Ad networks.   Some of our advertisers buy ‘run of network’… [but], even with the run of network ads, there is some level of user intent when they chose to click on an ad.”)

The Impact on the Online Publishing Industry

When you get right down to it, we have access to so much free content online because online advertising works. Publisher sites can afford to stay in business because of the money that advertising brings in. And advertisers keep spending ad dollars on online advertising because it’s effective. Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently noted:

“As Americans spend more time online for information and entertainment purposes, digital advertising and marketing has emerged as one of the most effective tools businesses have to attract and retain customers.”

Quarterly Online Advertising Revenue (1999 – 2011): Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)

If online advertisers don’t see a return on investment for ad dollars spent on visitors viewing or clicking on their ads, they may stop advertising online, which would hurt all online publishers. The IAB’s has published Networks and Exchanges Quality and Assurance Guidelines that Yahoo’s VP of Marketplace, Ramsey McGrory noted are important for sellers to adhere to because otherwise “the buyers… aren’t going to have a level of comfort about that … ad network’s inventory.”

Their Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines note that “filtration procedures are necessary to ensure that non-human activities (for example, known or suspected robot/spider originating transactions) are excluded from measurement counts.”

These guidelines are intended to ensure that the traffic is both real and targeted.

The Quality of Traffic From Ad Networks

The AdOn network web site notes that their solutions provide “high-quality traffic”, so I asked AdOn’s McDaniel about the quality of the traffic generated by their network. He told me that while quality is a subjective measure, they do work with their advertisers to ensure the traffic performs. He acknowledged that the traffic “isn’t Google traffic. That’s why [advertisers] aren’t paying Google prices”, but said that “performance is a great measure of quality” and that they “want to deliver a quality product that is successful for advertisers.” (And he was adamant that all of their traffic was real, not automated.) He noted that they use Adometry to score the quality of the clicks on their network and “maintain a very low amount of clicks with scores of less than 100“.

These goals sound a lot like the goals of any ad network. But it’s important for advertisers to really dig into the details of what an ad network means by quality traffic.

Specific Media gathers data about audiences to deliver “relevant messages to specific audiences” to generate “maximum brand impact”.

“We’ve developed a sophisticated data mining system that allows us to use the billions of data points we gather across our network to enable advertisers to address the specific consumers they want to reach with relevant advertising based on demographics, interests, contextual relevance and geography.”

Google’s own Double Click also talks about using targeting to developing a relevant message:

“The targeting options in DFA help you deliver a more relevant message when advertising online. Choose from a variety of targeting options, including audience segment, geo, daypart, browser type, OS, keywords, and user lists for remarketing.”

The bottom line is that this issue isn’t about the AdOn network. It’s about publishers potentially buying unqualified traffic to deliver ad views to their advertisers when those advertisers are specifically buying access to that publisher’s audience.

AllRecipes.com president Lisa Sharples told me:

“Allrecipes has been the #1 food site according to comScore for the past 26 months so of course we were surprised to see that our position had changed. As brands shift more of their marketing dollars from traditional to digital formats such as video, mobile and rich media, it’s essential decision makers have access to accurate, credible audience analytics. Allrecipes is committed to developing impactful advertising formats that provide strong results for top brands. Advertisers can trust that when they buy ads from us, they are connecting with Allrecipes’ vibrant, active and engaged community. We are head down focused on integrating online video as part of a positive user experience within our existing community of home cooks, delivering a sound product to them and our advertisers. We applaud Nielsen, Hitwise, comScore and the IAB for their vigilance in ensuring questionable tactics are not tolerated.”

comScore Revises Their Food Network Numbers

comScore initially looked into the Food Network spike and found that since the traffic was mostly coming from searches, Food Network may have invested in search marketing that drove the numbers up. But as you saw above, those searches weren’t actually searches at all.

The original May 2011 comScore numbers show Food Network at 16,828,000 million unique visitors (and foodnetwork.com specifically at 16,760,000 unique visitors). Revised numbers out today include the note: “Food Network and Foodnetwork.com May 2011 Unique Visitors and Page Views were overstated due to inclusion of invalid traffic. Revised data for Food Network is 14,352,000 Total Unique Visitors… Revised data for Foodnetwork.com is 14,294,000 total unique visitors.”

I asked comScore for more information about why they determined this was invalid traffic, but they haven’t yet provided public details.

Hitwise they told me that they discounted most of this traffic during data analysis. They said they look at clickstream data to make sure the traffic is valid and for instance, discount traffic from pop ups, from bots, or is otherwise automated.

Ultimately then, both comScore and Hitwise have deemed the AdOn traffic invalid. AdOn says their traffic is valid. Where’s Food Network in all of this?

Did Food Network knowingly direct a bunch of invalid traffic to a page that plays video ads in order to get more video ad dollars or to appear to advertisers to have a larger audience? Or were they simply using an ad network as many publishers do in order to gain audience?

I was hoping to get more insight on this from Food Network themselves, but I haven’t yet gotten a reply to my emails and voice mails. Without their side of the story, it’s impossible to say for sure. (But I’ll update the story if I hear from them.)

How Often Are Stats Adjusted?

We’ve seen adjustments like this before. In 2007, Microsoft gained 3.1% share by way of its Club.Live.com game that had people searching as part of the game. Compete, which had initially reported the numbers later revised them to exclude Club.Live.com after an investigation. Hitwise explicitly exclude that traffic when calculating search share numbers.

In 2010, comScore devised a new metric called “explicit core search” when looking at search engine market share specifically in order to separate actual searches from “contextual search” (slideshows and other activities that trigger searches that the visitor didn’t explicitly perform).

How Adjustments Are Reported

Looking at the restated comScore report, you may notice that the original numbers are still listed and the new numbers are only included as a note. This is the standard way comScore reports adjustments, as Yahoo found out last year.

When comScore underreported Yahoo page views by more than a billion in June 2010, Yahoo posted the correction themselves, noting “Due to the size of the error, Yahoo! is making the announcement today as comScore does not generally issue restatements of its published reports.”

comScore said that they’ve had the same correction policy for ten years: they include the correction as a note in its client notification center.

“When a client data error is discovered after the data for the month is officially published, we investigate the root cause, recalculate the affected metrics and report our findings to the client for review. Once we are satisfied that the revised metrics are correct, we post them in the Client Notification Center, an equivalent of software ‘release notes’ that compile any known issues for the month. Clients can use the postings to report the corrected metrics in internal and external communications.”

The Bottom Line?

The measurement services all want to report accurate numbers as they have to remain credible sources for this data as advertisers rely on it more and more. Understanding traffic sources is important because online advertising only provides return on investment if the ads are being viewed by real people who are legitimately interested in the types of products and services provided by the advertisers. We all need to get past the narrow focus on page views (and even total visitors). We all have been saying for years and years (and years) that page views is a terrible metric, but we don’t really believe it.

Those organizations that make money from impression-based advertising understandably look at page views and number of unique visitors as a primary metric. More traffic = more ad revenue. But that can be short-sighted thinking. What’s important is increasing traffic of a qualified audience who is interested in what your site offers and what your advertisers offer, and who will return and will engage with both you and your advertisers. Without that, why would advertisers continue to invest ad dollars online?

Li is set to speak at 5:15pm Pacific, and he’ll be interviewed on stage by John Battelle. Live blogging to start shortly. There’s also a live stream here.

Don’t know much about Baidu? China’s largest search engine. BusinessWeek just did a big profile about it, which you can read here or get the highlights from our How Google Could Have Bought Baidu And Other Fascinating Details About China’s Largest Search Engine post.

John: Baidu is largest search company and portal in China, welcomes Robin on. Says it’s his first talk at an industry conference in the US. Mentions Eric Schmidt’s comment in the BusinessWeek profile as a great gift to Baidu.

Robin: 5 years ago, people asked him what would you do to win China. Said he would stay 6 months to a year in China. Eric didn’t take his advice.

John: Your stock is double since January, market cap is pushing $40 billion.

Robin: Puts up roughtly to eBay.

John: Do you feel pressure to continue that rocketship ride?

Robin: When I founded this company 10 years ago, I never knew that search could be so profitable. I really liked to search and thought search could be useful. Used by 100s of millions of people, and I knew I could achieve that. Now, I don’t need more money, but I need to make our product better. That’s the driver behind my daily work. Not the stock price. Maybe some know 5 years ago when public, the Baidu price was $27 and closed at $22 (I think). That was more pressure. The stock has been up or down every year. I’m used to that. What’s important that the users keep growing, other things keep growing. We have plenty of room for growth. In US took about 10 years for internet market to mature. In China, started at roughly same time in 1995, but internet penetration is only about 1/3.

John: But that’s like 400 million people. How big can it get?

Robin: Lots of mobile phones, thinks can get to 800 million (think he said).

John: How many use Baidu?

Robin: about 99%. We have a lot of coverge (laughs from the audience). Answer more queries than any other search engine in their market.

John: Including Google in the US.

Robin: Yes [me: worldwide, Google reported by comScore last year as handling still far more than Baidu worldwide, I'll try to drop a link later).

John: Google got the sense with hacking and govt interference they weren't on a level playing field and China was a favored son.

Robin: That's a common misperceptions. People think there are no choices and Baidu is favored. But the reality is there are more choices in the US than in China. Here you have Google and Bing and what's the number three? In China, named one (didn't catch), and there's Sodu and there are a couple more. Many other Chinese companies are doing web search and places from outside China are offering it.

John: Why else do you think Google wasn't successful in China?

Robin: China is a very different market. It's a large and growing, meaning the market condidtions change every day, and you have to be close to it. Second, lots of VC money, lots of Silicon Valley VCs poured money into it. Third reason is that there are a lot of Chinese engineers here in the US that are very well trained, many of them are willing to go back to China and start their own company or join an existing one. If you're not prepared to compete in this type of market, you're not going to be successful. With Baidu, I think we did try harder. When I moved back to Beijing 10 years ago, I gave up all my stock options here (he was an Infoseek engineer).

John: You wrote a PageRank like algorithm before?

Robin: Before hired, Infoseek liked his research. Had the first patent on it in the US he believes. But he gave all that and focused on Chinese search. We were close to the market, came up with a lot of innovative ideas. For example in 2003, before Web 2.0 idea was coined, they started adding user generated content into their results. A query based online community, they have a bar or message board system where you can ask question, answer those from others or make comments. In early days, there wasn't enough Chinese information online. So we made this product [kind of like how YouTube created video content that in turn helped power a video search revolution]. Chinese users have already answerd 100 million questions on the system. We added a lot of social community so our users feel they really belong here. It’s very hard for them to leave.

John: So do you have Holy Grail of social and search that Google and Facebook seem to be looking at?

Robin: [Sorry, didn't catch first part]. System is designed to make people feel they belong, introduces high switching costs.

John: Would it make sense to have Facebook Connect in Baidu?

Robin: We don’t have a full blown social graph yet. But happy to add that.

John: Mark Zuckerberg will be here tomorrow, so I’m sure you’ll be happy to talk he jokes.

You’ve worked in both markets, what is it like to build a company with an entrepeneurial culture in China, with a very different environment and government. What can we learn?

Robin: China is an emerging market, not everything is developed, so you have to be patient. In US, company can be set up in 1 day, in China, it can take 20. He said it’s OK, hired a consultant, got office space while waiting for license. It doens’t hurt so much, as long as you keep open minded and control what you can. You can’t control censorship or slow internet connections.

John: There’s a perception in the US here that there’s no censorship versus China, that you search the whole web. Is that a frustration for you, along with low bandwidth.

Robin: My first reaction was also let’s move to Hong Kong (over censorship issue, when he first started). But I realized that wouldn’t work. If I were to move to Hong Kong, they’d call me some type of anti-government company, and my life would be ruined. If an American company moves, they’ll still call them “strategic partners.”

John: Found it interesting that the Chinese govt announced it might start a search engine, since Baidu has so much share.

Robin: It’s not a new thing. It’s OK. Providing more choices to the Chinese users is not a bad thing, but we are allowed to compete.

John: It would be unthinkable for the US to do such a thing.

Robin: China has a very strong govt.

John: I think you made an understatement.

Robin: I’m not worried.

John: Let’s talk about mobile. How is that developing in China, and if you ran a mobile app start up, what would be the things you should know.

Robin: There are about 800 million mobile phones but large portion of them aren’t internet enabled, maybe 150 million. But there’s a catch. Most of them use 2G phones to go on the internet, which means it’s slow and expensive, carriers charge by number of bytes. Most high-end people who use them don’t care about the cost. Vast majority of Chinese people are low income, can’t afford a PC, nannies or migrant workers, at night they lie back and go on the internet. It’ll change as the mobile network grows, user behavior will grow, and product will change, but we don’t know yet what the killer app will be. The status is not really stable. We don’t even know what the most poular device to go online.

John: Could Baidu provide it, like Google does with Android.

Robin: Our box idea is that something that boots up within one second and you get a box that lets you do whatever you want to do. It replaces the operating system. you can search, find apps, publish your tweets. The box is intelligent enough to understand.

John: How do you execute that vision?

Robin: One key part is to understand intention. People put all types of queries into their search box, so they know for certain user needs, like weather, there are probably 200 different needs to express the same meaning. So we can better understand intention, and once we have it, it’s easier to deliver it.

John: Lots of entrepeneurs here. One of the great stories is the moment when offered an ungodly amount of money to sell their company and they say no. That narrative is mythic in the valley. That’s happened to you a number of times. $1.5 to 2 billion offered by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Why say no?

Robin: Because I knew Baid u had more potential than 1-2 billion. At that time, China’s market was still knew. In 5 years, revs gone up 30 times. Don’t think Google Yahoo Microsoft knew that.

Q&A Time: Why doesn’t India have its own Baidu?

Robin: Most of India speaks English, writes in English, so Google already solved the problem. For China, it was very different. When I went back, people used to wait for 5 seconds to get answer. No space for words in Chinese language, you have to parse it differently. We had to help users create content and the speed of information growth was very high. In the first 3-5 year, we basically tripled our index size. Search engines here think overall growth 30-50 percent, then I’ll grow my index by that, and it’ll be good enough. But in China, we were able to keep up with the growth.

Question: What can the US learn from China?

Robin: Most of the ideas China learned from the US and its early start. But in recent years, there are innovations coming out for search, because we have the largest market. The addition of social layer makes search sticky and hard to switch. For social, Chinese company called 10 cents [I think] with hundreds of millions of users, started with instant messaging and added much to their platform. These kind of things, maybe US can pay more attention. Going forward, you should pay more attention to that market [the Chinese market] because it’s so large, and they’ll encounter new problems, and you’ll start to innovate.

John: Are you coming to the US?

Robin: We do have ambitions to expand outside of China. Been in Japan for two years. But US is probably not a high priority because it’s a large and mature market. We’d have to thnk carefully about it.

And that’s it.

Or maybe not.

The bold move? It issued its first quarter 2010 financial results on investor.google.com and said that future financial performance numbers would be announced on the web site. Shocking for a web company in this day and age of the web, no? Right. No. And the mainstream media and investor community that was so outraged? That would be Reuters. And… well, mostly Reuters. We at Search Engine Land happened upon this story on Friday morning (April 16th) and we had a bit of fun with it amongst ourselves. It read a bit to me like a press release itself for, well, press releases. What kept it from seeming more journalistic was a striking lack of sources and an abundance of, to use a technical term, crazy talk.

For instance:

“some worry that this trend [of issuing earnings statements on a company web site rather than via a press release] may harm individual and less-sophisticated investors who cannot access the blogs and websites as quickly as professionals. Others worry that not everyone will get the information.”

Questions: who are “some?” Who are “others?” Are “individual and less sophisticated investors” really less able to access blogs and websites than “professionals?” Seriously? Part of an investor’s professional training is to learn how to click a link or type a URL into a browser?

This same sourceless yet all-knowing “some” apparently worry that this move could therefore “disadvantage some investors”. And as Dominic Jones pointed out, saying that “the statement posed a brief obstacle for the media, analysts and others hungry for Google’s numbers” is like saying air poses a brief obstacle to forward movement. OK, he didn’t say that exactly. He called it “ridiculous”. And unless the faceless “some” has some inside knowledge that all of the media, analysts and others hungry for Google’s numbers have spent their entire lives in caves, devoid of electricity and light and therefore have no knowledge of the web, it’s unlikely many of them would call clicking a link an “obstacle”.

But Jones’s most telling point is around the core assertion of the Reuters article: “It [the move] may also suggest the company is headed down a road that could hurt companies that distribute press releases.” Jones points out that Reuters itself recently bought a company that distributes press releases (yet failed to disclose that in the reporting of the story).

So my initial read on the Reuters story wasn’t so far off. It was a bit of a press releases for press releases.

I’m not even going to get into the notion that Google is now headed down a road that might impact another industry. Surely that’s something they would never do.

The big loser in all of this might not be Google. PaidContent.org reports that Rambler, one of the big Russian portals, will be letting their CEO go after seeing their market share drop from 14.9 percent last year to just 6.4 percent. The CEO’s departure might be a signal that Google may not follow through on the Begun purchase, where Google would buy Rambler’s contextual ad service for $140 million.

In August of last year, Google renewed their deal with Mozilla to be the default search provider in Firefox. When Google came out with their browser, Chrome, it may have ruffled some feathers.

The methodology for ranking the brands is described below.

Here are the top 10, showing their rankings compared with 2007:

Source: Interbrand (2008)

Here’s how Interbrand evaluates brands:

All brands [are] subject to the following criteria:

–Financial Analysis –Role of Brand Analysis –Brand Strength Score

There are other brand studies and rankings in the market. For example, using a different methodology, Millward Brown named Google the world’s top brand in its annual “Top 100 Most Powerful Brands.”

paidContent.org reports Microsoft is restructuring their Search Business Group. Microsoft is adding a new group focused on commercial search. Leading the commercial search unit is Jeff Kelisky, the CEO of Multimap, who will be the general manager of this unit. That unit will be responsible for Live Search cashback, MSN Shopping, local, consumer mapping, Virtual Earth, and mobile. Jeff’s boss is Brad Goldberg, the GM of the Search Business Group.

paidContent.org also reports that Yahoo is losing another executive. This time it is Todd Teresi, SVP for its Publisher Channel. This comes right before a major launch of Yahoo’s two ad programs, APEX and AMP. Teresi said he is leaving for a “lifestyle” change, but sources told paidContent that he is leaving to take on a top role at some “venture-backed company.” Teresi has been with Yahoo for nine years.

This just in via adAge. Teresi is going to Quantcast, who provides a “new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence.” Teresi will be Quantcast’s Chief Revenue Officer.

Richard Kimber will be the new CEO of Friendster, and the old CEO, Kent Lindstrom, will become Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. Adam Hyder is joining Jobvite as the company’s new CTO. Previously, Jobvite hired Yahoo HotJobs leader, Dan Finnigan, as its CEO.

He also reportedly said, “I believe our product is in most respects better than Google,” and that he thinks Google’s dominance cannot last indefinitely in search: “At some point Google will not live ever after with 60 or 90 percent of market.”

Ask 3D was certainly more daring in most respects than Google’s Universal Search, but arguably the core relevance of search results on Ask doesn’t match Google. Diller’s statement about Google not being dominant forever is a kind of bland truism about all market leaders.

On to Yahoo and Microsoft. On the All Things D blog itself there’s a fairly extensive summary of Walter Mossberg’s interview with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker. Mossberg was very pointed in his questions about Yahoo’s strategy, its potential relationship with Google, and the failed Microsoft merger. It appears to have been a frank discussion with no new revelations about strategy.

Yang compares the failed Microsoft bid to the breakup of a high-school romance: “It’s like when you break up with your girlfriend in high school. It very quickly becomes he-said/she-said. I don’t want to look back. But I think we both understand that there is a tremendous amount of power in a combination like the one Microsoft proposed.”

Yang also says, “I’m the best person to run Yahoo.” He and Decker also apparently make lots of general statements and claims about exciting future plans and products, but with few specifics other than what’s already been announced elsewhere.

Yang apparently played golf with Steve Ballmer (his ex-girlfriend?) over the weekend, according to the Wall Street Journal, but no deal emerged. The full buyout is off the table and what they apparently discussed is Microsoft’s current interest in acquiring the search/search advertising business.

News Corp. Chairman (and owner of All Things D parent Dow Jones) Rupert Murdoch was also in the hot seat at the conference (coverage also on Barrons). He said that he was impressed that Yahoo held off Microsoft’s charge but also expressed that he doesn’t see the company succeeding in search or appeasing shareholders with a Google deal. He also dismissed the Carl Icahn proxy challenge to Yahoo’s board, saying that it “wasn’t serious.” As a practical matter, Microsoft’s abandonment of its takeover quest for Yahoo appears to thwart Icahn’s ultimate ambition to restart the merger discussions.

The Murdoch interview appears to have been the most interesting and candid and also the most free-ranging. It ran the gamut from the state of the US newspaper industry to online social networking, video distribution, search, and the US presidential election (the traditional conservative Murdoch appears to be leaning toward Obama).

All Things D’s Kara Swisher asked, “How do you look at Google right now?” Murdoch responds, “We love them . . . We think they’re fantastic, the greatest company in America. But you don’t want anyone to be a monopoly.”

Finally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and new (ex-Googler) COO Sheryl Sandberg took the stage to discuss the state of all things Facebook (summarized by Barrons). Facebook has been poaching a steady stream of Google employees and has become something of a “second front” for Google, with Microsoft being the primary one. Yet, Zuckerberg’s tone was conciliatory: “I’d like to work with them on something.”

Hmmm . . . “something.”

For her part, Sandberg had nice things to say about Microsoft. Barron’s paraphrases her: coming from Google, you don’t spend a lot of time at Microsoft; it’s a good partnership; it will continue to be important. Most of the discussion about Facebook’s business model and future advertising plans was about brand/display and trying to further innovate in those areas following the Beacon debacle.

It remains a mystery, however, that the company doesn’t implement web search and related monetization on its site (see Microsoft’s Facebook Ad Deal Doesn’t Include Search). Perhaps that was the “something” that Zuckerberg was alluding to with Google. We’ll see.

For over a year, Microsoft has been experimenting with games to help build its search marketshare. Yesterday, I learned of one that certainly caught my eye: Indiana Jones Search.

Designed for those in the UK, you perform a search:

Then at the top of the search results page, two stones turn, with you hoping they’ll turn green:

Then you get your results. I lost:

You also get shown how many people have won prizes that range from a trip to the New Mexico film location, to an Indiana Jones hat, whip, DVDs, and more.

If you don’t live in the UK or Ireland, you can’t win. Sorry. But you can still have fun playing with one of the latest ways Microsoft is trying to build traffic.

I’m going to take a longer look at the games activity Microsoft has been doing in a future post. Until then, check out Microsoft On Search Gains & Live Search Club, which I wrote last year and covers some of Microsoft’s goals, plus some controversy that has come up in the past over whether game-driven searches should be counted.

Ratings service Compete, in particular, seems to have been filtering these queries out. Last month’s Microsoft Dips In Compete’s Revised March 08 Search Figures shows what happens if you don’t.

At a Microsoft event I attended yesterday, I talked briefly with Microsoft Live Search general manager Brad Goldberg about how the games are going. One big takeaway was that he said they are indeed helping create regular users for Live Search.

Games and giveaways have worked in the past to help build share, at least in the short term. iWon did this in 1999 and last year did a revamp to try again.

As for Microsoft, we’ve covered these launches over the past year:

• Microsoft Tries Search & Win Again?, November 2007
• Microsoft Launches Search Prizes With Virgin In UK: Big Snap Search, February 2008

In the US, Microsoft Live Search Club continues to be the place where Microsoft offers search-related gaming ranging from Chicktionary (where you try to arrange letters to unveil a word, with search being used to offer hints) to Spelling Bee. You can even use Search and Give to donate to charities based on searching.

In the UK, it’s Gamesbox that serves as the home to search-based games, such as Search Star to the new Indiana Jones one (which isn’t yet listed on Gamesbox, but it replaces Big Snap that is listed).

Google would never do this, of course. Yeah, Google’s done it at least twice, far less organized than Microsoft, and around movies. The Ultimate Search For Bourne was a tie-in with The Bourne Ultimatum that Google ran last year. In 2006, it did a similar gaming site with the Da Vinci Code.