Sometime later today, a small number of Google users will see a new look to Google’s Search Options feature. If all goes well, the cleaner display may be launched across Google after the New Year. And it’s all because Google’s vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer doesn’t like jazz.

Simmer down, jazz lovers! Jazz is just not her thing; she’s not making a personal campaign against it. Instead, Mayer was using jazz to explain a pet metaphor she has about search results pages. They have their own “rhythm,” and Google’s results have been sounding a bit free form lately.

“I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next,” Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google’s search results. “I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.”

Indeed, it has felt a bit confusing with Google lately. When I wrote my Up Close With Google Search Options story in October, after new search option features were introduced, I detailed a number of inconsistencies in how they operate.

I haven’t yet finished another piece about a growing gripe I have, inconsistency in how Google enhances search listings with sitelinks. I never know where to expect them now. They can appear in in any position, within snippets, on a single line and in even more ways. It’s been making my head hurt.

I raised the inconsistency issues with Google cofounder Sergey Brin last month at a press conference, and he said experiments on this were in the works. So now we have a visual sign of that.

Search Modes

Personally, I’m glad if the results will be getting more predictable. But enough generalities. Let’s take a closer look at the changes. Here’s an overview of the new results page in testing (and yes, you can use the screenshots below if writing about this — just link over to our story):

“We’re basically looking at a new look and feel for Google,” Mayer said of the change. “It’s an overall cleaning up of the search results page.”

The search options appear in the left-hand column. The former “All results” area that allowed you to switch between different types of searches (images, news, maps and so on) has been replaced with new tabs for these services:

Internally, Mayer said that Google calls “modes.” For example, after searching for “australia” in the example above, you’re in “Everything” mode (I love this name). But with a click on the Images tab, you can switch to “image mode” and get back image results, select News to get news results in “news mode” so on.

By default, Google guesses at the modes it thinks are most relevant to your search. But the “More” tab gives you access to the full range of search services Google offers. If you Video mode, and that’s not automatically suggested, you can select More, choose Video and get those results:

As happens now, when you switch modes, the search options change. In video mode, you get unique video filtering options such as duration of clip or to see only video in high quality:

New to the search options area in this test is a “See also” section that suggests other queries related to your original topic. As for a search on pizza, Google also suggests things like “tacos” or “fried chicken:”

Interestingly, it doesn’t show more typical related queries that incorporate the main terms, as you can currently see at the bottom of results now for pizza, such as “pizza recipe.” But perhaps this will change.

As the second arrow in the screenshot shows, there are even more search features that you can access by using the “Show search tools” option. Features such as “Wonder Wheel” or “Timeline View” or “More shopping sites” all reside in this area (to learn more about these, see Up Close With Google Search Options).

Google 3D

The most dramatic change in the design is that the search options window is permanently open, rather having to be manually toggled on, as is the case now. That’s right. If the test proves successful, Google’s almost certainly moving to a three “pane” format, with search tools and options located on the left, search results themselves in the middle and ads on the right.

Mayer said going left made the most sense. Google continues to add new search features, and they need to be exposed to searchers somewhere. Putting them at the top of the page pushes results down; ads are already at the right. Having the tools on the left, with the pane permanently opened, is something she said she’s personally wanted for some time, but not everyone in the design team was convinced. The test will be a final proof of how well it works with Google’s audience.

“While I wish we had gotten here sooner, Mayer said, “I’m excited to finally have it out.”

But hey, wasn’t there a search engine that ushered in a three pane design like this not to long ago? Yep. Ask.com, with it’s Ask 3D view that was developed under then-Ask CEO Jim Lanzone. Bing and Yahoo now have three pane designs, as well. So did Ask have it right back then, I asked? And is the three pane view now the industry standard?

“Now you know why I’ve been searching for John Stuart Mill,” Mayer said, speaking of his book On Liberty and how it discusses that universal truths always come through.

“Is it the trend du jour or is that a universal truth,” she said, of a three pane design. “It is a likely universal truth.”

Mayer added that Google had recently done nearly 50 mockups, all done independently, to examine results. A three pane design was a common theme that kept coming up.

Bimodal World Of Screen Sizes

Mayer also spoke to the growth of screen sizes, pointing out that we’re in a “bimodal” world where screens are conversely getting larger on the desktop (and people have more of them) and smaller (as people do more and more browsing on mobile devices). So a three pane view may make no sense for mobile devices. But on the desktop, there’s much more room to spread out than in the past.

“This is a first step. We do think we can add that left navigation and it won’t impact the rest of the page,” she said, pointing out that currently, the actual search results only take up about 1/4 of the screen real estate available for a typical desktop viewer. She also said that Google will do more things in the future to take advantage of larger desktop screens.

What about the navigation bar at the top of the results, which people can also use to switch between different search options such as news and images. Is it becoming redundant as the left-pane continues to evolve?

Mayer said Google would revisit the design of the top navigation links area next year. But right now, it works, moving around “a ton of traffic” to different portions of Google. She also said it’s a helpful way to unify Google’s various properties. Plus, it allows people to go directly to a particular search service, such as image search, without first having to do an “everything” search and then refine it.

Search Button, Meet Search Box

Looking at the new design, I remarked how noticeable it was that the search button is directly integrated into the search box. Consider the before:

And after:

Internally, plenty at Google have noticed the change and not necessarily liked it. “That’s has been one thing that’s drawn the most ire. If the ire continues [from the public testing], that may be one of the first thing that changes,” Mayer said.

She added that Google’s also closely looking at how well the Everything tab and the new Search button work, as illustrated below:

“That big blue Everything on the left and search button on the right, they do pull …. and we do intend to pull the user’s eye …. but I wonder if it’s putting the emphasis enough where we want,” she said.

Fading Home Page Slow People Down

Since we were talking design, I asked about that funky fading home page that Google’s been testing. Is that going to become permanent?

“The fading home page is either going to be reformulated or go into a whole new direction,” Mayer said. People visit it more and do more searches because of the change, she said metrics show. However, ironically, the page also slows them down. They take additional milliseconds to act (and for Google, every millisecond counts).

“Their time to first action is slower,” Mayer said. “It’s almost like they’re disoriented, thinking ‘What? Where is everything?”

That brings things back to the search results page. People like patterns. The more a page has an easy pattern that can be processed — the more “rhythmic you can make it,” Mayer said, the faster she says people will be.

So who sees the changes? About 1% to 3% of Google users, who will be randomly selected. The test will probably run for about six weeks. If successful, expect to see the changes — altered to take in account test feedback — show up across Google soon after that.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: There are some people actually seeing the new user interface in the wild. Here is a screen shot of what people are seeing:

Justin Uberti, Google’s tech lead who I believe leads the Google Talk team, posted on his blog that Hulk Hogan visited Google’s Kirkland office. Hogan made his visit on Tuesday, November 3rd, as a signing event for his new book, My Life Outside the Ring.

Here is a picture from Justin:

I too grew up during the “Hulk-O-Mania” period, so it is cool to see him at Google. Also, big happy 35th birthday Justin!

Nielsen offers a blog post that shows the various ways that people discover content online. Search is at the top, followed by “portals” (which feature search boxes); at the other end are blogs and social networks. However Nielsen argues that certain categories of people are increasingly social media tools as content discovery sources:

We saw the power of opinions posted online in our global study earlier this year about trust in advertising, and the point came up again in our recent findings. Social media is becoming a core product research channel. Almost 15 percent of Socializers most trusted information they found on blogs when researching new purchases online, while nearly 20 percent trusted most the information they found on message boards.

Then the provocative question is asked: “So are social networks replacing portals or search engines?” Nielsen then says:

Perhaps. Regardless, if we don’t understand and address people feeling increasingly alienated by the amount of information on the Internet, and the need for a human guide, yes, your favorite social network (or something like it) will become the next great content gateway.

But it’s not an either/or, zero-sum situation. There may be some number of queries that people pose to their networks before or in addition to their use of search engines. Overall, “word of mouth” on social media sites is a complement to search engine usage. No doubt social media tools will continue to grow as content sources; however I don’t think we’ll see Facebook or Twitter replace Google or Bing any time soon.

Is Google a newspaper killer? Not by a long shot, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be. In a long interview about his company’s relationship with newspapers and the print journalism industry, Schmidt made it clear he wants established players to survive. In fact, he thinks Google has a “moral responsibility” to help. But help doesn’t mean a handout.

I spoke with Schmidt on the topic about two weeks ago in his office at Google. In summary, he felt that Google takes most of the blame for the internet as a whole, in how it has changed news reading habits that have impacted the newspaper industry. But despite that impact, he felt newspapers would survive in some form.

Schmidt would like Google to help by experimenting with new ways of reading news that might help print institutions make it through the transition they face. That’s especially so in that Google has no plans to produce news content itself. Google’s success, he says, is tied to pointing its visitors to sources of quality content.

Moreover, Schmidt said Google has a responsibility to help, given that part of his company’s vision is to make the world a better place. Without journalistic institutions to do professional investigative articles and other “deep” reporting, democracy would be harmed.

That argument is one many beleaguered newspaper executives themselves have made. If hearing that Schmidt agrees with them is a relief, there’s more goodness flowing their way. Schmidt largely believes that only existing mainstream news institutions have the resources and established trust to do deep journalism. He acknowledges that new online publications have emerged, and that there are journalists working independently of large companies. But his faith is still with the old school, so to speak.

As for the ongoing discussions with the Associated Press, he expects a new deal will be reached. More on that, and the other topics I’ve summarized, below.

Google’s Not A Newspaper Vampire

This year, Google has been blamed by some in the mainstream journalism industry for everything from being a vampire that’s sucked the life out of newspapers to undermining democracy by somehow short-changing publications of ad revenue. How does Schmidt view these accusations? He sees them as Google taking the brunt of disruption caused by the internet itself:

I think in this case Google is a proxy for the internet as a whole. So the people would make the same statements about the Internet as they do about Google. Substitute the internet for Google and you get that idea. And because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything. In some cases people don’t understand that we’re a conduit to other people doing things. They think Google did it when in fact somebody else did it and made it available.

Rereading Schmidt’s answer when writing up this interview, I was struck how it brought to mind something he started talking about back in 2006, his “don’t bet against the internet” line. That’s the idea that the internet was transforming the world and that only foolish businesses would effectively think they could stick with “old” ways.

Newspapers Will Decline But Won’t Die

So it’s the internet that’s killing papers? Schmidt immediately stopped me from suggesting that he’s saying newspapers will die. He thinks they will survive in some form:

Killing newspapers, that’s your words, not mine…

The number of readers for newspapers is declining. The market is becoming more specialized. There will always be a market for people who read the newspaper on a train going into New York City. There will always be a market for people who sit in in the afternoon in a cafe in the city and read the newspaper in the sunshine. The term “killing” is a bit over[blown]. Newspapers face a long-term secular decline because of the shift in user habits due to the Internet.

So again, if you take the criticism as a statement about the Internet, how will Google fix that? I think that’s just politically a better answer from our perspective. Let me put it this way: Imagine if Google didn’t exist. Would the same criticism still exist? You betcha. See my point?

Online Solutions To Newspaper Woes & Google Wants To Help

As for newspapers specifically, Schmidt feels they have three major problems: physical production costs, loss of classified revenue and loss of print ad revenue. Google’s role is to help with online fixes for these, Schmidt said:

In the case of the newspapers, they have multiple problems which are hard to solve. If you think about it there are three fundamental problems. One is that the physical cost of things is going up, physical newsprint. Another one has been the loss of classifieds. And a third one has been essentially the difficulty in selling traditional print ads. So, all of them have online solutions. And we’ve come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help them with the online.

One Solution: New Ways To Read News Online

In terms of the physical production issue, Google’s contribution seems to be experimenting with new ways of reading journalism online. Said Schmidt:

We think that over a long enough period of time, most people will have personalized news-reading experiences on mobile-type devices that will largely replace their traditional reading of newspapers. Over a decade or something. And that that kind of news consumption will be very personal, very targeted. It will remember what you know. It will suggest things that you might want to know. It will have advertising. Right? And it will be as convenient and fun as reading a traditional newspaper or magazine.

So one way one to think about it is that the newspaper or magazine industry do a great job of the convenience of scanning and looking and understanding. And we have to get the web to that point, or whatever the web becomes. So we just announced, the official name is Google Fast Flip. And that’s an example of the kind of thing we’re doing. And we have a lot more coming.

Google Fast Flip is out there now for anyone to use. As for the intriguing idea of a personalized news reader, Google’s Marissa Mayer hinted at experiments with this in August (see Of Living URLs, Newspaper Rankings & California Fires). Schmidt also talked again about the concept yesterday. Stay tuned.

New Ads For News Will Come

What about those lost revenues? Schmidt didn’t address the classified revenue loss, perhaps because Craigslist is the poster child for blame there. As for print display ad decline, Schmidt suggested new ads will follow through into the new reading models:

On the business side, which is what people are really talking about, it seems to me that we should be able to get very powerful advertising in display formats that people will like in this new model, invented, built and sold. Now I don’t know how much revenue that is, but it’s a lot more than they’re getting now.

Speaking of revenue sharing, some noted that Google’s Fast Flip seemed to mark the first time Google has shared revenue with news sites. When I asked Schmidt about this, he disagreed, noting that Google has ad deals with a variety of newspapers where revenue is shared.

However, those deals are for ads delivered on the news sites themselves. Publications like USA Today or the Washington Post carry Google search boxes and share in revenues generated by search ads. Other sites also carry display ads through AdSense. How about sharing revenue with news sites for content hosted on Google itself, as Fast Flip does. Isn’t that new?

Google’s Not A Content Company

Yes, that’s “probably true,” Schmidt said, though he stressed the goal is not for Google to be a content company but rather to help those with content thrive:

We need these content partners to survive. We need their content. We are not in the content business. So, you could decide that we’re just evil businessmen trying to give money to the newspapers [through the Fast Flip revenue sharing], or you could decide that we’re altruistic and trying to save an important Fourth Estate of American political discourse. Whichever one leads to the same outcome. I hope you believe the second. But even if you believe the first, it’s still good business. We need their content.

It should be noted that Google has worked to help newspapers with offline newspaper ad sales, but after trying for two years, it shuttered its program this past January. Meanwhile, Google competitor Yahoo continues with its own two-year-old Yahoo Newspaper Consortium that allows nearly 1,000 papers to sell online ads at their own sites and through Yahoo. The consortium has gotten a lot of positive reviews through it is far from a short-term solution, as even Yahoo admits.

Google Has A “Moral Responsibility” To Help The Press

Moving on, I asked Schmidt if Google felt any obligation to help the newspaper industry. Definitely, he agreed, saying:

Google sees itself as trying to make the world a better place. And our values are that more information is positive – transparency. And the historic role of the press was to provide transparency, from Watergate on and so forth. So we really do have a moral responsibility to help solve this problem.

If You Teach A Newspaper To Fish, They Don’t Need A Short Term Bailout

Sort of like the adage about teaching someone to fish, rather than giving them a fish, Schmidt sees Google’s responsibility as helping the press get into a healthier position in the long-term, not by providing subsidies that don’t solve their current problems:

The next question that the journalists who inevitably ask these questions say is, OK then why don’t you just write us a large check? Let me just posit that that’s a question that people might ask, because I know I’ve had it before. And the problem is that just transferring money from an area where we’re making a lot of money to an area where we’re making little money does not solve the problem for the long term. You’re fundamentally better off building the new product that is profitable and growing – again with the news, with magazines and so forth. It’s better for everyone. Because ultimately a subsidy model is a temporary solution. It’s not a long-term solution.

Google Wants “Well Funded” & “Professional” Investigative Journalism

So far during the interview, I’d largely used newspapers as being synonymous with journalism. But they’re not the same. Journalists don’t all work for newspapers; some publish through blogs. So I wondered, when Schmidt talked about feeling an obligation to support the press, did he mean large press organizations?

I specifically am talking about investigative journalism when I talk about this. There’s no lack of bloggers and people who publish their opinions and faux editorial writers and people with an opinion. And I think that one of the great things about the internet is that we can hear them. We can also choose to ignore them. So it’s not correct to say that the internet is decreasing conversation. The internet is clearly increasing conversation at an incredibly rapid pace. The cacophony of voices is overwhelming as you know.

Well-funded, targeted professionally managed investigative journalism is a necessary precondition in my view to a functioning democracy. And so that’s what we worry about. And as you know, that was always subsidized in the newspaper model by the other things that they did. You know, the story about the scandal in Iraq or Afghanistan was difficult to advertise against. But there was enough revenue that it allowed the newspaper to fulfill its mission.

Few Bloggers Can Do What The New York Times Can Do

But what about people who go out and do professional journalism on their own, who don’t turn around and complain they’re unable to succeed because Google’s hurting them? Said Schmidt:

Let’s talk about Afghanistan. How many free bloggers are there that are in a safe-house in Afghanistan with the necessary support structure to do the kind of deep investigative reporting on what’s really going on in the war? I’m not talking about the ones that are embedded in the government. That’s an example. The kind of articles about the scandals in the various government bureaucracies. All of those kinds of things. There are very few bloggers, to use the term broadly, who have the time and the resources – I mean these are stories that take months to develop, they take confidential sources.

Another example that people in our world often miss: Let’s assume you’re a mid-level government executive, not necessarily in the United States, and it’s a crime to leak information for purposes of discussion. Are you willing to leak to a blogger who has no track record of protecting his or her own sources, versus the New York Times, which routinely sends its people to jail over this question of a shield law.

So again, it’s facile in my view to say that the two functions are similar. There’s no question that a large part of the function of newspapers and magazines is broad communication that’s not particularly controversial, and helpful and it’s great. But whatever percentage that is that requires the protection of sources, deep investigative journalism, is very important in a democracy. You would be crazy to not understand the history of that.

People don’t like it, by the way, because it’s very controversial. The Pentagon Papers is a classic example. It was incredibly controversial: Was Daniel Ellsberg a patriot or was he a criminal? He was actually adjudicated and was not a criminal because the government was doing something inappropriate. People disagree over these things. But the point is that that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about.

Hearing Schmidt talk of this, I could only think that some newspaper executives who have attacked Google ought to be lining him up as a chief spokesperson for their industry.

It was also somewhat amazing to hear. Could I imagine someone leaking information to a blogger? Of course, I thought — to me! I was blogger (according to some) sitting right across from him, yet someone who has routinely honored embargoes and confidential information I’ve received from his own company.

To be fair, Schmidt did talk about bloggers with “no track record” (I think I’ve got one) versus the New York Times as an institution that has a well known track record.

But still, when I started as an independent journalist over a decade ago, I had nothing behind me (I’d have been called a blogger, but we didn’t have blogs back then). My site built its own audience because the traditional press was not covering search engines as well as or in as much depth as my publication was. It thrived because of the internet.

I countered. Aren’t there journalists out there who are independent of mainstream publications but who have good track records and relationships? Not for the deep journalism that Schmidt is worried about:

Not at the level I’m talking about. Name a blogger who today has the kind of deep embedded reporting that a traditional newspaper does for this kind of, for scandals. It just doesn’t exist yet. They may develop. It’s perfectly possible that they will develop. It’s a different kind of reporting. The online world is so immediate, it’s so competitive, you know people are like having heart attacks just keeping up with the publication demands in the online world. So there are some attempts at this. For example, ProPublica, which is funded by the folks [the Sandler Foundation] in Berkeley, San Francisco actually, is an attempt to replicate what I’m describing in a nonprofit way. So there is an example. It’s run by journalists, run by professionals.

Name a blogger doing deep investigative reporting? Schmidt’s got me there. I can’t name them off the top of my head. It’s not an area I focus on. I do suspect some are out there, though — if you know of some, drop them in the comments below.

Personally, I feel the big challenge to large, investigative reporting isn’t figuring out how to fund it or how to develope the trust factor needed. It’s dealing with the aftermath, when some large corporation or government body decides to sue you. That’s the chilling effect to me, for independents, especially when there’s still little clarity about how protected they are by various shield laws for journalists.

City Hall & Local Coverage At Risk

Assuming the mainstream journalism outlets did go away, would we lose investigation? Or would something spring up? Schmidt’s response that something might replace coverage on big issues but “city hall” or local deep reporting is at risk:

It’s a speculation. As I said, ProPublica is a good example. There’s a couple of groups that are funded out of political groups. There’s one that’s under Center for American Progress [Media Matters] …. Their basic job is to keep what they claim is the Republican spend machine honest. So that’s sort of an example of this. But it’s not quite. Again, think Iraq, Afghanistan, Defense Department errors, you know, corruption in governments, local governments. It’s fair to say that, though, I think the biggest worry is actually for local reporting.

Media Matters is an example. I think most people believe that in, hopefully, the unlikely scenario of the loss of all of these voices, most people believe that there’s enough emphasis and interest at the national level. But what happened to the guy who’s investigating the misdeeds of the CFO in the mayor’s office? And again, I’m talking about the stuff you can’t do in an hour. The gumshoe kind, walking around talking to people. There are very few of those people.

The loss of local coverage certainly resonated with me, since my roots in journalism started there. Last year, I did a piece talking about how over the years, the Los Angeles Times greatly reduced its local reporting from the heyday of when I worked there. So there are very few of these people? My response was that I know lots of them — they’ve all been laid off. That prompted Schmidt to say:

But they’re not doing it anymore. Or if they do it, they’re doing it on their own time.

It turns out there’s not enough money there — even with the improvement in overhead costs, because you don’t have a lot less overhead. There’s not enough money yet. Although for the most popular blogs you know, it’s the 1% phenomenon, the head of the tail, they do make money. But the vast majority of blogs end up being, it’s a little bit like wine-making. It’s a lifestyle as opposed to a real profitable business.

Last week, New York University professor Clay Shirky also had much to say about the issues of funding journalism, and the impact it might have on regional reporting. His comments are well worth reading for more on this topic. Shirky also has an interesting dissection of a local paper, looking at how few on a large payroll are actually involved in the reporting.

Schmidt: Institutional Brands Over Individual Journalists

Next the interview moved on to Schmidt’s statements about the internet being a “sewer” that brands such as major newspapers can help sort out. Is it just newspapers that have the important brands that people recognize as trusted sources, when it comes to journalism?

There are two different views. There are two different views even within Google. So one view goes like this: The institution becomes less important but the writer remains as important. So that’s sort of the new view.

I don’t happen to agree with this, but I want to make sure I report it accurately. And the rough argument goes like this: Newspapers existed because you needed an aggregation point of great talent. But you really go to a newspaper to read the writers. And because they have so many other outlets, they will become more like freelancers in this model. They will be paid by institutions and they’ll make enough money to get through the day and people will follow them. And some writers will become so famous that they’ll be like basketball stars – they’ll have large salaries and speaking [and] book deals and things like that, although the majority won’t get there.

I disagree with that view, because I believe that there is a value to the brand of the aggregator as well as this trust issue that I was discussing earlier that ultimately a freelance reporter, that ultimately it would be difficult for freelance reporters, as much as we favor them, to operate without at least some institutions of trust. And trust in two ways: trust to the reader, and trust to the sources.

I found his response fascinating, especially the discussion of a split within Google itself. All too often, there’s an assumption that Google has a monolithic view of everything. When it comes to newspapers, I think many newspaper business executives assume Google’s goal is to destroy their brands, to favor the blogs and aggregators, to be a newspaper-killing aggregator itself.

Instead, Schmidt’s not endorsing some massive revolution that will sweep mainstream publications away, with an air of good riddance. He seems to view the institutions that we now have as essential.

A Rise Of New Brands? Some…

Does this mean the institutional journalism brands we have now are locked in stone? Are there new brands that have arisen, new online ones?

Well, the most obvious one is Politico. So there is an example. I think it’s reasonable to say that there will be, in every category of information, there will be a couple of new brands that are Internet-only. An example in our world is TechCrunch….

All Things Digital is another one. So those are some of the brands that didn’t exist 10 years ago. And if you think about it, they’re defined by the personalities of their founders.

I asked if we should mourn some of the mainstream brands that will inevitably disappear.

Well I’ll tell you a story. I’ve been in this industry for 30 years, and during this time there has always been headline conferences that were very exclusive. And when I was a young executive I assumed that they would live forever. So the Agenda Conference was an example. For me, that was the most important professional event of the whole year. I would make sure that if I was invited I would go. I really enjoyed it. It was very, very important. When was the last Agenda conference? A long time ago.

So, do I mourn that? Yeah, I had a really good time. But society moves forward. New brands emerge. How old is the Starbucks brand? What would we do without Starbucks today? So the point about brands is that while it’s true that brands do end, new brands emerge. So it’s possible that the sum of the brands we were just talking about could ultimately… I’m not suggesting it can’t happen, I’m suggesting it’s very hard.

So, San Jose news. What is the brand that I will go to for news about San Jose? Well, I’ve got the San Jose Mercury News. Let’s assume for the purposes of argument that that’s in decline, which I think is without question. What’s the new brand that I’ll go to? I actually don’t know.

Google & The AP

Next I asked about Google’s current negotiations with the Associated Press. The AP ratcheted up suggestions earlier this year that it wasn’t getting a fair deal from Google from its current agreement, which was cut in 2006. The AP has also suggested that Google should be rewarding “recognizable news brands” more in its regular web search results. What’s the beef? Did the AP not get a good enough deal in the first place?

I would rather not discuss a business negotiation. But you’re smart enough to understand that this is a business negotiation. I am sure we will come to a good deal for all parties. How’s that? I was rather humored by the public criticisms because – there was all this criticism – we have a deal with the Associated Press that’s in place today. So, and surely they’re aware of this.

Indeed, I expect a deal will be struck. But my worry is that “must-carry” publications like the AP will get attended to at the expense of online publications that, as even Schmidt says, struggle to build their own revenues. And given how we’ve had suggestions that the health of democracy is at stake, if mainstream publications can’t get deals with Google, shouldn’t the AP terms be public. So that everyone knows what’s being given?

The fact of the matter is, the problems that are occurring in the industry are intrinsic. They need to be addressed. We’re doing what we can think of and we’ve been upfront about working on those. This is ultimately about money and the difficulty people are having of bringing in revenue. Again, I understand that.

So, in the private discussions with the AP, if the AP wants to do everything public then I’m sure we would consider that. But usually business negotiations are done in private for precisely the reason that people think it’s competitive.

OK, AP, so how about it? I sent the AP what Schmidt said and asked if it would be willing to publish the terms of any deal with Google. No luck. I was told:

As a longstanding corporate policy, The Associated Press has refrained from discussing the terms of its business dealings.

I was also given a quote from Sue Cross, the AP’s Senior Vice President, Global New Media & US/Americas Media Markets:

Commercial agreements are crucial to helping the AP offset the costs of its global newsgathering operation and keep member assessments lower. They allow AP to continue providing vital breaking news, including coverage of this week’s deadly earthquakes and tsunami, and to continue reporting from critical war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Back to my interview with Schmidt, I asked him how Google may deal with a situation where if the AP gets a new deal, others may feel left out. He said:

Well, the Associated Press is different from other publications, remember, because the Associated Press is really, they really are an aggregator at some basic level. Again, I don’t want to parse the specifics. But the fact that there’s a deal with AP does not mean that you have the same deal with the New York Times. And in fact we do not.

Finally, I was curious if Schmidt actually read a newspaper regularly. Yes, he does. Two, in fact. But the exact two are the only part of the interview he asked remain off the record. And I have a pretty good track record of dealing with that type of material :)

Also from the interview, on other subjects:

• Google’s Schmidt To Book Settlement Critics: What’s Your Solution?
• Google’s Schmidt: Independent Yahoo Still Important To Competition
• Eric Schmidt’s Favorite Google Product? Chrome!

As we previously reported, starting tomorrow Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service. Many of these people in turn will be allowed to invite others to join as well, reminiscent of how GMail propagated. (It’s wise for Google to allow these new users to invite friends and family because you effectively can’t use Wave without contacts on the system.) Those who will gain full access tomorrow will apparently be developers, early users who provided feedback and some Google Apps customers.

My earlier blog post provided some initial “hands on” reactions to the service. It’s a powerful and flexible tool that defies easy categorization. As I said earlier this month:

[Wave] looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

Accordingly Wave has huge potential, but people will definitely need to use and experiment with it before they understand and see its benefits. There’s a clear learning curve and some complexity surrounding the product; it’s not entirely intuitive. Wave probably also needs to incorporate email in order to go mainstream.

Google still considers Wave to be in “preview” as it works out kinks and bugs of one sort or another. As it releases Wave more broadly Google will gain considerable feedback, which should help it add features and refinements. Here’s the video demo of Google Wave in action from the I/O Developer event in May.

Google has more in its blog post this morning.

Postscript: There’s an already emerging developer ecosystem around Wave. These “extensions” (widgets, plug-ins) will make Wave’s value and use cases more obvious to new users and will speed adoption. For example, see the Ribbit extension for conference calls or 6 Rounds for video chat.

No one reading Search Engine Land should be surprised to hear stories about Google’s dominance of the search landscape. But the degree to which Google dominates in some areas is sure to make you raise an eyebrow.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

As everyone knows, today is the 8th year anniversary of the terrible 9/11 attacks. Many people, companies and organizations are doing things to remember the day. A lot of people are asking why there is no logo from Google for today. The quick answer is that Google does not do Google Doodles (aka logos) for sad days like this, they typically only do these types of logos for happier occasions.

But that does not mean Google is not doing anything. They have partnered up with several organizations and companies to bring together a web site named Make History at 911history.org. The site has a storytelling sharing tool that uses the Google Maps API to display Google’s Street Views. It allows “people to place and then share their photos and videos in geographical context, collectively piecing together the history that was witnessed, one photo and video at a time,” Google said. The site is also hosted on Google’s cloud computing environment, Google App Engine.

On the logo front, both Microsoft Bing & Ask.com have used meaningful background images for their home pages. Here are pictures:

Clearly, the Yahoo home page has news and images for the day. Plus Gary Price at ResourceShelf has compiled a comprehensive list of how the Internet is remembering the day.

Search and online marking firm 360i published findings from a small but structured test of how the “Caffeine” search infrastructure changes could affect results and ranking on Google. As Vanessa Fox wrote when Caffeine went public earlier this month, there apparently would be a number of changes in the ordering and content of results. As she observed in that post, “Google Caffeine will cause quite a kerfluffle in the web developer and search engine optimization world and many will dive in to try and figure out the changes.”

This is precisely what 360i has now tried to do. The company evaluated 40 retail-oriented keywords/searches to compare results before and after, and the potential SEO implications of Caffeine:

[A] sample set of 40 retail keywords. We looked at ten major retail brand names (keywords), ten retail head terms (single keywords), ten retail torso terms (two-word phrases) and ten retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases) and compared the search results on the first three pages of both engines (standard Google and “Caffeinated” Google).

With the caveat that “everything could change” before Caffeine formally rolls out 360i offered six observations or “things to expect” if/when it does. Here they are:

1. Domains and rankings will fluctuate.
2. The index size, or “competition,” of single keyword search relevance will increase.
3. You’ll see a boost in relevance for long-tail searches.
4. You’ll get results (SERPs) in half the time, on average.
5. Blended results will increase.
6. There will be a social jolt.

To read the larger discussion of each of these takeaways go to the 360i blog post.

On an annual basis the University of Michigan puts out the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, sponsored and administered by Foresee Results. Among the things the index examines is consumer satisfaction with search engines.

The survey asks a representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to several criteria, which produces an overall score on a 100 point scale. Google is again on top in search with a score of 86, identical to last year. The survey is supposed to be predictive of future consumer behavior, as the associated report argues:

[The ACSI] is a predictor of future success on both the micro and macro level. Google’s huge 10 point jump in satisfaction from 2007 to 2008 preceded a 7% increase in search market share from 2008 to 2009. Satisfaction with Yahoo, on the other hand, dropped 2.5% from 2007 to 2008, preceding a 17.5% decrease in search market share and a 5% drop in portal market share.

When the 2007 results saw Yahoo jump ahead of Google for the first time since the inception of the e-business survey I asked about this asserted relationship between the survey and market share:

The satisfaction data clearly don’t correlate with search market share. I asked [Foresee Results CEO Larry] Freed in this context why people should care and pay attention to the ACSI. Freed was confident that “search market share reflects past behavior. But the ACSI is predictive of future consumer behavior.” He said that historically it has been a very accurate gauge of future consumer behavior in other industries. He added that Google’s decline was a second dip in a row after a smaller decline last year.

Considered over the course of almost a decade of satisfaction rankings, the survey results would indeed appear predictive of market share (for Google), though the 2007 satisfaction win did not correctly predict corresponding market-share gains for Yahoo in 2007-2008.

Source: ACSI/Foresee Results (2009)

According to the survey, conducted before Bing, Google has a significant lead over its competitors, which has widened since 2007.

These overall results line up with a recent search loyalty report from comScore showing Google users as the most loyal.

It’s somewhat disappointing that we’ll have to wait an entire year to see what the ACSI has to say about Bing, because it would give us another opportunity to test the accuracy of the index as a predictor of future behavior.

According to comScore Bing now has an 8.9 percent share of the search market, up from 8 percent in May, before the launch. A year from now, when the next report comes out, we’ll know generally whether Bing is a success. For now, here’s what the ACSI report commentary has to say about Bing and its prospects:

[I]t seems unlikely that customers will actually leave Google in enough numbers to allow Bing to seriously challenge Google’s market dominance, given Google’s extremely high customer satisfaction. People are happy with Google, so why would they switch? They might switch if Bing is better, and that’s a tall order considering Google is the second- highest scoring ACSI service-sector company, behind Newegg.com. Bing has been called a search engine war “game changer,” but Google’s game will be very hard to change at this point. If anyone can do it, it’s the combined resources and market share of Yahoo and MSN.

The central “takeaway” from the report would seem to be that it’s not simply “habit” driving Google usage — people are actually “satisfied.”

This morning comScore released data and analysis that compares search share, searcher penetration and loyalty at the combined Microsoft-Yahoo property vs. Google. While Google has a much higher share of the number of searches conducted in the US in a given month, the searcher “penetration” for MicroHoo is almost that of Google.

The chart immediately below shows Google with 65 percent of the search volume in the US. It also shows that 84 percent of search users are on Google. However 73.3 percent of the search user population are on Yahoo and Microsoft, when the two are combined.

The data in the table below, according to comScore, are reflective of search engine user loyalty:

[T]hose who searched on Google had the highest loyalty rate, with 68.9 percent of all their searches occurring on Google Sites. Users of the engines at the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft Sites conducted 32.6 percent of their searches on the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft Sites, but a much higher 60.7 percent of their searches on Google Sites.

These data, again, reflect that while lots of people use Yahoo and Microsoft’s search engines most searching happens on Google. The “loyalty” issue raises the question of whether people are just using Google out of “habit” or because they have a positive relationship with the Google brand and affirmatively favor it.

The new conventional wisdom is that people simply use Google because they’re familiar with it and have become habituated to using it. But I suspect that explanation doesn’t really capture what’s going on. Here’s an earlier post on the subject of search satisfaction, brand strength and loyalty.