Google has reached a new milestone in its fight for total dominance over the search industry, while Yahoo, Microsoft, and the rest try desperately to stay relevant.

According to the latest figures from Hitwise, Google now owns 70.77 percent of the US search market and is trailed by Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com, which currently own 18.65 percent, 5.36 percent and 3.53 percent of the search market, respectively.  Hitwise claims Google’s search market share has risen over 10 percent in the last year and over 2 percent since last month.

But all this success has me thinking: where are the growing startups like Wikia or Quintura?  Why haven’t Microsoft or Yahoo gained any ground on Google in the US?  And most importantly, what is Google doing right that all the other companies simply don’t do?

Of course, the answer to that last question is riddled with a slew of possibilities and few would agree on them all.  But aside from the fact that more people are frequenting Google, thus finding more reason to use its search engine, Google understands better than any other company that a search engine needs to achieve two goals in order to be successful: it needs to be simple to use and it needs to get rid of users as quickly as possible.

Some may think that Yahoo has better results than Google, but the problem with it is that the main page is littered with extra junk that only confuses the person looking to perform a simple search.  On the other hand, Google.com features the search bar and little else, making it abundantly clear to the user that searching is the primary function of the site.

And while other search engines may be just as easy to use, aside from Google, no other search engine has been able to master the art of getting you to your destination as quickly as possible.

Part of that equation revolves around relevant results, which, in my experience, Google leads by a healthy margin.  But the other aspect of getting you to your destination revolves around the layout of the results page and ease with which you can input different queries, scroll through the results, and know what you’re getting by clicking on a particular result before you do it.

Let’s face it – search engines aren’t made to be destinations, they’re specifically designed to act as the middleman between your question and the site that has the answer.  And whichever site will get you to that destination quickest, no matter the complexity of your query, you will find most useful.

Countless sites try to do too much.  Some want you to edit results, others want you to drill-down into your results with the help of keywords, and still others feature gimmicks that don’t really matter.  But once they finally realize that all you want is to get to that destination, they’ll start making some headway in the space.

Search is all about the user experience.  And so far, only Google has mastered that art.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Yahoo Gets Better Consumer Rating than GoogleGoogle Stock Reaches $600 MarkGoogle Releases Custom Search Business EditionMyDataBus Reaches 100,000 UsersGoogle Blog Search Semi-Launched in ChinaGoogle Product Search Not as FroogleGoogle Reader Gets Search!

Wikia Search has launched a new Firefox toolbar which they call Wikia Evolution. Wikia Evolution is available for download and offers an easy to way to add pages to the Wikia Search project.

Here’s how the Wikia Evolution toolbar works once installed. When you search on Google, Yahoo, etc. or view any Web page, a new set of options will be displayed (see the sample below). The options allow you to add the page to the Wikia Search index instantly and tag the page for the appropriate keywords. There’s also a rating option available for each page that is submitted into the search database.

Wikia founder Jimmy Wales said on the Evolution toolbar launch, “This toolbar, like everything we are doing at Wikia Search, is open source. We hope that if you are a toolbar fan and programmer, you will let us know what features need to be added and/or take this and do something surprising and cool with it.” 

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Wikia Search is announcing today the launch of a suite of statistics and tools for research and reporting on the Wikia Search application. The site statistics tool offers information on queries, contributions and their social network. The statistics can be run by the day or month and there are some Ajaxy sliders for more details. And for those of you with a math calculator, standard deviations are provided.

There are also a few site tools launching today:

• Most Queries
• Most Contributions
• Recent Top Queries
• Recent Top Contributions
• Most Wanted - the difference between top queries and top contributions
• Keyword Trends

Most recently we reported on Wikia Search adding Google AdSense advertising to the search results.

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Just hours after we listed all of the major search engines and their advertising partners, we’ve been informed that Wikia Search has added Google AdSense ads this morning. I’ve embedded a screenshot below so you can see the ads. They were not there last night. I am guessing just like the search engine, the ads must be in alpha as they seem to be squished into an iframe box.

Update 11:45am - Looks like they removed the box around the ads.

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Leora Zellman has decided to put her body up for sale as a traveling booth babe. Leora is a blogger, photographer and model and attends many tech conferences around the country. The idea came from a discussion with a friend, "The other day at Tech Cocktail I jokingly mentioned to a friend that my ass gets stared at so much at these things I should start selling ad space."

So just how much is Leora’s ass? $30/hour. Same price as her head if you are wondering. Her back is $10, and arm $5. Check her blog for all of the body parts pricing. There’s a two-hour minimimum for all zones. If you go for the mega package at $100/hr, you will also get a link on her blog. I wonder how Google deals with paid body links.

Leora is here in NYC covering Internet Week events so you can book her now.

I met Leora at BlogWorld in Vegas and can tell you that she’s a really bright girl who understands blogging and making money.

To be honest, I could see a booth babe freelancer site working relatively well. If you are having a tech event or sponsoring a tech event, you could go on the service, see profiles of each booth babe and select the ones that meet your requirements. Each booth babe could have a profile showing her in action at previous events as well.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Editor’s note: The news below was embargoed for 9am today but it has already been posted on several outlets so we will post now per our embargo policy.

Back in January, Wikia launched the Alpha version of Wikia Search. We said it "wasn’t ready". Last month they made some major additions to the engine. Today they are rolling out the next Alpha version of the engine. I’ve embedded a video below that explains the updates. So far the company claims 20,000 users have registered, 25,000 mini-articles created, and 60,000 edits have been processed to-date.

I spoke with CEO Jimmy Wales who explained the updates to the alpha search engine. Wales noted that many of the new features are "wiki-like" and that you can now edit any search result as you see fit. Add, delete or update any link within a search result. You can also annotate, or preview, a URL in the search result. There’s also the ability to highlight a site in the results if you feel it’s worthy.

Here’s the search result for CenterNetworks. Note the logos up in the header and rated pages. One interesting thing to try out — scroll to the bottom of the page, watch how it adds more results on the fly with no pagination. I’ve never seen this before.

Here are all of the new features inside of the Wikia Search which allow anyone to customize the search results:

• The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone
• The ability to add new results for any search query instantly
• The ability to delete and/or hide any result
• Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position
• The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query
• The ability to add public comments to any result item
• The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results
• The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click
• The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search
• The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

I asked Jimmy Wales about the spam that this engine will see. Why wouldn’t I want to "own" every relevant query? And why wouldn’t my competitors want to also own every relevant query? He suggested that he wasn’t nearly as worried about spam as I am and that the community will monitor what’s going on. He said, "I don’t see spam as a big problem" when I asked why anyone wouldn’t want to edit the records they are affected by.

There is a pretty active community forming around the Wikia Search engine. I am on all of the mailing lists and have watched some interesting discussions and debates pop up over the past few months. If you are building anything search related, you should be monitoring the Wikia Search developer groups as well.

In related news, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week also announced the ability to edit pages on the search-engine friendly content source. Mahalo claims that any edits that are made by a user will be reviewed by one of Jason’s Mahaloians. The changes go live immediately and the review will come later on. This is a different than the above updates from Wikia as Wikia isn’t reviewing the changes, they are leaving it to the overall community to monitor.

The real question is whether people will want to edit for-profit sites for free while helping the CEOs generate more revenue that isn’t returned to the user. Will users want to edit Wikia Search/Mahalo the same way they edit Wikipedia? I’ve said for a while now that Jason would open Mahalo up because the more he can get done for free, the more likely Mahalo is to turn a profit. While Jason has claimed that Mahalo will have several thousand full-time paid editors over the next few years, my guess is that more features will open to the public first. Makes sense right — why pay outsiders when Jason/Jimmy’s fans will do it for free?

A few months ago, I started work on ArmchairGM’s New York Mets entry. My own knowledge stems back only until about 1983, but as one could imagine, the Web is a treasure trove of information, including stories about the early Mets teams. A quick search yielded this result — an entry from an old Geocities site. “Dave’s Mets Page”, in fact.

It immediately occurred to me that “Dave” would be a great contributor to ArmchairGM. After all, he had written excellent historical sports content to the point where I was able to base my writing almost exclusively off his. Scrolling down on his page, I found his email address, and sent him an email. It bounced.

Dave’s page admits that it was last updated on May 15, 1999. A quick look at his yearly summaries buttresses this fact, as the last summary written is 1998. And there’s one other interesting thing on Dave’s page: a copyright notice.

So here I have:

• Content I want to use
• An author who I can’t (easily) locate
• A clear indicator that the content is unavailable without permission.

That last bullet is, legally, meaningless, but anecdotally important. Web culture wrongly tends to assume that, in absence of a copyright notice or the equivalent, all content is available so long as due attribution is given. In this case, even that assumption is clearly false. Unless I have the author’s permission, I cannot use the content. And getting permission is, at best, difficult, as the author’s email address is inactive. (As it turns out, I probably could track the guy down. But let’s assume he had a more common last name; say, like, “Lewis.”)

The side effect of all this? Even if I were willing to pay for rights, I cannot, because there is no one to which I can write the check. In a very real sense, the content is held captive by an absent rights-owner, and the cost of me either (a) tracking down the rights-owner or (b) ignoring his rights and re-publishing in violation thereof probably exceed the value of the content altogether. Per a press release from Senator Pat Leahy, "Potential users of orphan works often fail to display or use such works out of concern that they may be found liable for statutory damages, amounting to as much as $150,000."

If you find this silly, rest assured you are not alone. In 2005-06, the U.S. Copyright Office studied the issue — called “orphan works” — and released its report in early 2006. Since then? A whole lot of nothing. A few bills and hearings in Congress, but no final action. Senator Leahy introduced his bill only last months, so there is some hope there, but call me skeptical regarding its odds of passage.

Even if it does pass, it only solves half the problem — that is, it removes liability from those who use “orphan” works and the rights-holder appears, but it does not remove the burdensome cost of seeking out the rights-holder. Indeed, the bill would require the republisher to “perform and document a good faith – but ultimately unsuccessful – search for the owner of the copyright in the work being used prior to such use.” And even then, “[i]f the owner later emerges and provides notice of infringement to the user, the user must negotiate reasonable compensation in good faith and render any such compensation agreed upon in a timely fashion.” Basically:

• I spend time finding some content I want to use
• I can’t locate the author easily, so
• I have to spend time and/or money to locate the author or risk significant statutory damages, and
• If the author emerges, the author has significant negotiating leverage that he’d not have held if he were easily locatable in the first place.

Wow! The words “perverse incentives” pop into mind. So do the words “not really a solution, Senator Leahy.”

A Better Idea: The Duty to Maintain

In the digital age, with content available over the Web, why put all the burden on the subsequent user of the content? Instead, let’s shift the burden on the rights-holder to, in the very least, maintain his content and/or contact information. Here are my givens and, therefore, the rubric for the idea:

• It is unreasonable to require that the author divulge his or her identity or contact information in order to receive copyright in the work

I would be surprised if there is anything controversial about that. Necessarily, the author would need to reveal his or her identity in order to enforce the rights associated with the work, but that’s a distinct question.

The corollary to that given is that a work is not considered an orphan merely because it, in the words of Leahy’s bill, “lacks identifying information pertaining to its owner[.]” That seems self-evident; otherwise, anything anonymous or even accidentally unsigned would be immediately available for republication. In short, without this tenet, copyright is eviscerated to a meaningful degree in many cases where it should not.

• If the author is unknown or unreachable, a certain amount of time must pass before the work is to be considered an orphan.

To a large degree, that is a restatement of the bullet item preceding. Using my Mets history example, though, here’s a distinction — let’s say that today were May 30, 1999, and I sent the same email to the same juno.com email address, and, again, the email bounced. The author is unreachable, sure, but he worked on the content in question (or some related content thereto) just 15 days prior. Would it be acceptable for me to declare the work and orphan and republish it? Hardly.

In the context of blogging, this point is even more meaningful. Imagine an anonymous blogger who posts once every three days. He goes on vacation for two weeks. His last post should, by no means, become succeptible to re-use as an orphan. On the other hand, say he stops blogging for two years. Different result? I think so. Similarly, apply the same logic to a known-but-unreachable blogger — in the case of a two week vacation, it’s unfair to claim that the work is an orphan, but in the case of a two year hiatus, it’s fair game.

That seems right to me. The conclusion, then: If an author is unknown and/or unreachable, and he fails to maintain his work, his works are considered orphans, and thereby are available for use by third parties without prior permission.

And, per the problem that Senator Leahy’s bill aims to address, those works should be available for use by third parties. Maintenance can be something as simple as writing an occasional blog post or, in the case of Dave’s Mets Page, changing the date to say “Last updated January 1, 2008?, or something like that. (In this case, pleas bear in mind that I am really only discussing compilations of Web-based content, such as blogs and other continually growing websites. It’d be more difficult, by leaps and bounds, to continually “maintain” a photograph, for example.) Or even more simply? Make sure you, the author, provide an easy and reliable way for others to contact you. You know, like keeping your email address current.

The question then becomes: How do we effectively put the burden on the rights-holder? My solution: a time-lapse Creative Commons license. For the first n months of unmaintained, anonymous work, the copyright holder would retain all rights. Another n months after that, the content becomes available via a non-commercial, no derivative works (NC-ND) license. And another n months after that, the content becomes available under a pure attribution license — basically, a link back. Perfectly tailored for the Web, as the default way to give attribution is via a hyperlink back to the source of the content. And for our purposes, it meets the initial goal, by shifting the burden onto the original author and not onto the subsequent user.

Could this be done legislatively? Probably, although the details would be murky and, again, I am skeptical that Congress will ever act on Leahy’s proposal, let alone my admittedly more controversial one. I would not consider Congressional action to be a realistic goal here, or, for that matter, in regard to copyright reform in any meaningful sense.

However, this rubric could be achieved socially. Already, many authors choose, of their own accord, to use “copyleft” licenses such as the Creative Commons menu or the GNU Free Documentation License (used by Wikipedia, for famous example). I believe that many authors who do not subscribe to the copyleft dogma would find the time-lapse Creative Commons licensing scheme less controversial, as so long as they maintain either (a) the content itself or (b) their contact information, the copyleft scheme will never come into play. As the risk of losing rights to one’s work only comes from sloth, it would be very hard for an author to socially defend their refusal to adopt this time-lapse license. In short, what appears controversial legislatively should be less so socially — and an effective solution to Web-based orphaned works.

Sure, there are details that need resolution, such as how the hypothetical license would define “maintain,” but those definitions are more for edge cases than the core problem set caused by orphan works. One hopes that the eventual solution for orphan works will include a duty on behalf of the rights-holder to maintain their work — or allow for licensing which permits re-use.

Dan Lewis is an graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and of Tufts University. He is a co-founder of ArmchairGM.com and now works at Wikia.

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