Lots of companies know about you,” Athey said. “But knowing what you want to buy now — that contextual information is so much more powerful.” It’s why search ads sell better than display ads. The problem? “If only one company has that data, we can’t actually expect the benefits of that data to benefit the ecosystem.” November 17, 2012 at 05:34PM

“Google is no longer organizing the world’s public information; that’s doing an increasingly fine job of organizing itself. Google is keeping the world’s secrets”

Good piece — made me think
Is this a Faustian bargain ?? November 14, 2012 at 06:49AM

Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for. September 09, 2012 at 08:26AM

Our sense of slow is changing. We deeply want the web to be instantaneous — delays of less than 10 milliseconds — but the web isn’t up to that yet. So, today, 250 milliseconds is the magic number:

Steve Lohr via NYTimes.com

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).

“Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.

The performance of Web sites varies, and so do user expectations. A person will be more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a search result. And Web sites constantly face trade-offs between visual richness and snappy response times. As entertainment and news sites, like The New York Times Web site, offer more video clips and interactive graphics, that can slow things down.

But speed matters in every context, research shows. Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading.