Mobifun’s Weblog

 Google and Salesforce.com are discussing partnership options should come as no surprise, considering the companies have collaborated in the past and firmly believe in the market for hosted business applications.

However, the discussions, reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal, might have been prompted by concerns that they could end up facing each other as competitors in the near future if they don’t synchronize their strategies now.

[ Related news: Salesforce launches SOA in the clouds | Google launches ISP version of Apps suite | Google, Salesforce may make software history ]

“It would be silly if they don’t talk to each other, but hammering out the details [of a potential partnership] could be challenging,” said Oliver Young, a Forrester Research analyst.

The partnership’s shape is still in flux but could involve the integration of the Google Apps suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications with Salesforce’s CRM hosted software, the Journal reported. The main motivation behind the talks is to better compete against common rival Microsoft, according to the article, which said an announcement could be made in the coming weeks.

Right now, Google Apps and the Salesforce CRM applications seem very complementary: Google Apps doesn’t have a native CRM component, while the Salesforce suite lacks office productivity applications. However, it’s easy to see how each could soon cross over into the other’s territory and end up squaring off instead of mounting a united front against Microsoft.

“There are reasons to expect both companies would want to follow what the other is doing,” said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research.

Google has the resources to develop CRM software in house and the cash to buy a CRM vendor, and Salesforce knows that. “This could be a way for Salesforce to make sure Google doesn’t go out and develop or buy something comparable,” said analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Last year, Salesforce collaborated with Google to build a module for Google’s Search Appliance that lets that enterprise search device better index data in Salesforce software. Salesforce also has an application to analyze the effectiveness of Google AdWords advertising campaigns. Moreover, Salesforce uses Google Apps internally.

The companies also are betting that the hosted model is the future of application provisioning in the enterprise market as opposed to the traditional packaged software approach. Both Google and Salesforce heavily promote what they perceive to be benefits of SaaS (software as a service), such as reduced cost and complexity in the delivery and maintenance of applications.

“There’s clearly a lot of synergy between the companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see them enter into more collaborations,” Wettemann said.

Although Salesforce is widely considered as the main player in hosted CRM applications, its competitors aren’t backing away from exploring opportunities with Google Apps. For example, Etelos Systems last month released its Etelos CRM for Google Apps product.

“We are getting ready to launch our developer program for Etelos CRM for Google Apps, and any developer around the world will be able to take the CRM and repurpose it, customize it, integrate and package it for resale, all for a fraction of the cost of conventional methodologies for making and distributing apps,” Danny Kolke, Etelos’ CEO, said.

It has been rumored in the past that Google has expressed interest in buying Salesforce, a move that would be consistent with Google’s aggressive move into the enterprise applications space.

Forrester’s Young believes that it would make more sense for Google to acquire Salesforce than to partner because a partnership could unravel as the two vendors expand their aspirations and possibly knock heads in the market for hosted enterprise applications. Nucleus’ Wettemann also sees a Salesforce acquisition by Google as a likely possibility.

However, Sterling thinks that with a market capitalization of about $5.5 billion, Salesforce could be too expensive for Google. “That would be a real shocker,” Sterling said.

Google and Salesforce.com declined to comment.

Via Infoworld

Google’s search result ranking algorithm received a major upgrade yesterday, incorporating its vertical search properties directly in the main search result page. The new design, Universal Search, integrates results from specialized Google verticals such as blogs, images, news, maps, and video. Results we’ve previously expected to find inside of a OneBox now appear anywhere in the users’ result listings thanks to rewritten ranking and content examination algorithms.

Examining vertical search

Google and other large search engines crawl the worldwide web for new information every minute of every day. The modern web consists of billions of documents expressed in multiple formats and languages created to serve various purposes of their authors and intended audiences. Search has also recently expanded its reach into our libraries’ book shelves, converting dead trees and ink into their digital representation.

Each vertical search engine takes a specialized approach to data and its sources, extracting more information than a generic crawler such as Googlebot. The main crawler might recognize a webpage contains web feeds and pass its RSS and Atom content to a specialized engine such as Google Blog Search for further analysis. A local search engine contains an entire Yellow Pages full of local listings data and other interesting pieces of information such as hours of operation, payment methods, or other items of local interest. A patent search engine knows how to navigate intellectual property databases such as the United States Patent office, turning standardized forms into structured data and diagrams.

Current Google search offerings

• Web
• News stories
• Images
• Video
• Web feeds
• Books
• Desktop
• Financial data
• Calendar and events
• Mailing lists and newsgroups
• Shopping comparison
• Personalized homepage modules
• Academic papers
• Mail-order catalogs
• Open Directory Project
• Local listings and map points
• Patents
• Public transit routes and schedules
• Source code
• Definitions
• Music

I’m sure there are even more specialized public data search verticals supported by Google I’m leaving out of this list. All of these various verticals present contain possible pieces of relevant information for a given query entered into the Google search box. Until yesterday they were isolated from the main Google search box in a separate silo or perhaps a short summary inside OneBox, the integrated results section at the top of a search page.

Google Universal Search

Google’s new search process collects relevant information for each search query from each of its vertical search properties. The universal search for data needs to be processed by a universal ranking algorithm to determine the top 10 results shown for each query. A search for “Utah Jazz” might contain recent news stories, video highlights, pictures of star basketball players, as well as relevant search results from across the Web. Google’s algorithms need to weight results from each vertical, assign it a universal search rank, order the results, and return a response to the user as quickly as possible. No small feat, and the new algorithm and breadth of search definitely impress. Google also announced yesterday it will process your search query in multiple different languages, returning results for your search term if it were translated into its equivalent value in French, Spanish, and more, creating an even more complicated problems of query extraction and result set analysis.

Visual changes

All of these behind the scenes updates allow a few new tweaks to the front-end UI adapted to your query’s result set. I’ll walk through some of the major changes.

Search refinement

Google lists search verticals with appropriate results for your queries at the top of this search result page. In this example I searched for “iPod” expecting to find information about Apple’s popular music player. Google assembles 10 “universal” results on the page, but clusters relevant search options across its vertical properties such as iPod patents, iPod products, and iPod news search enabling a quick refinement.

Inline video thumbnails and playback

Video thumbnails are included directly alongside video search results along with the video’s total length and user rating. You can even watch the video directly from the search result page using embedded players from YouTube and Google Video. Google gathers metadata from other popular video sites such as Metacafe, but embedded players video playback is currently not available for these third-party sites. Searchers will see a thumbnail image from supported sites’ video content and will need to visit the site directly before playing back any videos.

Google’s Marissa Mayer mentioned during yesterday’s Searchology event a lack of support for external video players and not the actual site content. The Media RSS module can help smart publishers better define video thumbnails and an appropriate web browser media playback console. The thumbnail element provides search engines with visual search result data and the player element specifies the location of your preferred playback interface. I don’t expect Google to load remote code such as a Flash player inside of their search results pages, but at least you can be properly prepared.

Related content

The search result page also suggest alternate searches related to your current query where appropriate. In a sample search for “Jerry Falwell” I received five related searches, three results from the news archive broken out by year of publication, and three recent blog posts on Falwell’s recent death.

If a searcher makes it all the way to the bottom of the page it’s likely they never found what they were looking for, and a few quick suggestions might boost the relevancy of their experience.

Summary

The main Google search result page just received a major revamp yesterday with more content integrated from search verticals and new methods of displaying information about your query. Google’s sidebar advertising has always restrained itself to matching the layout and expectations of the main search result page, so perhaps Google Universal Search opens up new advertising options beyond a text summary such as maps, images, and video.

Publishers should now be even more motivated to list their content in a Google vertical and stand out on the main search result page. I expect video publishers and local businesses will pay even more attention to Google and its referral power now that their data can be highlighted in a more visually appealing search result than the competition.