Last year when Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Charlie Rose for his 60 Minutes TV show, one of the key takeaways from it, besides the sneak preview offered on Air Prime, Amazon’s forthcoming drone-based home delivery service, was Bezos’ defence of his business practices, especially with regard to the book publishing industry.

He said, “The internet is disrupting every media industry. The future is happening to book selling. Amazon is not happening to book selling.” Responding specifically to the complaints about Amazon, Bezos said: “Complaining is not a strategy.”

I was reminded of this today when I made a casual review of several eBookseller sites, which sell a wide selection of eBooks for buyers around the world. One can very well say that when it comes to sale of eBooks, they are indeed competitors to Amazon.

Why are eBook sellers losing money from potential customers?
I did a very basic comparison of these sites to the Kindle eBooks section of Amazon.com. It was shocking to see these sites leave money on the table because they haven’t got their search function right.

Why are they doing it? If they don’t take care of their own interests, can these sites then complain against Amazon for its competitive instincts?

I adopted a simple methodology. I opened The New York Times fiction bestseller list for eBooks from a couple of weeks ago. I had already downloaded this sometime ago for a comparative study. I went there again and randomly picked up a few bestsellers.

First stop, Diesel eBooks (diesel-ebooks.com). I searched for the eBook Innocence (by Dean Koontz), a current NYT bestseller. This is what I got:

It was not there in the first page of 20 results. In fact the first page is entirely filled with adult fiction eBooks, many of them offered free. Please note that the search defaulted to bestselling.

I made the same search in the Amazon Kindle eBookstore to get the following result:

The NYT bestseller was returned as the top result, with Sort by Relevance as the default search method.

I went back to Diesel, and this time searched for the full title plus the author name. It turns out that the eBook is actually available in Diesel eBookstore, and that too at least for Indian buyers, at a much discounted price to that of Amazon:

On digging further, I found that the title is returned as the 25th result in Diesel when you just search for ‘Innocence’.

Twenty-fifth result! Just imagine. No why would any eBookseller offer a full page of adult eBook fiction as the search results page for Innocence, and return a free eBook as the top result? Shouldn’t its internal search default to relevance like Amazon’s does, and give weightage to an eBook listed as a bestseller by the prestigious NYT ? Scott Redford of Diesel, are you listening?  

Why is eBooks.com ignoring Linda Lael Miller? 
Next stop, eBooks.com. I searched for Linda Lael Miller. Her work Big Sky Secrets is currently an NYT bestseller.
But you wouldn’t know if you searched for her name in eBooks.com:

So I went to Amazon and did the same search:

They know a thing or two about relevance. The search for Linda Lael Miller returns her current NYT eBook bestseller as the top result in Amazon, and not the 20th result as it’s in eBooks.com. Now, how many people abandoned their search for Big Sky Secrets in eBooks.com because it didn’t list it as a top offering from the author?
Shouldn’t the search algorithm of the site be changed to give some weightage to the NYT bestseller list? Stephen Cole of eBooks.com, are you listening?

Why can’t eBookmall.com not search for full title and author? 
See what happened when I searched for the full title and author name at ebookmall.com:

I turned disappointed to Amazon.com even though as a matter of fact, I want small eBooksellers to thrive, and want to purchase eBooks from them, even at a slight loss in price. But it seems they are not interested in helping someone like me.

Amazon recognised the search for the full title and author name of the bestseller, but was not very truthful when it told me that only the hardcover was available. On clicking the result, I could find the Kindle eBook version as well.
So Amazon is not perfect, but still it takes you where you want to go.

I returned to ebookmall.com and performed one more search. This time, just for the eBook title. It turns out the eBook was actually available there:

My message to the promoters of eBookmall is simple. You’ve got work to do to review your search function. Otherwise, you are losing out on potential sales.

Infibeam too has to improve 
What about India? Infibeam (infibeam.com), co-founded by former Amazon employee Vishal Mehta, offers a good selection of eBooks. But here too, I found that they could improve upon their search function a bit more.
Look what I got when I searched for Laura Lael Miller in Infibeam:

Her current bestseller Big Sky Secrets returned as the 30th result. That needs improvement. EBooksellers have to give additional weightage to NYT eBook bestseller lists in their search algorithms and increase public awareness that they do sell these eBooks in their stores. Otherwise visitors to your sites will return disappointed, and you will continue to complain against Amazon.com. Remember, as Bezos said, “Complaining is not a strategy at all.”

We continue from where Douglas Edwards, the former director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google, left us in his book I’m Feeling Lucky. Remember, we are using these vignettes to understand the thought processes which drive Sergey Brin.

Let’s welcome George Salah into the narrative. He had left Oracle to become Google’s Facilities Manager after bonding with the founders at a roller hockey game. Oracle being a very successful company, Salah wanted to import best practices from there to the fledgling Google. Douglas quotes him as saying, “I said to Larry and Sergey, ‘I don’t want to recreate the wheel every time. Are you okay with me creating a set of standards?’ They looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Absolutely not!" the founders declared. "We don’t want to have anything to do with standards. We don’t want anything ‘standard’.”

“I think that was about the time I began to go bald,” George told me, says Douglas. Sergey and Larry wanted their company to be completely different. George threw out everything he had learned in his career, and set about finding vendors, contractors, and architects who understood what the Google founders wanted, and that was always function over form, writes Douglas.

The author notes that he and his colleagues in the marketing department too were forbidden to do things the “normal and accepted way”. He quotes one of his former colleagues saying, “Larry and Sergey hated the idea of template approaches to marketing. They refused to stick to manufactured messages, did not use presentations, and talked about what they wanted to talk about. The media loved them for it.”

A CURE FOR AIDS? NOT IMPOSSIBLE
Douglas continues. It seems once the founders came to know of marketing’s intent to dictate product plans to engineering. They threw a monkey wrench at it, he writes. Sergey eventually issued a company-wide manifesto listing Google’s top three priorities as “product excellence, user acquisition, and revenues”. It left a lot of questions unanswered, but Douglas writes that he eventually came to realize that the founders intended to “pick a path to the future based on their gut instinct”. An engineer by name Chad Lester marveled, “They had so much self-confidence that Sergey was convinced he personally could find a cure for AIDS.” Douglas noted that the VCs on the board, including storied names like John Doerr and Mike Moritz, didn’t have control and could do nothing beyond try and guide the founders.

NO BODY ODOR PLEASE
Larry and Sergey had appointed a VP for corporate marketing and put her in charge of PR and promotions, but not the development of products. The board wanted a different leader to build that organization —someone with technical savvy, but not an engineer. Douglas notes that Larry and Sergey reluctantly agreed to take a look around. The qualifications required? The right candidate would have to communicate with coders, execute quickly, and be very, very smart. And yes, smell nice too! Douglas writes that Sergey once rejected an applicant in part because “I thought he had kind of a bad body odor.”

 (To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)

When Douglas Edwards, the former director of consumer marketing and brand management, landed at Google for a job interview, among the questions that Sergey Brin peppered him with, one stood out: “What’s your GPA?”

In his book, I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas says that even after he was hired, the HR department kept pestering him for his transcripts and SAT scores. Indeed, having high academic records was once a pre-requisite for a Google hiring, a factor perhaps influenced by the views of the founders themselves, who were after all brilliant students.

As we have seen in a recent blog post, Google’s reliance on academic accomplishments seems to be a thing of the past.

One of the curve balls which Brin threw at Douglas during the hiring interview was when he offered him five minutes to explain something complicated that Brin didn’t already know. Douglas chose general theory of marketing. By the time Sergey came back, he had prepared stuff to answer 10 minutes of questions, but they were not of much use as he was forced to find answers on the spot to the questions Brin fired at him one after another. Later he found out that this was routine for Brin. An hour wasted with a candidate wasn’t considered a total loss if Brin could take away some new insights on a topic he didn’t know.

NO DIRECTORS IN A FLAT ORG
Douglas had applied for the post Marketing Director. Another individual by name Shari Fujii had applied for the same post advertised on the Google website. When they joined both found that Google didn’t seem to have such a post, and instead, the company preferred to address them as managers. “I shrugged my soldiers and swallowed my pride,” writes Douglas. Sergey reminded everyone constantly that titles aren’t important because Google wanted a flat organization with fewer levels and less of bureaucracy

NO GREAT CODERS
Apparently both Brin and Page were no great shakes as coders. Craig Silverstein, the first employee of Google, would say that he didn’t trust the founders as coders because he found a lot of bugs in their early code. He categorized them as research coders who were more interested in writing code that works than writing code that was maintainable. Jeff Dean, another engineer, told Douglas that the early Stanford version of Google had this quirk: when something unusual happened, it would print out an error message. It read, “Whoa, horsey!”

(To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)

The time has come for Indians to seriously think about having a search engine of our own. Google, Bing, and Yahoo (powered by Bing) are very powerful search engines. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for others. Homegrown Search Engines play a meaningful role in many big world markets, including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, China, South Korea, and the Czech Republic.

Yandex has around 60% of the search market in Russia, 43% in Belarus and a third (around 33%) of the market in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Baidu has around 56% of the Chinese search market and Naver leads the South Korean market with around 70% market share. There’s also a search engine with a sizeable market share in the Czech Republic, known as Seznam. All of them compete with Google in their respective markets, and are no pushovers. Baidu and Yandex are Nasdaq listed companies. So those interested in researching more about these companies can look up their SEC filings, some of which are quite elaborate.

Yandex apparently has an edge in the Russian and neighboring markets because of the Search Engine’s ability to recognize the Russian inflection in search queries. Baidu has an impressive pedigree, with co-founder Robin Li boasting of sound search credentials, besides being one of the richest individuals in China with a net worth of more than $12 billion.
LI, A SEARCH PIONEER
Most Western narratives give one a misleading picture that Baidu's success is because it kowtows to Beijing and allows its search results to be censored. But it's a fact that internet giants like Google in the US were more than willing to hand over treasure troves of user data to the US government when their spy agency came calling, often voluntarily giving more than what was asked for. It's difficult to believe that working for the interests of the US government is benign, and heeding requests from Beijing is evil.

And here's a surprising nugget: Baidu's co-founder Robin Li is one of the pioneers of search engine technology, and we cannot outright dismiss the possibility that Baidu is successful because it returns better search in Chinese.

Even when they touch upon Robin Li's background, Western news media skirt around the fact that he's an American educated tech wizard, who patented search technology ahead of Brin and Page. He was one among a handful who arrived early at the conclusion that inbound links from other Websites are a crucial pointer towards the quality of a Website. Just as Larry Page had devised the PageRank algorithm named after himself, Li —an alumnus of SUNY, Buffalo — had worked out his own system, known as RankDex.

In his highly regarded book on Google called In the Plex, legendary tech writer Steven Levy had this to say about Robin Li:

“One day in April 1996 he was at an academic conference. Bored by the presentation, he began to ponder how search engines could be improved. He realized that the Science Citation Index phenomenon could be applied to the Internet. The hypertext link could be regarded as a citation! ‘When I returned home, I started to write this down and realized it was revolutionary,’ he says. He devised a search approach that calculated relevance from both the frequency of links, and the content of anchor text. He called his system RankDex.” 

He didn’t sit quiet with this insight though, notes Levy. Li first asked his company Dow Jones to file a patent, and when that didn’t happen, he bought a self-help book on patent applications and filed it on his own in June 1996. “But when he told his boss, Dow Jones re-asserted itself, and hired a lawyer to review the patent, which it re-filed in February 1997,” Levy writes. Remember, this was two years before Stanford filed for the PageRank algorithm in 1998. And Li’s insight on the centrality of anchor text way back in 1996 is simply amazing, considering the entire industry of search engine optimization (SEO) draws its competitive advantage from it.

When Dow Jones failed to monetize the patent, Li quit to join an internet company by name Infoseek. Eventually, he left the United States and found his fortune in the Chinese market. So the Baidu founder is someone with serious Search Engine engineering chops, and we should not blindly accept Western speculation that Baidu got where it's now simply due to government patronage.

Similarly, Yandex has a research lab in California’s Bay Area. So these homegrown Search Engines have good pedigree, are financially sound, and have market leadership which they won’t be ceding any time to multinational competitors like Google.

GURUJI, INDIA’S LOST SEARCH ENGINE
This begs the question: What about India? A random search found that there apparently existed a Search Engine in India called Guruji.com. Without research, and without speaking to its founders, I won’t be in a position to comment on what went wrong, but apparently it shut shop sometime in 2012. I could capture this screenshot of how Guruji.com looked like just before it shut down, from the Wayback Machine. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and their upstart competitors like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are formidable in what they do, but it would be foolish to simply abandon the market to these companies, considering none of them are still very competitive in searching in Indian languages. The field is open for a Search Engine powerhouse in Hindi, or major Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu.

Search Engine technology is not rocket science, and if India can develop the knowhow to commercially launch satellites for others, providing state funding for any fledgling start-up in the domestic Search Engine space until it finds its footing would be a wise investment for the future. There’s no guarantee how multinational Search Engines would behave in times of conflict which pits Western interests against India's. Therefore, it would be prudent that the country makes this a priority.

The indictment this week in New York of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbrict for the second time is once again a reminder to the existence of the Dark Net or Invisible Web —that portion of the World Wide Web which has still not been indexed by the Search Engines of the World. Silk Road, for instance, could be accessed only through the Tor anonymizing software, and transactions were conducted using Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer digital currency.

Silk Road was a platform which allowed individual sellers of illegal drugs like heroine and LSD to find buyers in exchange for payment in Bitcoins. Its existence was not an aberration. Apparently up to 90% of the World Wide Web, and perhaps maybe more, remain invisible to search engines like Google and Bing. Not all of it is sinister though. Archives of academic journals which exist in walled gardens are a case in point. They are accessible to only those who have a gate pass.

There are communities all over the Web which are accessible only to members, and which do not allow indexation by search engines. Some are worried that the Dark Net will be used by terrorists and criminals to share secret messages and plot attacks. Hence, law enforcement authorities themselves are actively trawling the Dark Net with their own apps. In fact, the Tor software widely downloaded and used for hosting and accessing anonymous sites, was developed with funding by the US State Department!

HOW TO CODE MESSAGES WITHIN FLICKR
Others say that there’s no need for criminals and terrorists to go to the Dark Net to share secret messages when they can as well use popular platforms. For instance, it’s said that the digital codes of photographs uploaded in Flickr.com are used by some to pass on coded messages. Alternately, sequences of specific pictures with meanings can be posted on Flickr to convey a message. Apparently, coded messaging happens in full public view even through Twitter.

I guess the Dark Net would remain a reality so long as the regulators of the World Wide Web do not make search engine indexation a must for all online platforms. Such a regulatory stance may also have to confront the tendency of government agencies everywhere to be active on the Invisible Web. For instance, in his book Viral Loop, Adam L Penenberg speaks about an e-bay like auction market in Switzerland called WabiSabiLabi which sells blackmarket hacker code. And the biggest buyer in the blackmarket hacker code auction mart? Surprise, surprise, it is the US government! The Americans are apparently active there so as to stockpile software ammunition in anticipation of cyber warfare!!

So the combination of lax regulation, vested interests of government agencies, and the technological prowess of activists underground looks set to ensure the longevity of the Invisible Web.

So the answer to those who worry about the Dark Net could be that it would produce platforms which are capable of confronting and taming the toxic elements within.

e.o.m.