When Bill Gross talks about internet search, people tend to listen. You can put that down to his invention of the keyword-driven advertising business that is the foundation of Google’s fortunes (GoTo.com, the company founded by Gross’s Idealab to develop the idea, was later renamed Overture and sold to Yahoo.)

Gross’s latest Big Idea? Getting rid of what he calls "the crapshoot" of clicking on hyperlinks in web pages. Take the link in that sentence: you don’t know till you click on it where it will lead and how useful you will find it (it links to a description of the idea on Snap.com, Gross’s search engine.)

Gross stopped by earlier today to show off his alternative. It takes the form of a small window, powered by Ajax, that pops open automatically when you move your cursor over a hyperlink. The window can display a small preview of the page the link would take you to, so you can make a better assessment about whether to bother clicking through.

But why stop there? The window could also deliver a related news headline, open a link to a product for sale on Amazon.com, or play a video on YouTube. Thanks to Web services technology, any developer could theoretically create a mini-application and make it available through Gross’s system (imagine you are reading the TV listings and a window pops open that lets you automatically TiVo a show by clicking on the link.)

The commercial argument for this sounds much like the original one behind GoTo.com. Clicking the blue links on Web pages may or may not take you where you want to go. But by giving you more information first, Gross reckons he can make each "click" you make more valuable. That translates into better qualified leads for advertisers and online merchants (and thus higher advertising rates.)

Won’t this lead to the sort of kerfuffle that broke out last week, when MySpace blocked its users from embedding videos and photo slideshows from Photobucket on their MySpace pages? (MySpace objected to Photobucket making money from the advertising included in some of the slideshows.) Gross draws one big distinction: he promises to share any revenue he generates through the pop-up windows with website owners who carry the service (though at the moment that offer is opn only to big sites capable of negotiating a deal.)

It’s impossible to tell at this stage whether this is a proposition that will appeal to online publishers. But experience suggests that Gross should be taken seriously. It wasn’t long ago that the sponsored search links created by GoTo.com seemed an arcane and unlikely basis for a new advertising business.

April 17th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink