A New Search for MySpace

garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide the popular social networking site with a new search engine. From the article: 'Search is a driver of traffic and advertising revenue for other major Web destinations, but it's a largely untapped source of growth for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties such as online gaming site IGN and sports site Scout. Given MySpace's power, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are expected to compete fiercely for the right to be the search engine of choice for MySpace and the rest of Fox Interactive. News Corp. won't say how much money it expects to derive from a deal, but industry experts say it could conceivably boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.'"

Comments

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[brenddie]

Even if google doesnt "win" you can always insite:myspace my searches.
Thats if they dont hide content from other search engines, if they do then its their loss.

Sexual Predators

[dubmun]

Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators

Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?

Re:Sexual Predators

[Golias]

Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators

Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?

Better stay away from the shopping malls too.

MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision. If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex. The "real world" outside is vastly more dangerous for children than any social web network.

Re:Sexual Predators

[shaneh0]

"If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex."

Right. The staggering number of sexual crimes against women and girls are because the victim is "stupid about sex" This MUST be why 1 in 5 female undergrads are sexually assulted sometime during their 4(+) years at university.

Re:Sexual Predators

[Penguin Programmer]

You missed the point. The point was, it's not MySpace's fault that teenage girls post their home addresses and that pedophiles look at them. It's the fault of the girls for posting their information and the pedophiles for taking advantage of it. The parent had a very good point that real life is far more dangerous than MySpace, the only difference is that everyone's been taught not to talk to strangers in real life.

MySpace is the new full-size van with tinted windows and candy inside. The only way it contributes to sexual predators is as a vehicle.

Revenue Battle:Content Provider vs Search Engines

[ikejam]

This could be the begining of a trend where content providers start to demand more share of the monies to be made of the internet - obviously now only second-tier providers with aggregated content/large-scale hosting have the leverage but perhaps in the future....

Re:Quality or quantity?

[rmadmin]

How about advertisements for games? It seems that the gaming scene is made up of quite a few teenagers that all have nice consoles, or high end gaming PCs. Hmmm.. no buying power? It also seems that every teenager I see anymore has a cell phone. Hmmmm. I've also seen quite a few teenagers with MP3 players.

They might not have buying power, but they sure know what they want, and their parents sure have buying power.

RE

[Alex P Keaton in da]

I am going to bid for this contract-
I have developed a search engine that plays music when you load the homepage, is inaccesable between 6-10 pm due to a lack of bandwidth, reeks of emo-cutter desperation, and has little icons of music notes moving around the whole page so the links are hard to find/click. I am thinking we will be a good fit....

Re:RE

[Kesch]

That's it.

You're off my friends list.

Re:Quality or quantity?

[geddes]

If you think teenagers have little buying power you are crazy. Parents buy so much crap for their kids these days. The First result for 'teen market' in google says:

1. Teens (13-19) spend $94.7 billion per year, $3,309 per person.
2. 37 percent of teens' income comes from parents, the rest from jobs.
3. Online spending projections show teen expenditures are on the rise:
   o 2003: $1.7 billion
   o 2004: $2.6 billion
   o 2005: $3.6 billion
   o 2006: $4.8 billion
   

It's not a small market. When teens get jobs, more often than not what they earn is 100% discretionary, they aren't paying rent or buying their own food. I think it is unfortunate that teen culture is so consumption-driven, but that is the way it is.

I think I see a market...

[ChowRiit]

Maybe companies selling razor blades might be able to find a nice niche?

Non-structural markup

[illtron]

MySpace has got to be an absolute nightmare for any search crawler to dig through. The markup on all the pages is absolutely horrible. Maybe a partnership with Google could help convince them that their pages are built for 1996, not 2006, which is extremely sad for a site that's only been around for two years. Structural markup would make it a lot easier to find the relevant info.

Re:Non-structural markup

[geoffspear]

I'm sure it's a hell of a lot easier for a spider to read and index those pages than it is for an actual human to try to read them. For one thing, a computer program can read text that's the same color as the background picture just fine.

Re:Non-structural markup

[Golias]

MySpace text is black on white by default. If it's hard to read, it's because the teenybopper who customized her site chose to make it that way.

Bad markup under the hood is a more valid criticism of MySpace pages, but we're not talking about building the next Amazon.com here. We're talking about a service that provides quick-and-dirty tools for high school and college kids to slap together collections of their favorite pictures, links to videos on YouTube, rants about their favorite bands/movies/whatever, and also allows public & private messages, blogging, etc.

In other words, in spite of the ugliness, it pretty much allows anybody who wants it to be their own old-school BBS Sysop.

MySpace (along with LiveJournal, Xangxa, and a few others) are delivering exactly what the World Wide Web was originally promised to be: A place where everybody can be a content publisher. IMHO, People who whine about the broken HTML and/or the goofy choices some people make with their pages are losing sight of the Big Picture.

Re:Non-structural markup

[menace3society]

Actually, I think people whine because they've learned the truth of the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." People's myspace sites aren't just poor html; they're hideously ugly and frequently illegible, with the most obnoxious possible music playing in the background with dubious legality. Myspace would be a much more hospitable place to "hang out" if people had the taste and restraint to make it not painful to see.

The problem with MySpace is the problem with the Web generally: there's lots of content, but none of it is any damn good.

Re:Quality or quantity?

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Okay.

No.

Teenage girls drive entire markets. Know American Idol? Brittney Spears? InSync? Backstreet Boys? You think only college aged kids are buying this stuff? No. The music industry is run by teenaged girls, has been since the Beatles / Monkees.

Ever hear a story of how your co-workers' (or your) girls have like four outfits for everything? Know a girl who works in a shop and says, "Yeah, I spend most of my paycheck right here."

Many teens are: 1) not set in your was as far as who you will buy from. 2) not responsible enough to think, "Should I save this for a rainy day if possible?" 3) not paying their expenses yet. 4) Capable of moving up to a decent salary within 10 years. 5) More "Herd-Motivated" than most people. (even though most Americans are pretty socialized anyways)

Those are just the reasons I can think of off the top of my head; companies market like rabid dogs towards teenagers. They just look so tasty as a market.

MySpace Search Page Ranking System

[jo42]

This be the MySpace search page ranking system:

1) Dumb
2) Dumber
3) Dumbier
4) Dumbest
5) Stupid Beyond Words

++troll;

Another reason to avoid these sites, I guess

[martinultima]

I don't know about you, but I think that if they're trying to get major search engines – especially Google – to index MySpace, then that's definitely a good reason to avoid those sites (if you don't already). It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into; by combining MySpace's information with Google's search technology – or whoever wins – they'd basically be saying "child stalkers of the world, HERE YOU GO!" and handing the bad guys everything they needed on a silver platter. I can only hope that these people get their act together and realize the threats of social networking sites before something bad happens...

DISCLAIMER: I will admit I personally can't stand MySpace anyway, so there probably is at least some bias here – but either way, those sites definitely aren't doing very much good for society, at least as far as I can tell.

mySpace needs oversight

[cryfreedomlove]

Given that most mySpace users are minors, I'd feel better if a government agency participated in hearings to choose the right search engine for mySpace.

Re:mySpace needs oversight

[DragonWriter]

Yeah. The Department of Homeland Security should keep all those kids safe.

Re:Quality or quantity?

[bitt3n]

more importantly, if you brainwash a kid into buying your deodorant now, they may mindlessly buy it for years and years to come, whereas most older people are already brand loyal, and even if you do brainwash an 80-year-old guy, he might not finish his first stick before he keels over.

Non-structural markup - it's everybody's fault.

[Rob T Firefly]

Just to shed a little light on the awful markup..

To customize your MySpace profile at all, you need to basically type up a full stylesheet to ovverride the existing one. Not only that, but you have to type it into your "biography" infobox, where it'll load with your normal text and be chomped by the browser. As soon as your browser is done completely spacking out at the multiple nonstandard chunks of info being thrown at it from directions not normally expected, it digests it all into something almost, but not entirely, unlike a webpage.

Now obviously, the kids on Myspace by and large aren't web designers, and even if they take that HTML 101 class in middle school, they aren't going to be the type to slap together a stylesheet from scratch, much less hack one out to Myspace specs. These are the users more comfortable with something like Geocities or Livejournal use, where you can intuitively point-and-click your way through a few templates and customize them to your heart's content. However, Myspace is pretty much uncostomizable unless you use a stylesheet.

So, the kids who want to customize but can't stomach the various CSS tutorials long enough to misuse that information for evil, turn to a few services that have come up which generate a myspace stylesheet for you point-and-click style, but also insert ads for themselves into the code, which is usually dodgy code to begin with. And that's alongside Myspace's normal pervasive ads, which are annoying and usually badly scripted.

Then we get to the music and video gadgets MySpace uses, these bloated chunks of Flash that load more bandwidth-and-resource-sucking garbage, usually immediately on page load. Add to this the Google Video, Youtube, Imageshack, and about 47 billion other third-party content hosts, each with their own scripts, cookies, and bugs to add to the page, and their own bandwidth to suck. And on top of all that, Myspace is constantly pushing the bounds of its own resources, so if your page does manage to load at all, some important bits might not show up.

And this all doesn't even begin to take into account the natural result of non-web-designers designing webpages with no templates or handholding. The overloads of stupid gifs (and I love my own animated gifs so very very much, but have some limits, people!) horrible auto-loading music and video (I admit to embedding MIDIs into web pages in the early 90s, I'm still paying for that karmically. For example, this morning I woke up with my ears infested with fire ants. Lesson=learned!) and neon-green-text-on-bright-yellow-background-itis.

So basically, the site is broken by design, broken by its lack of resources, with a broken implementation further broken by its users.

Other than that, it's sound as a pound.

My 2 cents.

[Nm645908]

Ok so iam going to be honest here i my self have a myspace and i see no use for this service to search for stuff on the site is worth less there is so much crap filled on the pages even my own page is full of HTML and its a mess. It is purely for money and has no true value maybe if some one would explain it to me more clearly then i might like it more but, from my point of of view as a myspace user it is worthless and purely driven for profit i mean dosent the site allready make enough money. And Also i must add that some of the users posting replies in sound like they them slefes use myspace and it is not full of EMO ness most of you have no idea what that is and most people who say they are emo are not cutters get your facts straight the is alot of sterotyping going on in this thread. Iam just standing up for my generation which is more then likely the worst one in American history but give us a break please we will lead America one day and fight the wars and also control Microsoft one day.

Re:Quality or quantity?

[mBytz]

The music industry is run by teenaged girls

That explains the endless bitching.