Lately there’s been a lot of talk about this new program that’s been coming in my email inbox and being wildly talked about online right now.

But you see, I got a sneak peak into what Commission Crusher is all about – and wanted to give you my review on it.

So… what is Commission Crusher exactly?

Commission Crusher is based on a simple marketing concept that anybody can duplicate online… and never have to compete against one another. This method allows anyone to find profitable affiliate campaigns online and swipe them for their profits.

The real beauty behind Commission Crusher is the software engine that drives the product… titled “Ad Assault”. This amazing piece of software will allow you with a flick of a switch find tons of hot websites in any market… any niche… and tell you everything you need to know to get tons of traffic from these websites.

Best of all… you don’t have to deal with Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of that crap. This method is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before online.

… and here’s the best part – Steve walks through every step of the process on video. And he’s got a great support team in place to help you with any questions you have.
Can you get any better than that?
So simply put – Commission Crusher works. It’s a fantastic product. If you’ve been looking for a way to make constant money online with something that’s not going to disappear tomorrow, this is it.

Grab a copy before they sell out. I highly recommend you get your hands on this software now!

Click Here to Check it Out!

It’s no secret that Google has, on a very steady basis, dominated its competition and managed to return big profits.  And Carol Bartz may be in no position to question the company’s methods.  But Yahoo’s CEO nonetheless chose to point out a potential weakness today, and she may be on the right track.

Bartz told Jonathan Fildes, "Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search.  It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business.  They’ve got to find other things to do."

Also, in terms of how Google will be judged as it attempts to find those other things, Bartz observed, "Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting."

The 99.9 percent figure is obviously an exaggeration.  Still, if you figure that Google has a market cap of around $169 billion and Yahoo’s market cap is closer to $24 billion, the second remark doesn’t seem too inaccurate.

So as Bartz indicated, that puts a lot of pressure on Google to succeed at something other than search.  Whether that something’s Android, Google Apps, the TV Ads program, or a different product doesn’t matter, but in this light, Yahoo’s rather scattered network of properties starts to look a little more attractive.

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

Sorry, Google fans, but from a financial perspective, the search giant seems to have lost some of its luster.  Goldman Sachs hasn’t come close to suggesting that anyone sell their stock – and is in fact still recommending that people buy more – but at the same time, the firm has removed Google from its "Conviction Buy" list.

You can blame the nasty dive Google’s stock took following the company’s quarter one earnings report for this move; a drop from $595.30 at the closing bell to $563.00 at the opening one definitely counts as "underperformance," and Google’s stock has since fallen further to around $536.24.

What’s more, five-day, one-month, three-month, and six-month views of the stock’s performance all show losses.

Google’s stock is still up 38.92 percent if you look at it using April 28th, 2009 as a starting point, though.

Google’s stock is up this morning, too, by a not-unimpressive 0.87 percent.

By comparison, Microsoft is up 0.15 percent, Yahoo’s down 1.15 percent, the Dow’s down 0.14 percent, and the Nasdaq’s down 0.13 percent. Google’s shareholders don’t exactly need to go calling for anyone’s resignation just yet, then.

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

Sorry, Google fans, but from a financial perspective, the search giant seems to have lost some of its luster.  Goldman Sachs hasn’t come close to suggesting that anyone sell their stock – and is in fact still recommending that people buy more – but at the same time, the firm has removed Google from its "Conviction Buy" list.

You can blame the nasty dive Google’s stock took following the company’s quarter one earnings report for this move; a drop from $595.30 at the closing bell to $563.00 at the opening one definitely counts as "underperformance," and Google’s stock has since fallen further to around $536.24.

What’s more, five-day, one-month, three-month, and six-month views of the stock’s performance all show losses.

Google’s stock is still up 38.92 percent if you look at it using April 28th, 2009 as a starting point, though.

Google’s stock is up this morning, too, by a not-unimpressive 0.87 percent.

By comparison, Microsoft is up 0.15 percent, Yahoo’s down 1.15 percent, the Dow’s down 0.14 percent, and the Nasdaq’s down 0.13 percent. Google’s shareholders don’t exactly need to go calling for anyone’s resignation just yet, then.

A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.

Facebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.

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Consortium leader Meebo emphasized that it doesn’t see this as competition with Facebook’s system for letting users share links from around the web, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Facebook desperately needs more competition. Either way, XAuth is a good move that people excited about online innovation should support.

What XAuth Delivers

The gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It’s like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too.

Google’s Joseph Smarr, recently hired because of his high-profile work on distributed identity systems across the web, says that XAuth is a provisional solution to the limitations of the cookie system. If you visit ReadWriteWeb, for example, our servers aren’t allowed to check the cookies left on your browser by the social networks you use because they are tied to URL domains other than ours.

XAuth will provide a single place that participating websites can ping to request information about you, the user. The social networks that are participating in XAuth will have reported to the central XAuth hub that you are using their service (Google, Yahoo, Meebo, Disqus, Gigya). If ReadWriteWeb is sporting XAuth, we would check in with the central hub, find out where you network and prompt you to log-in through that service and share your account information, social connections and more with us.

And yes, there are privacy implications to exposing where you network, even if your personal info beyond that isn’t exposed until you log-in. “Broadcasting where you log-in,” says online identity community leader Kaliya Hamlin, “gives away things about yourself you may not want to give away.” Hopefully specialty networks will be selective about whether they participate in XAuth or not, but any time there is an opt-out model like this it’s dangerous.

Once you’re logged-in to your favorite social network, there are many things the website you are visiting could do. Think of all the things Facebook Connect lets you do. XAuth will enable to do that type of thing with any other participating social network, on any participating site. On the Huffington Post, you can see what your friends from Facebook are reading across that sprawling site. On CNN during the Presidential Inauguration, Facebook Connect let you comment on the live video with your real identity and see what your friends were saying about it at the same time.

It’s really easy, Facebook Connect is, and the huge audience that can be shared with makes publishers salivate as they install Facebook Connect.

Facebook is not participating in XAuth, though the companies behind it say they hope it will soon. That seems unlikely. For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. It might participate in XAuth later, as might Twitter (who calls another authentication system XAuth and generally communicates poorly with other companies), but only because they want to be everywhere. They won’t be sending out invites to publishers to attend any XAuth parties though. They already own the most dominant cross-site authentication system the world has ever known.

Above: Robert Scoble interviews Meebo’s Seth Sternberg about XAuth

Google’s Smarr says that XAuth is just a work-around until the browser itself reports to websites what social networks a user uses. He says he’s working with the Google Chrome team and Mozilla has been working on making Firefox a hub of identity for some time. Everyone has something to fear from Facebook.

Will Someone Please Stop Facebook?

You do too, as a user. Facebook is a fabulous service for communicating with friends and family, for sharing links, thoughts and feelings. It’s also too big, too centralized and too susceptible to making drastic changes that have terrible consequences in the real lives of users (hello, privacy policy).

Facebook needs meaningful competition. XAuth could help breathe more life into a constellation of other social networks to provide that competition.

It’s hard to say what will work against Facebook, though, because that’s where the most precious resource in the online world is hoarded – your friendships. The prospect of a large number of people and websites coming together to use a technology that discovers social network use across everywhere but Facebook and Twitter isn’t likely to excite very many publishers focused on their short-term interests.

It’s a very frustrating situation. Facebook just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The experience there just keeps getting more and more compelling. No information gets out without flying the Facebook flag. Your friends probably don’t use much else, so switching would come at a heavy social cost. And we grow more and more under Facebook’s thumb every day. December’s radical changes to Facebook’s privacy policy are likely to be just the beginning.

Google’s Smarr points out that just a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable to people that MySpace would come tumbling down from the top of the social networking heap, that the future is still wide open and Facebook’s total domination can’t be presumed unstoppable. He would say that. Facebook is smarter and much, much better than MySpace ever was, though.

I love using Facebook, I use it every day, but something needs to be done. There needs to be a variety of interoperable, viable social networking options. Imagine if there was one super-dominant cell phone network provider and it didn’t allow you to call people on other networks. It wouldn’t matter how good that service was, that would be a bad situation. Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It’s far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today.

I hope that XAuth today and browser-based identity management in the future can help other social networks gain more traction. This may be a part of the solution. It’s a nice move, but we’ll see how effective it is.

Discuss

Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. "For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets," explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing’s offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this.

This story isn’t about recipes though. It’s about the major search engines’ quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while know, but in reality, it hasn’t even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve. Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing.

Where are You Getting the More Relevant Results? Let us know.

Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for "matt cutts" on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google’s results left a bit to be desired. It wasn’t that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page, and Matt’s Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person’s name (It was in the first few on Yahoo’s results).

Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they’ve got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they’ve released. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for "latest bing features". Given Bing’s philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called "The Latest News from Bing" from November of 2009.

Search Diversifying

In the latest search market reports, Google has lost a little bit of market share. Bing is gaining (and has the potential to gain a lot more for reasons discussed here). Another thing Bing has going for it, or Google has working against it rather, is that search itself is becoming much more diversified as a result of mobile, social media, and geo-location. People are simply using more ways to find the information they’re looking for. It’s not that they’re not using Google anymore. It’s that they’re maybe using it less for certain types of queries. For example, where someone may have once used Google to search for a movie showtime, maybe they now have an app for that on their phone.

Is a Bingized Yahoo Good for Yahoo Search?

At some point in the near future, Bing’s results will be taking over Yahoo’s results to some extent. While most will agree that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be good for search advertising. Another question would be is it good for people who use Yahoo to search? Are Bing’s search results better than Yahoo’s? I’m not so sure, looking at the "matt cutts" example. For the "latest bing features" example, however, I can’t say that Yahoo’s results are really any better than Bing’s.

I realize that just looking at a couple of examples is kind of grasping at straws and are hardly representative of all queries in general, but it’s still a question worth pondering. Are Bing’s results better than Yahoo’s? Does it even matter? Will the average Yahoo user even notice a difference?

Google’s Edge in Innovation

Google still seems to have the edge in getting out new and interesting features. Take real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter around the same time. Microsoft even had one with Facebook too. While Bing had a separate destination relatively quickly, where users could search Twitter with Bing, they didn’t integrate real-time Twitter results into Bing results themselves. Google did this after a little while with not only Twitter, but many other sources to make up its real-time search results. Just this week, Bing announced that it is starting to include such results, and only from Twitter, and only to a small subset of users in the U.S.

That’s not to say that Bing doesn’t do some things first (like the recipes for example), but Bing has a lot more to prove (and in all fairness, they do regularly release new features). Google is already established. Bing is still trying to win people over.

Google is frequently making acquisitions to better its search technologies. Just this week, Google acquired Pink, to better its Google Goggles product, which lets people search with their phones by simply pointing their cameras toward an object. They recently acquired Aardvark, a social Q&A search service (a space that is growing rapidly – see AnswerBag/MerchantCircle news for one of the latest examples).

Wrapping Up

With regards to relevance, you’re going to find better results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing on a query-by-query basis. In reality, none of them deliver perfect results all the time, and that is why the diversifying of how people search is likely to continue, and for the better. The search engines can work to personalize results all they want, but in the end, it’s the user that personalizes how they search, and right now, it’s not  looking like any single search engine is going to control all of that.

Which search engine do you think most consistently delivers the most relevant results? Are you turning to other ways to find information beyond search engines? Tell us what you use.

U.S. Internet users watched 28.1 billion videos in February, with Google sites leading the way as the top video property wit 11.9 billion videos, accounting for 42.5 percent of all videos viewed online, according to the latest report from comScore.

YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 912.5 million videos, representing 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft sites landed in the third spot with 623 million (2.2%), trailed by Yahoo sites with 455 million (1.6%) and Turner Network with 318 million (1.1%).

More than 174 million viewers watched an average of 161 videos per viewer during the month of February. Google sites attracted 132.2 million unique viewers during the month (93.9 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo sites with 53.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and CBS Interactive with 45.3 million viewers (6.4 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 23.3 videos during the month, representing another all time high for the property.

In February, Tremor Media ranked as the leading video ad network with a potential reach of 81.7 million viewers, or 46.9 percent of the total video viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 75.5 million viewers (43.3% penetration) followed closely by Advertising.com Video Network with 74.8 million viewers (42.9%).

Other key findings from comScore include:

*83.1% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

*132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube (89.5 videos per viewer).

*The length of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
 

Yahoo announced this afternoon a “Yahoo! Updates Firehose service” that will provide a stream of activity gathered from various Web services, from Flickr uploads to YouTube favorites to blog comments and more.

The firehose will provide a stream of real-time data from Yahoo’s index, which will also include Twitter data, as part of a deal the two companies made last February.

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According to Yahoo, the firehose will include “a real-time feed of every public action taken on our network and elsewhere around the Web that users have authorized Yahoo! to make available.” This data will consist of “status updates, ratings and reviews, comments on stories, Buzz votes, Flickr uploads, Delicious bookmarking, tweets, Open App activity, YouTube favoriting, and Last.fm listening, among many others.”

Developers will be able to access the data using Yahoo Query Language, a “SQL-like query language”, and parse this information by a number of criteria, from language to location to all updates associated with a specific URL.

While companies like Twitter have already offered a firehose of its data, and Facebook is expected to release its in the very near future (likely at the F8 conference), there are few, if any, firehoses of large swaths of data such as this. The closest we came up with at the moment was Gnip, which provides a single API to connect with dozens of other Web services and their APIs.

According to the company, the firehose will provide access to more than 150,000 ratings, 8,000 reviews and 750,000 comments a day.

Discuss

March was an interesting month for the search market, according to new statistics from comScore.  Not so interesting that Google isn’t still on top by a huge margin, of course, but interesting insofar as the search giant lost a bit of market share, even as Bing and Yahoo improved their standing.

Let’s start with Google’s story.  In February, comScore puts its market share at 65.5 percent.  That declined to 65.1 percent in March, which is a moderately unusual turn of events.

As for how Bing did, it’s still Microsoft’s little search-engine-that-could, achieving its tenth straight month of gains.  Not huge gains, perhaps – its market share just moved from 11.5 percent to 11.7 percent between February and March – but the streak remains impressive, and even the tiniest numbers add up over time.

Then there’s Yahoo’s tale to consider.  Unfortunately for Carol Bartz, the company’s standing had dropped each of the previous 13 months.  However, moving from February to March, comScore recorded a 0.1 percent gain, nudging Yahoo from 16.8 percent to 16.9 percent.

So it was definitely an interesting month, as these things go.  And Bing and Yahoo, at least, are no doubt hoping April turns out to be just as unusual.

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft’s Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

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Verticals

Even though Bing lost some ground in the overall search market, it did quite well in the verticals it already specializes in. Year-over-Year, the percentage of upstream traffic from Bing to automotive, health, shopping and travel sites grew more than 100%. Month-to-month, Bing also saw double-digit growth according to Hitwise.

Google, of course, remains the most important source of traffic for these verticals and it’s worth noting that even though Bing’s important is growing, it only delivers between 2 and 4% of the upstream traffic for these key industries. To some degree, though, Bing isn’t really interested in delivering this traffic to outside sources and would rather serve its customers by giving them answers right on its own site.

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In addition to confusion over charging that we covered yesterday, a number of other issues have come to light to mar the iPad’s debut.

The most common, according to Apple’s iPad support forums, are weak and intermittent Wi-Fi signals and overheating.

The heat issue might make the beach bums ReadWriteWeb mentioned earlier as early adopters default to other devices – or make the long move to Peter’s Sink, Utah.

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An additional issue is the apparent inability of the iPad to handle IMAP push email from Yahoo and others.

Some of these and other problems may be the normal shaking out process of a hardware launch. Some may be genuine design issues. But some, like the “not charging” messages people were getting yesterday, may turn out to be a result of a multitude of expectations. Some expect it to behave like a phone, others like a laptop computer- and in some ways it does neither. It could be some time before expectations, and limitations, are established.

These issues, again, are rooted in the responsibility of manufacturers in setting those expectations. Were these limitations noted prior to launch? If so, were they not communicated out of a fear of limiting sales?

ReadWriteWeb has been evaluating the iPad extensively. How has your iPad experience been?

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When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr. Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium.

Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead.

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Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following:

“How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what’s now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges.”

Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month.

Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr’s-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of.

Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what’s now called “social media” and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since.

Photo by Beth Kanter.

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