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AltaVista News Makes Some Changes

AltaVista News which I like for some of my research since it has a longer archive than Google News (AltaVista's goes back to July 2001) has made a couple of changes.

AltaVista was using Moreover to stock their news search engine until late June, when they switched over to AlltheWeb's crawler. They have added more sources (they have about 4,000) and have a total of about 9.5 million unique articles in their archives.

I learned about this change via a phone call with AltaVista I had recently. I can't get into everything they told me yet, but I *will* say that I do feel better about the Yahoo acquisition of AltaVista. Stay tuned.

Source: Search Buzz

Jupiter: Search Powers Online Ad Revival

Paid search, which just two years ago represented just over one in every ten dollars spent on Internet advertising, will power an online advertising revival that is poised to make the industry worth $14.8 billion in 2008, according to Jupiter Research.

Jupiter pegs the paid search market as worth $1.6 billion this year, after growing at a 48 percent clip. Over the next five years, the researcher expects spending on search to increase by a compound annual rate of more than 20 percent. In 2008, Jupiter forecasts companies will spend $4.3 billion on search, accounting for 29 percent of the $14.8 billion online advertising market. "Search is definitely driving a near-term online advertising recovery," said David Card, Jupiter Research's vice president and research director. "Search's impact is monstrous."

The research group, which is owned by the parent company of this site, released the findings of its annual online advertising forecast on the first day of the Jupiter/ClickZ AdForum on Wednesday. Jupiter expects traditional display advertising on the Internet will turn the corner in 2003, retreating slightly from 2002, as AOL continues to drag down industry numbers, but growing solidly in the next five years. In 2008, display advertising is forecast to reach $7.1 billion.

Card said online advertising would grow at a fast clip in the next five years, thanks to sites better utilizing inventory and broadband penetration reaching 38 percent of homes in 2008. Online classified advertising is forecast to grow solidly, from $1.6 billion this year to $3.3 billion in 2008.

By 2008, Jupiter expects online will grab 6.1 percent of total advertising spending, up from 3.3 percent this year. While small companies pioneered the search industry, drawn by pay-for-performance deals that fit their modest marketing budgets, Jupiter expects a shift to big-budget advertisers. In its April survey of marketing executives, 82 percent from large companies and 61 percent from smaller companies surveyed by Jupiter said they were poised to bump up their spending on search marketing.

Some signs of this trend have cropped up at search companies. Industry leaders like Google have teams of sales people focused on winning business from large clients in key vertical markets, such as travel and financial services. Even a second-tier player like FindWhat.com recently reported a decline in its advertiser base, as its executives plainly stated that the company was focusing on building its rapport with ad agencies. The attention of big-budget advertisers will drive a growing sophistication in the industry, with improved analytics and optimization techniques. Thanks to these, Jupiter expects the industry's average revenue per click to increase from 27 cents today to 35 cets in 2008.

"As a form of direct-response advertising, search is clearly leading the pack," said Ted Meisel, Overture Services' chief executive, in a keynote address at the conference. One major wildcard for search is the degree search providers can provide local search, which Jupiter says could further increase participation in the industry. Google has made some strides in providing local search listing through creative deals with Mapquest and Weather.com, and CitySearch has its own local search product. Within the next year, Overture Services is expected to roll out its own local search offering, which figures to be integrated deeply in Yahoo!, which recently agreed to acquire Overture.

For the short term, search is poised to overshadow other aspects of online advertising, making up for continued sluggishness in display advertising because marketers see results. According to the executive survey, 74 percent of big-budget marketers rated search marketing as "better" or "much better" than banner ads.

Source: Internet News.com

Google just redesigned its ad-words interface

Google has completely overhauled the user interface (UI) of its pay-per-click internet advertising service AdWords to make it more user friendly, as competition in the search market continues to heat up.

The upgrade, which is currently available in beta version and will replace the existing UI in a couple of weeks, is designed to make managing campaigns easier, with emphasis on ROI and more transparency.

It also includes a number of new features such as campaign loading, account-wide search functionality and the ability to create and download more detailed and personalised reports.

The focus on ease-of-use should make the service more attractive to the mass market, including the vast number of local businesses worldwide, enabling Google to further extend its reach into the fast growing and lucrative pay-per-click market, expected to reach $5bn by 2006. The move will boost Google's understood aim of becoming the worldwide web's equivalent of Yellow Pages.

The company is currently locked in a fierce battle with pay-per-performance rival Overture, which agreed to be acquired by Yahoo! for $1.6bn last week.

Earlier this week, Overture announced a major search deal with US newspaper publisher Knight Ridder to provide both paid search and algorithmic search results to its network of 32 websites for one year, bidding against Google to win the business.

In addition, the company said last week that it won a similar full search service deal, including paid listings and web search, with Canadian portal Sympatico, which was previously a Google customer. Overture has also reportedly won a deal to displace Google for paid listings on UK ISP Freeserve, though this has yet to be confirmed.

However, Google has won its fair share of major deals including Ask Jeeves in the US and UK, and AOL in the US, which it stole from Overture last year. The company has also picked up several major customers for its recently launched contextual advertising product AdSense, including Weather.com and Switchboard, which spawned a rival product from Overture called Content Match.

Source: Net Imperative

Keyword Sponsorship: a rapidly growing field

A recent feature in the Financial Times drew attention to an increasingly popular and attractive form of revenue generation for search engine providers; one that may be little known to many users of search engines.

US Bancorp Piper forecast the revenues from this activity will grow from US$2billion by the end of 2003 to over US$6billion by the end of 2007. Currently 90% of such revenues are generated in the USA. Even by the end of 2007 it is estimated that over 70% of such revenues will still be generated from the USA.

How does key word sponsorship work? Search engines sell the sponsorship of key words to the highest bidder for a specific time period. So, when a search is initiated using that keyword, the advertiser's site appears at the top of the listing of sites derived from the search. Most search engines deploy this subtle form of revenue generation.

Revenue is shared between the site and the company powering the sponsored search. Each time the user clicks through sponsored search links to an e-commerce site, the advertiser pays a small sum. While there is no standard revenue split or distribution between the site and the search engine, anecdotal evidence suggests splits range from 50%/50% search engine provider and the site to 20%/80% search engine provider and the site.

The benefits to the search engine providers and the advertisers are manifestly apparent. It is a new and much needed source of distribution mechanism for the web, which has consistently disappointed forecasts of its velocity of profitable commercial development and revenue exploitation, since inception. It should additionally provide some further impetus to e-commerce.

The benefits to advertisers are equally obvious. The pay offs should be quicker, if only because the click through rate will be quicker, as they are relevant and specific to the searcher. Are there any benefits to the user? For those seeking information, which will result in an e-commerce transaction, this may be more rapid and efficient than an otherwise less structured search.

Do searchers have grounds for regarding this form of sponsorship as "adnoxious"? Certainly, some of the smaller search engines do not specify that the search was paid for, though the larger search organisations do disclose the fact that the search was sponsored in their search results.

There is the temptation by search engines not to rank search results entirely in the order of relevance but to give some prominence based on advertiser revenues. If revenues soar, as forecast from this form of advertising, that temptation will grow. Longer term such conduct would devalue the quality of the search and the reputation of the search engine. The clear leader in this form of revenue generation is the USA. It has the largest constituency of Internet users.

The quality of US Television was ruined early on in its life by the advertisers. Who watches much US Television(!!) We have to hope that the search engines do not allow the web, a very valuable very valuable tool for knowledge enrichment, to be debased by a surfeit of sponsored searches.

Article by Bob McDowall
Source: Bloor Research

Overture Wins Search, Ad Services Deal

Overture Services Inc. on Monday announced a key advertising services and search deal with Knight Ridder Digital, the Internet arm of newspaper publisher Knight Ridder Inc.

The deal is one of the first major search agreements announced by Pasadena, California-based Overture, which in April closed its purchases of two Web search engines. Earlier this month, Overture said it was being acquired by Internet media company Yahoo Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at around $1.6 billion.

Overture, best known for selling ad space linked to Web search results, is locked in an intense rivalry with No. 1 Web search provider Google Inc.

Under the agreement, Overture will provide its full line of services to Knight Ridder Digital for one year.

Overture will be the exclusive provider of both paid-placement search advertising services and Web search results -- business that an Overture spokesman said Google also had worked to win. Overture said it will join Google in providing contextual advertising services to Knight Ridder Digital.

Source: C-Net News

Microsoft boosts MSN to compete with Google

Microsoft is beefing up its MSN search engine to compete with Google, but at the same time has no immediate plans to cancel its agreement for paid search listings with Overture Services, which was recently bought by MSN rival Yahoo.

"MSN Search falls into the category of our [key] businesses," said Lisa Gurry, group product manager for MSN. "We are working on building our own search engine from scratch." While seeking to compete with Google, Microsoft appears to be taking a different approach with Yahoo.

Microsoft, for now, continues to use technology from Yahoo-owned Inktomi for MSN Search and said it had no plans to pull its agreement with Overture for paid search listings on MSN Search. Microsoft appeared to be following a similar course for its commercial search technology as it does with the web search engine. In the long term could develop its own paid listings technology, said Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Microsoft's MSN Personal Services and Business division.

Yahoo announced an agreement to buy Overture earlier this month. Some of Microsoft's work in the web search space has already been noted by website owners, who have spotted an "MSN bot" indexing their websites. However, the MSN Search project is far from done, according to Gurry, who did not detail when the MSN Search should hit the web.

"This is not a short-term project, it is a pretty extensive project," she said. "It is a strategic area for the [MSN] group and we are increasing the number of employees in that area far greater than in any other group in MSN." Microsoft believes web search can be done much better.

"Our research indicates that only 30% to 40% of the web is indexed and that people's questions [to search engines] go unanswered half the time," Gurry said. Analysts with investment bank SoundView Technology Group earlier this year were among the first to report on Microsoft's increased investment in web search.

Source: C-Net News

MSN stays wed to Overture, for now

Microsoft's MSN Web portal will maintain its relationship with paid search partner Overture Services while it explores long-term alternatives, a top executive reaffirmed this week.

Microsoft Vice President Yusuf Mehdi's comments came Thursday at the company's analyst conference, countering speculation that MSN would immediately dump Overture, given that rival Yahoo launched a $1.63 billion bid last week to buy the commercial search provider.

Mehdi said MSN has no plans to end its agreement with Overture, which is slated to provide sponsored text listings within MSN search results through 2004. But he added that in the long term, the portal will consider building its own commercial search operation.

That strategy would mirror Microsoft's approach to algorithmic Web search. When Yahoo bought MSN's Web search partner Inktomi earlier this year, the Microsoft unit did not sever its relationship with the company immediately, as many analysts had expected. But MSN has recently started erecting its own Web search technology, hiring software specialists to build out the service. It has yet to say whether it will replace Inktomi, but many industry observers assume that it will do so.

MSN has outsourcing alliances with search partners such as Overture, Inktomi and LookSmart. With Overture, MSN holds an option to back out of its deal early. According to financial analysts, there is an "out" clause built into the contract that allows the MSN unit to withdraw if Yahoo buys Overture. The clause obliges Overture to pay Microsoft $50 million in the case of a buyout, one analyst said.

Yahoo has hinted that it considered the possibility that Overture might lose MSN as an affiliate partner before announcing its intent to acquire the company. MSN brings in as much as one-third of Overture's annual revenue. This year, its contribution is expected to be $350 million.

Factoring in that potential loss, Yahoo has said it still expects that, by building out the sponsored search results on its network of sites, it will make the Overture deal worthwhile. But it says it plans to fully support the search company's affiliate partnerships.

Story by Stefanie Olsen
Source: C-Net News

Are Business Blogs a passing fad or will they stay?

This question has been raised many times so far and continues to stir a lot of discussions. Major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Google and most of the others crave on fresh and new information and that is frequently updated. Business Blogs consist of many links, written with fresh content that is updated many times a day.

The more search engines like Google find daily and updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit that business blog, resulting in high search engine rankings for a good part of your business blog-powered data. If you still have your doubts on business blogs and are wondering if they are just a passing fad, for your information, in February of 2003, Google bought Blogger, itself a blogging software pioneer. Google publicly said they don't even know how they are going to use the company, but they will certainly have some use for it... (!) (Quoted in the New York Times).

If you are still asking yourself why should your business start a business blog (b-blog), here are a few answers to ponder about:

If you have timely information to share with your customers
If you're unhappy with the results and ROI from banner and email marketing
You would like your web site to have top-ranking positions in Google
Many observers think that blogging is not a fad and will last for a long time

Here is a list you might want to read of the few business benefits of starting a good and serious business blog:

Higher search rankings on Google with no paid-submission
Other search engines will most likely position you higher too
Pay-per-click (PPC) is great but free marketing has infinite ROI
Create visibility with information by sharing with your customers and prospects
Fresh information appears on Google in only a few days, not weeks
Other business bloggers will point prospects towards you for free

Get to know more about Business Blogging by reading Serge Thibodeau Live.

Source: Marketing Fix

Overture sales, advertisers up

Overture Services on Wednesday reported better-than-expected second-quarter revenue as it signed up more advertisers willing to pay for placement in search results.

The commercial search company reported second-quarter net income of $7.6 million, or 12 cents per share, on revenue of $265.3 million. That compares to net income of $17.5 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $152.5 million during the same period of 2002. Analysts had expected the company to earn 6 cents in the second quarter, according to a survey by First Call, which tracks analyst forecasts.

Overture attributed the sales boost to a larger number of "paid introductions"--or the number of times Web surfers clicked on an advertiser's ad--and a rise in the average price advertisers paid for those introductions. The company has also focused on expanding internationally and developing new services for advertisers.

"Our second-quarter results provide clear evidence that we continue to drive the core business while rapidly transforming Overture from a one-product company to a multi-product enterprise operating successfully on a global scale," Overture Chief Ted Meisel said in a statement.

The earnings announcement comes nearly a week after Yahoo said that it will buy the company for about $1.63 billion. With the acquisition, Yahoo will shift from being one of Overture’s biggest portal and search distribution partners to becoming a major player in search-related advertising. Yahoo has reported that Overture provides roughly 19 percent of its revenue.

Overture said its advertisers' links were clicked on 646 million times in the second quarter, compared to 515 million in the comparable period a year ago. In addition, advertisers paid the company an average of 40 cents for each paid introduction during that time, up from 30 cents a year ago and 37 cents in the first quarter of 2003.

The company also said it added 7,000 advertisers in the second quarter, for a total of 95,000. That's up 42 percent from the same period last year and up 8 percent from the first quarter.

Overture has $113 million in unrestricted cash and liquid investments, including cash payments made to complete acquisitions of the Web search unit of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista.

Source: Business Week

Yahoo enhances My Yahoo Enterprise Edition

Yahoo! today announced agreements with Oracle Corporation and Moreover Technologies that will enhance and extend the ability of My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition to bring business critical external content to even more users of corporate portals, intranets, and extranets.

Under the terms of the agreement with Oracle , My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition will now be available through the award-winning Oracle9i Application Server used by more than 16,000 organizations worldwide. This enables enterprise customers to access more than 100 pre-built portlets, featuring content from more than 2000 web and premium news and trade sources.

Through its agreement with Moreover Technologies, a leading provider of real time information management solutions, Yahoo! will add expanded enterprise content from more than 5,500 specialty Internet sites. With nearly 80 percent of workers turning to the Internet for daily information searches*, and corporations' central content buying expenditures reaching approximately $3,500 a year per employee for premium publications and content**, the goal of finding relevant business information has grown increasingly costly in both hours spent by employees and dollars spent by corporate information professionals.

My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition offers a much more affordable solution that delivers real-time business information from thousands of sources directly to corporate portals, such as those built on the Oracle9i Application Server platform. Workers receive information such as company and industry news, company performance and competitive updates in a familiar format that is easy to consume and apply to their daily tasks.

"My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition is about helping people find information faster, managing it more effectively, and ultimately allowing them to be more productive while saving corporate dollars," said Steve Boom, senior vice president, Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions. "Our new relationships with Oracle and Moreover will allow us to aggregate even more Web-based information that can be packaged and delivered directly to business users of one of the world's leading corporate portal platforms." My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition is a complete portal productivity suite of products and integrated services that combines a cost-effective solution for portal administrators and business content buyers. This package includes:

Content Sources: More than 7,500 information sources spanning Yahoo! properties, premium news and trade content and specialty Internet sites. Select industry packages provided through the Gale Group (a business of the Thomson Corporation) provide hundreds of premium business content sources for targeted vertical industries including: Financial Services and Banking, Government and Education, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing, and Technology (Computers, Telecommunications, Internet).

Content Integration: Thousands of information sources are aggregated, normalized, categorized and packaged into familiar My Yahoo! portlets before being directly delivered through a corporate portal to a worker's desktop.

Productivity Tools: Multi-level personalization and integration with Yahoo! Tools (Yahoo! Companion, Mail, Calendar, Maps, etc.) help workers immediately access information and relate that information to daily tasks.

Portal Integration: Pre-integration with leading portal platforms from BEA Systems, Oracle, SAP AG, Sun Microsystems, and TIBCO Software allows for seamless, instant-on access to critical external content through a corporate portal.

"Managing information content is a crucial component of the competitive success of every business," said Anthea Stratigios, President and CEO of Outsell Inc., a research and advisory service specializing in the information content industry. "My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition delivers a high-value, enterprise-class information product that is compelling to anyone responsible for deployment of their company's corporate portal or managing budgets for corporate information purchasing."

Source: c-net news

Ask Jeeves adds Smart Search shortcuts

While Pandia is back in Greece, taking a holiday (Greece being the goddess’ birthplace and all…), Gary Price has been busy adding more search engine news to his ResourceShelf site.

He reports that he has now got a full list of keyword phrases for activating the feature called Smart Answers. These are in essence certain phrases that let you limit your search to certain specialized databases.

Following the philosophy of Ask Jeeves, these are "natural language" phrases, meaning that the search will look like a regular question:

Hence "What is the weather in Paris?" will give you -- ah, well -- the weather in Paris. You may also shorten the query: "weather paris".

There are phrases for weather, pictures, news, zip codes, maps, directions, baby names (!), software, music files, song lyrics, the Oscars, recipes, holidays, capitals, synonyms and more. Click here to read these keywords.

Source: Pandia