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Apple develops content indexing and search technology

Apple Computer focusses on search technology, as it develops a new content indexing and search engine planned for Mac OS X 10.4.

During Steve Jobs's keynote presentation for this week's Worldwide Developer Conference, Jobs took the wraps off the new technology, titled "Spotlight", and compared it with the database file system Microsoft has promised for its 2006 Longhorn release.

Noting that Spotlight and Tiger will arrive a year ahead of Longhorn, Jobs quoted one of the promotional banners Apple had hung outside the auditorium: "Redmond, start your photocopiers."

In some respects, Spotlight resembles a capability originally planned for Mac OS 8 under the name "Live Folders." Like that earlier Apple project, it lets users create "smart folders" based on a query against a metadata index of all the mounted drives on a Tiger system.

But the search engine also works contextually within applications such as Apple's Mail, Address Book and System Preferences—and Apple is giving developers at WWDC a software development kit to help them build Spotlight into their own applications.

Every file stored in the Tiger file system will be mined for metadata and indexed accordingly on the fly, making it instantly searchable by keyword. And developers can add their own metadata definitions—for example, searching on "Wi-Fi" within System Preferences causes the network-settings icon to be highlighted.

Apple also previewed a new visual scripting tool for Tiger, called Automator. The script builder, which currently has a library of more than 100 configurable "actions" it can automate within the Tiger OS and current Mac OS X applications, can also be used to build workflows and tie together application events with custom AppleScript and Unix shell-script macros.

Automator can also drive Spotlight searches and act on their results, automating tasks such as sizing and uploading images found with a user-entered search string.

Developers at the show were generally upbeat about the new features, even if they weren't entirely surprised. "Most of this was expected," said Bo Holst-Christensen, a computer scientist with Cutisan Laboratorium A/S of Denmark. "And some of this [like Spotlight] is old Copland material, so it's about time."

Spotlight "will definitely affect the way we handle the development of our next Macintosh version of our software," said one software engineer from a major cross-platform publishing software company who asked not to be identified. He said his company is focusing on leveraging more of the native elements of Mac OS X in future releases of its applications.

But others who build applications across multiple platforms were less enthused. "There's nothing [Jobs] said that really affects us," said Steve Poole, a development manager at WRQ Inc. of Seattle. "We're doing our cross-platform development with Java."

At the same time, Poole noted, "We've had people make Mac OS their primary development platform. I feel crippled when I sit at a PC now."

Source: eWeek

Ad agencies find SEM challenging

Traditional advertising agencies find that search engine marketing is really difficult. Not only is it more complicated than it would appear, but it's also difficult in making it profitable.

Companies offering keyword bidding tools have lulled some agencies into a false sense of confidence. "Our bidding tool will make search engine marketing effortless," they were told.

What these companies didn't tell the agencies was that they still needed search engine marketing expertise to use these tools effectively to maximize their clients' results.

As a result, many big, traditional ad agencies-and even interactive agencies-hate search engine marketing. Here are the top five reasons why:

1. Achieving profitability in managing clients' paid search advertising is extremely difficult: If you don't use a bid management tool, and if each of your customers doesn't spend in excess of $50K per month on paid search advertising, you won't make money. Period.

Trouble is, even many of the large client companies who employ agencies cannot justify spending more than $3K to $10K per month. The conversions aren't there; the keyword query frequency is not there. Charging a service fee of 20 percent (a typical pricing model for PPC management) on top of a monthly PPC spend of $3K is peanuts for the time necessary to do a good job. But ad agency clients are clamoring for search marketing: they know it works; they know they have to be in the game; and they want their agencies' help. But trying to do SEM is breaking the agencies and they know it.

2. A shortage of skilled SEM practitioners: Employees with even a few years of search engine marketing experience are hard to find and expensive! Most are groomed at search-engine-marketing-only firms. Without experienced staff, an internal training program won't succeed. Without an in-house training program, you won't develop experienced staff-presenting a catch-22.

3. Even "poaching" experts cannot produce superior results: If an agency lures away a few ex-SEM-firm types, they join the agency ill-equipped to deliver results. Much of the intellectual property and knowledge that made them successful were contained in the tools that the SEM specialty firm developed in-house. Most, if not all, of the tools that made these employees efficient, speedy, and successful are not commercially available.

SEM firms have spent the last six to seven years building proprietary tools that provide enormous leverage to staff. These tools evolve and grow with the organization, and because they are enterprise-based application suites, they don't leave with the employee.

4. SEM is so complex it requires singular focus. Performing effective SEM requires practitioners to deal with 10 or so search properties who are always changing database partners, algorithms, PPC bidding rules, and paid inclusion programs. Keeping up on it all requires a dedicated focus. There's a significant learning curve every month. Most agencies are not built to manage that much change, that much data, and constantly evolving best practices, strategies and tactics.

5. SEM requires a commitment to research: The biggest breakthroughs in process improvement come through data intensive research and analysis of linguistics and search engine user behavior. This requires collection of data and results for millions of visitors in a variety of verticals with a variety of online marketing objectives for their sites.

In the same way that most agencies didn't build direct marketing capabilities in the 1970s, because the practice was too data dependent and mathematically based, most agencies do not want to be bothered with the ongoing research and analytics necessary to make SEM effective.

With all this being said, some agencies have decided to partner with SEM firms and are letting the SEM firms have direct client contact. Why? Because there is too much education required for the agency to deliver the work required and yet the agency wants to successfully meet the demands of its clients.

But most agencies still hate search engine marketing. So they can curse the wind or adjust their sails.

Source: Mediapost

Major changes in the local search segment

The Kelsey Group today is slated to deliver an analysis of the major changes that it predicts will happen in the local search segment.

The market research firm anticipates seeing a flow of advertising dollars from small businesses with very small ad budgets, and little to no Web presence.

The report comes on the heels of Overture's introduction Tuesday of Local Match, the Yahoo! company's local search product for advertisers and Web publishers. Recent initiatives by Google, Overture, FindWhat, and interactive Yellow Pages (IYP) provider InfoSpace have shifted the search spotlight somewhat from paid search to local search.

"Local" is the next major advertising keyword expected to open the online media floodgates.

Local media spending in the United States is over $90 billion annually, according to Robert Coen, Universal McCann's senior VP and director of forecasting.

The Kelsey Group says that $22 billion of that spend comes from small- to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs comprise 98 percent of all U.S. companies--some 22 million enterprises. These are the advertisers that the new report--"'Local Match' Expands the reach of Geotargeted Search"--says will be the most difficult to lure online.

According to Kelsey Group analysts and report authors Greg Sterling and Neal Polachek: "Getting advertisers, especially small businesses, to sign on will be at least as challenging as building the back-end technology and getting distribution partners to make the necessary efforts to show consumers the way to a better local online shopping experience."

Sterling notes that paid search is on track to generate $3.5 billion by 2004. By 2008, TKG projects local paid search to reach $2.5 billion. Other research groups, notably Jupiter Research, are less bullish over the revenue prospects of local search, as an air of uncertainty still hovers around the prospect of monetizing local search.

The TKG report notes that the Local Match feature that enables advertisers to build a paid search campaign without a Web site is "the most innovative aspect of the program," and adds that Ingenio and FindWhat are expected to launch similar product extensions in the third quarter.

However, a key question remains as to whether local--and primarily offline--businesses with small ad budgets will adopt local search because of Overture's new product offering.

TKG notes that history is not on Overture's side.

"In all probability, a business that is ready to undertake a search engine marketing campaign, or at least understands its potential benefits, is already going to have a Web site," the report states.

It also indicates that the adoption curve of Internet advertising suggests that a Web site presupposes a paid search marketing campaign; this was true because it was impossible to run a search campaign without one. Essentially, it remains to be seen whether the new product offering will be effective or not.

However, recent data collected by TKG and ConStat, Inc. from the Local Commerce Monitor shows that 61 percent of small businesses are convinced that the Internet "represents a big opportunity to target and acquire new customers."

But local usage is still far from critical mass, according to local search and IYP industry panelists at TKG's "Drilling Down on Local Search Conference" in March. The report states: "Without exception, the panelists, which included executives from Yahoo!, America Online, AskJeeves, and InfoSpace, said that local search still 'wasn't ready for prime time.'"

Report authors Sterling and Polachek note that "organic" growth for local search will take time, although February 2004 TKG data showed a 44 percent increase year-over-year in consumer searches for local business information.

Meanwhile, Overture, Google, and others face the problem of driving sufficient traffic to local advertisers and educating SMEs about the benefits of local search. The report states emphatically: "TKG believes that at some point, somebody's going to need to do some major marketing around local search."

Source: Mediapost

Google needs to fight spyware

Tim Yu, a Stanford University student, recently found that one of his family's computers was infected with a program called "BrowserAid/Featured Results," which was delivering additional and unwanted pop-up ads atop Google results.

He managed to rid the computer of that application, but a similar, unidentifiable program could not be eliminated.

"I removed it from the registry, but this one heals itself," Yu said. Spyware makers, he said, are getting more sophisticated.

And that's a problem for Google, as new strains of spyware attempt to profit from the highly popular search engine and its lucrative pay-per-click advertising program by altering search results pages or delivering pop-up windows with their own lists of text ads.

Spyware is a catchall term for software that installs itself on a PC without consumers' knowledge and that tracks computer usage, sometimes with criminal intent. A related breed of software, adware, is designed for less invasive, but more annoying, delivery of advertisements.

An entire industry of spyware and adware has sprouted up to take advantage of search engine ads, which are the most lucrative and fast-growing sector of online advertising. Sales from search advertising are expected to reach about $3.2 billion this year, up from $2.5 billion last year and just less than $1 billion in 2002, according to research firm eMarketer. Google alone is expected to rake in more than $1 billion from advertising this year.

The problem shows no signs of abating. A recent survey reported that nearly one out of every three computers scanned for Trojan horse programs or monitoring software like spyware was infected, according to security software maker Webroot Software. For some in the U.S. Congress, the threat is serious enough to warrant legislation designed to protect consumers.

Google in particular has drawn the attention of interlopers. Researchers for Lavasoft, which sells the popular spyware detection software Ad-aware, have identified one application that targets Google by altering the display of search results. The spyware, known as "Gloggle.Shing," carries a high threat level, according to Lavasoft, because the software installs itself in stealth mode when people visit certain Web sites, which the company did not name.

DestPatrol, another spyware fighter, has named "BrowserAid," along with many of its variants, as an application that affects search results. According to PestPatrol, the software installs itself via downloads from partner sites and delivers pop-up windows displaying ad links when a person searches at Google.

And at least one publicly traded Internet company is trying to distance itself from yet another spyware maker preying on Google and other major search providers.

LookSmart, an online search and directory service, said it recently investigated its business partners in an attempt to discover which company had disseminated its text ads over those of Google. The partner had apparently linked it to a Web site called Clickthrutracking.com without permission, allowing that site to display LookSmart text ads over the sponsored results of Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, as well as those of Google.

The San Francisco-based company sent a letter in June to all of its partners, aiming to bar them from working with Clickthrutracking.com.

The company would not disclose the name of the offending business partner, which apparently owns the domain Clicktrutracking.com. According to Whois domain name records, the company is called Search Request and is based in Phoenix. Calls to business license authorities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Ariz., do not reflect a company of that name or address operating in the state. The company's Web site is intermittently out of service.

"We have a blacklist of sites that (our partners) won't allow traffic from, and that list includes Clickthrutracking.com," LookSmart spokesman Dakota Sullivan said. "They will screen that traffic out, and if it slips through, we won't pay for the traffic."

LookSmart's temporary link to this distribution partner highlights the reach of spyware across the Internet industry. Untangling from spyware is becoming as hard for Internet businesses as it is for unsuspecting Web surfers.

The ranks of spyware and adware makers are on the rise, because the technology makes it relatively easy for someone to make money. Google, Yahoo and others collect fees from marketers each time people click on sponsored text ads. Marketers buy into the programs and bid for keywords in hope of reaching people who are searching for a particular product or service.

Major search engines and second-tier search providers distribute those text ads to third-party publishers and split the fees with them when people click. So if a spyware maker can arrange to place text ads over popular search engines, it is set to cash in.

"You would not believe the size and scope of the gray market in this arena," said Elliot Noss, president of Tucows, a downloads site. "It runs the gamut from light gray to dark gray."

The complexity of the ad distribution partnerships is illustrated in Yahoo's recent move to provide Web surfers with a tool to block spyware and viruses on the browser.

Yet the toolbar application does not block advertising software like that from controversial company Claria, formerly known as Gator and one of the largest providers of adware. Through its own tool called Search Scout, Claria delivers text ads from Yahoo's Overture Services in a pop-up window when people search on Google. As much as 30 percent of Claria's revenue is derived from Overture.

In another example of the cottage industry, Internet service provider 550Access.com introduced a toolbar in March that blocks certain ads from search results and replaces them with others.

Google also distributes its text ads to questionable areas of the Web through Applied Semantics, a company it bought last year. When Web site visitors type in a misspelled domain name, they might find a page of related sponsored ads from Google.

Google limited its comments for this story, citing its upcoming $2.7 billion initial public offering. But the company pointed to recent guidelines it published on its Web site regarding downloadable PC software and best practices for the industry to notify consumers of their tactics and give them a way to opt out.

Google has a stake in the business as a destination site that can be affected by third parties out to profit from control of the browser.

It's also an application provider that could be affected by legislation meant to ban types of spyware or adware. It develops the Google Toolbar and Deskbar, which help people access search results from a central point on the browser and desktop, respectively. The applications also "phone home" usage data to the company's server if consumers agree to let Google monitor their habits for the sake of improving the service.

Utah and Massachusetts have already enacted laws to restrict types of downloadable software from tracking users and delivering ads. But adware maker WhenU recently contested the Utah law and won a temporary reprieve.

"Google's goal is to provide users with the best search experience," according to a statement on the company's Web site. "We have recently published a set of software principles designed to foster discussion about defining and fighting spyware, and ultimately to contribute to a better user experience online."

Yet Google's IPO prospectus acknowledges--if briefly--the threat facing the company: "New technologies could block our ads, which would harm our business."

Technology experts urge consumers to scan their machines with security or anti-spyware software regularly. Programs they suggest include PestPatrol, Ad-aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy.

"Consumers should be aware of the applications and files residing and running on their machines," said Matt Cobb, vice president of core applications at Internet service provider EarthLink.

Danny Sullivan, editor of industry newsletter Search Engine Watch, said he's had several reports of adware that obstructed Google results over the last six to eight months, and he suspects that there are several different strains.

"The bigger issue is that for advertisers, your paid listings can be distributed in all sorts of ways you don't know about," Sullivan said, "and you may not have a way to discover where they're going."

Source: ZD Net

Overture announces the launch of Local Match

Overture announces the launch of Local Match™, its new sponsored search product which delivers local search listings to consumers searching online for local products and services.

Through Local Match, advertisers can precisely target customers interested in a specific neighborhood and present customized offers and business details to them.

Overture's Local Match listings appear today in the U.S. on Yahoo! and MyCity.com and will be displayed on other popular sites including MSN, ESPN.com and certain sites within the InfoSpace network, including online directory sites Switchboard.com and InfoSpace.com and search sites Dogpile.com, WebCrawler.com, MetaCrawler.com and Excite.com.

Through its strong network of distribution sites, Local Match offers advertisers of all sizes -- including businesses that do not have a Web site -- the opportunity to reach consumers searching online for products and services in the advertiser's local area.

"Overture has built upon its core sponsored search product to deliver a highly relevant and precise local offering to businesses of all sizes, whether they have a Web site or not," said Geoff Stevens, General Manager, Local for Overture.

"The launch of Local Match marks yet another addition to our growing suite of integrated sponsored search offerings. As the product evolves, we are confident that both advertisers and consumers will realize the significant value of the highly targeted marketing and incredibly relevant search experience enabled by Local Match."

"Local search represents a very significant opportunity for both small and large advertisers, as consumers go online to find local business information," said Greg Sterling, program director for The Kelsey Group.

"Our research shows that slightly more than 25% of commercial searches performed by online buyers today are local, and we expect that figure to grow over time as local search capabilities continue to improve."

Local Match enables advertisers of all sizes to precisely target customers who are searching the Web to find products and services from a local provider. Specifically, advertisers have the ability to pinpoint a geographic area surrounding their business (between 0.5 to 100 miles) in which they would like their search listing to be shown.

For example, an electronics store in Austin, Texas could choose to have its listings displayed only to users searching for "DVD player" within a five-mile radius of its location. Similarly, a large national consumer electronics retailer could use Local Match to tailor its listings and discounts to customers who are looking to purchase items at specific local stores.

In addition, for businesses that do not have a Web site, Local Match provides a customizable business information page that offers key details about their business, such as a street address, phone number, payment options, hours of operation and a dynamic map.

Local Match is available today in the United States directly through Overture (http://www.overture.com) and will also be offered through select directory partners and online marketplaces.

Source: ZD Net

Yahoo-Trillian conflict has users very angry

As the Instant Messaging wars escalate again, consumers are claiming they're the casualties.

Yahoo on Wednesday evening began blocking third-party instant messaging clients in what it claimed was a "pre-emptive" action against IM spam, or "spim."

Just a few hours after Yahoo changed its instant messenger protocols, Cerulean Studios issued a patch to allow users of its popular Trillian software to connect again with users of Yahoo's messaging program.

For people who use popular third-party messaging clients such as Cerulean's Trillian, or smaller services such as Gaim, the reaction was instantaneous and negative. Speculation began flying about whether battling spim, currently a minor issue, was Yahoo's true intention.

"This is just Yahoo's attempt to stifle progress," one person wrote on CNET News.com's message board. "Trillian brings the IM worlds together. Why does (Yahoo) keep splitting it apart and saying it's to increase 'security' on their network?"

Regardless of intention, Yahoo's management of its IM network preserves the network's exclusivity. Like Yahoo's service, other major messaging services such as America Online's AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's MSN Messenger are proprietary networks that cannot communicate with competing systems. People who have contacts on different IM services must launch multiple messaging clients to talk to everybody.

Historic battles between the Big Three of Internet services have been ugly. In 1999, AOL and Microsoft engaged in a public spat after MSN Messenger launched with the ability to chat with AIM users. AOL considered Microsoft's action a "hack" into their systems and blocked MSN.

Microsoft eventually relented, but the block would later haunt AOL. A coalition of companies led by Microsoft launched an aggressive lobbying campaign to point out AOL's unfair IM market dominance when AOL was trying to acquire Time Warner. Yahoo was part of that coalition.

What Trillian and other third-party providers do is combine multiple buddy lists under a common interface. But that interface means Yahoo, AOL and MSN can't differentiate themselves via features such as emoticons. They also can't serve advertisements or direct users to other areas of their site networks.

"I don't think security is the biggest driver behind this" decision, said Genelle Hung, an analyst at market researcher The Radicati Group. "It's not something that Yahoo is really as concerned about as keeping its user base loyal."

Yahoo remained firm with its assertion that third-party providers are a spim threat to Yahoo Messenger users.

"Spammers are being aided by entities that are accessing our systems without our consent," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako.

A Cerulean representative did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Some analysts support Yahoo's decision. They point out that though spim remains a minor problem, e-mail in its early days also saw few issues with spam.

But the spam problem has gotten worse every year. E-mail providers such as ISPs and Web sites have been forced to devote significant resources to battling spam and filing lawsuits against alleged spammers. Consumers themselves have clamored for companies to do more to battle the problem.

"By the time spim becomes a problem, there's not much to do about it," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Media. "You're in reactive mode."

One developer who works on Gaim, an open-source IM integrator like Trillian, expressed dismay that its users were blocked. Still, he supported Yahoo's move to stop spim before it starts.

"If Yahoo's motives are true, if they are honestly trying to help solve a spam problem, more power to them," Christian Hammond, a Gaim developer, said in an e-mail response.

In the meantime, Yahoo's Osako said consumers will see "frequent protocol changes" should third parties continue hurdling its blocks. In the meantime, angry Trillian users will keep pointing fingers at the Web giant and claiming foul.

"They should be honest with the public and explain (that) their beef with third-party software is potential lost advertising revenue, rather than pretending it is part of some noble antispam quest," wrote another News.com message board contributor.

Source: C-Net News

Microsoft will improve its search capabilities for July

Microsoft plans to improve its search capabilities from July, as it looks to compete with heavyweights Google and Yahoo, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said today.

Gates told a media briefing in Sydney the company had "several milestones with its search site" on the way.

"In July, the format of the site will change -- and so will the quality of what you get -- and the way it'll look is dramatically improved," Gates said.

"It'll be later this year that we actually roll out what's entirely our own back end driving the search".

Gates said the way search was currently done was "very low-tech," based around taking "a bunch of words and making an index.

"You're not actually understanding the documents and so some of the false hits you get are almost humourous," he told journalists. "A human would not make those mistakes because a human can understand the document".

Gates said Microsoft had been doing linguistic research for more than a decade "that actually lets us parse and understand documents.

"That's where you can bring in the idea, don't show this person a restaurant if it's not nearby [or] don't show this person something about … potato chips if they mean computer chips.

Gates said search moving forward encompassed personalisation, understanding local information, being able to parse in to the semantics of a document, being able to browse databases and being able to attach domain knowledge.

"Say if I want to know if a flight is on time. "Generic Web search today is actually terrible for that, but we should be able to look at your query and say hey, that's a flight number and give a response that's basically just a direct answer to the question, not a list of random Web sites".

He described Google and Microsoft as being "fairly unique" in the way they both hired a lot of computer science Phds. "So the rate of improvement between us and them will be highly beneficial to the consumer as we compete".

Source: ZD Net

AOL signs agreement to acquire Advertising.com

America Online, a unit of Time Warner, said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Advertising.com, a provider of interactive marketing services, in a $435 million all-cash transaction.

Advertising.com operates the industry's largest third-party advertising network, reaching more than 110 million visitors monthly and over 70 percent of all U.S. Web visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix in May 2004.

The company's revenues increased almost 80 percent in 2003 to reach $132 million, and 2003 income from operations was $12.1 million.

Advertising.com will remain in Baltimore and will be managed as a separate company reporting to Michael J. Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks. The company has more than 300 employees and operates principally in the United States, with operations in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

America Online expects to close the transaction in late summer 2004, subject to regulatory approvals.

Advertising.com works with more than 800 advertisers to optimize the performance of their online marketing campaigns through proprietary ad delivery and optimization tools.

Advertising.com also works with more than 1,500 online publishers by providing a large and consistent customer base for their available advertising inventory and by licensing its ad serving technologies.

Jonathan Miller, chairman and CEO of America Online, said, "Advertising.com has built a profitable, scalable and highly attractive business. This acquisition is a strategic move that will bolster AOL's advertising business, building on the strides made in the past year."

Source: Forbes.com

Merrill Lynch drops out of Google's IPO

Merrill Lynch dropped out of the list of underwriters taking part in the upcoming initial public offering of Google, mostly out of concern that the fees it would generate wouldn't be worth it.

Early Monday, Google, the Internet search engine based in Mountain View, California, disclosed that Merrill Lynch wouldn't be one of the firms that would allow clients to bid for shares in Google's initial public offering, which is being led by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston.

It was Merrill Lynch that decided to take a pass, according to people familiar with the syndicate put together to sell the shares, because of the amount of money Merrill Lynch stood to take in from customers who were awarded allocations.

"The fees are too thin," said one institutional investor who is a client of Merrill Lynch and other firms planning to sell shares in the deal. "It wasn't worth the trouble."

A Merrill Lynch spokeswoman declined comment. Underwriters who don't get the coveted lead role in an IPO often settle for far less in fees than other banks. Typically, companies going public pay about 7 percent of the size of the offering in fees, and most of that goes to the lead underwriters. Other firms in the syndicate of banks get less in fees, but also distribute fewer shares.

Google's IPO, though, is anything but conventional. The company has insisted on an auction-style sale for its shares, and, though fees haven't been disclosed, they're likely to be low even for the lead underwriters, let alone those lower down the list of bankers. Instead of a 7 percent fee, some bankers believe the total fee could be around 3 percent.

What's more, other firms involved in the deal could, in theory, handle the sale of more shares than the lead underwriters if a lower-level firm's clients bid at the right price and right size to win shares. That could mean those lower-tier firms are handling more of the risk in placing the shares and paying more of the administrative costs of handling the offering, and getting paid less than other firms.

Source: Taiwan News.com

Lycos receives 4 offers for its US portal Lycos

Spanish Internet firm Terra Lycos has received four offers for its U.S. portal Lycos, a company source said on Tuesday.

"We are weighing the sale of Lycos. No decision has been taken yet but Terra has four offers and we expect a decision will be taken in the short term," the source told Reuters without giving further details.

Terra, a subsidiary of Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, bought Lycos for $12.5 billion in an all stock deal in May 2000, near the height of the Internet boom. Its book value today is 75 million euros ($91 million).

Terra, Europe's third largest Internet service provider, posted first quarter earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of 0.7 million euros, its second quarter of positive EBITDA after years of losses.

It expects to make its first net profit next year. Despite the huge drop in Lycos's value since Terra bought it, the sale of the U.S. unit could have a positive effect on Terra's earnings as the Spanish firm wrote off goodwill on the initial purchase in 2002, the source said.

The same source said Terra does not plan to make an offer to buy out small shareholders and delist the stock in the short term.

Telefonica, which owns 75 percent of Terra, launched a bid for 100 percent of the Internet firm last year but had to abandon the full takeover as small shareholders were reluctant to part with their Terra stock at the price offered.

Lycos is undergoing a restructuring to turn itself into a paying subscription site. It said in February the process would affect 20 percent of its staff in the United States.

At that time, it had 420 U.S. staff. The company source also confirmed media reports that Terra would increase the services it offers through an accord with search engine leader Google Inc.

The source did not give any further details on the proposed deal. The source said the accord would increase Terra's revenues and help it reach its objective of a positive operating result this year and a net profit in 2005.

Shares in Terra Lycos were up 0.8 percent at 4.97 euros at 0940 GMT.

Source: F-T.com

Google might publicly release some of its software code

Google is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code, only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float.

The revelation comes as Google considers Melbourne for the home of a regional research and development centre in an effort to triple its global workforce over the next 12 months.

The time has come for Google to "give something back", Wayne Rosing, the company's vice-president of engineering, told students while on a recruiting drive in Melbourne last week.

"There have been a lot of conversations in the company in the past two months about (how) . . . it's time for us to give something back. So our technical director, Craig Silverstein, has started a project to look at all the Google code and start figuring out what parts of it we want to give back," Rosing said.

"I'm not saying we're going to open-source Google, because that would be a little dumb when we have these Microsoft guys making noise," he said, referring to the practice of giving away the raw computer instructions to a software program.

He says it isn't fair for Google to draw smart people from all over the world and "just keep it all for ourselves".

"We need to have the tools out in the universities so the next generation can build on our work, too."

Google is making a policy decision to be more open, said Craig Nevill-Manning, director of engineering at the New York office, the other Google visitor.

"We're encouraging the software engineers to submit papers where it makes sense, particularly where it is landmark work and it is really important that other people know," Nevill-Manning said.

Rosing and Nevill-Manning were on a whirlwind recruitment drive, canvassing postgraduate students from RMIT and Melbourne University on Thursday night before presenting a seminar on Friday.

Google was in town to "assess the local talent", Rosing told the Thursday night gathering. "We could consider opening and looking for sites here. We're looking for a critical mass of talented people."

His audience was mainly software engineering students but the address also attracted some linguistics and statistics students - as well as those who sneaked out of work early in search of a new job with the dotcom star.

Later, Rosing told delegates he was using the night to gauge the viability of a local office and was "very excited" about the turnout of more than 200 people - the same number Google attracted to a similar night in New York.

He said Google will triple its workforce from, 700 to 2100, during the next 12 months.

The next day it was standing room only as Nevill-Manning addressed a 360-seat lecture theatre packed with Australia's industry and academic digerati - including representatives from Microsoft, Sensis and CSIRO - crammed alongside eager postgraduate students.

Google's consideration of an Australian research presence is "another tick in the box for Australia", said Australian Computer Society president Edward Mandla.

"Google is one of the companies that is leading in technology, and I think young Australians who are studying want to get their hands on the latest technologies and help develop the latest technologies.

"We've got to attract multinational companies here to set up research centres and to take advantage of Australia."

Victoria's Minister for Information and Communication Technology, Marsha Thomson, says Google's interest in Melbourne proves Victoria's ICT industry is on the right track.

"The recent Meta report found that Australia was second to India in attracting offshoring work from the US, and Google's interest is confirmation that we are achieving our goal of having a highly skilled ICT workforce," she says.

Source: F-2 Network

Harder to distinguish between regular and paid results?

There will soon be a report published by a consumer panel that concludes searchers find it harder to distinguish between paid pay-per-click text ads and regular (organic) search results.

In a discussion on "Building Trust on the Web" under the Consumer WebWatch's April summit on Web credibility, Leslie Marable of Consumer WebWatch told that according to one study of April last year 60 percent of the consumers they polled "had no idea that some search engines charged fees in exchange for prominent placement of search results."

It should be added that since then several search engines have started designating their pay-per-click search results more clearly, not at least because of pressure from the American Federal Trade Commission. This was clearly one of the reasons Consumer WebWatch commissioned a new study.

The new study is not based on a phone survey like the previous one. Instead Consumer Webwatch has opted for an anthropological/ethnographical in-depth study of 17 people.

It turns out that all participants were surprised when they learned about pay for placement -- even the more "advanced" Web users.

Search sites often mark paid results as "sponsored". One participant noted that "A sponsor is someone who gives money to support programs," and he did clearly not read this to mean "paid text ads".

This is not a representative survey. You need more than 17 respondents to achieve that. Still, we would not be surprised if a majority of searchers are unable to distinguish between pay-per-click text ads and regular search results -- especially when the text is formatted and presented in a similar way.

Does it matter? Well, a cynic may argue that "what they do not not won't hurt them" -- as long as they find relevant results that is.

Both Overture and Google AdWords spend a lot of resources on ensuring that the paid text ads actually are relevant -- not only to avoid complaints from organizations like the Consumer WebWatch, but also in order to make advertisers happy. Relevant text ads results in more click-throughs and higher conversion rates.

But there is also the question of credibility. If this marks the start of a new debate on the legitimacy of pay-per-click text ads, the search sites may get hurt, as these ads have become one of their most important sources of revenue.

Moreover, the success of a site like Google is built on a good reputation, and Google cannot afford to loose that.

Google has actually done a lot to distinguish the text ads from regular search results, placing them i colored text boxes set apart from the rest of the listings. However, they are still called "Sponsored Links".

So why don't they just call the adverts "Adverts"? Our guess is that they are afraid that this will cause a drop in click-throughs and lower revenue.

In the long run, however, the risk of more bad publicity may make that a more sensible option.

The searchers may like it as well. This especially applies to those that are searching for information instead of goods and services. People who want to know more about how to grow a lush lawn are not always looking for fertilizer.

Source: Pandia

Yahoo launches Chinese-language search portal

Yahoo launched a Chinese-language search portal on Monday, following Google's lead for a stronger foothold in one of the world's biggest Internet markets.

The introduction of Yahoo's new Web site, www.yisou.com, follows Google's acquisition last week of a minority stake in Baidu.com Inc., China's biggest independent Internet search engine and one of Google's strongest rivals here.

"Yahoo believes the introduction of Yisou will help extend our reach into the rapidly growing search market in China," David Lu, Yahoo North Asia's vice president of search and marketplace, said in a statement.

Yahoo China already has a Chinese search company, 3721, which it acquired last year for $120 million.

Google has offered Chinese-language searches since 2000 and is hugely popular among China's more than 80 million Internet users --the world's second biggest Internet market after the U.S.

Source: The New Nation

Ask Jeeves adds site preview tool

Search portal Ask Jeeves expands its Smart Search capabilities and adds site preview tool called Binoculars, making it easier and faster for users to find information.

The company has expanded its Smart Search features, which enable users to conduct more effective searches by helping narrow, broaden or more directly answer user queries.

Smart Search uses Ask Jeeves' combination of everyday language and structured-data search technologies.

Ask Jeeves' also introduced Binoculars, a patent-pending site preview tool, currently in beta launch, which enables users to preview their search results before clicking through to visit the end pages themselves.

The company said that a study conducted by VeriTest, a unit of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., concluded that Binoculars reduced the number of clicks required to find relevant results by 50-70 percent per search.

Source: Click Z

Find.com launches as a new business search engine

Find.com is a business search engine that delivers search results from three different types of sources.

Results from business sites that charge for their content, such as Gallup and Frost & Sullivan, appear at the top of the search results pages.

Users can then buy the content. Results from a list of 3,000 business sites appear in the free organic listings, along with results from a variety of search engines.

Find.com, a search engine designed for business professionals, was launched in beta this week by partners FIND/SVP, Empire Media and TripleHop Technologies.

"This is in line with the trend toward specialization we've seen over the last 6 to 12 months," said Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media, a search marketing firm. "We've had quite a bit of success with alternative or vertical search engines because they reach such a specific audience."

Find.com also has implemented an innovative navigational scheme that's reminiscent of that used by clustering firm Vivisimo.

"In the upper-left-hand corner is a graphic you can use to organize results by topic and source, putting them into an organizational structure that makes the most sense for the user," Hershberg said.

Results can also be organized using tabs perched directly above the search box. Clicking on the "Research" tab causes only search results from the premium business sites, those charging for their content, to be displayed. "News" displays only news stories, "Directory" produces a searchable listing of sites by category from the open directory, and "Web" produces results from all three sources.

Established research and consulting firm FIND/SVP picked the paid subscription sites used for premium content, as well as the 3,000 business sites used for the free listings.

These sites, along with a number of search engines, are indexed by TripleHop Technologies. The third partner in the Find.com enterprise is Empire Media. This company will organize the advertising sales on the site, both sales done directly by Find.com itself and sales from third-party sales organizations. Empire will also do outbound marketing, advertising Find.com via channels including print and online.

Empire and FIND/SVP each own 47.5 percent of the business, with TripleHop taking the balance.

In developing Find.com, the partners relied on the results of a FIND/SVP study that 52 percent of business professionals are only "somewhat confident" that standard search results come from credible sources. The Internet study surveyed a random sample of about 300 professionals in April and May.

"Users can trust the results they find on Find.com because they come from trustworthy sources," said Chris Travers, CEO of Empire Media. "You can feel confident putting the information in a business plan, using it in a presentation to a client or showing it to your CEO."

There are two components to the site's revenue model, Travers said. When a user clicks on one of the premium listings displayed at the top of the search results, an intermediary Find.com page appears through which the content can be purchased. Find.com gets a cut of the revenue.

The site will also use advertising in multiple forms. Currently, sponsored listings from Clicksor are displayed on the right-hand side of the page.

However, the site will soon sell its own sponsored links using technology vendor Zedo, Travers said. "We will work with them to deploy keyword-based advertising," he said. The company will also work with two or three other keyword and contextual advertising groups, which Travers would not name. He did say that IndustryBrains "will be adding contextual advertising for us."

Also, Empire has a co-registration business, and is now investigating the possibility of using co-registration on Find.com, Travers said. He said the company has seen interest from advertisers but would not name any specific advertisers who might be coming on board.

"Their premium research is interesting because it's occupying the same space where we're used to seeing sponsored listings," said Hershberg, who felt this was a good idea.

Source: Click Z

Google considering support for RSS news feeds

Search engine giant Google is perceived at renewing its support for the popular RSS news feeds format in some of its search services, marking the latest turn in a standards war over technology.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets online publishers automatically send Web content to subscribers, giving readers a powerful tool to compile news headlines on the fly from several sources at once.

Next to Atom, which launched as a challenger last year, RSS has become a leading candidate to form the basis of an industry standard for an entirely new style of Web publishing.

In January, Google seemingly chose sides, bypassing RSS support for most subscribers of its Blogger publishing tool in favor of rival Atom. But now, there are signs that Google may be poised for a change of heart, as support has grown inside the company to restore equal footing to both formats.

According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.

"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.

As of June 4, it appeared no decision had yet been made on the issue. A Google representative declined to comment.

Were Google to support both RSS and Atom equally, it might help ease growing pains for a swiftly rising movement of Web publishing. It would also restore Google to the status of a neutral party in the midst of a bitter fight between backers of RSS and Atom, who have been divided since last summer when critics of RSS banded together to create the alternative format. Since then, many blog sites and individuals have rallied behind Atom.

Google is central to the debate because of its mounting influence in the online community and within Web publishing circles as the owner of Blogger.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which is gearing up for a $2.7 billion initial public offering later this year, recently redesigned Blogger with simplified features to help newbie Web surfers publish regular accounts of their lives online, a move to appeal to wider audiences.

Google also has plans to introduce a raft of community services, including e-mail discussion groups (Google Groups 2), free Web-based e-mail and search personalization tools, which could eventually tap the syndication format.

A slew of feed readers or news aggregators has emerged to take advantage of the technology and spur consumer demand. Newsgator, for example, lets people subscribe to various Web logs and news sites and have the feeds delivered to their e-mail via a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, at a cost of $29.

Topix.net lets people parse news into 150,000 different categories, even down to a ZIP code, and create their own information site. Pluck recently released a set of browser add-ons for Microsoft's Internet Explorer with an RSS reader. Many news readers support both RSS and Atom, although some support only one or the other.

Despite the fissure, RSS has been gaining allegiance among many computer makers and online publishers. In recent weeks, Time magazine, Reuters, Variety.com and Smartmoney.com have started supporting the format, syndicating their headlines to news aggregators and individuals.

In January, Yahoo started testing RSS feeds, allowing visitors for the first time to create personalized MyYahoo pages with automatic news feeds from third parties of their choice. Yahoo also supports Atom feeds. Computer companies including Microsoft, Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems also support RSS.

Two major versions of RSS currently exist. They are known as RDF Site Summary and Rich Site Summary, respectively.

The technology is becoming more important because it essentially allows Web surfers to get information how and when they want it, without surfing to Web sites.

People can set up a Web page and aggregate headlines from multiple sites, and click only on those that interest them. Publishers are embracing the technology to drive more traffic to their sites, amidst media overdrive on the Web. Many publishers and advertisers are even evaluating ways to make money from syndicating news feeds with ads or sponsorships. For example, publishers could seed advertisements into RSS and Atom news feeds.

Yet without interoperability between the news readers, consumers could eventually hit a brick wall. If a publisher's syndicated news feeds are available only in one format, then the consumer using another would have to install an updated news reader.

"From a layman's perspective, if this is going to move out of the geek space, these two warring parties need to come together and realize it's the applications that will determine the standard," said Charlene Li, principal analyst for Forrester Research. "It shouldn't be polarized into a Betamax vs. VHS discussion."

RSS was developed as a Web scripting format in the late '90s by a team of Netscape engineers and eventually came under the domain of Dave Winer's blog software company, Userland, when Netscape's RSS team disbanded.

Last year, Winer transferred the format to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where he is a fellow. RSS is also now available for use under a "creative commons" license, which frees it from commercial copyright claims.

Sam Ruby, an IBM software engineer, launched Atom last summer as a way of bypassing what he and other critics called Winer's de facto control over RSS. Industry watchers say the format is more robust than RSS, with more tagging capabilities in syndication, and is more promising because it's on a fast track to becoming an open standard.

Atom backers have proceeded with plans to bring their technology under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Detractors of RSS argue that the format is closed because it is essentially governed by one man, Winer.

In May, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced a proposal for a new IETF Atom publishing format and working group under the IETF. Ruby and others have said that the working group would draw on the experience of RSS to help create a single, interoperable format. Ruby could not immediately be reached for comment.

Winer himself has lobbied for a merger of the rival formats, in part because of concern that Google's dominance would influence a greater split in the Web publishing industry.

In a worst-case scenario, Winer described how in the future, people might need to download two different news reader applications to compile headlines from publications supporting competing formats.

Winer said that he's asked the company repeatedly to get behind RSS and quell confusion over competing formats, with no answer.

The "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would coalesce, but then things started to fragment, largely due to Google," Winer said. "RSS deserves Google's respect, and it's not getting it."

Source: C-Net News

Wanadoo not clearly identifying sponsored links

French ISP Wanadoo argued before the UK's Advertising Standards Authority that all sponsored links at its web site were clearly identified as being delivered by Overture, by a link at the foot of each sponsored search result.

Freeserve plc has been told by an advertising watchdog that search results on its web site, now re-branded as Wanadoo, must clearly identify sponsored links following a complaint that its rankings are based on the sums paid to search advertising company Overture, not relevance.

Clicking the Overture link would open a window with the following text:

-- "Overture ranks its Advertiser Listings based on the amount the Websites bid, with the highest bid amount at the top of the search listings. Websites pay Overture the amount shown on www.uk.overture.com next to the Advertiser Listing, when a user clicks through to their Website."

The ISP said the sponsored results were all checked manually for relevance to the search criteria and the most relevant results always appeared first. It argued that because advertisers had to pay each time a consumer clicked on their search entry, it was in their interests to appear only in relevant search results.

A visit to uk.overture.com reveals that Singers Outdoor bid up to 30 pence per click-through, eBay 26 pence and LXDirect.com 25 pence.

The ISP said it did not believe its web site was misleading or its search results were less relevant because they showed sponsored links first. It said it would add a link to its search page that consumers could use to find more information about how its search engine service worked and how results were ranked.

But it seems that this promise was insufficient for the ASA, which became involved following a complaint from the head of web design firm 2-Minute-Website.com. “I contacted the ASA on behalf of all our small business clients”, said Managing Director, Andrew Ellam.

“Since they pay less than a hundred pounds to get their website, they can’t afford to spend hundreds on advertising - and they shouldn’t have to," he continued. "Consumers are likely to be fooled into thinking these adverts are unbiased search results, and small businesses who should appear in the listings are suffering”.

The ASA noted that each sponsored link on Freeserve's site had a hyperlink to an explanatory pop-up box and sponsored links were identified by the Overture hyperlink.

However, because sponsored links were not clearly identified by a headline or title, and the search page did not contain an explanation of the purpose of the hyperlink, it considered that consumers were unlikely to realise that the Overture hyperlink indicated that results were sponsored and concluded that "consumers could be misled."

It asked the ISP to ensure that sponsored links were clearly identified in future.

This follows the CAP Code, the ASA's rule book, which states that "marketing communications" should be "designed and presented in such a way that it is clear that they are marketing communications". Another rules states that marketers "should make clear that advertisement features are advertisements, for example by heading them 'advertisement feature'."

The ruling is a clear endorsement of Google's approach: Overture's biggest rival clearly marks all 'sponsored links' in search results as such.

This UK ruling will likely be of less concern to Overture itself. Its biggest search partner is its parent company, Yahoo!, and a search on Yahoo!'s UK site already separates 'Sponsored Results' from 'Web Results'.

While the ASA ruling is in the name of Freeserve plc, the brand launched by High Street retailer Dixons, the ISP was re-branded as Wanadoo in April. Wanadoo, part of France Telecom, bought Freeserve for £1.6 billion in December 2000. The complaint to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority was made two months before the re-branding.

A spokesperson for Wanadoo told OUT-LAW.COM that the company is looking into today's ruling "with interest" but that the company has no further comment at this time.

ASA spokesperson Donna Mitchell said consumers "need to know when advertising is advertising" and warned that today's ruling applies to the industry as a whole. "Anyone who doesn't currently clearly identify their sponsored links should do so now," she said.

Andrew Ellam said he has contacted the ASA about a number of other UK search engines and asked it to issue UK guidelines to correspond with those in the US, where the Federal Trade Commission demands that search sites make ‘clear and conspicuous disclosure’ when advertisers have paid to appear in their results.

Ellam said that a check of the UK's top 20 search sites indicates that 13 may have similar problems to Wanadoo.

Source: Out Law.com

Yahoo cancels corporate instant messaging

The cancellation of Yahoo Messenger Enterprise Edition marks the end of the Web portal's now-defunct enterprise software division.

The unit was created in 2000 to sell customized Web portals and video conferencing services for internal use in corporations. But in October 2003, Yahoo scrapped the division and melded its businesses with their consumer counterparts.

Yahoo confirmed on Thursday that it is no longer selling a version of its popular instant-messaging service for corporations, ending the Web portal's attempt to sell IM as a software package.

In an informal interview earlier this week, Yahoo's Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe said the enterprise instant messenger was shelved, because Yahoo is largely a consumer company and not structured to take on the kind of support tasks and other responsibilities that come with selling corporate software.

The move will consolidate Yahoo's consumer and enterprise products into one product package.

"We have reorganized our instant-messaging business to optimize our ability to leverage the Yahoo network, whether our customers are at work or at home," Lisa Pollock Mann, senior director of Yahoo Messenger, said in a statement.

A Yahoo representative declined to comment Thursday on when the company had stopped selling the service.

To the Big Three Web portals--Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and America Online--selling IM to companies has sounded like a good idea. The companies all offer popular, free IM clients that millions of Internet users have downloaded. IM technology lets people exchange messages in real time, and it has evolved features that let users play games, make phone calls and hold video conferences.

Instant messaging has made its way into companies as well. Some 85 percent of all enterprises in North America use a form of IM in their networks, according to a survey by research firm The Radicati Group. This penetration was mainly spurred by employees downloading Yahoo, AOL or MSN software to keep in touch with personal and professional contacts.

However, IM flourished in businesses without the oversight of corporate information technology departments, leaving many system administrators concerned about IM's safety against viruses. Some industries regulated by the federal government, such as the financial services and health care industries, are concerned that the use of IM in their offices might violate compliance or privacy laws.

The Big Three saw in this an opportunity to sell adapted versions of their free service to companies. The revamped software included features such as conversation logging, authentication and identity management. The companies also partnered with third parties such as IMLogic and Facetime Communications to add these applications to their IM products.

But consumer Web companies often have a hard time becoming enterprise software vendors, some industry watchers have noted.

"The market has shown that you cannot bring continuity from the consumer market to the enterprise market," said David Gurle, an executive vice president of Reuters Messaging. "You need to think about the enterprise market very differently than the consumer market, which doesn't pay you directly."

In addition, experienced vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun offering their own IM products through their established sales channels.

Like Yahoo, AOL has retrenched its enterprise IM division. It has opted instead to sell add-ons such as video conferencing for a fee. Microsoft has focused less on MSN Messenger and more on its Live Communications Server--which combines IM, Net phone calling and video conferencing--as its enterprise communications product.

Source: C-Net News

Adsense program extended to smaller businesses

Google yesterday extended its Adsense program to smaller businesses and is also testing a new "enhanced" search tool that provides web publishers with a flexible search tool to reflect the content of the site.

Adsense was previously offered exclusively to larger websites and portals that achieved a certain amount of web impressions, such as AOL and BellSouth. Now any web publisher can apply for the programme at www.google.com/adsense/.

Adsense delivers targeted text and image ads to websites, with Google sharing the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher. The search tool is hosted by Google and requires no additional resources from the publisher.

These search results pages can also be customised with logos specified by the publisher and colour schemes that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of queries, clicks, click through rate, and earnings through a web-based account interface.

Google also announced it is trailing a 'Site-Flavoured Google Search'. The tool allows web publishers to select from a variety of categories to specify the interests that describe their website.

For instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.

Source: Net Imperative

Traffix acquires SendTraffic.com

Traffix today announces that it has signed an agreement to purchase all of the assets of SendTraffic.com, a search engine marketing company.

Formed in 1999 by Messrs. Greg Byrnes and Craig Handleman, SendTraffic has been recognized as one of the top search engine marketing firms.

SendTraffic provides full service search engine marketing solutions to over 100 clients. During its five year operating history, SendTraffic has established strong working relationships with the major search engines and portals, including Google, MSN, Overture, FindWhat, Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves and LookSmart.

SendTraffic maintains a "Certified Ambassador" status with Overture, and is a member of the Google Research Board.

Traffix reported that it expects SendTraffic to generate approximately $10 million in revenue and $1 million of EBITDA (1) in the next twelve months. In calendar 2003, SendTraffic generated revenue of approximately $5 million and an adjusted EBITDA of approximately $300,000.

Traffix expects to close the transaction on or about July 1, 2004. Traffix believes that the acquisition will be immediately accretive to Traffix's future earnings per share.

The Company also noted that after the closing of the SendTraffic transaction, it will still have cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet of over $33 million.

Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, dated June 9th, 2004, Traffix will purchase all of the assets (including net working capital of approximately $500,000) of SendTraffic at the closing for $5.43 million, comprised of $1.68 million in Traffix common stock, and $3.75 million in cash.

In addition, Traffix agreed to pay SendTraffic a contingent earnout of $2.5 million if SendTraffic generates EBITDA of $3.75 million in the first year following the closing, an additional $2.5 million if SendTraffic generates EBITDA of $4.75 million in the second year following the closing, and an additional $2.5 million if SendTraffic generates EBITDA of $5.75 million in the third year following the closing.

If SendTraffic generates certain lower agreed upon annual EBITDA benchmarks, Traffix will pay a portion of the contingent earnout payments. The contingent payments, if any are earned, may be paid 50% in cash and 50% in stock, with the share price determined on or about the time of their issuance.

In connection with the acquisition by Traffix, both of the founders of SendTraffic, Greg Byrnes and Craig Handleman, have agreed to enter into five-year employment contracts.

Commenting on the transaction, Mr. Jeffrey Schwartz, Chairman and CEO of Traffix stated, "Management has spent a lot of time trying to identify a meaningful acquisition that can add value to Traffix. We believe that SendTraffic fits that profile for a number of reasons.

First of all, the founders of SendTraffic, Greg Byrnes and Craig Handleman, built this company from their own hard labor with no third party capital. They are some of the most knowledgeable operators that we have met in the search engine marketing industry.

We interviewed a number of their competitors, clients and vendors and their reputation was stellar. Second, we believe there is a lot of potential synergy between the companies, since many of Traffix's current clients would likely use the SendTraffic services, and many of SendTraffic's clients may use Traffix's customer acquisition programs.

Interestingly, there is virtually no overlap in our respective client bases. Equally as important, SendTraffic should be able to enhance the growth of many of Traffix's current web properties through increased search engine traffic.

For example, SendTraffic and Traffix are currently collaborating on programs that will capitalize on some of the huge volumes of unsold search engine inventory. Finally, we believe that the purchase price and earnout formula represent fair and reasonable consideration for this business, and are not based on aggressive valuation multiples."

Commenting on the potential of the SendTraffic business, Mr. Schwartz stated, "We believe that SendTraffic has tremendous growth potential to add new clients from the thousands of businesses that have not begun to tap into the use of search engines for marketing.

Virtually any company can benefit from using search engine marketing if they are aligned with an industry expert such as SendTraffic. Furthermore, this type of growth is not capital intensive."

Mr. Greg Byrnes, co-founder and co-owner of SendTraffic, stated, "It was not an easy decision for Craig and me to sell the business. Frankly, we feel that by merging it with Traffix, we will be able to tap their tremendous resources and marketing expertise so that we can take this business to the next level.

We are very excited because we see so many opportunities to grow our business with Traffix. These guys have proven themselves with over 10 years of profitable operations in all forms of direct marketing media."

He added, "Collectively, we see the search engine industry as one of the most effective direct marketing media created to date. Overall, we are thrilled to be joining the Traffix family."

Mr. Joshua B. Gillon, Executive Vice President of Traffix added, "Traffix seeks to expand its business through sales of products and services sold directly to consumers, and through media properties that we use to generate sales and leads for our clients.

The acquisition of SendTraffic represents an important extension of our on-line media reach. Traffix will continue to seek other acquisition opportunities while it works to organically grow its current business."

Source: Personal Computer World

The BBC will make its archives available soon

The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming.

The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users.

The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing. It will debut with natural-history programming, including clips that focus on plants, animals and birds.

"The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation," said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. "It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works."

Other organizations, including some small music publishers in the United States, have begun to offer their content to users under liberal licensing terms.

In contrast to record companies and Hollywood -- which are trying to lock down their content with help from legislators -- these organizations believe that liberal licensing terms will generate even more interest in their content.

In fact, in the BBC's case, access to its programming archive is part of its charter. In the United Kingdom, anyone who owns a television must pay a BBC-allocated fee, so the public owns its programming.

In the past, the BBC has not been efficient at making its archives accessible, Le Dieu said, but the Internet makes it much easier. In addition, digital distribution and editing tools now enable audiences to modify the content for their own creative endeavors.

The BBC archive would only be available to British citizens who pay the yearly TV license fee. Anyone who tries to visit the site through a foreign IP address won't be allowed to log on, Le Dieu said.

She said the BBC is working on ironing out various legal and contractual issues. The BBC plans to license its materials using a system similar to Creative Commons, an American organization that has developed a set of flexible copyright licenses for creators of digital content.

But clearing the rights is a significant challenge. Some clips contain elements like musical soundtracks, which may require getting permission from the copyright holders.

"Much of our programming is interspersed with other programming owned by other people," Le Dieu said. "We completely understand the audience's interest in getting the full programming. We're trying to balance that desire with the rights of the (content) ownership."

Those technical and legal challenges may render the archive incomplete, some fear.

"We want to make sure that the archive is more than just shagging marmots," said David Tannenbaum, coordinator for the Union for the Public Domain. "There's been no public discussion of how they are going to get beyond these nature clips."

Tannenbaum said the group hopes to build support to change the BBC's charter in 2006, when it comes up for review, so that the BBC will commit more fully to open access. Also, the group wants the BBC to clear rights with other copyright holders in its future contracts, so that the BBC can freely distribute other producers' works.

But observers expect commercial broadcasters to oppose the archive and the expansion of liberal licensing efforts, arguing that they cannot compete with free programming.

"We hope that by getting this into the charter, that people within the BBC will be able to stand up to the objections that get raised as time goes by," said Cory Doctorow, European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"They will have the ammunition they need to say, 'This is exactly what the BBC is there for: to really move public broadcasting into the next century and define what public broadcasting looks like in an Internet world.'"

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, said the BBC's plan would help the world understand that there is more at stake in the copyright war than "piracy."

"If the archive succeeds ... then that will drive demand for computers, broadband and software to enable that creativity," he said. "Businesses -- beyond the content industry -- will recognize just what's at stake."

The BBC hopes others will follow its lead. "We hope that we can provide a model so other rights holders can do something similar," Le Dieu said.

Source: Wired News

Akamai disruption affected Google, Yahoo and Microsoft

A DNS service outage at Akamai Technologies prevented access to some of the Internet's major Web sites Tuesday, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, according to The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center.

The DNS (domain name system) servers that content hosting company Akamai uses to host DNS services for some customers stopped responding at around 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time in the U.S., leaving Web surfers who were trying to reach those sites high and dry, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer at the Internet Storm Center.

Andy Ellis, Akamai's chief security architect, declined to comment on Tuesday, but did not deny that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company was experiencing problems.

An Akamai spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Akamai offers an "Enhanced DNS" service, in which customers use Akamai's network of DNS servers to resolve Internet requests for their domain, such as Google.com. The distributed, worldwide network of servers is marketed by Akamai as a more stable and robust solution than internally managed DNS servers, which are susceptible to failure or attack.

However, users began reporting problems Tuesday reaching popular sites, like Google.com and Yahoo.com, that use the service. The Internet Storm Center received reports of troubles from across the world, including Asia and South America, Ullrich said.

An investigation into the problem revealed that Akamai's DNS servers were not responding to requests. The problem appeared to affect the company's worldwide network of DNS servers, suggesting that the problem may have been with caused by a problem within Akamai rather than an external attack on its DNS servers, Ullrich said.

"It could be anything -- somebody tripping on an power cord. I think an attack is unlikely, unless somebody was able to hit a central control node," he said.

While some Internet users were prevented from reaching the affected sites during the outage, others were unaffected, due to the distributed nature of the DNS infrastructure.

DNS, which translates reader-friendly names like "Yahoo.com" into numeric Internet Protocol addresses used on the Internet, is a tree-like structure of distributed servers, each with its own frequently-updated list of server and domain addresses.

Problems in one part of the DNS system often do not affect other parts of the infrastructure for hours, or more, Ullrich said.

The hiccup in Akamai's service is the second in less than a month. In May, a software glitch slowed Akamai servers used to host customer Web pages and other information, making it difficult to reach some of its customers' Web sites for around 90 minutes, Akamai acknowledged.

Akamai blamed that service interruption on a bug in content management software that Akamai customers use to update content on Akamai servers, said Jeff Young, an Akamai spokesman.

Yahoo.com, Google.com and Microsoft.com were all reachable again within two hours of the reported interruption.

Source: IDG News Services

Yahoo Takes On Google with E-Mail Storage Offering

Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO - news) has rolled out a new e-mail product designed to compete with Google's forthcoming Gmail offering and dark horse Lycos' similar service, which made its surprising debut last month.

New features include 100-megabytes of free storage -- 25 times more than Yahoo's prior offering. Premium customers, including subscribers to SBC Yahoo! Dial and DSL, will have virtually unlimited storage at 2 gigabytes, or 200 times the amount offered by most other Internet service providers, according to Yahoo.

The company also has redesigned its e-mail page: It now includes new search capabilities, and graphical ads from Yahoo! Mail Plus and SBC Yahoo! Mail have been removed. And Yahoo is opening up over 50 million Yahoo IDs to give consumers more address options for their e-mail accounts.

Market Moves

Yahoo's plans initially were reported at a corporate meeting last month. Shortly thereafter, Lycos jumped the gun with a similar e-mail offering, albeit at different price points. The concept of free, near-unlimited storage first was introduced, though, by Google, as it announced its Gmail offering with great fanfare.

"The Internet-portal and search-engine market, in general, is becoming increasingly competitive just in the last six months," Yankee Group analyst Patrick Mahoney told NewsFactor. "All of them are looking for any way to differentiate themselves to garner more customers or keep current customers satisfied."

Indeed, within the space of a few months, free e-mail with unlimited storage has become the de facto minimum standard for Internet content providers, such as Yahoo, AOL (NYSE: AOL - news) and Google -- much to their chagrin, no doubt. E-mail accounts, at one time, were considered a revenue source for these providers, Mahoney noted. The premium accounts still will be, of course, but given the storage available in the free accounts now, the paying accounts will represent a much smaller portion of revenue.

Pay IM

Even this model may change once again. Online consumer and business products, such as e-mail or instant messaging, are in a constant state of flux as Yahoo, Google, AOL and others seek ways to make Internet services pay. For example, AOL is hoping to turn its instant-messaging product into a paying concern by attaching value-added services and marketing the enhanced product to business.

AOL recently launched AIM Business Services, a voice and Web-conferencing product it has developed through partnerships with technology providers Lightbridge and WebEx, respectively.

AOL can use AIM as a launch pad for conferencing, drawing more corporate customers, IDC research manager Robert Mahowald told NewsFactor, noting that Yahoo has Business Messenger, a similar product that offers the same WebEx conferencing technology.

The difference between the two offerings is that any AOL AIM customer can use the business services, while Yahoo requires users to sign up separately for its business messaging service and charges a subscription fee.

Erika Morphy, www.newsfactor.com

Yahoo cancels corporate instant messaging

The cancellation of Yahoo Messenger Enterprise Edition marks the end of the Web portal's now-defunct enterprise software division.

The unit was created in 2000 to sell customized Web portals and video conferencing services for internal use in corporations. But in October 2003, Yahoo scrapped the division and melded its businesses with their consumer counterparts.

Yahoo confirmed on Thursday that it is no longer selling a version of its popular instant-messaging service for corporations, ending the Web portal's attempt to sell IM as a software package.

In an informal interview earlier this week, Yahoo's Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe said the enterprise instant messenger was shelved, because Yahoo is largely a consumer company and not structured to take on the kind of support tasks and other responsibilities that come with selling corporate software.

The move will consolidate Yahoo's consumer and enterprise products into one product package.

"We have reorganized our instant-messaging business to optimize our ability to leverage the Yahoo network, whether our customers are at work or at home," Lisa Pollock Mann, senior director of Yahoo Messenger, said in a statement.

A Yahoo representative declined to comment Thursday on when the company had stopped selling the service.

To the Big Three Web portals--Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and America Online--selling IM to companies has sounded like a good idea. The companies all offer popular, free IM clients that millions of Internet users have downloaded. IM technology lets people exchange messages in real time, and it has evolved features that let users play games, make phone calls and hold video conferences.

Instant messaging has made its way into companies as well. Some 85 percent of all enterprises in North America use a form of IM in their networks, according to a survey by research firm The Radicati Group. This penetration was mainly spurred by employees downloading Yahoo, AOL or MSN software to keep in touch with personal and professional contacts.

However, IM flourished in businesses without the oversight of corporate information technology departments, leaving many system administrators concerned about IM's safety against viruses. Some industries regulated by the federal government, such as the financial services and health care industries, are concerned that the use of IM in their offices might violate compliance or privacy laws.

The Big Three saw in this an opportunity to sell adapted versions of their free service to companies. The revamped software included features such as conversation logging, authentication and identity management. The companies also partnered with third parties such as IMLogic and Facetime Communications to add these applications to their IM products.

But consumer Web companies often have a hard time becoming enterprise software vendors, some industry watchers have noted.

"The market has shown that you cannot bring continuity from the consumer market to the enterprise market," said David Gurle, an executive vice president of Reuters Messaging. "You need to think about the enterprise market very differently than the consumer market, which doesn't pay you directly."

In addition, experienced vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have begun offering their own IM products through their established sales channels.

Like Yahoo, AOL has retrenched its enterprise IM division. It has opted instead to sell add-ons such as video conferencing for a fee. Microsoft has focused less on MSN Messenger and more on its Live Communications Server--which combines IM, Net phone calling and video conferencing--as its enterprise communications product.

Source: C-Net News

Adsense program extended to smaller businesses

Google yesterday extended its Adsense program to smaller businesses and is also testing a new "enhanced" search tool that provides web publishers with a flexible search tool to reflect the content of the site.

Adsense was previously offered exclusively to larger websites and portals that achieved a certain amount of web impressions, such as AOL and BellSouth. Now any web publisher can apply for the programme at www.google.com/adsense/.

Adsense delivers targeted text and image ads to websites, with Google sharing the revenue generated from ad clicks with the web publisher. The search tool is hosted by Google and requires no additional resources from the publisher.

These search results pages can also be customised with logos specified by the publisher and colour schemes that complement the website. Web publishers can also track the number of queries, clicks, click through rate, and earnings through a web-based account interface.

Google also announced it is trailing a 'Site-Flavoured Google Search'. The tool allows web publishers to select from a variety of categories to specify the interests that describe their website.

For instance, a computer site owner might select [computers > hardware] to describe their site. A user searching for the word "mouse" from that site will see results more relevant to the computer peripheral than the animal.

Source: Net Imperative

Yahoo to hire PR agency for promotion

Revolver Communications, TheFishCanSing, Cow PR and Naked Communications are the PR agencies understood to be about to lock a contract with Yahoo.

PRWeek understands that Yahoo! is prepared to spend up to £2m on activity coordinated by the selected agency. The account will involve non-traditional PR, such as guerrilla marketing and event-based promotional work, and an appointment is expected within weeks.

It is understood that the focus of the promotional activity will be a single major event that is set to take place in England later this year.

The communications blitz will aid Yahoo!'s bid to compete with market-leader Google in the internet search market. Yahoo! wants to become the number-one global provider of search.

The internet company currently retains Cow to handle its consumer PR and Revolver to promote its Yahoo! Personals service.

A Yahoo! spokesman confirmed that 'meetings' were ongoing with agencies. He declined to comment on the fees of the planned PR contract.

The spokesman stressed that the company's pre-existing contracts with PR and marketing agencies -- such as Cohn & Wolfe, which handles corporate PR and press office work for Yahoo! Personals -- were not being reviewed.

Yahoo! is investing heavily to strengthen its search engine capabilities, having bought paid-for search companies Inktomi and Overture and French online shopping comparison service Kelkoo within the past 12 months.

It is understood that Yahoo! UK & Ireland marketing director Yonca Brunini is planning imminent further discussions with the four agencies battling for the new account and that head of PR Georga Douglas and PR manager Jon Wayth are also involved in the review.

Source: Digital Bulletin

Yahoo Ups E-Mail Storage Allowance

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) on Tuesday made good on its promise of a month ago and boosted the storage allowance for users of its free and for-fee E-mail services.

In a move to pre-empt Google's Gmail, the search site's announced-but-not-yet-final E-mail service that started the arms race in the Web-based mail space by offering 1 Gbyte of storage, Yahoo handed out 100 Mbytes of storage space to all users of its free E-mail and boosted storage for premium customers to 2 Gbytes.

Previously, users of the for-free version of Yahoo Mail were limited to just 4 Mbytes. With the capacity expansion, Yahoo is also allowing users to send and receive files as large as 10 Mbytes.

Paying customers, including subscribers to SBC Yahoo Dial and DSL Internet services, which Yahoo co-markets with SBC Communications Inc., have "virtually unlimited storage," Yahoo said. For $19.99 annually, Yahoo Mail Plus provides 2 Gbytes of storage space.

Yahoo also introduced a new design to the Yahoo Mail interface, increased search speed, and put back into circulation more than 50 million long-dormant Yahoo E-mail addresses so users can sniff out a better or shorter address.

The move is in reaction to Gmail, a free Web-based E-mail service that Google is still testing. One of Gmail's most-touted features is a 1-Gbyte storage allowance.

Auction theorists figuring out Google's new IPO

As Wall Street and some investors gear up for Google's US $ 2.7 billion initial public offering of shares, an obscure group of academics known as auction theorists are already trying to figure out the best way to get a piece of the action.

The internet search engine's plan to go public through an auction has captured the attention of these researchers, who analyse bidding mechanics. That means they anticipate how bidders will behave, how much they are likely to spend and whether winners pay too much.

Legg Mason portfolio manager Bill Miller, who is considering bidding for Google shares, has consulted two such theorists. Even Google consulted one of the best-known auction theorists - essentially odds-makers who analyse the best strategies for making a winning bid.

"I'm becoming very popular," says Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, who specialises in auction theory at Columbia University's business school in New York.

Under the system outlined so far by Google, investors will register with investment banks underwriting the offering, indicating how many shares they want and the price they are willing to pay. Google and its bankers will consider the bids and other factors to determine a "clearing price" at which all of the bids could be sold. Anyone bidding below the clearing price won't get any shares.

Auction theory is related to the serious study of games in which researchers use economics, mathematics and psychology to assess the way people make decisions. And they aren't just finding ways to win at poker: game theory has been used to study financial markets, war strategies and airport-landing fees.

Auction theory is playing a role in big business, too. In 1994, auction theorists from Stanford University in California helped the Federal Communications Commission set up rules for an auction to sell wireless spectrum worth $US20billion. Energy companies have consulted auction theorists when bidding on foreign oil leases. In 1996, Columbia University's William Vickrey won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research on auctions.

Auction theorists find Google intriguing because so many individuals are expected to bid. By pursuing an auction, Google is shunning the traditional IPO model in which professional investors buy most of the newly issued stock.

A pool of bidders that includes professionals and individuals means there is more of a chance some will bid too high, say auction theorists. Furthermore, individuals are unlikely to use the same criteria to analyse Google's value as professional investors, they say. Also there are bound to be different views of Google's value depending on how long the shares will be held.

"It's an unusual situation," says Paul Milgrom, a Stanford auction theorist who recently discussed the process with Google executives. He declined to talk about the meeting, citing a confidentiality agreement.

Like most auctions, one of the biggest risks is what is known as "the winner's curse", an outcome in which a bidder triumphs by overpaying.

"We only have bits of auction theory about how people behave in these situations, so this is a unique opportunity in that sense - it's a $US3 billion experiment," says John Miller, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Source: F2 Network

Microsoft looking at new filtering technology

Microsoft has unveiled a research project at its Silicon Valley campus which uses statistical analysis to locate spam web pages.

Microsoft will be incorporating this new filtering technology into its forthcoming MSN Search portal, aiming to offer results free of web spam.

A spam web page is designed solely to fool search engines by linking keywords to web pages that the spammer wants to show up high in the search results.

Spammers are increasingly trying to weasel their way into search engine results, and Microsoft hopes that filtering them out can be one area where its tool can outshine Google's.

"This will be part of the [upcoming] Microsoft search," researcher Marc Najork told vnunet.com.

Microsoft has so far given little detail about its MSN Search project, which is designed to compete head on with Google. The new search technology is scheduled to be available this year.

In a sample of one billion web pages, Microsoft claims that eight per cent are spam.

In one case, the Microsoft researchers claim to have found a webpage in Germany that would constantly create pages filled with pieces of text that were copied from random web pages, linked to a porn site.

This not only leads visitors away from the webpage from which the text was copied, but gives the spammer an indefinite source of keywords and key phrases to link to.

The researchers found the site after their analysis identified that German web pages on average were updated more often than those in other geographies.

Source: Personal Computer World

Google takes minority stake in search engine Baidu

Robin Li, Baidu's chief executive, confirmed reports that Google was among a group of foreign investors included in a recent overseas fund-raising by the privately held Chinese company.

But Li would not say how much was raised or how many shares the investors held.

Expanding its reach overseas, Internet search company Google Inc. has taken a minority stake in a leading Chinese-language search company, Baidu.com Inc., the Chinese company said Tuesday.

"Google does not have a controlling stake," Li told journalists in a conference call from the company's headquarters in Beijing.

Phone calls to Google were not immediately returned. Privately-held Google is planning to list its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange later this year. Industry and Chinese media reports have said Baidu is also planning to list its shares on the Nasdaq. Li refused comment on share listing plans. "My board has not authorized me to disclose any such information," he said.

Baidu is China's biggest independent Internet search engine and is one of Google's strongest rivals in China. Its music search tool is considered one of the country's best.

But it faces growing competition both from other Chinese search engines, such as Sohu.com, and from foreign giants like Google and Yahoo, which has an alliance with Beijing 3721 via a Hong Kong partner of the Chinese Internet service provider.

"From Google's perspective, it saw Yahoo acquiring 3721 and may have felt prompted to make a move," said Duncan Clark, managing director of the BDA China Ltd. consultancy in Beijing.

"Increasingly, they're going head-to-head in China," he said. Li said Baidu was hoping its alliance with the California-based search engine giant would help improve the Chinese company's technology, build up its brand name and expand its market share.

"We're both competitors and partners," he said. "Baidu has a better understanding of the Chinese market, and we hope to reinforce that advantage with the money raised overseas."

Google's investment in Baidu does not include management, Li said. "Google is a strategic investor. We don't have cooperation in operations at this stage," he said. "We keep our independence in management. Google does not have a seat on our board."

China's government strives to control online access to information and Web sites it deems politically sensitive or otherwise unacceptable. Yet, use of the Internet has continued to climb as the country embraces computers and other high-tech accessories.

Google is hugely popular among China's more than 80 million Internet users because of its wide-ranging search capacity. It has a Chinese-language search site, and launched its AdWords online advertising in Chinese in February, seeking to expand its own market share in the fast-growing market.

Most of Baidu's revenues come from companies that pay to be listed on its site.

Li said that for now, Baidu does not plan to build its own English-language Web site, although it might consider Korean and Japanese in the future.

"China is a huge market. For now, we'll concentrate on expanding here," Li said.

In Chinese, Baidu means "a hundred times," a phrase taken from a Song dynasty love poem. Li, who attended university in the United States and worked in Internet-related jobs before returning home, founded the company in 1999.

According to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other U.S. newspapers, Google helped lead Baidu's recent fund-raising round with venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures.

Li denied that the fund-raising had brought in $10 million, as reported, but refused to give a figure.

Source: Seattle PI.com

Ask Jeeves offers graphical peek at their search results

Ask Jeeves is currently conducting limited tests of a new search preview feature, offering searchers a graphical peek at their results.

Search result pages reflecting the trial feature were discovered by Andy Beal, VP of search marketing for WebSourced and editor of search-focused blog Search Engine Lowdown.

An Ask Jeeves screen grab posted on Beal's blog reveals a page of search results in which a tiny set of binoculars appears next to each link. Rolling over the binoculars causes an image preview of the linked-to page to appear.

Further searches on Ask Jeeves did not turn up the graphical preview feature, but technology companies commonly test new features on a subset of Web site visitors.

Ask Jeeves representatives declined to comment on any wide rollout of a "look ahead" feature, saying it regularly conducts trials of new product ideas that may or may not be pursued.

"In the normal course of product development, Ask Jeeves tests products with a limited number of users from time to time," said an Ask Jeeves spokesperson. "Andy simply stumbled across one of these tests, but we have no product announcements in this regard at this time."

A graphic preview such as that being tested by Ask Jeeves offers users the benefit of no-click peek at the Web content that lies beyond a search engine's results page.

Catching such a glimpse into landing pages could shorten the time it takes searchers to find relevant results, as they wouldn't have to load an entire page's content to assess its relevancy. The method would also decrease surfers' reliance on the back button when they encounter non-relevant content.

New York-based Viewpoint Corporation is offering similar "graphically enhanced search" technology in the form of a toolbar plug-in. It launched in March 2004, and uses search results from Yahoo! Canada's Smartdevil has long been pushing graphical previews, which it calls Thumbshots, in Web search results.

Source: Click Z

Ask Jeeves says acquisition of Tukaroo is good strategy

Ask Jeeves's acquisition of software startup Tukaroo is an example of the kind of small transactions the company expects to continue to make, CFO Steve Sordello said.

Small buys like this one, which was announced Wednesday, won't affect the company's financial results but are "strategically important" as it works to strengthen its technology position for the search industry's coming battles, Sordello told a New York conference.

Ask Jeeves, of Emeryville, Calif., will acquire the assets of closely held Tukaroo, a San Jose, Calif., startup which develops specialized search software. Tukaroo was incorporated in 2003 and has not yet released any products on the market.

Terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is significant because it gives Ask Jeeves technology to allow consumers to quickly search for e-mails and files on their computers' hard drives.

Ask Jeeves' rivals are rushing into this area. Terra Lycos, the Internet unit of Spain's Telefonica SA, in March launched HotBot Desktop, free software that does that, besides handling Web searches.

Analysts and search-software makers who have talked with Google say they expect the company to release it's own desktop search tool before long.

Microsoft Corp.'s new search technology, expected later this year, will include improved ways of combing the hard drives of PCs. Microsoft is also building such functions into the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due around 2006.

In January, Tukaroo said it had completed technology for fast searches of files on a user's hard drive, local networks, and the Internet. It said it had developed so-called toolbar software to run on a user's computer.

Tukaroo also said it had come up with a new, better way to organize search results and a system to serve up advertisements to users.

Tukaroo was founded by Creighton Chong and Jeffrey Sidlosky, who have joined Ask Jeeves' staff.

Sordello told a conference hosted by Deutsche Bank that Ask Jeeves believes that technology will become an "even more critical component" of a competitive equation that also includes a fight for user traffic and advertisers targeting those users.

Ask Jeeves, which is now the No. 7 Web property based on users, has proprietary search technology, but gets advertisers through a partnership with Google.

Shares of Ask Jeeves closed at $38.45, down $2.17, or 5.3 percent, Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Ask Jeeves acquires Tukaroo

Ask Jeeves has acquired all of the assets of Tukaroo Inc., a San Jose-based desktop search technology company.

"Since the 2001 acquisition of the Teoma search engine, Ask Jeeves' strategy has been to build or acquire differentiated, next-generation, and best-in-class products or technologies," said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves Inc.

"We expect that Tukaroo's desktop search and information management capabilities will enable Ask Jeeves to deliver a seamless, end-to-end search experience across the desktop and the Internet."

Tukaroo Inc., founded in 2003 in San Jose, California, is a privately held corporation.

Its unique desktop search and file management software enables consumers to access, view and manage their information in real time.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Hollywood.com to be powered by Thunderstone

Thunderstone Software announced its sale of a search system for the Hollywood.com website.

Thunderstone's Webinator product will provide an up-to-date indexing of around one million movie reviews, entertainment listings, and related information appearing on the re-designed new and improved Hollywood.com web site.

Webinator is one of the original web-search software products, introduced in 1995 and now in major release 5. Webinator powers search features for many hundreds of web sites in many languages around the world.

Hollywood.com is one of the leading movie-related sites on the Internet, featuring movie reviews, showtimes listings, entertainment news, and an extensive multimedia library. Hollywood.com serves more than one billion web pages annually.

"We found Webinator the best technology for searching our content under our requirements," said Laurie S. Silvers, President of Hollywood.com. "Its many advanced features were crucial, such as its ability to reindex fast-changing subsets of the site quickly, and its ability to crawl through JavaScript links. Our site structure is somewhat complicated but Webinator handles it beautifully."

Thunderstone's general manager, John Turnbull, said: "We built many features into Webinator to optimize it for indexing large complex web sites. We're happy to see that effort put to good use on Hollywood.com."

Thunderstone's Webinator is available in a variety of configurations including a free version.

Source: Thunderstone

Overture signs deal with News Interactive

Yahoo subsidiary Overture Australia has signed a deal with News Interactive, to provide advertising and search services to the News websites.

The sites include news.com.au, CareerOne, realestate.com.au and websites for newspapers such as The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Courier Mail.

News Interactive managing director Nic Jones said his company was the first internet network in Australia to implement Overture's entire online marketing suite.

"We believe that our agreement with Overture will set a precedent for the Australian industry," Mr Jones said in a statement.

"By combining the expertise of both our companies we will capture significant value in one of the fastest-growing online advertising markets".

Overture Australia managing director Mel Bohse said Overture's distribution network now reached 85 per cent of Australian internet users.

Source: SMH.com.au

Froogle creating controversy

Search engine Google placed its reputation as the Web's first search engine, delivering relevant and fast search results, untouched by humans, or so it seems.

But with Father's Day approaching, Google Inc. is experimenting by promoting its own shopping site ahead of other online search results and ads.

That has prompted criticism from some industry experts who say that the giant search engine company appears to be compromising the unusually high standards that it has set for itself just as it prepares to sell stock to the public.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, said this was the first time he had noticed Google promoting its shopping service, named Froogle, by placing it at the top of the list of advertiser-supported search results.

For example, when computer users typed the phrase "Father's Day gifts" into Google earlier this week, Froogle often came up as the first listing. Google previously has said its ad rankings were based entirely on formulas combining the prices paid for ads and the popularity of Web sites among searchers.

"It is weird when Google shoves its own stuff in there," Sullivan said. "It is wrong, in that Google has taken a spot an advertiser was expecting to get. If you are an advertiser, you have a right to be upset. They ought to come up with something better."

Google declined comment about the recent promotion, citing the quiet period companies customarily enter leading up to their initial public offerings of stock.

Federal securities laws prohibit companies from saying anything that would hype the offering during the quiet period. Google has recently taken a liberal approach to that directive, talking openly about a number of new product initiatives, though it has been careful to avoid making revenue projections.

In another recent practice that is drawing criticism, Google manually altered the mathematically generated search results for certain products -- such as golf clubs -- that might typically be purchased as gifts for Father's Day so that the first thing coming up in a search under ads was a link to Froogle.

In this case, Google did not identify Froogle by name, choosing instead to label the result under the heading "Product Search Results." Only when users clicked on the link did they find it led to Froogle.

While Google considers this an experiment, some industry analysts said it appears to violate Google's own standards about disclosure and its description of how search results are derived. Andy Beal, vice president of WebSourced Inc., a search engine marketing firm, called Google's practice misleading since it makes it appear that the Froogle link came up because of its relevance, rather than because Google officials decided to list it on the top.

"If Google thinks there is nothing wrong with showing Froogle at the top, why are they not clearly labeling it?" Beal asked. "They should at least have a button that explains what it is and where these results are coming from."

Google's practice contrasts with that of Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) Type "Father's Day" in its search engine, and the first results that come back are labeled "Inside Yahoo" to distinguish them from search results for the rest of the Web.

"Google does hold itself to higher standards, and they are vocal about trying to establish guidelines and standards for others to live by," Beal said. "A case in point was their recent guidelines about software. If Google is going to set the standards, then by Google's own definition, they should have those results labeled as Froogle, and make it clear what those results are for."

Other industry experts said they saw nothing wrong with Google's promotion of Froogle, noting that the company was simply attempting to provide computer users with the most useful links for buying gifts. Fredrick Marckini, chief executive of iProspect.com Inc., a search engine marketing firm, said that with product searches becoming a more important task for search engines, Google is making life easier for online shoppers.

If Google decides to routinely favor Froogle in directing people where to go when they shop, Marckini said online retailers may be forced to take Froogle more seriously, marketing their wares through the service as they do on the search engine. Google allows businesses to list their products for free on Froogle. Google will apparently seek to profit from Froogle, as from its main site, primarily by selling ads.

"They seem to be true to their word. I don't think this is inconsistent with anything they have said," Marckini said of Google. "I think they are doing it in a clear attempt to improve the value of their search results."

Dennis Pushkin, chief executive of marketing firm MoreVisibility.com Inc., said Google appears to be laying the foundation to ramp up Froogle, which has been in a test phase, and make it an engine of profit. While Google is immensely popular and enormously profitable, its Froogle service is relatively small compared with other Internet sites and search engines specializing in product comparison, Pushkin said.

"This is the next stage of Google, and they are presenting the beginning of Froogle," Pushkin said. "The advertiser in due course is going to have the opportunity to advertise on Froogle."

Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor's, said Google needs to develop Froogle and other services if it is to continue growing amid heightened competition.

An April survey commissioned by S&P showed that Google remained the undisputed leader in search and that Yahoo was a distant second. Among 1,000 people surveyed, 48 percent said they used Google most, followed by Yahoo (20 percent), MSN (14 percent) and AOL (7 percent). Kessler said that it is likely the gap between Google and the others will narrow and that the leading search engines will increasingly come to resemble one another.

"We think Google will have difficulty replicating Yahoo's success in consumer content and services," Kessler wrote in a new research report. "With Froogle, Google has extended its search capabilities to comparative shopping.

But users of Google search somewhat less for information about products and services than those of other major search services. While Froogle is an application, Yahoo offers similar search functionality, as well as browsing capabilities, a shopping marketplace, and payment offerings."

Source: Yahoo News

A rebirth of Internet advertising

Is online advertising undergoing a rebirth? Some might argue it is, first spurred by paid search advertising, then contextual ads and adware placements.

Now, there is another new game in town, if the buzz-o-meter is any indication. While not altogether new, behavioral advertising is getting more play than ever, perhaps because it’s now being married with every marketer’s favorite word: targeting.

Is behavioral targeting really all that? Let’s take a closer look.

The Process
One basic premise in marketing is that to more effectively sell your product or service, you should understand how your customers’ minds work. What do they like to see? What do they want to hear? What do they like to do? And can you determine these things with as little time and money as possible? Now there are technologies that *can* easily establish these answers quickly and effectively to give you an at-a-glance picture of behavioral targeting to these consumers.

Behavioral targeting technologies work by anonymously monitoring and tracking the content read and sites visted by a designated unique user or IP as that user surfs the Internet.

This is done by serving tracking codes, which are implemented as cookies, on a user’s computer as s/he is served ads from various online advertising networks. Sites visited, content viewed, and length of visit are then all databased and analyzed to predict an online behavioral pattern for such a user, thereby classifying that user by his/her online demographic. Behavioral ad networks then serve targeted advertising related to that user’s behavioral classification, regardless of where s/he then visit.

For example, if a computer user frequents sites such as SlashDot, Maxim Online, Wired, and Men’s Health, behavioral targeting would classify such a user as a male, with interest in technology.

When behavioral targeting advertising companies such as Tacoda or 24/7 serves ads on such sites, their ads place behavior targeting cookies on the user’s computer.

Then, if that same user later visits a site with ads served by these networks, an advertisement might be served for shaving cream or even a tech job site (especially if the user is reading the news online during regular work hours). If that user becomes target to a behavioral advertising, he may be served a series of the same ad campaign across various sites, all without his awareness of the targeting going on around him.

The Players
Companies like Tacoda Systems, Claria, Revenue Science and Kanoodle - 24/7 provide advertisers with behavioral targeting technologies (a.k.a. “audience management systems") that pinpoint the actions that users are likely to make in the future based on recent behaviors.

Founded in 2001, Tacoda has the ability to collect audience data from existing data sources (ad servers, email databases, etc.) and then merge that information with subscription, contest and registration data. These profiles contain both demographic and audience site behaviors to provide marketers with a picture of a site’s audience.

Claria publishes advertising messages for various companies and ad agencies to consumers who are part of its GAIN Network of 43 million consumers who agree to receive advertising based on their actual online behavior.

Revenue Science, boasting no upfront costs for publishers, provides its own Audience Search analytics system. A publisher can simply type in specific words from an advertiser’s RFP and have delivered to them precise audience segments. The technology then allows the marketer to drill down and build customized audiences.

Kanoodle and 24/7 Media have partnered to put a new spin on behavioral advertising via sponsored text ads. Dubbed BehaviorTarget, the service will be the first behaviorally targeted sponsored text links network.

Case Studies
According to some recent studies, behavior-based ads are faring much better than content-placed ads. TM Advertising of Dallas recently ran an ad campaign for American Airlines that included rint, radio, TV and online placements on 14 various sites, including a behavioral targeting test on the Wall Street Journal Online. The specific goal was to “increase brand awareness and reach the maximum number of audience members likely to have a live interest in making business travel plans in the near future.”

Working with Revenue Science, TM Advertising was able to determine what pages visitors to the site were reading and what they were reading, as well. From there, a database-targeting system was employed to narrow visitors into different user-groups. The system then tagged these unique visitors to see what activities they were engaging in.

The results of this behavioral targeting proved to be quite dramatic. When compared with the basic web ads, the behavior ads were seen by 115 percent more business travelers making at least one trip a year. The targeted consumers also scored three percent higher than the average viewers in brand awareness.

Another case study involving Snapple and iVillage had a positive outcome. Rather than placing its Snapple-A-Day meal replacement drink ads on the iVillage dieting/fitness pages, Snapple implemented Tacoda Systems’ tracking technology to determine who had visited that channel in the past 45 days.

These users were then followed and received the Snapple ads while visiting ALL pages of iVillage.com. Dynamic Logic, an independent research company, concluded that these specific visitors scored higher for key brand metrics than others who saw the same ads within the dieting/fitness channel.

Because behavioral marketing enables advertisers to more easily determine and then postulate about user preferences and purchasing habits, the advertiser is able to treat each prospect more as an individual than an advertising collective. If, in the long, the buyer is unobtrusively being sold on a particular product/service run and the seller profits as a result, behavioral targeting may be a benefit to all.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Domain name registrations hits record

According to a report released by VeriSign, more than 4.7 million new domain names were registered during the first quarter of 2004. That's the highest quarterly figure for new domain registrations in the history of the Internet.

In total, more than 63 million domain names are now been registered, approximately one for every 100 people in the world today. This number is greater than at any time in the Internet's history, surpassing even the heights that were seen during the Internet "bubble."

Perhaps even more important than raw numbers, VeriSign data reveals that the current base of domain names is being utilized more actively than ever before, as measured by renewal rates, look-up rates and the percentage of domain names tied to live sites.

A high rate of new registrations, as well as growing stability and utilization of existing domains, are strong indicators of overall Internet vitality.

Highlights of VeriSign's "Domain Name Industry Brief" point to increased growth, utilization and globalization:

1) New registrations, renewal rates and the number of domain names under registration, all set records in the first quarter of 2004.

2) At 21% growth over the first quarter of 2003, total domain name registrations passed 63 million in Q1.

3) 72% of today's domain names now link to a Web site, up from 55% in December 2002.

4) Total domain name resolutions for .com and .net reached an average of 11 billion a day in the first quarter (indicating that the speculative purchase of domain names that fueled much of the growth in the late nineties has been replaced by real Web sites and e-mail boxes that real people are using).

5) Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) account for a growing portion of overall domain names, and currently represent 40% of all domain names registered in the world.

6) The majority of ccTLDs are registered in Europe, including .de (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom), which account for 12% and 8%, respectively, of all domains registered in the world.

"Though North America has the highest number of Internet users as a percentage of its population—some 55%—increasing Internet traffic is a reflection of a fast growing group of Internet users around the world," said Rusty Lewis, VeriSign EVP.

"For instance, 223 million people in Asia and 173 million people in Europe currently use the Internet on a regular basis, compared with around 175 million in North America. But, those Internet users represent only 6% and 22%, respectively, of the total populations of Asia and Europe."

The Web may not be worldwide yet, but give it time. It is still growing. In fact, it may be growing faster than ever.

Source: eMarketer.com

Ask Jeeves files universal shelf registration statement

Ask Jeeves has filed a universal shelf registration statement on Form S-3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

After the registration statement is declared effective by the SEC, the Company will be able to offer and sell up to $400 million of its common stock, preferred stock, depositary shares, debt securities and warrants from time to time in one or more public offerings.

The terms of any such future offerings would be established at the time of such offering.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state.

Ask Jeeves, Inc. provides consumers and advertisers with search and media products across a diverse portfolio of Web sites, portals and desktop search applications.

Ask Jeeves' search and search-based portal brands include: Ask Jeeves (Ask.com and Ask.co.uk); Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com); Excite (excite.com); iWon (iwon.com); My Search (mysearch.com); My Way (myway.com); My Web Search (mywebsearch.com) and Teoma (teoma.com).

Ask Jeeves also owns the search technology Teoma, proprietary natural language processing technology, as well as portal and ad serving technologies. In addition to powering several of the Ask Jeeves brands, the Company syndicates its technologies to help companies increase revenue through powerful search.

Ask Jeeves' advertising services, which includes Ask Jeeves, The Excite Network, and MaxOnline, provides advertisers with targeted tools to reach a broad base of highly valuable customers.

Ask Jeeves, Inc. is headquartered in Emeryville, California, with offices throughout the United States, as well as in London, Dublin, and Tokyo.

Source: inSourced

Google faces challenges as it expands

Google dominates the desktops of Internet users, according to a nationwide consumer survey on search engines.

The survey's findings indicate that 48% of search engine users say they use Google most overall, compared to 20% for Yahoo, 14% for MSN and 7% for AOL.

However, Google could face challenges as it expands beyond search into offerings such as comparative shopping, social networking, and e-mail services, according to Part 1 of a pre-IPO report on Google also released today by Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services.

According to the survey, which was commissioned by Standard & Poor and conducted by InsightExpress, an online market research firm, search engine user satisfaction is quite high, with most users (83%) saying they are extremely pleased with the search engines they use, and two-thirds of users (67%) have been using their search engines of choice for more than two years.

Google is the most widely used search engine, primarily because of the relevance and accuracy of its results. However, more than six out of 10 Google users (63%) indicated they would switch search engines if a better service came along.

Importantly for Google's free e-mail service called Gmail, less than one out every four search engine users would be very likely (8%) or somewhat likely (15%) to sign up for and regularly use a new personal e-mail service if it offered unlimited storage and the capacity to search old e-mails, and would search e-mails to target advertising to users.

Scott Kessler, Internet Software & Services Equity Analyst and author of the report, notes that Google is the Internet search leader, whose appealing offerings and opportunities are offset somewhat by notable challenges.

"For 2004, we project Google's net revenues will nearly double, but its margins will narrow somewhat due to increased investment by the company," says Scott Kessler, Internet Software & Services Equity Analyst, Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services.

"At the same time, we believe Google and its shares will also face risks relating to commoditization of the company's offerings, difficulties related to its introduction of new products and services, and competition from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google also has a limited operating history, expects to invest heavily in new initiatives, is employing a largely untested price to process and distribute its shares. Based on comparisons to what we consider the company's closest peer, our preliminary estimate for Google's market value is $33 billion to $40 billion."

Part 2 of Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services' pre-IPO report on Google, which will address the anticipated Dutch auction process, as well as valuation in greater detail, is expected by August.

Source: Standard & Poor

Yahoo quietely testing a new home page

While Yahoo's redesigned homepage appears to be a preliminary test, the mock-ups show minor layout changes rather than a drastic overhaul of the home page.

According to this version, the six "buttons" that flank the Yahoo logo have been moved down into a "Y Services" box that also displays links to other areas on its site.

The buttons are graphic links to popular tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, finance, travel, job search and the company's My Yahoo page. The links in the Y Services box are regrouped alphabetically rather than by theme.

Another shift is the prominence of Yahoo's advertising box along the right side of the page. It's now above the box that links to e-mail and Yahoo Messenger. Meanwhile, its search bar remains a major focal point on top of the page.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako could not confirm the authenticity of the screen shot, but she said the company routinely tests changes in its products to get feedback.

"We value our consumer insights, and from time to time, we will test a few simple modifications to see if these ideas and enhancements are beneficial to our broad base of visitors," she said in an interview.

The home page redesign has been expected. Yahoo executives last month told Wall Street analysts that a handful of its high-profile Web properties would undergo changes later this year, including its e-mail service.

The e-mail revamp, slated to launch this summer, will include a boost in memory to 100MB for free users and "virtually unlimited" storage for its paid customers. The move is meant to counter archrival Google, which plans to launch a free e-mail service called Gmail that offers 1GB of storage.

The latest home page update comes about two years after Yahoo's last facelift, when the company opened larger portions of the site for online advertisements and promotions.

Still, Yahoo's home page changes are few and far between. The company has long remained militant about maintaining the site's speedy load time and visual style, resisting a heavy use of graphics and animation. Before its 2002 makeover, Yahoo's home page had maintained its basic framework since 1995.

Source: C-Net News

Yahoo sues Google for patent infringement

Google could end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Yahoo, if it loses a little-noticed patent lawsuit, unfolding in a San Jose courtroom.

The case pits Google against Overture Services, an Internet advertising company bought by Yahoo last year. Overture claims it patented an online bidding system for ads seven months before Google introduced a similar system.

Patent attorneys who have reviewed the suit said Overture's patent claims can't be easily dismissed.

``I think there is merit based on the breadth of the claims,'' said Dave Ashby, a patent attorney with the IP Strategy Group in Cupertino. ``I took a look at it and said, `Yep, Google does that. Yep, Google does that.' ''

A key ruling in the 2-year-old case -- which could determine whether the two sides settle or forge ahead to a jury trial -- is expected at any time, say patent attorneys who have reviewed the suit.

Advertising made up about 95 percent of Google's $1 billion in revenue last year. If the company loses the patent suit, it would probably have to pay damages, license technology from Yahoo or alter how it manages its ad system.

Overture, then known as GoTo.com, filed its patent in May 1999 for a ``system and method for influencing a position on a search result list.'' The 43-page patent application details a system in which advertisers would be able to bid for better placement of ads in search-engine results and manage their accounts through a Web browser.

The U.S. Patent Office awarded the patent July 31, 2001. In February 2002, Google introduced its AdWords program -- a system that would eventually help reshape Internet advertising and legitimize search engines as a viable business. With AdWords, advertisers bid for the right to certain keywords. When a Google user types in that keyword as part of a search, the advertiser's pitch shows up near the results.

A tour operator in Hawaii, for example, might buy the terms ``Hawaii,'' ``vacation,'' ``volcano'' and ``beach,'' and its ads will appear next to Google search results for those terms. Advertisers bid against one another for keywords, with higher bidders getting better ad placement.

In its suit, filed in April 2002, Overture says Google is ``willfully'' and ``directly infringing'' on its patent. The company is seeking triple damages.

Google, which is in a mandated ``quiet period'' leading up to its IPO, declined to comment on the suit, as did attorneys representing both companies.

But in court documents, the company denies Overture's allegations. Among other things, Google is claiming that Overture was using its advertising system for more than a year before it filed for its patent. Patent law gives people a year to file patents after inventing something; a late filing automatically invalidates the patent.

Patent attorneys who have reviewed court documents have mixed views on Overture's chances of prevailing.

Mitchell Rosenfeld, a patent attorney with Capstone Law Group in San Mateo, said Google has submitted substantial evidence to show that Overture missed the one-year deadline.

Rosenfeld said a key issue in the case could end up being whether Overture was testing its technology or using a finished product.

On the other hand, Overture needs only to prove that Google infringed on one of the 67 claims in its patent. Also, Overture's patent application appears to have been well-researched by both the company and the patent office, said Bruce Sunstein of Bromberg & Sunstein in Boston.

``This is going to be a patent that is relatively difficult to knock out,'' Sunstein said.

Since late March, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a former patent attorney, has been analyzing the scope and meaning of Overture's patent, poring over each word and studying terminology such as ``database'' and ``search result list.'' It's a crucial step before a jury can be asked to decide whether a company has infringed on a patent. A ruling could come any day.

Known as ``Markman'' rulings, these decisions are often tipping points in patent cases, said patent attorney John Ferrell, co-founder of Carr & Ferrell in Palo Alto.

If the judge does not agree with one side's interpretation of the patent language, it will often push to settle the suit, he said.

The case is especially intriguing now that Internet search engines have become big business. When the suit was filed two years ago, Overture was suing an up-and-coming search engine with an unproven business model.

Today, Google is considered the king of Internet search. And Overture's stature increased when Yahoo acquired the company for $1.83 billion in stock and cash, incorporating its advertising technology and patents into its services.

``It's one of those things that two or three years ago wouldn't have been an issue,'' said Andy Beal, vice president of search marketing for WebSourced. ``But it just goes to show you how big search is.''

About half of all patent verdicts are overturned on appeal. And the stakes are high. Ultimately, the two sides will have to weigh the costs of a prolonged legal fight -- attorney bills in a case like this could reach $1 million a year -- against the possibility of losing.

``My observation is that there is this big lawsuit between two enormous players,'' Ashby said, ``and no one is paying attention to it.''

Source: Silicon Valley.com

LookSmart and Cal Athletics in partnership

LookSmart and the University of California, Berkeley, today announced a partnership under which LookSmart will develop a branded web search property for Cal Athletics.

This deal will support the university's athletic programs, while supplying highly relevant search results to Cal students and alumni.

Beginning this summer at CalBears.com, CalBearsSearch.com and via a toolbar application, CalBears Search(TM) will provide results powered by LookSmart's proprietary search technologies and 1.2 billion URL index.

Each time users click on a paid listing, a portion of the revenue will go to support Cal Athletics. CalBears Search(TM) will also feature free access to LookSmart's full text article database.

"Cal becomes the first major university with its own branded search engine," said Steve Gladstone, director of athletics. "Students, alumni and Bear Backers will perform their web searches here, knowing the ad revenue that is generated will directly support our commitment to excellence and rise to national prominence."

Cal Athletics will promote CalBears Search to Cal's 20,000 faculty and staff and 165,000 alumni living in the Bay Area through an integrated radio, print and interactive marketing campaign.

Solomon Fulp, director of corporate partnerships for Cal Athletics said the university selected LookSmart as its partner based on their flexibility, "LookSmart demonstrated the ability to develop a world-class, branded web search property that becomes a valuable asset both for the athletics department and the university."

Damian Smith, CEO of LookSmart, said the relationship would give advertisers a new source of high quality search traffic at a reasonable price.

"UC Berkeley, its students, staff and alumni have been responsible for critical advances in Internet technology and are among the most knowledgeable and influential web users. We're honored to partner with Cal Athletics for this groundbreaking program."

Source: LookSmart

Google lets Yahoo use its AdWords program

Even if the two companies are acknowledged competitors, Yahoo has begun advertising on Google, using Google's AdWords program.

AdWords works by having clients bid on keywords that can be used to query search engines. These keywords, when searched, will cause Google AdWords to display text ads associated with the content of the search.

The keyword which Yahoo is using to advertise on Google is "RSS." RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for, according to XML.com, "syndicating news and the content of news-like sites." When users search the term RSS in Google, Yahoo's keyword related advertisement garners the top AdWords position.

If Yahoo's AdWords ad is clicked, the user is taken to a landing page for Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo's shopping portal. The landing page is a Yahoo Shopping SERP.

In Google's AdWords program, clients who won the keyword bid must pay the cost for the click to Google. This applies to Yahoo as well.

MarketingVOX suggests "the campaign may be an effort at keyword arbitrage. In keyword arbitrage, Yahoo would pay for clicks with the expectation that the Yahoo advertisers will pay more once the original Google visitor arrives."

Who says competitors can't work in unison to benefit each other. Google is receiving money each time Yahoo's RSS ad is clicked.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has the opportunity to sell items and gain click revenue from advertisers on their landing page, once the user reaches Yahoo's ad destination.

Source: Web Pro News

Google battling in China, Japan and Europe

Google has been a real success at home, but its biggest struggle may be unfolding on the shores of China, Japan and Europe.

The future of the premier search engine company increasingly will be fought abroad, experts say, because growth in revenue from online advertising is slowing in the United States. By contrast, it's doubling in many countries overseas, where the market is just ramping up.

Like its competitors, Google makes most of its money from advertising placed next to online search results.

Google is already the most popular online search site in many countries, operating 96 different Google Web sites in 97 languages.

But as the 6-year-old Mountain View company prepares to go public, it faces a host of challenges in making money from its leading position abroad.

Google must span cultural chasms among users in different countries viewing Web sites in their native languages, and woo foreign politicians anxious about giving it too much sway.

It faces intense competition from its more experienced archrival, Yahoo, and must decide to fight or ally with entrenched local competitors in foreign countries. It's unclear how soon Google will make money in some online ad markets that are just developing.

"That battle is yet to be played out," said Brian McManus, who leads the search business at InfoSpace, a company whose search engine uses both Google and Yahoo's results.

Google and Yahoo together hold a narrow lead in search-related advertising over most other players in Europe, but the race is wide open across most of Asia, says McManus.

Google won't comment on the skirmishes. In its filing to go public, though, Google warns: "Our inexperience outside the U.S. increases the risk that our international expansion efforts will not be successful."

The company has scrambled to open offices in 10 foreign countries in less than three years.

Google's revenues from abroad jumped to 29 percent of its total sales during the first quarter, up from 26 percent a year earlier. And it's likely to keep growing.

The U.S. search-related ad market remains the world's largest, but the international market for search revenues will grow to $1.9 billion in 2007 from just $200 million last year, estimates investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.

China is expected to be the market to watch. Its online ad revenue is still minuscule, but is growing 50 percent a year, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. So far, only 6 percent of China's population is online.

But Google's popularity has led to run-ins with Chinese authorities anxious to control public opinion on issues like Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing shut down Google in September 2002 without explanation, but a public uproar in China forced the government to back down.

Since then, China and Google have been on tenterhooks. Beijing has endorsed a local search engine, called Zhongsou.com, that has been backed by China's three main domestic Internet portals: Sina, Sohu and NetEase. (Sohu is launching its own search technology in July.)

In February, Google began offering advertisers a way to list ads next to its Chinese search results. While it has brought in millions of dollars in revenue already, Google has been unable to recognize those sales on its books, according to people close to the company. That's because it has no office or employees in China and no license to do business there. Google's executives have made multiple trips to Beijing to sort the problem out.

Now, Google is making an investment in one of China's largest search engines, Baidu, which means "hundred times." Google won't comment, but the investment was confirmed by U.S. investor Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested $10 million in Baidu. The move might give Google a way to secure its position in China and gain leverage over its chief competitor there.

Google must contend with cultural differences, too. In China, as well as Japan, the difficulty of typing Asian language characters on a computer means it's more tedious for users to enter terms in a search box like Google's, noted Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and early adviser to Google.

One of Google's biggest challenges in China will be marketing, says Guo Liang, a professor in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on China's Internet. Unlike Yahoo, which translates as "elegant tiger," or Chinese portal Sohu, which means "search fox," Google has no Chinese name. Many Chinese Internet users "don't even know Google, especially in small towns," Guo said.

In Japan, currently the world's second-largest market in terms of search users, online advertising remains severely stunted. Moreover, Yahoo gained an early entry into Japan when one of its first investors, Masayoshi Son, built Yahoo Japan into the country's largest portal.

Two years ago, Google won a contract with Yahoo Japan to provide text advertising _ called paid listings _ beside Yahoo Japan's search results. But last week, Yahoo booted Google, instead taking paid listings exclusively from its subsidiary, Overture.

In the United Kingdom, the second-largest search advertising market by revenue, Google remains neck and neck with Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary won the search business of U.K.'s largest Internet access provider, Freeserve, supplanting Google.

Still, while Yahoo has sewn up advertising alliances with Freeserve and other Internet providers, many users still switch over to Google to search, says Lee Colbran, who runs Fresh Egg, which manages ad campaigns for U.K. companies. "Seven or eight times out of 10, Google is going to be the search engine of choice," he said.

Germany is also hotly contested _ but there Google has gained the upper hand. Germany's former telecommunications monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, owns the premier Internet portal in that country, T-Online. That company first turned to Yahoo's Overture for its paid listings. But threatened by Yahoo's other portal offerings, T-Online last year dumped the contract, and signed up with Google instead. Yahoo has since dragged T-Online to court for breach of contract.

Ultimately, some countries might prefer to have search technology provided by homegrown companies, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.

"Search is essentially a U.S.-based business, similar to how Boeing once seemed to have the lock on the majority of aircraft orders," he said. "Europe reacted by supporting Airbus.

Similarly, we might see countries outside the U.S. react to help build or support local search technologies. That potentially could reduce gains by the leaders Google and Yahoo."

Source: San Jose Mercury News

A search engine for cell phones

Siemens Technology announces plans to introduce a cellular phone search engine feature.

The search engine technology that will be integrated in mobile phones was developed by MotionBridge, a French company initiated and founded by Siemens.

According to an article that appeared in PC World, the search engine will work with all mobile Web standards.

These modes consist of WAP, i-mode, and UMTS. Siemens goal is to have search engine improve mobile web use by 50-70%, meaning users will be able to access sites that much faster when using Siemens' search technology.

Another feature is when users enter a name of a popular web presence like Amazon, they will be taken directly to the site, instead of a search results page. The system will also feature an automatic correction tool to deal with typographical errors.

PC World gave the example of a user typing in "weater". Siemens' search function would offer suggestions of what the user may have meant, much like Google and Yahoo do.

With this system users will also be able to enter numbers that correspond to letters to perform searches. For instance, instead of typing the word "travel", users can just enter the appropriate numbers (872835 for travel) and the correction tool will infer what the user meant.

The search function will also feature a statistical program that will keep track of keywords searched and provide the user with the 20 most frequent. Siemens search has already been deployed in Europe and can be used by 75 million users.

Source: Web Pro News

Differences in search engine technology

Despite their differences, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves said they have the same mission, and essentially the same message to those seeking to improve their search engine rankings: it's all about relevancy.

Yahoo! Search Director of Product Management Tim Mayer began his part of the session with a presentation outlining the new Yahoo! search platform (YST).

Though many of the features were announced in February it was clear that the majority of session attendees were unaware of the width and breadth of the enhanced Yahoo! offering.

"For the launch we aimed to provide a superior experience to the users of Yahoo! than they had been getting previous to the switch to YST," Mayer said, noting that the size of the search engine had grown dramatically due to the new technology and that the listings will continue to sift through the YST spidering/crawling efforts.

"We think we should be able to find all of your content just by following links," Mayer said.

Just in case Yahoo! doesn't crawl a site on its own, it has now re-instated the Add URL free function that allows users to submit a site for inclusion in the index. Mayer said the Yahoo! index will also continue to grow via the Yahoo! Deep Web Initiative that aims to index public domain information from public libraries and various government agencies.

According to Mayer, the critical factors in how YST indexes a site are based on four criteria: ranking, comprehensiveness, freshness and presentation. Among the large array of new features that Mayer presented are RSS feeds, flight tracker results, sports scores, smart view and integrated search within Yahoo! Messenger platform.

"If you look at a lot of the features we're launching, we've got the answers and the technology to provide users exactly what they're looking for," Mayer said. "Yahoo! is in a unique position as we have over 100 million registered users so we already have a lot of user data, we know a lot about our users and we can use that to increase the relevance of our search result."

Though clearly the search engine race has of late has been dominated by Google and Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, which is powered by TEOMA technology, wants to be perceived as the engine that provides the most relevant results.

"I don't want to be outdone by Yahoo! so I'll have to come up with something good. The gloves are off," Micahel Palka, director of search at Ask Jeeves told the capacity audience. "TEOMA yields more relevant results and that's what search is all about."

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, TEOMA search technology powers 25 percent of all web searches. Palka said what's unique about TEOMA is its ranking system called Subject Specific Popularity. The system is based on social networking theory and the notion that communities are formed around certain subjects.

"Looking at those communities and seeing how they're built -- identifying experts in those communities -- that's really going to provide expert validation and give the user the most relevant information as opposed to information that may be linked to today's most popular sites," Palka said.

Current industry leader Google measures and indexes pages based on Page Rank. Jen Fitzpatrick, director of engineering at Google, explained that Page Rank is a rating of how important a page is relative to the rest of the Web.

Google also combines Page Rank with text analysis to come up with the most relevant result for a particular site. There are over 100 different factors that Google's algorithm considers when doing text analysis to consider appropriate relevance to a particular search.

"The most important thing that you can do for the perspective of search engines, or at least Google, is to really look at building sites that have appropriate relevant content for your users. If you're focusing on that, that's well over half the battle," Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald added, "The central issues is how do you direct users to the best possible page that has the content they're looking for."

Source: Internet News

Google lets Yahoo use its AdWords program

Even if the two companies are acknowledged competitors, Yahoo has begun advertising on Google, using Google's AdWords program.

AdWords works by having clients bid on keywords that can be used to query search engines. These keywords, when searched, will cause Google AdWords to display text ads associated with the content of the search.

The keyword which Yahoo is using to advertise on Google is "RSS." RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for, according to XML.com, "syndicating news and the content of news-like sites." When users search the term RSS in Google, Yahoo's keyword related advertisement garners the top AdWords position.

If Yahoo's AdWords ad is clicked, the user is taken to a landing page for Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo's shopping portal. The landing page is a Yahoo Shopping SERP.

In Google's AdWords program, clients who won the keyword bid must pay the cost for the click to Google. This applies to Yahoo as well.

MarketingVOX suggests "the campaign may be an effort at keyword arbitrage. In keyword arbitrage, Yahoo would pay for clicks with the expectation that the Yahoo advertisers will pay more once the original Google visitor arrives."

Who says competitors can't work in unison to benefit each other. Google is receiving money each time Yahoo's RSS ad is clicked.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has the opportunity to sell items and gain click revenue from advertisers on their landing page, once the user reaches Yahoo's ad destination.

Source: Web Pro News

Google lets Yahoo use its AdWords program

Even if the two companies are acknowledged competitors, Yahoo has begun advertising on Google, using Google's AdWords program.

AdWords works by having clients bid on keywords that can be used to query search engines. These keywords, when searched, will cause Google AdWords to display text ads associated with the content of the search.

The keyword which Yahoo is using to advertise on Google is "RSS." RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for, according to XML.com, "syndicating news and the content of news-like sites." When users search the term RSS in Google, Yahoo's keyword related advertisement garners the top AdWords position.

If Yahoo's AdWords ad is clicked, the user is taken to a landing page for Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo's shopping portal. The landing page is a Yahoo Shopping SERP.

In Google's AdWords program, clients who won the keyword bid must pay the cost for the click to Google. This applies to Yahoo as well.

MarketingVOX suggests "the campaign may be an effort at keyword arbitrage. In keyword arbitrage, Yahoo would pay for clicks with the expectation that the Yahoo advertisers will pay more once the original Google visitor arrives."

Who says competitors can't work in unison to benefit each other. Google is receiving money each time Yahoo's RSS ad is clicked.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has the opportunity to sell items and gain click revenue from advertisers on their landing page, once the user reaches Yahoo's ad destination.

Source: Web Pro News

Google battling in China, Japan and Europe

Google has been a real success at home, but its biggest struggle may be unfolding on the shores of China, Japan and Europe.

The future of the premier search engine company increasingly will be fought abroad, experts say, because growth in revenue from online advertising is slowing in the United States. By contrast, it's doubling in many countries overseas, where the market is just ramping up.

Like its competitors, Google makes most of its money from advertising placed next to online search results.

Google is already the most popular online search site in many countries, operating 96 different Google Web sites in 97 languages.

But as the 6-year-old Mountain View company prepares to go public, it faces a host of challenges in making money from its leading position abroad.

Google must span cultural chasms among users in different countries viewing Web sites in their native languages, and woo foreign politicians anxious about giving it too much sway.

It faces intense competition from its more experienced archrival, Yahoo, and must decide to fight or ally with entrenched local competitors in foreign countries. It's unclear how soon Google will make money in some online ad markets that are just developing.

"That battle is yet to be played out," said Brian McManus, who leads the search business at InfoSpace, a company whose search engine uses both Google and Yahoo's results.

Google and Yahoo together hold a narrow lead in search-related advertising over most other players in Europe, but the race is wide open across most of Asia, says McManus.

Google won't comment on the skirmishes. In its filing to go public, though, Google warns: "Our inexperience outside the U.S. increases the risk that our international expansion efforts will not be successful."

The company has scrambled to open offices in 10 foreign countries in less than three years.

Google's revenues from abroad jumped to 29 percent of its total sales during the first quarter, up from 26 percent a year earlier. And it's likely to keep growing.

The U.S. search-related ad market remains the world's largest, but the international market for search revenues will grow to $1.9 billion in 2007 from just $200 million last year, estimates investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.

China is expected to be the market to watch. Its online ad revenue is still minuscule, but is growing 50 percent a year, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. So far, only 6 percent of China's population is online.

But Google's popularity has led to run-ins with Chinese authorities anxious to control public opinion on issues like Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing shut down Google in September 2002 without explanation, but a public uproar in China forced the government to back down.

Since then, China and Google have been on tenterhooks. Beijing has endorsed a local search engine, called Zhongsou.com, that has been backed by China's three main domestic Internet portals: Sina, Sohu and NetEase. (Sohu is launching its own search technology in July.)

In February, Google began offering advertisers a way to list ads next to its Chinese search results. While it has brought in millions of dollars in revenue already, Google has been unable to recognize those sales on its books, according to people close to the company. That's because it has no office or employees in China and no license to do business there. Google's executives have made multiple trips to Beijing to sort the problem out.

Now, Google is making an investment in one of China's largest search engines, Baidu, which means "hundred times." Google won't comment, but the investment was confirmed by U.S. investor Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested $10 million in Baidu. The move might give Google a way to secure its position in China and gain leverage over its chief competitor there.

Google must contend with cultural differences, too. In China, as well as Japan, the difficulty of typing Asian language characters on a computer means it's more tedious for users to enter terms in a search box like Google's, noted Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and early adviser to Google.

One of Google's biggest challenges in China will be marketing, says Guo Liang, a professor in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on China's Internet. Unlike Yahoo, which translates as "elegant tiger," or Chinese portal Sohu, which means "search fox," Google has no Chinese name. Many Chinese Internet users "don't even know Google, especially in small towns," Guo said.

In Japan, currently the world's second-largest market in terms of search users, online advertising remains severely stunted. Moreover, Yahoo gained an early entry into Japan when one of its first investors, Masayoshi Son, built Yahoo Japan into the country's largest portal.

Two years ago, Google won a contract with Yahoo Japan to provide text advertising _ called paid listings _ beside Yahoo Japan's search results. But last week, Yahoo booted Google, instead taking paid listings exclusively from its subsidiary, Overture.

In the United Kingdom, the second-largest search advertising market by revenue, Google remains neck and neck with Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary won the search business of U.K.'s largest Internet access provider, Freeserve, supplanting Google.

Still, while Yahoo has sewn up advertising alliances with Freeserve and other Internet providers, many users still switch over to Google to search, says Lee Colbran, who runs Fresh Egg, which manages ad campaigns for U.K. companies. "Seven or eight times out of 10, Google is going to be the search engine of choice," he said.

Germany is also hotly contested _ but there Google has gained the upper hand. Germany's former telecommunications monopoly, Deutsche Telekom, owns the premier Internet portal in that country, T-Online. That company first turned to Yahoo's Overture for its paid listings. But threatened by Yahoo's other portal offerings, T-Online last year dumped the contract, and signed up with Google instead. Yahoo has since dragged T-Online to court for breach of contract.

Ultimately, some countries might prefer to have search technology provided by homegrown companies, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.

"Search is essentially a U.S.-based business, similar to how Boeing once seemed to have the lock on the majority of aircraft orders," he said. "Europe reacted by supporting Airbus.

Similarly, we might see countries outside the U.S. react to help build or support local search technologies. That potentially could reduce gains by the leaders Google and Yahoo."

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Vivisimo ties with Yahoo for second place

About.com just finished a survey that polled a focus group of 181 men and women between the ages of 20 and 64, and found that metasearch engine Vivisimo tied with Yahoo for the second place in popularity, with a score of 4.6 out of 5.

Vivisimo employees a clustered approach to its search results. Clustering organizes the results into meaningful groups providing users a quick overview of the main ideas buried in the results.

For example, with Clustering, if you search for the keywords "German shepherds", Vivisimo will also offer you results organized by "breeds", "training", "breeders", "rescue", and "clubs".

"Vivisimo is an excellent alternative to Google. It is fast, clean, and relevant, and it offers guiding search suggestions in the form of 'Clustered Results'," said Paul Gil, About.com Guide and long time Internet veteran.

"It offers all the functionality and speed of Google, with 'Clustering' added. Once the users discovered Vivisimo, it quickly became a favorite."

Not only has Vivisimo gained the second position in About's poll, Vivisimo has also been selected twice as the "Best MetaSearch Engine" by Search Engine Watch.

Saman Haqqi, Director of Marketing at Vivisimo stated, "We are pleased with the growing recognition for Vivisimo's Clustering.

As the size of the Web indices continues to grow, Web searchers need to have this huge amount of data organized meaningfully. At Vivisimo, it is our mission to help people handle large amounts of data by presenting them with organized information."

Source: Web Pro News

Porn websites 3 times more popular than search engines

Porn websites had more than three times the visitors of the major search engines combined during the last week in May, says Hitwise.

According to Melbourne, Australia-based Web-tracking firm Hitwise, visits to the top three search sites--Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search--accounted for just 5.5 percent of all Internet site visits during the week ending May 29.

Porn sites, lumped by Hitwise into a category appropriately dubbed “Adult,” received 18.8 percent of all Web visits in the same period.

When all search and directory sites--including those such as AskJeeves and MSN.com--are combined, the porn-versus-search skew doesn't look so bad.

Overall, search engines and directories accounted for 13.8 percent of the total Net visits during the week.

Source: TechWeb.com

The Google Search Appliance

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a combined hardware and software solution for online enterprises that require either public-facing or corporate intranet search technology.

On Wednesday, Google announced an upgrade to the service.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google claims that the new model is faster than previous versions, which have sold well in the past, but accounted for less than 5 percent of the company's $962 million in net revenue last year.

The new configurations will allow online administrators to search for more documents at a faster rate, while a redesigned crawler (continuous crawl, which was first deployed on the Google.com search engine) will continuously scan the database contents of either intranet or Web site content to ensure up-to-date indexes. Search relevance will also be improved by deploying many of the same search technologies refined for Google.com.

According to Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business, Search Appliance's upgrades benefit from improvements to Google.com. He says the newer version deepens relevance and scalability. "[GSA] essentially implements improvements made to the Google search engine [like continuous crawl] into GSA. In fact, some of the improvements in GSA share the same code as the Google Web site," Girouard says.

A Google spokesperson further remarked that while the continuous crawl feature is not dissimilar to the so-called "Google Dance" that marks the period of 30 days or so needed for Google's crawlers to scan its entire index, updates with GSA continuous crawl are more constant--as even companies with large databases have far smaller indexes than the Google search engine.

"Search inside of companies has been a challenge," notes Girouard. "This was something a lot of companies came to us and asked for," he says. The Search Appliance comes in three main versions, and the number of documents the systems can handle increases with the price. List prices start at $32,000.

Girouard says GSA is for medium- to large-sized corporations with "hundreds, not tens" of employees. He says that several of GSA's customers already deploy GSA both internally and externally, and several GSA customers are also Google AdWords customers.

Whit Andrews, GartnerG2 research director, says that Google had to decide whether it would make sales at a certain level without "a lot of hand-holding."

Andrews says that with GSA, Google is finding a serious market for Web content providers that have more Web pages than they can handle, but don't want to spend a lot of money on a complex, expensive search provider. He notes that from their perspective, the thinking is: "Instead of changing the way we're going to sell this thing, let's sell to a market where the page count is bigger than [any given content provider] thought it would be."

Andrews says that the existing model makes sense for Google particularly because of its low price. "Pricing in the computer industry is agony," he notes, adding that other search vendors like Varity fight Google on improved, more sophisticated relevancy. Scale, he says, is not the hard part. Relevancy is the real issue, but the next issue is cost-efficiency, which is where Google's dependency outweighs relevancy concerns.

Microsoft Corp.'s Longhorn server application could be a potential competitor to Google in the company intranet space, as integrated Web and intranet search is considered one of its most attractive features. According to Andrews, Longhorn is too far away for it to present any problems yet.

"Realistically," he says, "I don't see a strong conflict between the two," as Google's main target with GSA is large corporations, while Microsoft representatives have reported that the Longhorn server will target small- to medium-sized enterprises.

While there is no direct advertising element included in the Google Search Appliance, Girouard notes that Web administrators for public-facing sites can fix the results returned for certain queries through Key Match, a GSA add-on that returns a given URL or set of URLs to the top of a list for certain queries.

Through Key Match, administrators can highlight partners, advertisements, and other promotions. GSA is currently used by some 500 clients, including Pfizer, Xerox, Nextel, Procter & Gamble, the U.S. Army, and the City of San Diego.

Source: Media Daily News

Arnold Schwarzenegger to decide on Google

Californian senator Arnold Schwarzenegger will be deciding on whether Google’s Gmail should be cancelled before it is even born.

While the ironies will be apparent to anyone who has seen Arnie’s Terminator trilogy, Californian senators have approved a bill that limits Google's plans to scan messages and include ads based on what it finds.

Soon it will be up to the former action hero if the law will live or die.

Gmail has caused a storm in a tea-cup before it has actually been released. The scheme is still being tested by tame journalists and Google staff and is a few months away.

The normally secretive Google has said it was working with law-makers on a way to both answer privacy concerns and run a viable service. Lined up against it is Senator Liz Figueroa who introduced the bill to hobble the freedom Google had to use Gmail to sniff content.

The Bill, which now has the backing of California senators, will order Google scan messages in real time and ban it from producing records of what people are mailing each other about.

It would also ban Google from collecting personal data from Gmail messages and flogging it to other firms.

The bill now goes to California's Assembly for another round of debates and amendments. The final decision on whether it becomes law falls to Governor Arnie who can approve it or decide to terminate it.

Source: The Inquirer

Google offering new intranet search feature

Google is polishing and increasing the number of search tools that it sells to companies, schools and government agencies, hoping to mine new revenue sources as it strives to become less dependent on online advertising.

AP Wire reports that Google on Wednesday took another small step beyond its renowned online search engine releasing its most significant upgrade of a 2-year-old kit that’s sometimes called “Google in a box.”

The hardware-and-software package is supposed to provide prospective customers with everything they need to do a better job indexing and searching the information on intranets - a cluster of Web sites maintained behind security shields known as firewalls.

Google’s top-of-the-line system, priced at $175,000, will index up to 1.5 million Web pages and perform 300 search queries per minute - five times the capacity and speed of the earlier version, said Dave Girouard the company’s general manager of enterprise.

A less sophisticated version of the kit will sell for $32,000.

The original version of Google’s search kit is being used by “several hundred” customers, Girouard said. Google is hoping to drum up more demand by offering a more powerful product and making it even simpler to run - the company says the kit can be installed in about 30 minutes.

The market for intranet search products remains relatively small. The industry leaders, Verity Inc. and Autonomy Corp., combined to generate slightly less than $200 million last year. Google, meanwhile, posted 2003 revenue of $962 million.

Online advertising accounted for all but 4 percent of Google’s first-quarter revenue - a heavy concentration that has raised mild concerns among some industry analysts as the company prepares for a highly anticipated initial public offering of stock. The IPO is still several months away.

Although online advertising is expected remain its financial foundation, Google is trying to diversify.

The company reportedly is working on a product, code named “Puffin,” that would search information stored on the hard drives on individual computer users - an initiative that would intensify Google’s rivalry with software giant Microsoft Corp.

Google so far has declined to discuss the Puffin project.

Source: Search Engine Journal

The Yahoo Search Gas Price Shortcut

Finding prices at the gas stations too much to handle this summer? Yahoo is offering a new search engine shortcut to help save a couple of cents a gallon when filling up for road trips.

Yahoo! Search has launched an online gas price shortcut! The Yahoo! Search Gas Price Shortcut enables users to get the lowest gas prices for their area with just one click.

Just type in gas prices [location] into the Yahoo Search bar http://search.yahoo.com

Example: “gas prices San Francisco” or “gas prices 94111” (your zip code).

Yahoo! Search has teamed up with two sites to provide consumers with easy access to search for their local gas stations carrying the lowest prices.

Disclaimer:
* Gas Price Watch has no affiliation with any of the fuel vendors or other advocacy groups listed on the site. Its mission is to become a voice for the consumer and continue to improve value to the consumer.

* Gas Buddy the portal site to more than 170 web sites that help consumers find cheap gas prices. All web sites are operated by the non-profit organization known as Gas Buddy Organization Inc, which is a registered non-profit organization.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Google and MSN sending consumers to shopping sites

While Google provides the highest percentage of all search engine traffic going to shopping sites, MSN Search drives the highest proportion of its own search engine traffic to shopping sites, Hitwise says in its recently released Search Engine Report.

Google sent 4.73% of all search engine traffic to shopping sites in April, compared to 2.73% from Yahoo Search and 0.66% from MSN Search, Hitwise says.

Hitwise includes in its shopping site category “classified” sites such as DineOutFreeToday.com and YourGiftCards.com.

The rest of the top 10 search engines in terms of their share of all traffic going to shopping sites in April:

Ask Jeeves, 0.22%
My Web Search, 0.16%
iWon, 0.15%
Dogpile, 0.12%
Google Image Search, 0.09%
Excite, 0.06%
Alta Vista, 0.05%

MSN gets bragging rights, however, to having the highest proportion of its own search traffic that goes to shopping sites.

Of all the searches that took place at MSN, 10.07%, of users went to shopping sites, edging out Google, at 9.26%, and Yahoo Search, at 8.85%, Hitwise says.

Source: Internet Retailer

Google taking away market share from trade publications

Google could notch $2 billion in advertising this year from trade publications-related advertising.

The latest players to see a fearsome competitor lurking behind Google's meteoric rise are publishers of tightly targeted magazines. Google provides readers with tightly targeted content about specific trade niches as well as equally tightly-targeted ads.

Earlier this month at the annual conference of business-to-business group American Business Media, Pat Kenealy, CEO of tech publisher IDG, warned attendees about a foe he believed was underestimated.

The killer advertising app for Google -- as well as its search competitors like Yahoo! -- is its AdWords service, which allows marketers to buy paid-link placement next to searches conducted around keywords they identify. Marketers use AdWords to reach consumers with tightly targeted messages as consumers seek tightly targeted information, which is a decent thumbnail description of business-to-business publishing's model.

Google does not break out what percentage of its ad revenue comes from paid search, but analysts and observers believe it accounts for the lion's share. David Hallerman, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer, projected paid search ad-related revenues will reach $3.2 billion in 2004.

(A Google spokesman cited the "quiet period" before the company's planned IPO and said the company couldn't comment on advertising and competitive issues.) Google's own ad revenues, according to the prospectus for its initial public offering, rose 187% in 2003 to $916.6 million.

Some close observers of the media landscape say it's not just b-to-b publishers that face threats. "They are taking ad dollars away from b-to-b and consumer-magazine companies," said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment banker DeSilva & Phillips, and whose company advertises via AdWords.

Chicken Little pronuncements about how new media will magically make portions of established ones disappear are as old as radio, but in the specialized world of trade publishing there's at least some precedent for new technologies displacing modes of business.

A staple of the trade publishing world, pre-Internet, were high-priced newsletters that justified their price tags by aggregating obscure content for highly specialized audiences. The Internet itself made it simple for those seeking such information to do that on their own, and such newsletters took a serious hit.

And while the sky may not be falling, even those who insist targeted magazines are safe concede that search engines have significantly changed the playing field for information.

"Google has created a revenue stream from being the card catalog or the newsstand, not the magazine," Mr. Kenealy said. Those he addressed at the ABM convention "have spent less time than they should looking at what search does to the seeking and finding of specialized information."

Others see the matter more bluntly. "If Google can slice and dice [information]," said one b-to-b publishing executive, "and give highly qualified users to very targeted advertisers, then what do you need a trade publication for?"

This executive and others saw consumer-enthusiast titles -- those aimed at lovers of bicycles and knitting -- to be less at risk. These titles depend more on "image" advertising, which Google has yet to fully exploit.

Two executives also said that such titles tend to offer more of an editorial personality than the average trade title, thus giving the reader, in one executive's view, "a much less information-only paradigm."

But in the years-long ad downturn for magazines, it's hard enough to find big-name consumer titles that substantially increased editorial budgets, much less consumer enthusiast titles, which must typically keep a tighter hold on costs.

"One of the questions about [paid search advertising] is not will they have raw numbers, but will they wind up having results and response?" asked Jack Kliger, president-CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., which publishes consumer enthusiast titles such as Boating and Popular Photography.

One former trade publishing executive, though, pointed out that paid-search links find consumers when they are seeking information to make a purchase, which may not be necessarily true if they're simply reading a magazine. "That is not the entire process of influencing a purchase -- there's still room for context," the executive conceded.

The bigger question, the executive added, was how much context was left in some tightly targeted magazines.

Source: Adage.com

Baidu beats Google in terms of Web traffic

Baidu has beaten Google, in becoming the fourth largest Internet website in the world in terms of web traffic, according to the latest Alexa traffic rankings.

Another leading Chinese search engine, 3721.com, ranked seventh.

Baidu.com claims that it has become the world's largest Chinese language search engine with over 300 mln Chinese language website pages, and over 60 mln page hits every day.

In China, it covers over 95% of Chinese netizens, with more than 80 mln users. According to Shanghai-based Internet research house, iResearch, Baidu.com has a market share of 48.2% in China in terms of search engine traffic, while the global Internet search giant Google.com accounts for only 29.8%.

Baidu.com has accelerated its expansion in China, with staff numbers doubled to over 300 from around 100 one year ago, Zhu Hongbo, COO of Baidu.com, told Interfax. Apart from traditional search services, the company launched or is planning to launch several new services.

The latest addition to its services, "Posted Message Bar", enables users to search messages on various Chinese BBS, while the under-testing "Download Bar" service enables users to share files with other netizens for free mutual downloads.

Other new services include weather information, with which a user can search a city's weather and have exact weather information displayed on the top of the search result list, rather than from a link to this information.

"All these new services aim to bring convenience to netizens. They are free of charge, but they will be helpful to boost our page views and improve our website popularity," Zhu pointed out.

Source: Interfax

Yahoo offers anti-spyware toolbar

Yahoo just released a beta version of its downloadable toolbar that detects and removes spyware installed on a user’s computer.

Yahoo will be testing the anti-spyware technology, which has been supplied by antispyware company PestPatrol.

The software will be available to a limited number of users and no date has yet been set for the full release of the toolbar including anti-spyware.

A spokesperson for Yahoo said the toolbar can be used to “perform a high-level scan of files on the PC to detect viruses or other applications that were installed surreptitiously and are used to spy on computer behaviour.”

The Yahoo Companion toolbar already offers search features as well as a pop-up ad blocker. Companion Downloads are probably bound to increase with the release of Yahoo Messenger 6. The two downloads are bundled together on Yahoo, making the popularity of each beneficial to the other.

Spyware has become a large online problem with user PC’s becoming infested while downloading certain tools like screensavers or peer to peer software which batch in spyware to help turn a cool buck.

Strictly defined, spyware is computer software that gathers information about a computer user without the user’s knowledge or informed consent, and then transmits this information to an organisation that expects to be able to profit from it in some way.

Data-collecting programs installed with the user’s knowledge are not, properly speaking, spyware, if the user fully understands what data is being collected and with whom it is being shared.

Wikipedia adds that more broadly, the term spyware is applied to a wide range of related malware products which are not spyware in the strict sense. These products perform many different functions, including the delivery of unrequested advertising (pop-ups in particular), harvesting private information, re-routing page requests to illegally claim commercial site referral fees, and installing stealth phone dialers.

Spyware is normally installed through either one of two common methods. The first is to hide a spyware component within an otherwise apparently useful program. Often, the containing program is made available for download free of charge, so as to encourage wide uptake of the spyware component.

The second common method is to take advantage of security flaws in Internet Explorer.

Source: Yahoo News