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Yahoo offers new photo feature

Yahoo now offers a new feature that lets people upload pictures from their camera phones to its photo-sharing site.

This new feature is the latest example of a service that's trying to capitalize on interoperability problems that limit picture swapping between phones.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the addition of the feature was part of Yahoo's "renewed commitment in the mobile space."

To use the service, phone owners must provide their handset's make and model, plus the name of their service provider. Registered users then get an exclusive e-mail address to use when sending photos from their phone to their Yahoo Photo online account.

With the new feature, Yahoo Photos joins moblog sites such as TextAmerica in trying to entice phone users who've discovered that they can only send photos to phones that use the same service provider, thus limiting the pictures' audience.

The interoperability gap stems from the fact that wireless service providers each built slightly different versions of photo and video-messaging services instead of waiting for an industrywide standard.

U.S. cell phone service providers vow to solve the interoperability problems by the end of the summer.

Yahoo also unveiled on Thursday a $2.99-a-month feature, providing camera phones access to pictures stored at Yahoo Photos, plus features previously available only over a wired Internet connection. The application is available from Sprint and AT&T Wireless, and requires a phone capable of using Java software.

The download is an example of another Yahoo mobile strategy: to improve the experience people have in using Yahoo software on a cell phone's small screen and with a phone's limited processing power, the Yahoo spokeswoman said.

Yahoo has been trying to tap the growing number of camera phone users and convert them into Yahoo users. The company lets Sprint and AT&T Wireless subscribers view and download pictures from Yahoo Photos. Yahoo also has deals with mobile providers such as Cingular and AT&T Wireless to enable PC-to-phone text messaging.

The king of the Web portals has also fiddled with different business models for its online photo site.

Yahoo Photos originally launched with unlimited free photo storage for people to upload their digital camera snapshots.

Bowing to pressure to boost nonadvertising revenues, Yahoo in 2002 imposed restrictions for nonpaying users to view other people's photos and then charged people for uploading more than 30MB of images. In December 2003, the company scrapped those charges and reverted back to unlimited storage.

Camera phones, which number in the tens of millions, represent just a small fraction of the about 1.5 billion cell phones now in circulation. Handset manufacturers, gambling that the surging interest in camera phones will continue, are adding the feature to a greater number of their models.

Source: C-Net News

Blinkx takes into account the entire text

"Most search-engine technology is based on the keyword," company co-founder Suranga Chandratillake said. "What's different with Blinkx is we take into account the entire text."

The future of search lies instead with bigger concepts. Blinkx, which last month quietly launched a beta of its desktop search application, is getting ready to take on the increasingly competitive Web search market. On Friday, it plans to formally launch the company and its new approach to search.

Blinkx, which installs its own search client and mini toolbars within Windows applications, distills large amounts of text—from Word documents, Web pages or e-mails—into concepts in order to retrieve search results, its founders told eWEEK.com.

Based in London and San Francisco, the company bases its search results on its own Web index, which stands at about 65 million pages, almost 40,000 news sources and thousands of Web logs. It also scours a user's hard drive to find relevant e-mails and files, supporting more than 200 formats.

Chandratillake started the company with co-founder Kathy Rittweger. Chandratillake's background includes three years as the chief technology officer at enterprise software company Autonomy Corp., while Rittweger was one of the early employees of now-defunct Web personalization company Firefly.

Blinkx joins a growing array of new search companies taking on major players such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., but it is one of the few to build its own Web index. Others such as Vivisimo Inc. and Groxis Inc.'s Grokker have focused on new approaches for displaying and sorting through results from the major engines.

By also concentrating on the desktop, Blinkx also will be squaring off against the large search engines. Google reportedly is working on a broader desktop search tool, while Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division and Ask Jeeves Inc. both recently bought small desktop search companies and are likely to integrate the new technology into their search offerings.

At its heart, Blinkx uses what it calls "self-learning" algorithms in order to figure out the context of what a user is reading and to initiate searches in the background.

Results are then available when users scroll over a toolbar that appears in the upper, right-hand corner of Windows applications such as Internet Explorer, Outlook and Microsoft Office applications. The toolbar displays six icons that represent results from the Web, news sites, blogs, video and audio sources, the local hard drive, and related products.

Users can initiate their own searches from the Blinkx application, with results displaying as a user types.

To co-founder Kathy Rittweger, Blinkx's approach changes the dynamics of Web and desktop search by allowing results and information to flow to users as they read and work.

"The whole idea behind Blinkx is to provide information in the most non-distracting way," she said.

Blinkx is available as a free download and requires Windows 2000 or XP as well as Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. The business model for the 10-person company is to earn revenue from affiliate relationships and advertising.

Already Blinkx includes product search results in its toolbar that displays related Amazon.com books. The company plans to expand such product searches and consider search-based advertising, Rittweger said.

Source: eWeek.com

Sports can attract sales to a website

The number of unique visitors to fantasy sports websites peaked at about 7.4 million in October 2003, a month in which all four major sports were in their regular season or playoffs.

A study by comScore released in July 2004 measures the volume and usage of the unique audience for online fantasy sports sites from October 2003 to May 2004. Fantasy sports Web sites averaged about 4.7 million unique visitors in that period, with users averaging 93 minutes and 219 pages each per visit, with about 7 visits per month.

The National Football League (NFL) is clearly the strongest fantasy sports draw, accounting for 81% of fantasy sports users at the onset of the football season in October 2003, or more than 6 million people. By comparison, the beginning of the Major League Baseball (MLB) season in April only drew about 3.1 million visitors.

The number of unique visitors to fantasy sports Web sites was high from October to December, when three major sports were in their regular season. Usage dropped in January and February, as football ended and baseball was barely in spring training. By April, with baseball, basketball and hockey all in full swing, the number of visitors was up, though still between 300,000 to 400,000 below the October to December period.

Yahoo Sports drew more than one-half of the fantasy sports audience, averaging over 3 million for the time period, compared to under 1 million for ESPN and Sportsline.

All three Web sites received more visitors during football season, though Sportsline seemed to be more adversely affected by the end of the NFL season in January. From October to January, Sportsline drew an average of 300,000 more users than ESPN; once football ended, ESPN showed its strength in hockey, basketball and, by March, baseball fantasy games, outdrawing Sportsline by an average of 200,000 users through May.

Fantasy sports fans are active and voracious users of content, often scrolling through page after page of content to gather information on players and mold their fantasy team.

The fantasy sports category draws more dedicated visitors than the general sports category — the average fantasy sports site visitor viewed an average of 219 pages, compared to 107 pages per visitor for the average sports site.

Similarly, fantasy sports visitors viewed content for an average of 93 minutes, while general sports visitors only averaged 71 minutes. The kind of engaged user that fantasy sports sites attract present an ideal target and overall opportunity for companies marketing sports-related products.

Source: eMarketer.com

Picasa's traffic soars 6,000 percent

Google’s acquisition of Picasa last week resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of visits to its website.

These statistics come from Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service.

The company's software, which enables consumers to organise and share photographs online, complements Google's ongoing mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.

When Google placed a link to Picasa on the Google UK homepage (www.google.co.uk) on July 16th, Picasa experienced a staggering 6,000% increase in visits among UK sites.

Key points

--- Picasa increased its rank among all sites from # 16,300 on July 9th to # 313 on July 16th.

--- On July 16th, Picasa was the 2nd most visited site within the Hitwise Photography category (up from # 152 the previous day), ahead of Jessops, Kodak and Canon.

--- On July 16th, Picasa received over 45% of visits from Google.co.uk (up from less than 10% a week earlier), with 25% originating from Google.com

Source: Net4NowT

Google adds a feature to GMail

Google added a feature to GMail, its free e-mail service that lets people import their address book contacts from rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

Since the weekend, Google's free e-mail service, called Gmail, has been letting its users transfer their address book contacts from Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's Hotmail and AOL Mail.

Yahoo allows immediate exporting of its contact lists onto other clients such as Gmail, but for Hotmail and AOL in particular, people have to build their special files through a spreadsheet, which means the process would normally involve more steps.

Gmail's software also lets people add contacts from Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client, a feature supported by Yahoo and Hotmail as well.

A Google spokesman confirmed that the tool, and other new features, launched over the weekend. He declined to comment further, citing the company's quiet period before it goes public later this year.

The launch of the feature illustrates the rising tide of one-upmanship surrounding free e-mail.

Google in April began offering a test version of Gmail that included 1GB of free storage. The launch altered the free e-mail landscape, dominated by Yahoo and Hotmail, and caused Yahoo to increase its own free storage limit from 4MB to 100MB. Hotmail then raised its storage limit from 2MB to 250MB.

While Yahoo and Hotmail have the advantage of many years of service and millions of users, Google's entry could shift the balance of power. In fact, Google has launched a number of properties, such as its Orkut social networking site and Google News, that have put it in closer competition against the Web portal giants.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said the new tool doesn't change the competitive balance among the services. "Yahoo Mail users have enjoyed the ability to both import and export address book information for years, and we hope that others in the industry will share our commitment to providing consumers with a highly useful and convenient service," she said.

Microsoft did not immediately comment on the new features. The Gmail updates were first reported by Microsoft Watch.

In addition to its contact import tool, Gmail now gives users the option of including a signature at the bottom of messages. Gmail also began supporting Apple Computer's Mac OS X's Safari Web browsers, for versions 1.2.1 and newer.

Google also last week began promoting on its home page a link to Picasa, an online photo site that the company acquired last week, the spokesman confirmed.

Source: ZD Net

Yahoo's criticism continues for Site Submit

With Ask Jeeves and MSN eliminating paid inclusion listings from their search results this month, Yahoo is the lone holdout among major search engines to let advertisers pay to have their Web pages in its search results.

Unlike paid placement, advertisers paying for inclusion in a search index are not promised placement. Instead, they are promised that their sites will be included in a search index. The practice has advantages for businesses with constantly changing Web pages that are not indexed as frequently by Web search spiders.

Search leader Google has taken a firm stand against the practice, vowing never to accept payment for inclusion. Its IPO filing makes its stance explicit: "Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them."

Google’s stance has gained converts. Ask Jeeves this month banished its last vestige of paid inclusion, Site Submit, which let Web publishers pay to ensure Ask Jeeves’s Teoma spider scanned their sites. The Emeryville, CA, search engine eliminated its Index Express XML paid inclusion service in March that charged each time a listing was clicked.

MSN followed suit this month when it unveiled a new look to its search pages. A longtime user of paid inclusion pioneer LookSmart, MSN removed all paid inclusion from the search engine, including Site Match listings provided through its use of Yahoo’s Web search technology.

Yahoo remains committed to its 6-month-old Site Match paid inclusion program. When it debuted the program, Yahoo executives explained that it would address the problem of search spiders not reaching all the Web’s content.

As a companion to the paid program, Yahoo operates the Content Acquisition Program, which lets noncommercial sites feed their Web pages through for free. Yahoo has signed National Public Radio, the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library and others for the Content Acquisition Program.

"We are still committed to the Content Acquisition Program," Yahoo spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose said. "We continue to work with content providers to consider ways to evolve and improve the program."

Nate Elliott, a Jupiter Research analyst, said paid inclusion still has a bright future because search engines simply cannot refresh their indexes quickly enough to offer the best possible search results. Jupiter expects paid inclusion spending to reach at least $200 million next year.

When it dropped Site Match from its listings, MSN did not rule out returning to some form of paid inclusion, including through Yahoo, as long as it is clear to users which listings are paid and the index is improved.

"I wouldn’t be surprised to see MSN back in the [paid] inclusion game," Elliott said. "They clearly don’t have any philosophical problem with it."

Fredrick Marckini, CEO of Arlington, MA, search marketing firm iProspect, said most of his clients use Site Match, benefiting from the guarantee that Yahoo will crawl their sites every 48 hours. Since iProspect estimates up to 70 percent of all clicks occur in the algorithmic search results, Site Match has been useful, he said.

"Without Site Match, you’re never assured that more than 50 percent of the Web site will be included in the index," he said.

Critics contend Site Match gives the appearance that Yahoo favors paid inclusion listings over non-paid, since it charges a fee each time a paid inclusion listing gets clicked. Marckini does not think Yahoo gives Site Match listings favorable placement, but a submitted listing is easier for Yahoo’s search algorithm to consider than a crawled Web page, giving a paid inclusion Web page a de facto boost.

Jim Lanzone, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, said the search engine found combining structured content of paid inclusion feeds with unstructured content of Web search like mixing "apples and oranges."

"We found that it affected relevance," he said. "Sometimes that would be positive, but that was an accident. More often than not it was negative."

The Federal Trade Commission two years ago issued guidelines for paid inclusion, recommending that search engines "clearly and conspicuously" disclose that some sites paid to have their Web pages included in the index. Yahoo provides that disclosure under an "about this page" link at the top of its search results page.

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an industry Web site, has criticized Site Match for not disclosing which listings paid to be included in the index.

"I don’t like the way it’s currently offered on Yahoo," he said. "It goes against how Web search is traditionally supposed to operate."

The greatest concern for Yahoo could be Site Match affecting its standing as a search engine. It ranks behind Google in search share, drawing 30 percent to Google’s 36 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix. MSN ranks third with 16 percent of searches.

"The only way this could really hurt them is if consumers dislike Yahoo because it uses [paid] inclusion," Elliott said. "But consumers don’t know it’s happening."

Source: DM News

Ask Jeeves increases its Web traffic 150 percent

In the first month since closing on the acquisition of new search properties, Ask Jeeves increased its Web traffic 150 percent, to become the sixth-most-visited Internet property in June, according to comScore Media Metrix.

The Internet measurement firm said yesterday that Ask Jeeves' monthly unique visitors ballooned to 39.3 million, up from 15.7 million in May. The traffic explosion, which vaulted the company up 18 places to No. 6, came thanks to the addition of properties acquired through Interactive Search Holdings, including the MyWay, iWon and MySearch portal sites.

Ask Jeeves executives painted the $501 million ISH acquisition as a way for Ask Jeeves to quickly expand its reach in the search market.

According to comScore, Ask Jeeves and the ISH search properties accounted for 6 percent of Internet searches in May. Last quarter, the Emeryville, CA, search engine said it increased queries 42 percent from the same period a year earlier, excluding ISH's properties. Combined, Ask Jeeves said its search properties handled 1.7 billion searches in the quarter.

The increased market share figures to help Ask Jeeves in its negotiations with Google over renewing their paid search distribution agreement, which expires in September 2005 but allows for either party to terminate it this September or October. Google's paid search ads accounted for 69 percent of Ask Jeeves' revenue in the first quarter.

Another search property saw its traffic surge from a recent acquisition. InfoSpace had a 44 percent rise in traffic in June to 19.2 million visitors thanks to its purchase of Internet yellow pages site Switchboard.

Source: DM News

24 percent of movie tickets are bought online

A Feedback Research survey indicates that of the respondents who go to the movies, 24% said that they have bought flick tickets online.

According to a survey conducted by Feedback Research, a division of the Claria Corporation, as more and more moviegoers read reviews, view trailers and explore interactive content online, the Internet will continue to grow as a source of information, advertising, influence — and even direct sales revenues — in the film world.

Feedback Research analyzed online traffic to gain insight into how the success of online film-related promotions influenced summer blockbuster movie-related behavior online.

Traffic was monitored from May 1 through June 30, 2004 among moviegoers who viewed sites related to three summer blockbuster movie sequels: Shrek 2, Spiderman 2 and the Harry Potter sequel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Feedback also surveyed users in the weeks leading up to each individual movie release to gauge interest and activity around these three movies.

Here are some of the findings and conclusions of the survey:

* More moviegoers are skipping theater lines and purchasing tickets online

* Of the respondents who go to the movies, 24% say that they have bought movie tickets online.

Of the respondents who bought movie tickets online, 71% made a purchase between one and three times in the past 6 months.

Fandango was the most popular site for movie tickets with 44% of people saying they have used it to purchase tickets. Movietickets.com and Moviefone.com followed with 36% and 21%, respectively.

Film-related sites are successful

Yahoo! Movies was the most popular general movie site among users for information relating the three summer blockbuster movies. The Shrek 2 Yahoo! movie site captured 30% of total traffic to the top general movie sites related to the three movie sequels, followed by the Yahoo! Harry Potter movie site with 29% and finally the Spiderman 2 Yahoo! movie site captured 12% of total traffic.

39% of total traffic to the three official movie sites came on Fridays and Saturdays.

Survey respondents cited "watching trailers" as the most popular reason for visiting official movie sites with 66% of respondents going online to see the trailer for Harry Potter, 53% for Shrek 2 and 48% for Spiderman 2.

Of the total respondents surveyed, 39% said they go to the movies once or more every 3 to 4 weeks, and most respondents said they plan on seeing the movies within 1 to 3 weeks of their release, which means most will be online well before that.

Source: eMarketer.com

BBC to launch low-cost broadband search engine

The BBC is investigating the possibility of launching its own low-cost PC terminal, bundled with cheap broadband internet access.

In an interview with the Guardian, the corporation’s new media director, Ashley Highfield, said that he is committed to using the BBC to overcome the country’s digital divide, and a BBC low-cost broadband service would advance this, similar to the success of the BBC’s DTT project, Freeview.

The offering is still in the planning stages. “A few people have come together to see if we could put a low-end connected PC into the market. Could we do it? I don't know, but we would have to be clear about why," Mr Highfield told the UK newspaper.

Mr Highfield also outlined plans to launch a BBC standalone search engine that would compete with Google and others.

While the recent government review of the BBC’s online activities suggested the broadcaster had perhaps extended beyond its public service remit and was undermining private sector online services in the UK, the chair of the report, Philip Graf, did say that the BBC’s existing search services were to be welcomed, as search technology is currently dominated by American firms and thus there was value in spending public money on a UK-oriented web search service.

Nonetheless, the moves will most likely anger private sector internet players in the UK, many of whom are opposed to the BBC’s online activities to begin with and want a curtailment of them, not an expansion.

Source: DM Europe.com

Click fraud becoming a growing problem

Internet marketers facing higher advertising fees on search networks are becoming increasingly concerned about a form of online fraud that was thought to have been contained years ago.

The practice, known as "click fraud," began in the early days of the Internet's mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures.

This led companies to develop policing technologies touted as antidotes to the problem. But some marketing executives estimate that up to 20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today's search industry.

Net marketers facing higher ad fees as are becoming increasingly worried about an online practice known as "click fraud."

The persistence of click fraud has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Internet search marketing, but most advertisers aren't sure how to address the problem.

In one recent example of the problem, law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program. He was indicted by a California jury in June.

Matt Parrella, chief of the San Jose branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Northern California, said that case was "not unique." The problem "is certainly not shrinking, and we're ready to prosecute people," said Parrella, whose office handled the Google case.

Click fraud is perpetrated in both automated and human ways. The most common method is the use of online robots, or "bots," programmed to click on advertisers' links that are displayed on Web sites or listed in search queries. A growing alternative employs low-cost workers who are hired in China, India and other countries to click on text links and other ads. A third form of fraud takes place when employees of companies click on rivals' ads to deplete their marketing budgets and skew search results.

Although the extent of click fraud is impossible to measure with any certainty, its persistence has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Internet search marketing. Google's pending initial public offering has been widely anticipated as a barometer of online advertising and the post-apocalyptic dot-com climate in general.

"It's hard to tell how big the problem is, but people are looking at it closer and closer as the cost of search advertising goes up," said John Squire, vice president of business development of Coremetrics, a Web analytics firm. "Click fraud is a fin sticking out of the water: You're not sure if it's a great white shark or a dolphin."

Unlike advertising in traditional media such as billboards and print publications, "cost per click" Internet ads displayed with specific keyword searches have been promoted as a definitive way for companies to gauge their exposure to potential customers. As a result, U.S. sales from advertiser-paid search results are expected to grow 25 percent this year to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2003, according to research firm eMarketer. From 2002 to 2003, the market rose by 175 percent.

As more advertisers have competed for desirable keywords in their industries, the cost for clicks has risen too. On average, advertisers are paying 45 cents per click this year, according to financial analysts, up from 40 cents in 2003 and 30 cents in the second quarter of 2002. In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.

But marketing executives say click fraud is pervasive among affiliates of search leaders Google, Yahoo-owned Overture Services and FindWhat.com. In a typical affiliation, any Web publisher can become a partner of these large networks by displaying their paid links on a Web page or within its own search results and then share in the profits with every click.

"There's a fatal flaw in the cost-per-click model because a ton of marketing dollars can be depleted in a fraction of a second," said Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, a search-engine marketing firm based in Los Angeles that specializes in fraud protection. "Technology is continuing to be developed that can exploit this pricing model at incredibly high volumes."

Google declined an interview for this report, citing the mandatory "quiet period" before its initial public offering, which is expected to raise $2.7 billion. But the company said in a statement that it has been "the target of individuals and entities using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years. We have applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employ a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyze clicks."

In recent documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company also acknowledged the problem as a threat to its revenue, of which 95 percent is derived from advertising. Google and other search networks provide refunds to advertisers when click fraud has been discovered.

"If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase," Google said in its SEC filing. "If we find new evidence of past fraudulent clicks we may have to issue refunds retroactively of amounts previously paid to our Google Network members."

Google and Overture employ "fraud squads," or teams of people dedicated to fighting click schemes. But at least two marketing executives say such countermeasures are missing fraudulent clicks that are responsible for between 5 percent and 20 percent of advertising fees paid to all search networks.

Overture spokeswoman Jennifer Stephens refutes that estimate, saying that the numbers likely represent acts of fraud that are ultimately caught. She added that Overture filters most fraudulent clicks with the best antifraud system in the industry, which combines technology and human analysis.

"We take this very seriously; it's the foundation of what we do," Stephens said. "If an advertiser has a question about it, we look into all matters."

Cost-per-click advertising comes in many forms, but it essentially lets marketers gain exposure on a Web site and pay only when people click on their ads. Google and Overture let advertisers bid for placement of paid links, which appear when certain keyword searches are conducted on the networks' sites or those of third parties that partner with them. Keyword ads can also be distributed according to the content of partners' sites and displayed on non-search pages. (CNET Networks, which publishes News.com, partners with Google for shared advertising revenue.)

Most advertisers are aware of the click-fraud issue but have not delved into it because of the technical complexities involved. Others are concerned that they could jeopardize their relationships with the powerful search networks if they complain too loudly.

"It is a bigger problem, but folks just don't want to take the time to track it down because it's a complex problem," Coremetrics' Squire said. Given that some of the largest marketers manage up to 1 million keywords in a campaign, he added, the data can be difficult to crunch.

Danny Sullivan, who runs a quarterly search-industry conference, said many advertisers do not raise their concerns with the ad networks because "they're afraid that if they complain, it will hurt their free listings."

Still, more fraud-detection technologies are emerging to help advertisers analyze their campaigns and traffic. Some advertisers and search-engine marketing companies say they are compiling lists of sites that generate a high number of clicks but not sales.

Coremetrics, Urchin and Whosclickingwho.com are just a few that sell technology to examine click rates and sales that result from paid searches. Alchemist Media, which charges flat fees for its consulting services, has detected fraud while acting as an intermediary between search networks and marketers.

In general, Alchemist's Stricchiola estimates that 10 percent of all search ad clicks could be fraudulent. But she said the rate can reach 20 percent in particular businesses that have been targeted for click fraud.

Roy de Souza, CEO of advertising technology firm Zedo, said his company's geotracking systems have traced Internet Protocol addresses to detect click operations in China. In describing one common scheme, he said a legitimate site is duplicated under another name, complete with text ads from a search network. A bot would then be trained to click on the ad links that appear on the bogus site, said de Souza, who estimated that click fraud affects 10 percent to 20 percent of today's search network ads.

Many policing technologies can counter click fraud by analyzing Web traffic logs or surfing behavior. If a page is turned every 1.8 seconds over a period of time, for example, fraud-detecting systems will flag the traffic as suspiciously uniform.

Human operations can be more difficult to detect because a wide network of people can click on ads from different computers across many regions, without a steady pattern. According to a report in the India Times, residents are being hired to click paid links from home, with the hopes of making between $100 to $200 per month.

In other instances, the source of bogus clicks can be much closer to home.

Joe, the chief executive of an Internet marketing company, enjoys clicking on his rivals' text ads on Google and Yahoo because his competitor must pay as much as $15 each time he does it. Eventually, such phantom clicks can add up and drain a rival's budget.

"It's an entertainment," said the executive, who asked to keep his name and company anonymous. "Why do you run into a store without dropping a quarter in the meter? You know it's wrong, but you do it."

Kevin Lee, chief executive of search marketing firm Did-It, estimates that fraud from such "drive-by" competitive clicks and affiliate scams makes up about 5 percent of the industry's total sales. Lee concedes that he can only guess at the number, but he does know one thing for sure:

If it gets much higher, he said, "then we should all be getting worried."

Source: C-Net News

Ask Jeeves continuing its expansion

Ask Jeeves's decision to participate in Macy's Thanksgiving day parade underscores the new era at the company.

It has emerged from the brink of extinction during the dot-com downturn to become consistently profitable.

Unconstrained by financial worries, Ask Jeeves, based in Emeryville, has initiated its most aggressive phase yet. Over the past few months, the company has made two major acquisitions and introduced new features that signal its intent to grab a bigger piece of a search market pie.

"I know we can become an even stronger force in the marketplace," said Steve Berkowitz, the company's chief executive.

To succeed, Ask Jeeves must overcome the disadvantage of its diminutive size. Industry leaders Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN are several times larger and have far deeper pockets.

Furthermore, Ask Jeeves must counter a reputation earned during its infancy of inferior search results. Although the company is receiving accolades from analysts for improving its search quality, the question remains whether the effort is enough to lure new users or prompt existing ones to visit more frequently.

The most notable event for Ask Jeeves recently was its $501 million acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings, a private Irvington, N.Y., company with several Web sites. They include IWon, a search portal that attracts users with millions of dollars in cash prizes; Excite, a traditional portal; and MyWay, a bare-bones search engine.

Berkowitz describes the acquisition, which was finalized in May, as part of a strategy to own multiple brands with distinct personalities. Users, he said, want to access information differently, not necessarily in a one-size- fits-all model like Google and Yahoo.

Bob Davis, a venture capitalist who is the former chief executive of Terra Lycos, owner of the Lycos Web portal, compared the plan to television companies owning several channels in an effort to appeal to different demographics.

"It makes a ton of sense," he said. An added benefit of the acquisition is the array of portal-like features that come with the new Web sites. E-mail, news feeds and personalization technology, such as the ability to change a Web page's color, were bells and whistles that Ask Jeeves previously lacked but give users a reason to stay longer and enter more search queries.

Most notably, the Interactive Search Holdings acquisition nearly doubled Ask Jeeves' search market share. Combined, the two properties controlled 6.1 percent of all U.S. searches in May, according to ComScore QSearch. Google dominated the industry with 36.8 percent of the market. Yahoo was second at 26. 6 percent, followed by Microsoft and its MSN portal at 14.5 percent.

Ask Jeeves, whose name is inspired by a butler in the books of English novelist P.G. Wodehouse, was founded in 1996 by David Warthen, the company's current chief technology officer, and Garrett Gruener, a venture capitalist. The Web site, which encouraged users to type in questions rather than simply entering keywords as was the norm, went live a year later.

In short order, Ask Jeeves was swept up in the dot-com frenzy. Big losses and a soaring stock were par for the course.

By the time the Internet bubble had popped, the Ask Jeeves butler was nearly in a coma. The company's shares ultimately fell below $1, a sign that many on Wall Street had given it up for dead.

Management embarked on a painful turnaround. They cut jobs, pinched pennies and invested in improving their search engine.

Today, Ask Jeeves is a stellar performer. Its shares finished trading Friday at $30.29, up by a factor of 40 from its low in 2001.

The turning point came when Ask Jeeves agreed to run sponsored advertising links, currently supplied by Google. Such marketing, now a standard in the search industry, became a big moneymaker.

"Jeeves is sitting in a position today that is so different from a year or two years ago, where we sat in some cases on a precipice," Berkowitz said. "We can still go up or down, but the difference between our up and down today is that we have a sustainable business model and that no matter what happens, we are going to be in business."

Berkowitz, a New York native, came to Ask Jeeves in 2001 as president before assuming the chief executive role last year. He was previously president of IDG Books, where he expanded the "Dummies" series of how-to books in addition to overseeing the acquisitions of Frommers Travel Guides, Cliff Notes and Betty Crocker Cookbooks.

In 2003, Ask Jeeves earned a profit of $24.8 million on $107.3 million in revenue. Helped by acquisitions, the company expects to post a profit of around $49.5 million on $255 million in revenue this year.

The growth spurt is allowing Ask Jeeves to relocate from its cramped headquarters to a downtown Oakland high-rise in December. Ask Jeeves had planned to move into the same building in 2001. But with the losses and layoffs, it changed course and was forced to pay $16 million to get out of the lease.

The quest to build a better search engine is three years in the making. The company abandoned its trademark reliance on human editors to compile lists of results, in favor of algorithmic search.

The foundation is the search technology Teoma. It ranks results based primarily on links from "respected members" of Web sites related to a particular subject rather than links from just any Web site.

On top of that, Ask Jeeves has added features to keep its engine competitive in terms of quality. Most revolve around the idea of getting users to the information they are seeking in fewer clicks.

Called SmartSearch, users can enter a keyword such as a celebrity's name and immediately get a small biography and photograph above the usual results. There are around 170 examples of SmartSearch in all, some of which were rolled out as recently as last month, including surf conditions, terror alert levels and movie titles.

Among the other new and distinctive features on Ask Jeeves are binoculars, which appear as small icons next to search results. Placing a cursor over the icons allows users to quickly preview many Web pages.

"Ask Jeeves has demonstrated that they have turned around their search," said Chris Sherman, editor of SearchDay, an online newsletter about the search industry, and president of a Web consulting firm in Boulder, Colo. "People are pleasantly surprised when they give them another try."

Still, Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties for Ask Jeeves, recognizes that there is still more work to be done to change consumer perceptions.

"We're like a little kid on the playground who was skinny and could be pushed around," he said. "We're bulked up but haven't quite gotten the respect. "

Future product releases planned by Ask Jeeves include software that would allow users to search the Web and computer hard drive files simultaneously. The company signaled its interest in June when it bought Tukaroo, a San Jose firm that specializes in desktop searches.

The acquisition, made for an undisclosed amount, was Ask Jeeves' second this year. Microsoft and, reportedly, Google, are working on similar technologies.

Berkowitz's goal is for Ask Jeeves to eventually win a double-digit share of the search market. He doesn't see the job so much as stealing traffic from other search engines as persuading occasional users to visit more often.

"If I had to acquire new users, then it would definitely cost a lot of money," Berkowitz said. "But if I could get one more search from the people who use me, then I think our market share goes up 10 percent per month."

Sasa Zorovic, an analyst for Oppenheimer & Co., the investment bank, applauded Ask Jeeves' turnaround. And he expects rapid growth for the company in line with the rest of the search industry.

But Zorovic isn't optimistic about Ask Jeeves actually narrowing the gap with its rivals, at least without more acquisitions. Yahoo, Google and MSN are all investing heavily in Web site upgrades and showing no signs of giving up so easily, he said.

"They'll all be putting pressure on Jeeves," Zorovic said. He doesn't own any Ask Jeeves shares and his firm does not have a banking relationship with the company.

Ask Jeeves' advertising partnership with Google is another concern. The deal provides Ask Jeeves with about 65 percent of its revenue, according to Berkowitz.

Davis, the former Terra Lycos executive, called it risky to depend so much on one source of revenue. Google could eventually pull the plug, he said.

Berkowitz responded that creating a small advertising network like Google's wouldn't be wise, at least at the moment. There are already a few others, including FindWhat and Yahoo's Overture.

"Would I love to do it all myself? Absolutely," Berkowitz said. "Do I think it's the right thing for us to do? Absolutely not right now."

As for Sorensen, the artist responsible for drawing the Ask Jeeves butler, 2004 holds a lot of promise.

The butler balloon will float through midtown Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day. For the past couple of years, the butler -- who last participated in the parade in 2002 -- has kept a low profile because of a limited marketing budget and its association with the old Ask Jeeves.

Although no new advertising campaign has been planned, Sorensen is already thinking of redrawing the icon without the chubby cheeks to reflect what he calls the company's newly speedy searches.

Source: SF Gate

Google in a pilot program with DSpace

Scholarly research has improved a lot since the days of looking over piles of books at the library.

Search engines are starting to explore the particular opportunities within academic research.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most venerated American institutes of higher learning, made its own foray into the search market with DSpace, a joint project with Hewlett-Packard that was first launched in 2002.

DSpace is open-source software designed to assist colleges and universities in creating, managing, and maintaining digital repositories. There are currently about 125 schools using this software, but no tool existed that enabled searching across repositories instead of just within them.

Google and 17 partner schools have joined forces on a pilot program to enable searching among DSpace repositories.

In addition to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the other 16 universities involved are: Australian National University, Cornell University, Cranfield University, European University Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Minho University, the Ohio State University, University of Arizona, University of Calgary, University of Oregon, University of Parma, University of Rochester, University of Toronto, University of Washington, and University of Wisconsin.

The number of documents available for searching has been one point of contention for DSpace.

An April 2004 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education cited DSpace as estimating that each of the 17 participants had an average of 1,000 papers in its digital archive.

In Between—"a weblog on scholarly online publishing, open access, and library related technology"—published a look at available documents as of April 2004.

While some universities had considerably more than 1,000 documents (MIT had 3,565, but some with limited availability, and the Australian National University had 34,050, but none as texts) most hovered around 100 and many had considerably fewer.

For the pilot program, Google and DSpace have enlisted the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to facilitate searching by acting as a middleman between Google and the participating schools.

DSpace documents have all been tagged with metadata so that Google can sort through them more efficiently, but the Handle system that DSpace uses can be difficult for Google to manage, so OCLC plans to regularly gather DSpace metadata and convert it to formats that Google can more easily use.

Although both sides have been tight lipped about the project, representatives from DSpace have commented that the agreement with Google is not exclusive and that they are open to working with other search engine companies or even developing their own technology.

Plans with Google continue to move forward, though, and if all goes well with the pilot, then Google may launch the program under its Advanced Search section within the next few months. Other schools are encouraged to participate, and DSpace hopes to eventually include all 125 colleges and universities in the program.

Source: eContent Mag.com

Google can now browse by name, not just URL

Wishing to keep surfers from using rival search engines, Google this week added a new feature to its regular toolbar that lets users search the Internet by typing in simple words, not Web addresses.

Using Browse by Name, users can type "adobe reader" into Internet Explorer's address bar.

They would then end up at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html, a much harder address to remember for most people.

If the toolbar doesn't recognize the word(s), it does a standard Google search and displays the results. Typing “toyota pickups,” for instance, brings up a typical hit list of sites.

Although Google's toolbar has an auto-update option that grabs newer versions without user intervention, the pace is methodical; not all users had been upgraded to the newest version by Thursday.

The new toolbar, which is available in English and more than 30 other languages, requires Windows 98 or later and IE 5.0 or later. It can be downloaded free of charge from Google's Web site.

Source: Tech Web.com

How to solve irrelevance with Textonomy

Any Web user trying to carry out online searching is faced with excessive amounts of irrelevance, incoherence and downright inaccuracy.

Routinely, search-engine enquiries fail to produce relevant results; advertisements fail to link appropriately to websites; and products cannot be found in online store catalogues.

Successful searching can come only from a procedure which places sense at the core of its operation. A sense engine provides the frame of reference within which a search engine can operate. This means relying on those branches of linguistics which analyse what is involved when people handle sense - in particular, semantics and stylistics.

Any procedure which wants to improve the relevance, coherence, and accuracy of online searching has to be semantically based, to enable them to choose the right words to capture relevant records, and also stylistically aware, reflecting the way people vary their language according to their regional, social, and cultural backgrounds.

Semantic and stylistic principles are at the heart of any linguistically based approach to online searching - searchlinguistics.

A lexicological solution derived from this frame of reference is the basis of a suite of products known as Textonomy.

Textonomy rejects the view that searches based solely on statistical algorithms can achieve a successful outcome. It relies instead on the systematic harnessing of human linguistic intuition, tapping into native speakers' knowledge about the semantic relationships between words and the contexts in which words occur.

Because any word in the language can (in principle) be part of a search enquiry, all words have to be analysed to determine their potential as discriminators of online documents.

This is done by assimilating the content of both a dictionary and an encyclopedia The sense engine identifies all the likely search words in a language and rates them for their contextual distinctiveness. The words are then related to a taxonomy of semantic categories that is encyclopedic in scope. Each sense of each dictionary word is assigned an encyclopedia classifications.

The sense engine which drives Textonomy is the result of a searchlinguistics development programme which has taken six years to date and involved an investment of over £4 million in lexicographic and encyclopedic research.

The dictionary component currently has a coverage of over 200,000 items, and the encyclopedia component contains some 4 million words. The apparatus developed to enable the sense engine to function has received a UK patent, with US patent pending.

Source: Crystal Semantics

Photo-management company Picasa acquired by Google

Google has acquired the assets of a company called Picasa Inc. that produces management software for organizing digital photographs.

The photo management program runs a peer-to-peer network for sharing digital photos, Google announced on Tuesday.

A Google spokesman declined to say how or if Picasa's technology would be further integrated into Google's services. Financial details of the transaction weren't disclosed. In May, Picasa's technology was integrated into Google's Blogger service to simplify the publishing and sharing of digital pictures into Blogger messages.

The software for organizing digital photos is called, like the company, Picasa, and is now on version 1.6 and sells for $29, according to information on Picasa's Web site.

The peer-to-peer network for sharing photos is called Hello and its access software can be downloaded for free at http://www.hello.com. The network can be used with or without the Picasa photo management software.

Google, in Mountain View, California, runs the world's most widely used search engine, but it seems interested in broadening its horizons and building complementary Internet services around its search functionality.

For example, in April it announced plans to launch a free Web-based e-mail service. Called Gmail, the service is still under development, but some privacy watchdogs slammed it when it was revealed that Google would scan the text of e-mail messages to deliver ads based on their content.

There is a consensus among industry analysts that users are not very loyal to search engines and that search engine companies need to build a suite of services to hold on tighter to their users.

Analysts have said in the past that it is key to Google's survival to stop being a one-trick pony and build a broad suite of Internet services similar to those offered by rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., with things such as instant messaging, e-mail, photo album and calendaring services.

Some analysts have speculated that the money Google stands to raise from its upcoming initial public offering will help the company accelerate the development, creation and acquisition of services it will need if it is to compete on equal footing with its rivals. No date has been set for Google's IPO, for which the company filed a government registration in April.

Currently, most of Google's revenue comes from online advertising, particularly the type of "sponsored search" ads that are served based on the context of a user's keyword search.

However, competition in this space is heating up, as Yahoo, Microsoft and others are investing heavily in the search market.

In October 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture, a seller of sponsored search ads, and it is continually enhancing its own Internet search technology and integrating it with its other Web-based services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has declared the search market a priority and is developing its own search technology, which Microsoft hopes will reach information not only on the Internet but also in other data repositories, such as proprietary databases and users' desktops.

Source: InfoWorld

A search engine for traveling people

Travelzoo, an online travel marketplace launches a search tool that lets users query low-cost and discount travel and carrier sites, by entering specific travel-related information.

Called "SuperSearch", the search engine carries performance-based listings from airlines and discount travel sites. Unlike meta-search engines, SuperSearch does not return combined listings on a single page. It gives searchers one-click access to results from each travel site that serves a route. Searchers’ flight information is then automatically fed into the selected travel site, which opens in a separate browser window.

"We’re making sure we balance the needs of the users and advertisers," said Jason Dailey, SuperSearch’s product manager. "Consumers want control over how they visit the different sites."

Travelzoo, New York, shows customers discount travel deals through its Web site and e-mail newsletters. SuperSearch is available through Travelzoo’s Web site. Searchers can use it to find prices for flights and hotels. The company plans to add other travel-related products, such as car rentals and vacation packages.

Unlike paid search providers such as Google and Yahoo’s Overture Services, Travelzoo is not operating an auction. It charges a flat fee. Advertiser Web sites are displayed with logos. Non-advertiser sites are available through a drop-down menu. Dailey declined to disclose pricing. Advertisers include JetBlue, Travelocity and Expedia.

Dailey said Travelsearch developed the search technology. It incorporates user data to become more relevant over time.

SuperSearch will compete with more established travel search engines like IAC’s TripAdvisor and SideStep.com.

Source: DM News

Google to add audio and video search

Google is said to developing a new feature, allowing users to search the Web for video and audio clips.

The company has yet to announce plans for the new service, but Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made no secret of it during talks with investors and media executives at an annual retreat hosted by investment bank Allen & Co. in Sun Valley, Idaho.

A Google spokeswoman said she couldn't confirm the plan. As it prepares for its highly anticipated $2.7 billion initial public stock sale this year, Google has been seeking to diversify and expand its offerings amid heightened competition from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The search engines are announcing new features almost daily in a race to capture bigger audiences and more advertising dollars. In particular, they are competing for a growing segment of consumers armed with faster "broadband" Internet connections who are driving demand for multimedia content that moves beyond plain text.

When it comes to multimedia searches, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google trails some of its competitors.

Yahoo's AltaVista, one of the oldest search engines, already allows users to search for audio and video. Time Warner's AOL, which has paid-search partnership with Google, bought Singingfish earlier this year in a move to offer multimedia search capabilities.

In the past, Google and other search engines have expressed some trepidation about listing audio and video files because of legal concerns that some of the content may have been illegally copied and downloaded.

Google may decide to take its search function one step further by tapping into the growing popularity of legal music downloading. For instance, it could strike partnerships with record companies, which would sponsor links to legitimate song files available for downloading.

Another route would be for Google to host music files on its own site, allowing it to establish an online music business similar to Apple's iTunes service.

"One of the things I think they would try to do is take a new leadership role by rolling out an audio and video search function that is different," said Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com.

"You can't ignore it — there is tons of money to be made off of music."

So far, Google's forays into multimedia have been limited to audio clips from National Public Radio. Google News, which links to stories from news outlets around the world, features clips from such NPR shows as "Talk of the Nation" and "Fresh Air."

Source: NY Post

Marketleap being acquired by Digital Impact

There is more signs of consolidation in the search engine marketing industry.

Integrated digital marketing products seller Digital Impact Inc. of San Mateo, says it is acquiring Marketleap, a San Francisco-based Internet marketing firm specializing in search engine marketing services, for $1.5 million in cash and 1.25 million of Digital Impact's shares and options.

The acquisition will enable Digital Impact to enhance its product lines by offering clients search engine optimization, paid inclusion and pay-for-placement solutions, it says.

Under the terms of the agreement, there's additional contingent consideration of up to 200,000 common shares of Digital Impact stock issuable at the end of Digital Impact's 2005 fiscal year if certain revenue milestones are met.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Being number one helps in PPC

Atlas DMT released research demonstrating the impact of paid search listings rank on traffic, and how marketers can better model and forecast paid search campaigns.

"What does being number one in search really mean to your business?" asks Young-Bean Song, director of analytics and the Atlas Institute, Atlas DMT. "Just like any other marketing channel, success for search is about balancing cost and volume. Understanding those trade-offs is the focus of this research."

The research conducted by Atlas DMT provides traffic forecasting benchmarks by quantifying the trade-offs between the top 10 ranks in paid search.

The insights will be used to inform strategic decisions for search marketing campaigns and advise tactical executions for specific keywords.

In addition to paid search, the principles of the study also apply to paid inclusion and natural search. To view the complete Atlas Institute Digital Marketing Insight on "How Search Engine Rank Impacts Traffic," go to: http://atlasdmt.com/insights/.

"Paying for the number one ranking may not be the best strategy for all advertisers," commented Song. "For some marketers the cost of traffic associated with the top ranking may be too high.

On the other hand, some marketers are forgoing the top spot, without really knowing how many customers they are losing to their competitors. Most advertisers don't know whether they are paying too much, or needlessly missing out on sales."

The research found that overall, advertisers should expect about a 10 times difference in potential traffic between the top and 10th rankings.

The research further revealed significant differences across the two leading search providers. One major insight included the strength of Google's number one ranking.

The amount of potential traffic drops more than 40 percent between the number one ranking on Google and the search engine's number two ranking. This statistic highlights Google's reward to advertisers willing to pay for the top position.

At Yahoo's Overture, the drop is more gradual, as it delivers to advertisers increased traffic potential for rankings one through four compared to its rival.

Utilizing data from Atlas Search, the industry's first integrated search marketing and online campaign management system, the performance of hundreds of millions of impressions and clicks for tens of thousands of keywords were analyzed.

To learn more about Atlas DMT's search offerings including Atlas Search for agencies and large advertisers, and Atlas OnePoint for small and mid-tier advertisers, go to: http://www.atlasdmt.com.

Source: Atlas DMT

Yahoo acquires Oddpost.com

Search engine Yahoo has agreed to acquire Oddpost.com, a supplier of online news and email services.

The amount of the transaction wasn't disclosed at this time.

The two companies confirmed Yahoo's plan to purchase Oddpost on Monday, but disclosed few details about the buyout. According to a source familiar with the acquisition, Yahoo paid close to $30 million for the company. Oddpost's 10 employees, based in San Francisco, will now report to Yahoo's Sunnyvale headquarters.

"The acquisition of Oddpost provides Yahoo with outstanding technological expertise, which will be brought to bear on products across the Yahoo network, such as Yahoo Mail," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako.

In a document posted to its Web site, Oddpost told members it would continue to operate existing e-mail accounts, but said the company will focus on helping Yahoo produce a new version of its online e-mail service.

Existing Oddpost members will be migrated to Yahoo when the portal's next Web mail update is introduced, according to the document. The announcement did not give a date for the debut of the new Yahoo Mail release.

The Oddpost acquisition underscores the recent surge in competition among providers of free e-mail services.

Yahoo is fighting for business against such rivals as Microsoft's Hotmail service, and is preparing for the entry of a promising new contender--Google's Gmail system. Gmail promises users 1GB of storage, which in June led Microsoft to pledge to raise Hotmail's free e-mail storage limit from 2MB to 250MB. Yahoo upgraded to 100MB for free users and 2GB to paying e-mail customers.

Like Microsoft, Yahoo attempts to use its free Web mail to lure users to pay for additional online services, such as expanded memory or the ability to manage multiple e-mail accounts from a single interface.

But since its founding in 2000, Oddpost has existed somewhere between those free services and the more expensive e-mail software marketed by Microsoft and others.

For $30 per year, Oddpost has offered 50 megabytes of online e-mail memory, along with spam filtering tools and daily news aggregation. The service also offers some of the more advanced features of shrink-wrapped software like Microsoft's Outlook, such as automatically generating frequently used e-mail addresses as they are typed into new messages.

Oddpost also allows people to aggregate news feeds, share photos and compose e-mail without constantly refreshing a page as Yahoo and other free e-mail services currently require. It does this with a combination of dynamic HTML, javascript and XML.

"Our vision is that people want more than e-mail...but in one place rather than nine," said Toni Schneider, Oddpost's chief executive, who will report to Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's head of communications. "We think our technology is a perfect fit for the types of services Yahoo has."

Schneider declined to comment on financial terms of the acquisition. In its statement, Oddpost said existing accounts would be extended until the Yahoo service is launched, but indicated that it would not accept any more new users.

In addition, the company said its customers would be offered a year of premium Yahoo e-mail service, including the 2 gigabytes of storage, free of charge.

The company, which has maintained a humorous and decidedly anticorporate image, attempted to assuage concerns among its members that it was "disappearing into the bowels of corporate America" as a result of the acquisition.

"Our technology will flourish like a palm tree and/or IT professional's waistline in Silicon Valley," the statement promised. "While the glory of Oddpost has, thus far, been witnessed by the eyes of an enlightened few, soon it will be savored by millions."

Source: C-Net News

Google will be listed on NASDAQ, not New York

Google has finally decided to be listed on NASDAQ, instead of the New York stock exchange for its upcoming $2.7 billion IPO.

Google's statement is part of a regulatory SEC filing done on Monday. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search company, which filed to go public in late April, had not previously disclosed information on its chosen stock exchange, and it has yet to propose a trading symbol.

Google's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicates the end of a duel between the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, staunch rivals that were clamoring to host the technology IPO, one of the most widely anticipated this year.

Stock exchanges not only collect healthy fees from registrants, they gain renown from the clout of their listed companies. The Nasdaq is largely known for its technology constituency, which has been battered by a slump of late. Having Google on board could lift its stature.

"Google is an outstanding company with a great management team, and we wish the company well with its initial public offering," the NYSE said in a statement Monday. The Nasdaq could not immediately be reached for comment.

Google filed with the SEC on April 29 to raise about $2.7 billion in a stock sale later this year. Google's lead underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston.

In May, the search company named 26 additional bankers, including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers. It has removed Merrill Lynch from the list.

The search company plans to sell shares via an open auction process, in hopes of leveling the playing field for smaller investors.

Typically, institutional investors run the show in an IPO, setting the share price of an offered stock and allocating shares to parties of their choice. Google's IPO is designed to allow interested investors to bid for shares at the price they're willing to pay, and the highest bid wins.

No date has been set for the stock offering. Investors will need to have an account with one of the underwriters.

Source: C-Net News

Microsoft making it easier finding data on hardrives

Microsoft is developing new technology to allow users finding information stored on hard drives easily, such as e-mails, certain documents and various data files.

On the other hand, Google is reportedly working on similar technology to allow faster and more relevant searches of information stored on personal computers.

"We are collaborating together across groups," Raikes told a group of reporters Thursday, adding that existing search functions within Office programs were already advanced enough to deliver relevant information to users.

Asked if the Office division, which Raikes oversees, was pursuing a specific search strategy, Raikes said that there was no specific effort but that his group was working with Microsoft Research and other divisions to enhance information retrieval in Office.

Office is Microsoft's second-largest division after Windows, offering a system of programs for business tasks. As a result, it generates and retrieves much of the information stored on computer hard drives.

Third-party software providers, such as Lookout Software, have attracted a large following of users by offering an add-on to Outlook, Microsoft's e-mail, contacts and scheduling program, that allows faster and more efficient searches of such information.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's research arm has also been working on an information-retrieval technology called "Stuff I've Seen" that gives users an instant snapshot of information that they have used on a PC.

Asked if search functions would be integrated with Office, Raikes said that his group was "always working" on improving the functionality of Office and was not working on a specific time frame to compete against Google.

Search experts have identified local hard drive search as the next battleground among search providers.

X1 Technologies is offering a $99 software program called X1 Search that indexes and delivers nearly instant search results of information stored on hard drives, including e-mail and attachments. X1 was conceived by Idealab founder Bill Gross.

Source: ZD Net

PPC advertising gaining in popularity

The PPC search industry in Australia will be worth about $70 million in 2004, and will grow to $250 million in 2008, as the demand for pay-per-click advertising grows.

The findings are in the first independent analysis of this burgeoning category of online advertising, to be released today by Frost & Sullivan.

The industry's strength was in its "cost per lead" model, the report says. Advertisers only pay for each click through to their website — as opposed to paying per ad viewed ( one of the reasons for the downfall of online banner advertising) or paying for each sale generated.

The price per click paid by advertisers ranged from 10c to $58, Frost & Sullivan senior analyst Foad Fadaghi said.

Eighty-six per cent of advertisers surveyed said they were satisfied with the return on investment from search marketing.

Search marketing in Australia is dominated by three players: Google, Yahoo! subsidiary Overture and Telstra's online directory business Sensis.

IT Today understands Google has more than half of the market and Sensis between 10 and 15 per cent, although neither company would comment.

Microsoft is expected to shake up the market when it launches its own web-search service later in the year.

Mel Bohse, who manages the Overture's local business, said she believed the Frost & Sullivan projections were "conservative".

Ms Bohse said Overture would introduce a local search service at the end of the year, adding it would benefit "not just those who have a website but also those brick-and-mortar companies who don't have a website at all".

Google has a US localised search beta, while Sensis, publisher of the Whitepages and Yellowpages directory, already has an advantage in this area.

But it's not all clear blue skies for search marketing. The report says traditional companies might be cautious of getting into bidding wars to have their ads placed alongside popular keywords.

Source: Australian IT

Ex AltaVista employee involved in hacking source code

A man arrested last week on allegations that he stole proprietary source code from the AltaVista search engine 2 years ago is apparently a Microsoft employee working on MSN's Search initiative.

Federal authorities allege that Laurent Chavet, a former AltaVista employee, illegally accessed the California company's computer system in March 2002 and June 2002, after he left AltaVista and well before he went to work for Microsoft.

Chavet, then living in California, copied to his home computer source code that was used by AltaVista "to perform the function of scouring the World Wide Web," according to an FBI affidavit.

Chavet's arrest was announced by the U.S. attorney in northern California last week without reference to his current employment. Microsoft acknowledged yesterday that Chavet is a Microsoft employee but declined to name the team on which he works.

However, three other people with knowledge of Chavet's Microsoft employment confirmed that he has been working on the MSN Search effort. A brief biography attached to a paper Chavet co-wrote on text analytics described him as an expert "in all aspects of search technology." He worked at IBM's Almaden Research Center after leaving AltaVista and before joining Microsoft.

Microsoft's MSN division has been developing its own algorithmic search engine to replace technology it currently licenses from Yahoo! Inc.'s Inktomi unit. Microsoft last week released a preview of the new MSN Search technology, and the company said it hopes to come out with a final version within the next year. The project is part of an effort by the company to compete more effectively with Google.

Citing a policy against discussing personnel issues, Microsoft declined to answer questions about Chavet's case, including whether it is investigating on its own to determine whether Chavet incorporated any of the allegedly stolen AltaVista technology into any of his work at Microsoft. A Microsoft spokeswoman, Tami Begasse, referred questions about the criminal investigation to the FBI, and said company policy requires employees act "honestly and ethically, and comply with all laws and regulations."

The allegations in the indictment against Chavet "do not pertain to Microsoft," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Sonderby, chief of the U.S. Attorney's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property unit in Northern California, which is prosecuting the case. The FBI did not seize computers from Microsoft as part of the case, said Greg Fowler, the supervising special agent for the agency's Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force. AltaVista was acquired in 2003 by Overture Services, which was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! A spokesman for the company declined to comment.

Reached yesterday at his Kirkland home, Chavet, 29, declined to comment and said he had yet to retain a lawyer. A French national, he was required to surrender his passport after his arrest, court documents show. He is scheduled for arraignment July 20 in San Francisco.

The first alleged hacking incident took place a month after Chavet left AltaVista, authorities say. Chavet told an investigator that he used a former co-worker's log-in to access the company's computer system, according to an FBI affidavit. Authorities allege that Chavet caused more than $5,000 in damage to the AltaVista system after gaining access a second time, in June 2002.

According to the FBI affidavit, Chavet told investigators that he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving because he "was curious" about the evolution of the source code after his departure."

Source: Seattle PI.com

Paid search taking a breather

For the past two years, paid search has been increasing at a fast pace. However, the past quarter showed some signs the industry is simmering down.

Analysts and industry executives dismiss the idea that the paid search business is contracting. Instead, they say, paid search may be growing up.

"Could the search market--after explosive growth in 2002 and 2003--have reached the beginning stages of maturity, with pronounced seasonality in terms of price and volume? Probably," Mary Mahaney, an equity analyst at American Technology Research, wrote in an investor note Thursday.

The first and most pronounced sign of this trend taking hold occurred Wednesday, when Web giant Yahoo reported quarterly earnings that only met Wall Street expectations.

Because Yahoo's Overture Services subsidiary runs one of the largest paid search businesses--and counts CNN and Microsoft's MSN as clients--its results are closely watched as a litmus test for the industry.

The other heavyweight is Google, which feeds cash to big-name partners such as America Online and Ask Jeeves. Google is preparing to go public this year and bases more than 90 percent of its revenue on paid search.

During a conference call Wednesday with analysts, Yahoo executives admitted that its paid search query volume and pricing were flat last quarter, causing a scare on Wall Street. Shares of Yahoo stock plummeted 12 percent in after-hours trading, but recovered a bit the following day.

Paid search is still growing, but not as quickly as the previous quarter. Overture revenue grew 39 percent from last year, but that's less than the 45 percent growth it saw during the first quarter, according to Mahaney's note.

"Yahoo grows in step functions," said Safa Rashtchy, an equity analyst at Piper Jaffray. "You always have a flattish period. You can't have two jumps in a row at (the) level of the first quarter."

Commercial search is a business that relies on volume. Companies such as Yahoo's Overture subsidiary and Google allow advertisers to bid on keyword placement, and then they pay the companies a fee every time a Web surfer clicks on the link.

Overture and Google have sparked a financial revival for many Web companies and brought battered giants such as Yahoo, America Online and MSN back to life. The business has helped Yahoo so much that it acquired Overture last year for $1.63 billion.

While the business has been booming, there are some concerns that per-click pricing has reached its peak. Once Google goes public later this year and reports earnings every quarter, there will be a better understanding of how to measure paid search.

"Seasonality was only a minor concern last year, and it is a major concern now," said Jordan Rohan, an equity analyst at Schwab Soundview Capital Markets.

Still, Wall Street analysts are bullish and putting a positive spin on these results. The euphoria and the breakneck growth for paid search may benefit from a bit of a slowdown, they say. Just look at traditional advertising, which shines when the weather is lousy and then sags during beach-going months.

To its credit, Yahoo continues to show strong signs of growth outside of paid search. Subscription revenue jumped to $104 million from $88 million last quarter, while the company's long-stagnant HotJobs subsidiary showed some signs of much-needed life.

In the meantime, Yahoo executives are crossing their fingers and hoping the mood swings will change like the seasons.

"To us, we're very happy," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said in an interview Wednesday. "We weren't at all surprised. Pricing is stable. Everything is good."

Source: C-Net News

Yahoo's earnings double, but disappoints Wall Street

Yahoo's earnings on Wednesday were reported as doubling the previous quarter, but that disappointed Wall Street investors that were hoping for even more than that.

The Web giant posted a profit of $112.5 million, or 8 cents per diluted share, for its fiscal second quarter, which ended June 30.

That's up from $50.8 million, or 4 cents a share, in the same period last year, taking into account a 2-to-1 stock split, effective May 11. Revenue for the quarter was $609 million, excluding traffic acquisition costs (TAC), compared with $321 million a year ago.

Yahoo's stock fell in after-hours trading, down 14 percent to $28 a share shortly after the company reported earnings.

Wall Street expected Yahoo to earn 8 cents per share and $610 million in revenue, according to Thomson First Call's consensus of analyst estimates.

Much of the stock downturn stemmed from what Yahoo executives deemed as seasonal flatness in the commercial search business. Despite contributing significantly to Yahoo's revenue and profitability, Wall Street investors were hoping to see blowout results like last quarter.

"I believe investors have overestimated the growth in search," said Jordan Rohan, an equity analyst at Schwab Soundview Capital Markets.

The result is that the second and third fiscal quarters are expected to show slower growth, while the first and fourth could become boom periods for paid search. Still, Yahoo executives are satisfied with this quarter's numbers.

"To us, we're very happy," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said in an interview. "We weren't at all surprised. Pricing is stable, everything is good."

Last quarter, Yahoo earned $101 million in profits, or 7 cents a share, after the stock split. Revenue for the period was $550 million.

Yahoo's earnings highlight revenue numbers that do not include TAC, which excludes the fees its Overture Services subsidiary pays to search partners. Companies such as CNN and Microsoft's MSN get a cut of revenue every time customers click on Overture's paid search listings. Executives consider TAC revenue less illustrative of Yahoo's true revenue potential.

Yahoo's total revenue including TAC reached $832.2 million for the quarter.

Yahoo's operating income before depreciation and amortization--formerly known as EBITDA--reached $234 million. Cash flow hit $250 million, while free cash flow reached $194 million from $71 million a year ago.

Here's a breakdown of Yahoo's various revenue generators:

• Marketing services: The business line, which encompasses the company's advertising revenue, posted $691 million, up from $635 million the previous quarter and $219 million a year ago. The results include revenue from Yahoo's acquisition of Overture, whose highly lucrative paid search business accounted for the bulk of this quarter's gains. The company did not break out how much of this revenue came from paid search and how much came from display advertising.

• Fees: Revenue from Yahoo's paid services businesses jumped to $104 million from $88 million last quarter and $70 million last year. Bulk paid subscriptions reached 6.4 million from 5.8 million last quarter and 3.5 million a year ago. Executives attributed the revenue difference to a price increase for SBC Communications' dial-up customers who also use Yahoo's services.

• Listings: This business, which largely consists of Yahoo's HotJobs subsidiary, reported $38 million in revenue. That's up from $34 million last quarter and $32 million a year ago.

Yahoo has undergone a number of changes, many with archrival Google in mind. In June, the portal giant launched a redesign of its Web e-mail service and boosted free accounts from 4MB of memory to 100MB. The move was an attempt to counter the launch later this year of Google's free e-mail service, called Gmail, which will offer 1GB of storage.

Yahoo also offered a glimpse of its new home page design, which emphasizes its search engine and simplifies its layout. The company is testing a number of designs and soliciting feedback for its eventual launch later this year.

On the product side, the company in April released a flashier version of its popular instant messaging software. The launch illustrated the company's commitment to its free IM product. In June, however, the company scrapped its long-struggling IM product for corporations. Meanwhile, it also began shutting out third-party IM integration services such as Trillian and Gaim, causing many users to complain.

Source: C-Net News

Google offers more warnings to would-be investors

Google offered more warnings again on any would-be investors who might be getting overly excited, as they wait to buy Google's IPO.

In a financial document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google emphasized again that its shares are at high risk of dropping in value right after the deal -- rather than soaring, as some did during the Internet bubble.

That's largely because of the unusual way Google is setting the price for its initial public offering of stock, or IPO.

Google's latest financial documents gave investors more details about risks that could make buying Google stock a losing proposition, either in the short run or in the long run.

Those risks, according to Google, include nebulous ones, such as the risk that ``corporate culture'' could change, or more specific risks like spammers who could damage Google's prized search results.

Google also beefed up the section of the document that spells out how Google's unusual plan for its IPO, using an auction style of bidding for stock, poses risks for unwary investors.

Under the auction, investors will bid for Google shares, indicating how many they want, and at what price. Google will generally award shares to the highest bidders. After looking over the array of bids, Google and its bankers will set a single price that all winning bidders will pay.

But under this method, Google warned, overenthusiastic small investors might run up the IPO price to unreasonable levels, driving away larger investors like mutual funds or pension managers. That would make it more likely that Google's stock will fall once it starts trading, Google warned.

``Successful bidders should not expect to sell our shares for a profit shortly after our Class A common stock begins trading,'' Google said.

Experts say the SEC, which is currently reviewing Google's financial documents to make sure they are complete, may be worried that small investors are having visions of huge, bubble-era first-day profits from Google's IPO. So SEC lawyers could be asking Google to spell out the risks very clearly.

Google's executives also noted that if, as expected, they decide during the deal to sell extra shares, the stock will be more likely to fall rather than rise after the deal.

Separately Wednesday, Google found itself facing a trademark complaint by the owners of a children's Web site called Googles.com.

Stelor Productions, which owns and operates Googles.com, said it started trademark proceedings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office against Google for infringement of its brand name.

The original creator of Googles trademarked the name in 1997, the year before Google incorporated as a company. Google had no comment on the complaint.

Source: Mercury News

IT Interactive launches new design for GenieKnows

IT Interactive today announces the launch of GenieKnows.com, Version 3.0.

The new version of the innovative search engine integrates an attractive design with relevancy- focused results.

The search portal underwent an extensive overhaul; the redesigned GenieKnows.com interface features clear and comprehensive navigation architecture for search users, advertisers, and affiliates, alike.

"We are thrilled to announce that GenieKnows.com Version 3.0 is now live; our technicians and designers have been working hard to bring users an innovative site design that is both visually and functionally appealing," said Barbara Manning, President of IT Interactive Services.

"The new face of GenieKnows.com marks the beginning of a series of new and exciting ventures for us.

We are currently involved in industry-leading research with several Canadian universities that is certain to change the face of Internet search as we know it."

GenieKnows.com delivers search users direct access to highly relevant product and service search results from a broad base of advertisers.

GenieKnows.com delivers users editorial content and the latest news and information in GenieKnows.com Featured Articles, a unique complimentary online media-outlet dedicated to supplying visitors with quality, informative, entertaining content distributed across eight GenieKnows.com sites: Globe, Health, Taste&Style, Travel, Entertainment, Business, Life, and Sports.

GenieKnows Pay-Per-Visit Advertising allows advertisers to bid for keyword placement, based on site relevancy, within the GenieKnows network search results.

GenieKnows provides targeted search traffic for a wide range of advertisers through a Search Network that consists of over 350 partner sites, and serves over 180 million searches monthly.

GenieKnows.com empowers its broad distribution network by conveying meaningful, relevant, revenue- generating search resources.

GenieKnows Pay-Per-Visit Advertisers and Search Distribution Partners can easily learn more information about GenieKnows.com Advertiser and Search Distribution Programs, as well as set up and manage their accounts using the new user-friendly GenieKnows.com interface.

Source: IT Interactive