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OASIS on searching and topic maps

Various search engines and numerous databases provide instant access to an almost endless information stream on just about anyone or anything, but sometimes the search results can be deceptive.

To generate more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal government are using topic maps to index their data.

Topic maps are smart indices that improve search capabilities by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things. For example, William Shakespeare is a topic that would be mapped to essays about him, his plays and his famous quotes.

Today's the Day. Organizing content with topic maps provides context for words that can have multiple meanings, according to Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.

For example, searching Google for "Franz Ferdinand" mixes results for the alternate rock group and the doomed Austrian archduke for whom the group is named. If topic maps were used to organize the data, the musical and historical links would be separated, Durusau said. "The payoff (of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject," Durusau said.

Durusau said the Internal Revenue Service began developing topic maps to organize its tax forms about three years ago. Topic maps are used to help IRS representatives answer phone calls more efficiently, as well as to create the small-business CD that the agency sends to taxpayers. The IRS also uses topic maps to compare its data with that of the Social Security Administration, which "is structured completely different," he said.

Computer automation and human intervention are used in building topic maps, according to Michel Biezunski, president of InfoLoom and a consultant on the IRS project. He said an artificial-intelligence application groups the data into a preliminary map that is then refined by people, he said. "You need experts to build the relationships" between terms, according to Biezunski.

Biezunski, who helped write the topic-maps specification that was passed by the International Organization for Standardization, said several U.S. Department of Defense agencies are building topic maps, and that the legal and pharmaceutical industries are the next ones likely to index their data. "We are only at the beginning" of adoption, he said.

George Kondrach, president of software company Innodata Isogen, has been consulting with several U.S. intelligence agencies on how to use topic maps to overcome regional variations in spelling. Kondrach said agencies are working to define suspected terrorists as topics so that differences in agency spelling, such as "Osama" versus "Usama," would no longer prevent linking to vital information.

"The same problem exists in tracing genealogy," where last-name changes are common, Kondrach said. Topic maps can accelerate building family trees, as family members would be defined by all of their relationships, simplifying the process of tracking previous generations and extended families.

Eric Freese, a software engineer for research company LexisNexis, helped to create the World Wide Web Consortium standard for creating XML documents so that they can be easily incorporated into topic maps.

Outside the U.S. government, Freese said the most interest in topic maps is coming from Europe, where companies such as Ontopia, Mondeca and Empolis are developing commercial applications. "The fact that it is gaining ground in Europe has me optimistic that we'll figure it out here," Freese said.

The sagging U.S. economy has slowed the adoption of topic maps in the private sector, according to Freese. "In 2002 (when the XML standard was finalized), nobody was spending on new technology except the government," Freese said. LexisNexis has a few prototype applications using topic maps but has not yet updated its commercial databases.

Freese said topic maps would allow a LexisNexis query of the word "Iowa" to differentiate between the University, the state and the jurisdiction. "It makes sense to present the multiple choices (of context) before returning all of the results," he said.

Freese said search engines such as Google could take advantage of topic maps to increase the accuracy of web search without any changes to the web pages they are indexing. He said the Open Directory Project is already taking advantage of topic maps.

Source: Wired News

SortPrice reaches 1000 merchants

SortPrice.com announces that it has reached 1000 merchants with over 10 million product listings, ranging from small retailers to industry giants.

Some of its largest clients include companies like Target, Buy.com and Office Depot.

Launched in 2003, SortPrice.com was created to provide free listings for merchants and an easy to navigate and user-friendly interface for shoppers.

SortPrice.com stands out from its competition due to its flexibility with merchant data feeds, “Our advanced integration capabilities enables us to harvest any type of data feed and therefore allows easy and fast integration to merchant sites” says Chief of technology and co-founder, Asaf Klibansky.

“Merchants have responded well to the no-cost factor, and by mid 2005 we expect to feature over 5000 merchants and 50 million products.”

In addition to free listings, merchants can also display their logo to increase brand awareness and equity.

Another available feature is to purchase keywords and become a ’sponsored merchant.’

In similar sites, merchants would struggle to get a return on investment as time and money is spent on advertising and creating a compatible data feed.

Source: Search Engine Journal

More on the Snap search engine

Is Snap revealing too much of its own numbers?

Silicon Beat interviewed Bill Gross earlier this month to see how his Snap new search engine is coming on.

Gross unveiled Snap at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco in early October and vowed to do something we'd not seen at another company: share the daily financial details of his company with its users.

Sure enough, looking at Snap's stats page today, we see that:

--- They've served 2.6 million searches since they first launched
--- Snap made $55.88 yesterday
--- They have 1,235 advertisers
--- Snap had 624 clicks on ads yesterday that generated revenue

Digging deeper, we find that the most searches in one day was 59,723. In early November, the number of advertisers shot up from single-digits to the 1,235 that Snap has today. Last month, Snap made $1,176.40 in gross revenues. So far, this month it's made $1,558.56.

Now that the business is up and running, we asked Gross if he'd changed his mind about this level of transparency.

Not in the least. "Now whenever I want to find out how we're doing, I just go to the home page," Gross said from his Southern California office at Idealab.

Although Snap's revenues and search counts are but a sliver of its competitors, Gross is thrilled with the speed with which the Web site has grown.

"We never thought we'd see a million searches this fast,'' he said. "But now that we have, advertisers are starting to see that there's a market.'' (Snap crossed the 2 million search mark shortly after we chatted with him.)

Gross said that once the site opens up its self-serve advertising service -- similar to what Overture and Google offer -- the number of advertisers will shoot up.

"As soon as that goes up, we'll have thousands. We have a lot of pent-up demand.''

We asked Gross if it really made sense for companies to be so forthright about their financial situation, particularly if they are new and off to a slow start.

Won't investors and potential business partners, sensing a dud, shy away when they see the numbers. It doesn't give new companies much time to build momentum.

Consider, too, how the stock market would react to a company's daily business diary. On the one hand, investors would get to see the daily life-cycle of a company. But how would investors react to daily or weekly blips in traffic or revenues? (Witness the dip and then spike in searches and revenues that Snap experienced around November 20 as an example.)

"That's a good point. I would countercontend that we make the marketplace more interesting to advertisers. I'm predicting this is the wave. You can't write that story for a year, but I'm predicting this is the way to go.''

"It's kind of scary to put that data out there,' he added. "But it's liberating at the same time. I think it's good in the long-term. I think it will be a trend. In every aspect, it's better to be open.''

Source: Silicon Beat

MSN search using Rosette Linguistic Analysis

The Rosette Linguistics Platform provides MSN with the ability to better handle foreign languages used in a search.

One example is the quote all news and forums are using from a press release:

Rosette performs linguistic analysis that helps information retrieval applications understand search queries.

For example, Rosette identifies individual words for languages such as Japanese that do not use spaces between words, breaks compound words into their individual components, and identifies parts-of-speech such as verb, adjective, etc.

This information increases the accuracy of search results.

This is also common in German, where they often join two words into one (i think), such as “webdesign".

An other useful quote from the press release is “The Rosette Linguistics Platform uses state of the art Natural Language Processing techniques to improve information retrieval, text mining and other applications and apply them to global markets.

Rosette provides capabilities like identifying the language of incoming text, providing a normalized representation in Unicode, and locating names, places and other key concepts.”

Source: Search Engine Journal

Yahoo updates its algorithm

Observers just noted shifts in Yahoo’s search results pages for competitive keywords.

Yahoo has been serving up basically two sets of search results. Yahoo has been testing out a new algorithm that assigns more weight to those pages that have been listed in the Yahoo Directory. Reasoning for this could be that Yahoo’s only competitive advantage is its directory.

Members at Search Engine Watch Forums were noticing different results based on the case sensitivity of the keyword phrase.

Tim Mayer, directory of Yahoo product management search technology, answered this anomaly by saying “that the document was not being returned in one cluster and it was being returned in another” but it absolutely had nothing to do with case sensitivity.

Interesting to note these two threads with Tim’s response - might be some correlation.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Are desktop search engines safe to use?

Desktop search features and newer computer indexing tools such as Google's Desktop Search could cause security risks.

The reason is simply because companies that use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL protocol) to remote access or VPN, these protocols could copy content accessed during any SSL session and make it available to anybody that later uses the same computer.

Caches created by PC search tools get around the security many SSL vendors have put in place to purge cached data from remote machines as secure sessions shut down. These so-called cache-cleaning agents wipe out temporary files created during SSL sessions, but they don't wipe out the copies made by the search tools.

"You could end up caching and indexing files you don't want cached and indexed on machines outside your control," says Dan Harman, remote access administrator for real estate developer Lewis Group in Upland, Calif., which uses SSL remote-access gear made by Whale Communications Ltd.

One touted benefit of SSL remote-access technology is that any machine with a Web browser can be used to access a corporate network securely. The downside is that the PCs might not be owned by the corporation, so any number of unauthorized users could have access to them. "This tends to negate user authentication," says Rick Fleming, CTO of Digital Defense Inc., a vulnerability assessment company.

Besides Google's product, such search engines are made by Blinkx, Copernic Technologies Inc., ISYS Search Software and X1 Technologies Inc. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are said to be on the verge of having them, too.

SSL VPN vendor Aventail Corp. says its Secure Desktop, a virtual desktop for SSL sessions that are destroyed when the session closes, prevents files downloaded during the session from being viewed by Google Desktop Search.

To solve the problem for its customers, Whale has a software upgrade that detects whether Google Desktop Search is running on a remote PC. If so, access to the corporate network is denied or restricted. The company is developing similar upgrades to address nine other desktop search engines, says Whale Chief Technology Officer Noam Ben-Yochanan.

Google Desktop Search makes it easier to find data on PC hard drives and doesn't address these security concerns, a Google spokesman says. Customers can manually turn off Desktop Search or put it on pause during SSL remote-access sessions to avoid having the sessions cached by the search engine, he says.

Ben-Yochanan says he installed Google Desktop Search on a PC, opened an e-mail attachment, altered the document, sent it as an attachment, then deleted the file from the hard drive. Desktop Search retained a copy of the original attachment and the modified version.

Fleming says such tools pose similar threats to shared PCs on corporate LANs. So a person working the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift could access all the data accessed by the person working the 8 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shift, including personal human resources data or Internet banking information, he says.

Similarly, if a network administrator uses a random desktop to reconfigure a firewall, a desktop search engine will record those settings and the password used to gain access, Fleming says.

It also makes it easier for attackers to search machines they have taken over, says Fred Felman, vice president of marketing for Zone Labs Inc.

Source: ComputerWorld.com

Creative Commons updates its search engine

Creative Commons has updated the beta version of its search engine, which scans the web for text, images, video and audio files that are free to re-use on certain conditions.

Creative Commons’ announcement coincides with the Mozilla Foundation’s release of its industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0, which now features the Creative Commons search technology in its toolbar alongside such leading search services as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Dictionary.com.

“The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online,” said Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search engine’s product manager.

For example, a documentary filmmaker could use the Creative Commons engine to search for “images of the Eiffel Tower free for noncommercial use,” and incorporate any or all of the many photographs indexed.

A DJ seeking songs free to remix or mash-up could browse listings of MP3s by their legal terms. An entrepreneur seeking illustrations for her slideshow presentation could reduce costs and liability by using a Creative Commons image-specific search. An educator building course materials could include texts and videos found by the engine.

What distinguishes the Creative Commons engine from other search services is that all of the above are possible without the hassle of rights-clearance, licensing requests, or royalty payments.

At the core of the Creative Commons search engine are two key innovations, one legal and one technological.

First, Creative Commons offers authors and artists a simple, standardized way to mark their work as free to share or transform, on certain conditions.

By applying a Creative Commons copyright license and (cc) notice to her work, an author invites the world to make certain uses of it without giving up her copyright. Rather than the traditional “all rights reserved,” a Creative Commons license declares “some rights reserved.”

Second, and complimentary to this free legal tool, is Creative Commons machine-readable translation of the copyright licenses.

When an author affixes the (cc) copyright notice to her webpage or MP3 or image file, it is automatically marked with Creative Commons “metadata” as well.

It is this metadata – akin to a library catalog card describing a particular book – that the Creative Commons search engine then reads, processes, and presents to users as it crawls the web for their search requests.

The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org, an open-source search developer.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Mobissimo launches travel search engine

Mobissimo launched a new online travel search engine on Tuesday, and the company said it added an additional service allowing users to search for rental cars at the same time.

The site, http://www.mobissimo.com, allows users to search for flights, hotels and rental cars. A test version was first made available to the public in March.

Competitors to the privately held, San Mateo, California-based company -- whose name means "the ultimate in mobility" in Italian -- include SideStep, Yahoo's FareChase, as well as comparison shopping firm NexTag.

Elsewhere, Time Warner Inc. unit America Online last week said it made an investment in Kayak Software Corp., another travel search engine.

Travel search engines work like referral services, pointing users to where they can find bargains on the Web. The sites that get the business, in general, pay finders fees to the search companies.

They compete and sometimes partner with larger and more established Web travel service providers such as InterActiveCorp.'s Expedia, Orbitz Inc. and Sabre Holdings Corp.'s Travelocity.

Those companies are more like travel agents and aim to offer one-stop shopping by finding and selling hotel rooms, airplane tickets and rental cars.

Source: Reuters

Researching publications online with ebrary

ebrary is a Palo Alto company that builds online searchable databases of books, maps and other publications.

Ebrary takes PDF versions of publications -- typically supplied by publishers -- rips them apart and reconstructs them so they can be entered into a searchable database.

A downloadable piece of software called the ebrary Reader embeds itself into Web browsers and allows users to view the documents, aided by a bevy of features not available in standard PDF readers.

Clicking on a word within an ebrary document, for example, triggers a pop-up menu that allows you to highlight text, look up the word in a dictionary, or search for it within the document, the ebrary database or the entire Web.

Searching for ``Wahhabism'' in one book about the Middle East, for example, spawns links to other books that mention the word. The tool inspires discovery in a way that printed text never could.

``You can explore from one book out to others,'' said David Bass, senior vice president for sales and marketing.

Ebrary usually sells its databases of content to academic libraries. But the company also is starting to make sales to public libraries.

Although users typically first encounter ebrary at their library of choice, they can also access the technology from home, through a library account.

Students, researchers -- or anyone else using the system -- can electronically highlight words or passages, scribble notes in the ``margins'' of the books and save that information for access later through their home computers.

``So even if a library has limited hours, they can still offer library services,'' said Warnock, ebrary's chief executive.

Ebrary's been around for nearly six years, but the company has grown tremendously in the past year or so. Its collection now totals 50,000 to 60,000 titles, from books and reports to journals and sheet music.

The 30-person company is privately held and is partially funded by three major publishers, Random House Ventures, Pearson and McGraw-Hill.

Source: Mercury News

Performance-based online marketing

According to The Kelsey Group, small and medium-sized businesses (SME's) that use performance-based online marketing fall into three distinctive groups, based on the age or maturity of their business, their use of the technology and their preference for measuring actual results.

A report released this week lists three segments of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) marketplace most inclined to adopt performance-based Internet marketing -- newer businesses, "tech-forward" organizations, and direct mail marketers.

"People speak of a 'small-business market,' yet in essence there is no such thing," said Neal Polachek, senior VP of research and consulting for The Kelsey Group. "While there are common SME characteristics, there is also remarkable diversity.

What this report reveals is that there are certain categories of small businesses that are much more likely to adopt online marketing than others."

The report found that businesses that have been in operation less than 10 years, especially service-based ones, embrace performance-based marketing online.

These businesses typically generate fewer revenues, but allocate more dollars to marketing compared with more established businesses and even young product-based businesses, Polachek said. For this reason, they are generally interested in measurable advertising vehicles to ensure an efficient return on investment, he said.

"Tech-forward" SMEs, with high-speed Internet access and a Web site, tend to utilize technology to its fullest extent, the report found.

These businesses show no signs of relying on traditional advertising and marketing approaches, according to the report.

The Kelsey Group analyzed the data and found implications that the use of direct mail by a small-business marketer may be a signal that a business owner is more oriented toward measuring media performance.

Therefore, this group tends to be more inclined to devote resources to media that can show a demonstrable and dependable positive rate of return, such as performance-based online marketing, Polachek said.

Source: ClickZ

Google adds new search engine for scholars

Google has launched a new search engine that specifically focus on the needs of scholars and scientists.

The Google Scholar index is based on a subset of the regular Google index. This service enables you to search specifically for "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."

The search algorithm is apparently a little bit different from the regular one.

There is also a special search query syntax rule to be learned. If you want to find a specific article it is best to combine a search phrase (in quotes) with the last name of the article's first author: author:einstein "theory of relativity".

If a search result is marked [citation], that means that Google has found a reference, but that the article is not available on the open Web. This also applies to books. Some of the articles will not be available for free on the Web.

For the time being the service will not include Google Adword text ads.

Source: Pandia

Google sues AdSense publisher over click fraud

Google just filed a lawsuit against one of its AdSense publishers, claiming that company defrauded it by clicking on its own ads to generate revenue.

The case, filed in Santa Clara County Court, also alleges that Houston, Texas-based Auctions Expert International were in breach of their contract with Google for intentionally manipulating the advertising program.

AdSense allows for “unobtrusive and context-sensitive advertising,” according to Google, by linking a web user’s queries with similar advertising. “The advertiser pays Google for the user’s click and Google, in turn, pays the majority of the money it receives back to the website author,” Google said in its legal filing.

The AdSense agreements, though, expressly bar any company from clicking on its own sites in order to create ad revenue or to pay other people to click on the company’s sites.

“[Auctions Expert] flagrantly abused the AdSense Online service by artificially and/or fraudulently generating ad clicks,” the complaint stated. “These clicks were worthless to advertisers because they generated significant and unjust revenue for the defendants, who were paid by Google as if the clicks were legitimate.”

Pay-per-click fraud has been a hot topic recently for Google over the past year.

In March, 32-year-old Michael Bradley was arrested by the FBI after he developed a piece of software called “Google Clique” that roamed the Internet, clicking on AdSense advertisements.

Bradley first tried to sell his software to the search company for $100,000, and then, when Google failed to respond, threatened to release the program to the “top 100 spammers.”

Google also mentioned the subject in its April IPO filing with the SEC as a potential threat to its stock viability.

“We have regularly paid refunds related to fraudulent clicks and expect to do so in the future,” said Google. “If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase.”

Calls to Google attorney David H. Kramer, with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, were not returned as of this posting.

The case is Google Inc. Vs. Auction Expert International L.L.C., et al., CV030560.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Google sued by porn publisher

A pornography publisher based in California sued Google for copyright infringement violations Friday, accusing the search engine of failing to remove from its search results pages thousands of photographs posted on the Internet without permission.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Perfect 10 Inc. alleged that Web surfers can find its copyrighted pictures of nude women for free by performing Google searches.

The company said it has sent 27 formal requests to the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to remove the offending Web sites from its index and stop displaying the photographs in its search results, but was not satisfied with Google's response.

"It's very difficult to make money when all of your pictures are given away worldwide for free," said Perfect 10 President Norm Zada.

A Google spokesman declined to comment, saying the company had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.

Perfect 10 is represented by attorney Russell Frackman, who also represented major record companies in their lawsuits against file-sharing networks for copyright infringement.

Federal law places the burden of identifying copyright infringement on the copyright holder. While Google is not compelled to ferret out violations, it is required to respond to violations brought to its attention.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said Google has typically responded quickly to remove infringing works from its database.

Google has sometimes been accused of being too aggressive in responding to complaints of digital copyright violations. For example, the search engine company was accused of censorship after, at the request of the Church of Scientology, it removed from its searchable index Web sites criticizing the church.

"Google gets tons of notices and generally listens to them," Zittrain said. "I'd be surprised if they weren't listening to these."

In an earlier case, Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp., the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2002 that search engines could not display full-sized images without linking back to the Web site upon which they were posted.

But they could display smaller versions of the images, called thumbnails, without infringing copyrights. Google displays its results in postage-sized images, but links to Web sites that Perfect 10 says illegally display full-sized images.

Source: Detroit Technology News

Could Google remodel computing?

Google, best known for its wildly popular search engine, is invading Microsoft's turf, including its stronghold: the computer desktop.

Analysts say Google's aggressive ambitions could pose a formidable threat to Microsoft because it gets to the heart of what drives Microsoft's dominance: its control of the user experience through the Windows operating system.

If successful, Google could help refashion computing, making people less reliant on storing information on the Microsoft-powered PC on their desk and more dependent on free Web-based e-mail and search functions that can be accessed anywhere from any device regardless of the operating system.

Under such circumstances, the risk for Microsoft is that the computer desktop as we know it could cease to exist, said David Garrity, an analyst with Caris & Co. The question, Garrity said, is whether computer buyers may one day decide that they no longer even need a Microsoft operating system.

The two companies are already battling it out on fronts including Web search, free e-mail and better ways for searching individual computers. Analysts say that's evidence Microsoft should - and likely is - taking Google much more seriously.

"They'd be mad not to," said Niki Scevak with Jupiter Research.

Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said the company's goal is to organize information and make it universally accessible, and that goes far beyond search.

But she downplays the suggestion that Google's tools could eventually overtake Microsoft's ubiquitous software, saying the company doesn't currently have such plans but "it's hard to speculate" what the future might bring. Chief executive Eric Schmidt has, however, ruled out developing a Google browser to compete with Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.

The Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products.

For instance, Google's expansion into e-mail already has forced Microsoft and others to dramatically increase free storage. Analysts say it's also prodding Microsoft to improve products customers have long complained about.

As it became clear that Google and other search engines were increasingly gaining control over people's time online, Microsoft's MSN online division rapidly began developing its own search technology. Microsoft had previously outsourced that job.

Web search isn't the only place where Microsoft is playing catch-up. In June, Microsoft launched an Internet browser toolbar that blocks pop-up ads and enables search, years after Google had created its own.

And after Google announced plans for Gmail, a free e-mail service touting massive amounts of memory, Microsoft said it would boost free memory on its Hotmail accounts. Adam Sohn, a director with MSN, said to expect more Hotmail improvements soon, but he wouldn't provide details.

Microsoft also has promised its own system for searching desktop computers, responding to frustrations over how difficult it is to find things like e-mails and family photos on increasingly cluttered computers. Google launched its desktop search product last month and said users should expect more improvements to that product.

Then there is ad delivery, where Microsoft recently extended through June 2006 a contract for Yahoo Inc. to place relevant ads alongside its regular search results. Ad placement alongside search results is Google's main cash cow.

David Smith, a vice president with Gartner Inc., says the chain of events illustrates that Google is proving to be customer-driven while Microsoft tends to be more driven by competitive threats.

Microsoft denies that Google has been the impetus for improvements in its products. Sohn says the company is simply responding to customer feedback. He also downplays the Google competition, saying Microsoft has always faced plenty of foes.

"There's lots of innovation and competition, and it's way bigger than just Google, who I think everybody's excited about and focused on because they're a little bit newer," Sohn said.

Google, meantime, has signaled that it will fight Microsoft's moves into its turf. The day before Microsoft launched a test version of its Web search engine, Google said it had nearly doubled the size of its search engine index. And this week, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened an office in Kirkland, not far from Microsoft's Redmond campus.

Mayer said the goal is to attract employees who don't want to leave their hometown.

Asked if that meant the company was recruiting Microsoft workers, she said: "Not in a specific or targeted way, but we are looking at technical workers in the Seattle area who are interested in working for Google."

Still, Scevak said it's still too early to say if Google will ultimately be able to pull off a massive shift in allegiance. While many people turn to Google for search, he says plenty of others could see no reason to leave Microsoft products, such as Hotmail - especially if Microsoft is willing to match Google's improvements for free.

And while Google has been the first to desktop search, he says many users may still prefer to wait for Microsoft's more familiar product.

"It's at a very, very early stage," Scevak said.

Source: The Miami Herald

The CEO of Vivisimo talks on narrowing searches

In the early days of the Internet, search engines succeeded very well at turning up relevant results. But the situation is now changing.

With the growth of online content and the improvement in the ranking of search results, things are now flipped: Any query turns up an overabundance of results, both relevant and irrelevant.

Search engines struggle with the challenge of helping users deal with this information overload. Some search engines are placing their bets on personalization, which I contend is a dead end: Top talent will be expended on the problem with little to show for it in the end.

True search personalization has several inherent problems. True search personalization means that software will observe your Web surfing and other habits, and infer a profile of your true information tastes. Then your next search for, say, "anthrax," will turn up the rock band rather than the chemical.

But true search personalization has several inherent problems. Chief among them are the following:

• People are not static; they have many fleeting and seasonal interests. A student might intensely research Abraham Lincoln for a school project but may care nothing at all about the subject later on.

• The surfing data used for personalizing search is weak. The data that online booksellers like Amazon.com use is strong: I'm paying $20 for a book and committing 10 hours of my life to reading it. (Let's ignore the problems with gift purchases.) Surfing data involves the minimal commitments of a mouse click and a few seconds to look at a page before leaving.

• If the data used for inferring user profiles is the whole Web page that the user visited, then it's misleading. In this case, the user's decision to visit the page is based on the title and brief excerpt (snippet) that are shown in the search results, not the whole page.

• Home computers are often shared among family members, whose surfing interests obviously diverge.

• Queries tend to be short. My own spouse couldn't figure out my interests from a one or two word utterance, so how is a computer going to do better?

The best personalization is done by individuals themselves. Given all these difficulties, search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists for years to come.

But if not search personalization, then what? Some companies are placing bets on a display of search results that goes beyond simple ranked lists. The idea is to analyze the search results, show users the variety of themes therein and let them explore their interests at that moment, which only they are in a position to recognize.

One approach is to cluster the search results into possibly overlapping categories. They can be displayed as simple category folders which can be expanded into subfolders and whose folder contents can be listed.

They can also be displayed as spatial or temporal objects that are visualized on a computer screen in various dimensions with a time component. Clustering into categories takes place first, and exactly how to show the clusters is a second, independent decision.

Other approaches do not make use of categories at all and instead directly embed the search results into a map of some sort, possibly with an added time dimension.

Two researchers at the University of Maryland experimentally compared zoomable interfaces to folders-style clustering interfaces along the user dimensions of task accuracy, efficiency and subjective levels of satisfaction. Among their statistically significant conclusions was that users preferred the folders-style clustering interface partly because of its simplicity.

Which approach is best? The best personalization is done by individuals themselves. Software or even other people can only guess--usually poorly--a person's interest.

The next advances in search technology will acknowledge this limitation and make it easy for people to act on their interests of the moment--which only they can recognize.

Raul Valdes-Perez is CEO of search engine Vivisimo.

Source: C-Net News

Google launches its Deskbar API

Google announces the availability of the Google Deskbar API (application programming interface).

Google's technology makes it possible for software developers to build their own features, or plug-ins, for the popular Google Deskbar.

For instance, a developer could use Google Deskbar APIs to create a movie search command that enables users to search their favorite movie site by entering a movie name into the Deskbar search field and typing a special command such as "Ctrl'M." Other examples include:

- Locate and play a music play list on your hard drive
- Solve algebraic equations
- Send instant messages from the Deskbar (example: type "AIM
- [screen name] [message text]")

Results will be displayed within the Google Deskbar mini-browser which appears to the bottom right of the user's computer. New features developed with the Google Deskbar API will be displayed as an option in the Deskbar main menu.

The Google Deskbar API is in the experimental, beta phase. We invite developers to use the service and encourage them to send us their input and feedback. Plug-ins can be written in any .NET language, such as C# or Visual Basic.NET.

More information about the Google Deskbar API can be found here: http://deskbar.google.com/help/api/index.html.

Source: Google

Can rich media overtake search before 2010?

A recent report from eMarketer.com expects rich media could overtake search to become a dominant form of Internet advertising by the end of the decade. Although paid search continues to be the main online advertising medium, with Google's soaring stock price and SEO revenue numbers higher than expected, could rich media overtake search before 2010?

The drivers behind rich media's rise will be the swift adoption of broadband by consumers and the migration of traditional brand marketers to the Internet.

On the consumer side, eMarketer's numbers indicate that by 2005, 53% of US online households will access the Internet via broadband. On the advertiser side, Yahoo! reports that its 200 largest brand-advertising customers spent 38% more on branding ads in Q1 2004 than in 2003's corresponding quarter.

The online advertising environment is changing — it is beginning to look more like traditional media every day. By presenting ads capable of swaying emotions, not just generating clicks, rich media will break down barriers and draw in large traditional advertisers.

In fact, the new eMarketer report, Rich Media predicts that rich media will overtake search to become the dominant form of Web advertising by the end of the decade.

Rich media ad spending grew by nearly 37% in 2004, and growth rates of more than 25% are projected for the next three years.

The resistance to new media is rapidly falling as advertisers learn which rich media formats work best for their goals, how to implement rich media-based campaigns and how to track the results of the online portion of their campaigns. As a result, the market is becoming increasingly valuable for advertisers, agencies and Web publishers alike.

"The single most important factor supporting rich media growth is the audience," says David Hallerman, Senior Analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. "More people are going online, they spend considerable time online and do more things there and more of them are accessing the Internet using high-speed connections that make rich media ads palatable, if not always welcome."

That the Internet is a mainstream medium, an effective place for branding-oriented advertisers to reach part of their audience, is implied in a recent Online Publishers Association report titled "Generational Media Study."

When the trade group asked 1,235 US adult Internet users to choose two, and only two, media outlets (and jettison the rest), 45.6% made the Internet their first preference. As the clear-cut second banana among the respondents, 34.6% picked TV as their first choice, with every other medium in single figures.

"While the survey reflects the fact that Internet users are making the Internet their first choice among media, it also indicates that once people get accustomed to going online, they tend to make it primary in their lives — or at least secondary to television," says Mr. Hallerman.

This trend toward choosing the Internet first will continue, since more than 50% of users ages 18 to 24 made the Internet their main choice among the eight media surveyed.

Furthermore, 74% of the OPA respondents use the Internet for entertainment. That's more than for print media, and starting to approach TV levels (at 86%). The best of rich media entices its audience through being, in some way, entertaining — much like television commercials.

Brand marketers not advertising on the Internet today are like their counterparts 10 years ago who failed to embrace cable television: "No thanks — we find the big networks give us all the market reach we'll ever need!"

Just like you rarely hear that today about TV, most brands will soon make the Internet an integral part of their campaigns. And for brand marketers working online, the greater engagement of rich media advertising is essential.

Whether that engagement means offering entertainment, moving the audience's emotions or creating unique interactive experiences, rich media combined with targeting gives marketers tools they can't find anywhere else — but online.

"Moving beyond the numbers," says Mr. Hallerman, "the implications of all this portents huge changes in online advertising, and advertising overall — because the growth of online brand advertising will mean less ad dollars in other media."

Source: eMarketer

Yahoo and SBC expand wireless services

Yahoo and SBC Communications have expanded an existing agreement to move beyond dial-up and DSL to collaborate on the delivery of entertainment over a multimedia platform to a variety of devices, including wireless phones.

The two companies say they plan to expand the SBC Yahoo! customer service offering as a means of promoting the digital home.

SBC says the branded content soon will be available on Cingular wireless phones, SBC FreedomLink Wi-Fi, as well as home televisions, the PC, audio systems and SBC home networking equipment.

The expanded deal enables the companies to offer customers access to the Yahoo! portal via a host of devices.

Specifically in the wireless environment, the partnership will give Cingular Wireless customers who subscribe to SBC Yahoo! access to personalized Web-based content and integrated messages.

The SBC Yahoo! service also would be integrated into the SBC Wi-Fi service, the companies say.

"What you see on your SBC Yahoo Internet home page is coming to a TV set or wireless phone near you," SBC Chairman and CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. said in a statement.

SBC says the extended partnership also will deliver a "one mailbox" service that will enable subscribers to access their e-mail, wireless and wireline voicemail and faxes from a central location.

Text-to-speech software enables all messages to be read over the phone. SBC first introduced this service, dubbed SBC Unified Communications, last month.

Further down the road, the companies hope to develop a consolidated address book as well that will be accessible by a wireless phone, landline phone, computer or television.

The first products are expected to make their debut next year.

Source: Wireless Week

Ask Jeeves to launch desktop-search feature

Ask Jeeves plans to launch a desktop-search feature in December, a company representative said.

Desktop search has become the latest battleground among leading search players, with Google, Microsoft's MSN division and Yahoo all working on products. But if desktop search catches on among users, it's unclear how it would affect the webmasters and marketers vying for top rankings.

While Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves hasn't provided many details, its product appears likely to follow the approach of other Web search engines by combining hard-drive results, such as from e-mails and files, with its core Web results.

"It's going to be an inclusive thing, and we hope to incorporate the whole experience," said Michael Palka, director of product management at Ask Jeeves.

Signs of Ask Jeeves' desktop plans surfaced earlier this year when it acquired desktop-search startup Tukaroo Inc.

During the launch in September of the MyJeeves personalized search service, an Ask Jeeves executive told eWEEK.com that desktop search would be out by the end of the year and would include integration with MyJeeves.

Among major Web search engines, it will join Google Inc., which already released its desktop search beta, and Microsoft Corp., whose MSN division has slated a beta of desktop search for December.

Google Desktop Search delivers both local and Web results within its Web interface. Meanwhile, an internal beta of MSN's product leaked onto the Web this week focuses on returning different types of results depending on where a user is working within Windows.

Also in the wings is Yahoo. Its chief executive, Terry Semel, said in a financial analyst conference earlier this month that the Sunnyvale, Calif., company is working on desktop search, but he offered few details on its plans.

Source: eWeek

Google opens new office near Microsoft

Google just opened a new office down the road from rival Microsoft's headquarters as it seeks to lure local engineering talent.

Google, which competes with the world's largest software maker in Internet search as well as for employees, has leased space in Kirkland, Washington, less than 8 km from Microsoft's Redmond headquarters.

Alan Eustace, vice president of engineering at Google, said that the only reason to start a remote engineering office is to hire really talented people, that the Seattle area has an amazing amount of technical talent, but that in some cases Google has had difficulty hiring people, because they did not want to leave the Pacific Northwest for California's Silicon Valley.

Eustace also said that the new office, which takes up an entire floor of a building in downtown Kirkland, will have perks similar to those in other Google offices.

Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and also has engineering offices in New York, Santa Monica, California, Zurich, Bangalore, India and Tokyo.

So far, about 10 Google employees are working in Kirkland in a space that could hold at least 200 more people. Some engineers with ties to Seattle would be moving up from Mountain View as well.

Google is inviting local friends, family members, civic leaders and press to an invitation-only party on November 18, but declined to say whether Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was invited.

Source: Reuters

Google sees slower growth

Google warns that increased competition could see revenue gains at a slower pace in the fourth quarter.

Search engine Google has seen share prices more than double since its August initial public offering, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that while it believes revenue will continue to grow, the growth rate will not keep accelerating as it has been.

Google's lost $5.50, or about 3 percent, to $167 in pre-market trading on Inet following the filing.

"Our revenue growth rate has generally declined, and we expect it will continue to do so as a result of increasing competition and the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels," said the company's filing.

"Consequently, we believe that our revenue growth rate from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2004 may not be sustainable into the fourth quarter of this year and in future periods. "

The company's filing also said it was offering to repurchase 23.4 million shares of stocks that had been held by current and former employees and contractors, as well as 5.2 million unexercised options.

That share repurchase offer is more than the 19.6 million shares it sold in its IPO. At current market prices the company will not have to repurchase any of the shares, since its offering only the price paid for the shares, between 30 cents and $80 a share.

But the offer stays open through December, so if the shares were to have a sharp fall in the next six weeks, the company could face some additional share repurchases.

Source: CNNfn.com

Dulance launches its comparison shopping service

Dulance, Inc. today announces the launch of its comparison shopping service in RSS (Real Simple Syndication) format.

Dulance is the first search engine to use RSS technology to facilitate reserve price shopping.

The new feature effectively transforms any third-party RSS reader into a personal shopping agent.

Shoppers with a particular item and price in mind can now initiate a search once and rely on their RSS reader to repeat it automatically, until at least one seller drops the price below the set level.

“Trying to snag a product the moment it goes on sale requires users to frequently visit search engines or comparison shopping sites to manually repeat the same search over and over again until they see that the price has dropped.

It’s a tedious process that requires time and resolve that most shoppers don’t have,” explains Dulance founder and CEO, Sergei Burkov. “At Dulance.com, they can now automate the process. It changes the game when a bargain hunt costs near nothing in terms of time and effort.”

At Dulance, shoppers can run a search for a desired product indicating their price limit. Dulance returns a list of shops that sell the sought product below that price.

Now they can opt to subscribe to a RSS feed of results based on the same criteria. Subscribing to a Dulance RSS feed works much like subscribing to a news feed or blog elsewhere.

The Dulance feed contains links to individual online stores selling the particular product, along with current prices. A “news” event is triggered when Dulance finds a new seller or a change in price. It is picked up by the shopper’s RSS reader, as any other piece of news.

This new feature is a function of Dulance’s unique ability to extract prices and product availability from unstructured webpages in real time, milliseconds after downloading fresh copies of product pages off the live web.

This allows Dulance to report news of dropping prices to RSS readers seconds after they occur.

“Even if Google, Yahoo and other search engines made their search results available in RSS, their feeds wouldn’t offer timely news of changing prices.

Standard practice for most search engines is to fetch information from copies of webpages stored at their own servers, not from the live web.

The update cycle ranges from a few days to six weeks,” explains Burkov. “In contrast, Dulance does not maintain any web caches. Instead it relies on its artificial intelligence algorithms to dynamically extract the current prices.”

Learn more on Comparative Shopping Search Engines.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Google works with inexpensive cellphones

Google now works with inexpensive cellphones, not just the more costly ones with Web access and more features.

Over the last month, the popular search engine company has quietly turned on a new service that lets people use most newer cellphone models to get snippets of information by sending short text messages to a special five-digit number, 46645, which spells GOOGL on a phone keypad.

People looking for a list of pizza or Chinese restaurants in Back Bay, for example, just have to send the message "pizza 02116" or "Chinese 02116."

Within 10 seconds or so, Google shoots back one or more text messages listing restaurants with addresses and phone numbers from its Google Local page.

Related services from Google let users get a phone number by sending a message containing the desired person's first and last names and city, area code, or ZIP code; they can also use Google's Froogle shopping site to get a price quote by sending a text message with "price" followed by the item's name or Universal Product Code number.

Google's is among a handful of new services that give consumers a much cheaper, on-demand alternative to paying $5 to $15 for a monthly subscription to a plan like Verizon Wireless's Get It Now, Sprint's PCS Vision, or the mMode service offered by the former AT&T Wireless Services Inc., which is now part of Cingular Wireless LLC.

With the Google service, users pay their carrier for only the cost of text messaging, typically 10 cents a message or less when subscribers buy monthly "buckets" of 100 or 500 messages.

The Weather Channel last month activated a service that offers 36-hour weather forecasts when people send a text message containing a ZIP code or city and state name to the number 42278, which stands for 4CAST.

The Weather Channel, part of closely held Virginia media company Landmark Communications Inc., charges 75 cents per use, added to subscriber's phone bills, plus a charge for each text message.

Also last month, San Francisco start-up UpSnap Inc. launched a way for wireless subscribers to get free directory assistance listings for businesses as an alternative to paying $1.25 or more for calling 411 on their cellphone.

Users have to start at the upsnap.com website, where they register their phone number and soon get a text message.

By keeping that message in their inbox, users can respond to that message with the name and either ZIP code, area code, or geographical location of a business.

UpSnap sends back a new reply message with the phone listing. Recent tests, however, showed the service can take several minutes or even hours to generate replies.

Like Google, the service is free except for the text charge from the phone company. The company makes its money from advertising.

Source: The Boston Blobe

Indexing sites in Flash still a challenge

Despite some improvements done recently to help the indexing of websites created using Flash technology, there are still many major roadblocks left.

For sites designed using Macromedia Flash technology, most major search engines are anything but friendly. The major crawlers (spiders) used to discover content rarely dig deep into Flash, often missing pages or, worse yet, ignoring those sites altogether.

But a pair of Web designers detailed a new approach on Tuesday at the WebmasterWorld.com World Search Conference here to change that.

They are investigating a way to abstract the content and presentation layers of Flash sites so that search engines can spider the HTML that they favor and sites can take advantage of the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash.

"We want [Flash sites] to act just like HTML Web sites," said George Shaw, creative director at DivinePenguin, in Los Angeles. "There's no reason philosophically why they shouldn't."

Shaw is one of the designers behind a project called RichMediaSEO. The other is Gregory Markel, founder and president of search marketing company Infuse Creative, of Santa Monica, Calif.

While demand remains high for Flash-based sites in industries such as entertainment, which want to display multimedia, the lack of full search-engine support creates roadblocks, the designers said.

"The only issue we're running into is verifiability of the content," Shaw said. "It's a trust issue at this point. The search engines need to trust that the content they're searching is the same as the Flash [sites] are displaying."

The options for Flash sites today, though, remain limited. Shaw and Markel agreed that sites should avoid Flash if search engine optimization is a top priority and if the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash are not necessary.

Even sites using Flash need to take a hybrid approach by combining Flash and HTML, rather than relying exclusively for Flash in their architecture, Shaw said.

The pair's efforts are not the first to try to tackle Flash's search engine problems, Macromedia Inc. in 2002 released a software development kit (SDK) for Flash to help search engines index the content.

Click here to read about multimedia search engine Singingfish's introduction of Flash support.

But the SDK has offered limited help, Markel said. He said that Macromedia in recent months has become more involved in figuring out how to optimize Flash for search engines.

Google earlier this year appeared to begin indexing Flash using its own SDK, but that effort has appeared to be on again, off again, Markel said.

Tim Mayer, director of product management for search at Yahoo Inc., said that Yahoo does not spider into Flash content for its Web index but could once it "helps our comprehensiveness."

Multimedia sites, though, can use Yahoo's paid inclusion program, Overture Site Match, to feed the content into its index.

"At this point, if you're using Flash you rarely are going to get a No. 1 listing, and that's a shame," Mayer said

Article by Matt Hicks
Source: eWeek

Google provides targeted advertising to Buy.com

Buy.com and Google launch an advertising partnership that delivers Google AdWords to Buy.com's customers.

As part of the agreement, Google's targeted, text-based ads appear on Buy.com's website through the Google AdSense program.

The partnership between Google and Buy.com furthers both companies' mission statements, which are customer-centric," stated Neel Grover, president of Buy.com.

"By adding Google's targeted ads to Buy.com, we are giving our customers additional, highly-relevant resources with which to make an informed buying decision."

Google's relevant, targeted ads are now incorporated throughout Buy.com's website, including top-tier technology pages such as the computers and electronics homepages, as well as the popular entertainment and leisure stores including Books, Music, Sports, DVDs, and others.

In addition, customers searching on Buy.com will receive Google advertisements on the search results pages.

"Google's relevant ads are designed to improve the user experience on Buy.com, while providing the company with an additional revenue opportunity," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of World Wide Sales and Field Operations.

"This agreement also adds Buy.com to the Google Network and extends the reach for Google AdWords advertisers to another quality website."

Source: Buy.com press release

Google and iPod-like devices

Almost everyone wants better high-speed Internet access and more bandwidth and performance.

Monday was a day when Silicon Valley's heaviest hitters put aside their business plans and day-to-day worries and riffed on the future of technology, innovation and U.S. competitiveness.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt imagined a personalized iPod-like device, and Intel President Paul Otellini looked forward to the day when wireless technology will finally make high-speed Internet ubiquitous.

The occasion was an ``innovation summit'' organized by the technology industry's advocacy group, TechNet. Google hosted the event at its Mountain View campus, and PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose moderated the panels of valley chief executives and other luminaries.

Rose's show taped the discussions, which will air beginning this week as four episodes. Rose's show airs weekdays on KQED (Ch. 9) at midnight.

Panelists included venture capitalist John Doerr, Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel, Chambers from Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorna.

The marriage of wireless technologies and the Internet was a common theme. Doerr said his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested in half a dozen companies involved in wireless technologies.

And Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said he is eager for the day when everyone has an intelligent, Treo-like device that uses the Web to help schedule trips, manage time and organize the fire hose of information that bombards people daily.

``Our lives are overwhelmed with information coming at us,'' Joy said. ``We hunger for something that will help us make sense of the chaos.''

Schmidt, of Google, picked up on that theme later. ``The next killer device is a clearly a personal one,'' Schmidt said. ``The one I personally favor is putting all the world's information into the equivalent of an iPod, which will be possible in the next five to 10 years. And if you can't quite do that, your wireless connection will help you get what you need.''

Lobbying the government is a key part of TechNet's mission, and Doerr and others spoke to the limited but crucial role the government should play in helping spur innovation.

``There are three things we need the government to do,'' Doerr said: Invest in research, invest in education, and foster an environment where innovation can thrive.

Nearly all the participants agreed that the lack of widespread high-speed Internet access has held back adoption. U.S. broadband penetration is below 50 percent and lags behind other developed nations, such as South Korea.

``A country like Korea is totally broadband,'' Semel said. ``It all comes back to broadband. It changes everything we do.''

Rose asked why broadband penetration in the United States is so low relative to the rest of the developed world.

Doerr cited the physical vastness of the United States, high prices and what he said were conflicting government regulations. But Joy said the lack of competition in many areas has stalled the spread of high-speed lines.

``We didn't have government leadership saying we need to do this,'' Joy said. ``If there wasn't strong competition between the cable and phone companies, broadband didn't get rolled out.''

The country's competitiveness with other countries also found its way into many discussions. As they have repeatedly over the years, executives said the United States must invest more heavily and intelligently in its schools.

``The U.S. is falling behind in education,'' Chambers said. ``You look at China, and they will guarantee that 25 percent of their college students will graduate with a degree in the computer sciences. I think that's the biggest challenge we face.''

Source: Mercury News

Internet advertising to reach $9.4 billion in 2004

Dow Jones will buy MarketWatch, owner of the financial news site CBS MarketWatch, for $519 million.

That deal is being billed as a way for the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to expand its online audience and capitalize on a revived Internet ad market.

Executives at Dow Jones are not the only ones taking notice.

The Internet is now the nation's fastest-growing advertising medium, with sales expected to reach a record $9.4 billion this year -- up 16 percent from the bubble days. What's more, Internet research firm eMarketer expects companies will nearly double their annual Web ad spending by 2008.

Another sign of revival Monday: the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers said Internet ad spending jumped 35 percent to a record $2.4 billion in the third quarter from a year earlier, and were up 2 percent from the second quarter.

The ad revival is driving revenue spikes at some top news sites, including CNET, The New York Times Digital, and Knight Ridder Digital.

But strong ad sales overall are masking a challenge that many Web sites operators face: while demand is up, so too is the total supply of ad space available. That means ad rates aren't rising nearly as fast.

"There's more inventory in general," said Denise Garcia, a principal analyst with GartnerG2. "There is still more supply than there is demand for online advertising."

It's the paradox of the Internet's second act. While everyone reaped the benefits of skyrocketing rates during the late 1990s boom, this time around a handful of ad-driven sites are going gangbusters, with no available ad space.

Everybody else, however, is saddled with too much inventory. Companies like ValueClick (up $0.45 to $11.94, Research) and privately-held Blue Lithium, which specialize in aggregating sites' excess supply and selling it off cheap in exchange for a commission, are going strong.

"At a macro level I guess you could say that spending is going up," said Gary Stein, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. But he estimates that about half of ad dollars spent online are going to four sites: Google, Yahoo!, MSN (owned by Microsoft (up $0.42 to $27.31, Research)) and AOL (which, along with CNN/Money, is a Time Warner (down $0.11 to $17.29, Research) property). From there, he said, "it starts to fragment pretty quickly."

Yahoo! (down $0.36 to $37.44, Research) and Google (up $3.18 to $185.18, Research) are on a tear because they dominate paid search advertising, which is by far the hottest form of online advertising. A IAB-PricewaterhouseCoopers survey shows that search advertising comprises about 40 percent of the total online ad market, up from nearly 30 percent a year ago.

The beauty of paid search is that the ads that appear are directly related to the keywords a consumer uses to conduct a Web search. A sponsor pays only if and when a user clicks onto the company ad that appears along with Web search results.

So, for instance, a mortgage lender will bid to have its ad appear next to a search of "mortgage rates." The assumption is that someone who's looking for a new house might be interested in finding out about loans.

Last month a bank paid on average $4.31, or 36 percent more than in September, for each mortgage-related search that ended in a click, according to Fathom Online, a San Francisco research firm that began tracking paid search rates in August. Fathom says prices for keywords jumped 14 percent last month, from September.

Web site operators that don't sell paid search advertising are discovering too that they can charge more if they can deliver the customer the marketer wants to reach.

Jason Vogelpohl is the vice president of advertising at TradingMarkets.com, a subscription-based information site for active day traders that draws advertising from financial services companies. If an advertiser wants to sell itself to, say, Canadian investors, Vogelpohl said he can command top dollar if he can produce them.

"The more you can tell advertisers about your demographic, the more money they will spend," said Vogelpohl.

The problem for Web sites that don't have the benefit of detailed subscriber lists is that they still don't know the faces behind the clicks.

To change that, some online publishers are embracing technology that tries to profile users based on all the pages they visit on a single site.

The idea is to help Web sites sell ads at higher rates on less-popular pages by, for instance, showing auto makers that site users head not only to the automotive section but also to information on the weather or general news.

But behavioral targeting technology is still in its infancy, said Garcia of GartnerG2. "It will be awhile before that really starts to take off," she said.

Source: CNNfn.com

AOL improves its Google-powered search features

AOL is still using the Google search engine but is gradually integrating its own services and its own content inside its search results pages.

One good example was found on searching for ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’. AOL Search gave information from Moviefone like Movie Details, Buy the DVD, Find the Best Price, and even trailers and clips. Searching for ‘Eagles‘ (the music group) gave me information about Philadelphia Eagles from AOL Sports.

Not exactly what I was looking for but it can be helpful for someone looking for the football team. Overall, it is a good way to integrate you services and drive traffic to them. AOL saves money and effort in building a new Search Engine from scratch.

It is in the coming days releasing its own browser where the search page (or homepage) can be directed to this search engine. And they can use the Search service more effectively.

MSN Search Beta Engine does so with MSN Music, Encarta and other Microsoft services. Seems like trend is spreading for making search pages more than just plain jane. Google is also not behind with its News and desktop search results integrated with normal searches.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Blinkx launches Smart Folders

Blinkx just launched a new version of its search engine, which now creates special folders in users' computers.

The new feature, called Smart Folders, is the highlight of Blinkx 2.0, the newest version of this internet and desktop search tool, which is available as a free download from the start-up company's website at http://www.blinkx.com.

Blinkx 2.0 also has a feature called SIS, an acronym for the phrase Stuff I've Seen, which maintains a record of viewed files. Blinkx 2.0 also adds support for querying peer-to-peer networks.

The first version of Blinkx was launched in July and generated significant interest among users and industry watchers because of its unique approach to search. Instead of relying only on keyword-based queries, Blinkx reads users' entire screens or specific windows and, based on that contextual information, flags documents from their PCs and from the internet. Blinkx works unobtrusively in the background and displays search results when prompted by the user.

Blinkx also gained attention for its ability to index files on a user's hard drive, the so-called desktop search capability that big vendors such as Google, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are also pursuing.

Blinkx 2.0's new Smart Folders are automatically populated with PC and internet documents that are contextually related. Users can configure Smart Folders in various ways to narrow the types of documents and files that can be included. Smart Folders can contain pictures, music and video clips, text and web pages. Blinkx 2.0 also can alert users when it has updated the content of a Smart Folder.

Blinkx 2.0 is available only for Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Source: PC Advisor.co.uk

Google GMail now allows POP3

Google's GMail just added 2 new features in their beta mail feature that includes POP3 support. Also available is email forwarding capability.

Downloading the mails only available on GMail website is now possible.

They have made some intelligent options available when you enabled pop support in GMail. You can chose to receive only the new mails to be available for pop download.

So if you already have 100s of Megs of mails stored in GMail, you can avoid downloading them at all! GMail have pop-enabling tutorials available for many popular mail clients on their website. I personally tried GMail POP on Opera’s excellent M2 Mail client and it worked flawlessly.

The other functionality is mail forwarding. Nothing special in this other than the fact that using GMail filters, only those mails that satisfy certain conditions could be set to be forwarded to another mail account.

Now the catch is, since GMail is still in beta stage and Google does not clarify anything about it… it is not sure if POP and mail forwarding would be available when it is publicly released. But if it is… it can be real bad news for many paid for mail services out there.

Another thing worth noticing is that GMail mails sent through POP did not include any footer or advertisements (in my tests)! Maybe Google would have some other plans for us in the future. On the other hand, maybe it is an indication that POP would not be free once the public release of GMail is out.

Source: Search Engine Journal

There are more than 8 billion pages in Google's index

"Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it's invaluable for queries that only return a few results", says Bill Coughran, V.P. of engineering at Google.

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but Bill Coughran does.

He says it's a measure of how many pages Google has in its index and gives an indication of how broadly it searches to find the information people are looking for.

Yesterday, that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made him smile.

Now when Bill searches for friends who previously generated only a handful of results, he now sees double that number. These are not just copies of the same pages, but truly diverse results that give more information.

The same is true for obscure topics, where you're now significantly more likely to find relevant and diverse information about the subjects. You may also notice that the result counts for broader queries (with thousands or millions of results) have gone up substantially.

However, as with any search engine, these are estimates, and the real benefit lies with the queries that generate fewer results.

The documents in Google's index are in dozens of file types from HTML to PDF, including PowerPoint, Flash, PostScript and JavaScript. Together, these pages represent a good chunk of the world's information, but hardly all of it.

That is why Google keeps building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what it finds.

So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well the search engine company does in finding what you want from within those pages.

"We'll keep improving that too", says Bill Coughran.

Source: Google's blog

Arafat's death boosts Web traffic

In the hours after Yasser Arafat's death on Thursday, the Web reacted with a lot of headlines, speculation and debate.

Arafat's death dominated nearly every major news Web site worldwide, including those of Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde and The New York Times.

Headlines ran the gamut form Al-Jazeera's "Israelis shed no tears for Arafat" to the Times' "State for Palestinians and peace with Israel left unrealized."

Web portal Yahoo listed its coverage of the leader's demise as its most heavily e-mailed story less than an hour after his death was first reported. The story also garnered the top spot among the most popular stories on CNN's international news site.

His death came as little surprise. Arafat was admitted to a French military hospital in late October, and rumors soon began circulating that his death was imminent.

The contentious nature of Arafat's reign over Palestinian politics sent Web surfers to Internet message boards to debate the leader's track record.

A quick scan of the various subject headers in Yahoo's discussion area threw light on just how divided sentiments about the leader remain.

Some posters lavished praise on the deceased chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. One subject line stated: "He stood up to the white man." Other posters blasted Arafat: "Why are we honoring a terrorist?"

Source: C-Net News

Dogpile offers new IntelliFind technology

Dogpile announces enhancements to its metasearch platform.

Dogpile's new IntelliFind™ technology utilizes sophisticated query intelligence to assess the likely intent behind every entered query, enabling Dogpile to return more relevant results from a wider array of content sources.

IntelliFind builds on Dogpile metasearch's unique ability to search more of the Web by analyzing the likely intent behind every query and intelligently searching the sources most likely to return the best results.

By limiting the sources queried to those most likely to contain the best-matched content, Dogpile now returns an even higher concentration of more accurate results to end users.

IntelliFind also extends Dogpile metasearch beyond leading engines such as Google, Yahoo! and AskJeeves to pull relevant results from a variety of vertical content sources such as white pages, news, audio, video and images.

Results from these content sources are reported at the top of results pages, above the Web search results, for easy access. Building on this functionality, Dogpile also today announced new vertical content partnerships with Topix.net and Singingfish.

"Today's release results from more than a year of hard work to refine our metasearch platform.

Users will find significant improvements in the relevancy of our results, along with rich new sources of content," said Melissa Turtel, senior product manager for Dogpile. "IntelliFind lays the foundation for a steady stream of useful, new features that will appear on Dogpile over the coming months."

Dogpile IntelliFind is highly responsive to rapid shifts in current events and pop culture that can influence the likely intent behind individual query terms.

For example, when an eruption at Mount St. Helens occurs, the intent of users entering the term "volcano" can change suddenly. Additionally, the intent behind queries that contain the word "tree" can vary sharply in the summertime and over the holidays.

IntelliFind is designed to keep pace with these developments so that users can quickly locate highly useful results year-round.

Throughout 2005, Dogpile will continue to add a variety of content sources not previously available through Web search engines.

These include specialized information on specific product categories, yellow pages content, movies, entertainment and more.

Source: TMCnet.com

Mozilla won't make a browser for Google

Not only has Google's top executives denied the company is developing a Web browser, but the Mozilla Foundation recently has denied speculation that it is working with the search engine.

In an interview with eWEEK.com ahead of Tuesday's Firefox launch, Mozilla President Mitchell Baker denied rumors that the Mountain View, Calif., foundation was working with Google on a browser based on Firefox or its Gecko rendering engine.

"The code base is open for companies to do what they wish to do, but we're not working with Google on a special browser," Baker said. "We are not working on a Google browser."

As an open-source project, Mozilla's code base is available to other organizations and companies for building browsers and Web-based applications. Most notably, America Online Inc.'s Netscape Communications released its Netscape 7.2 browser based on Mozilla's underlying technology.

Though it is possible for Google to take the same development approach, Google executives have downplayed reports of a forthcoming browser. According to a report in the Financial Times in late October, Google CEO Eric Schmidt refuted browser rumors.

"We are not building a browser," Schmidt said in the report.

A Google spokesman on Tuesday corroborated the accuracy of Schmidt's statement but declined to discuss the browser speculation further.

Much of the speculation about a Google browser arose because of recent Google hires with browser expertise and because Google has registered the domain name gbrowser.com. Curious eyes turned to Mozilla after Google hosted a Mozilla developer day and after some Mozilla bug reports made reference to Google.

Mozilla is planning to refresh its overall application development platform, which includes Gecko and its XUL (XML User Interface Language) for building user interfaces, Mitchell said. Mozilla plans to target the platform to developers wanting to create Web-based applications, which might use browsing capabilities.

"We're not thinking…along the lines of co-branded browsers or re-branded browsers so much as this broader set of technology for Web-related applications," Mitchell said, when asked about co-branded browsers.

While a co-browser might not be coming from Google and Mozilla, the two organizations have grown a bit closer with the release of Firefox 1.0.

In the release, Mozilla changed the default home page to a Firefox-branded version of Google's search page that appears to be hosted at google.com. Google also is the default Web-search provider in Firefox's search toolbar, though