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IBM is preparing a software upgrade to its WebSphere Commerce Suite in an effort to better index web sites in the search engines.
New to WebSphere Commerce v. 6.0 is the ability to create static URL pages.
This lets spider technology used by search engine sites, such as Google and Yahoo, query the URL, grab the keywords, and push the page back to the search engine so it shows up in the search results.
Web-site performance--speed and accuracy--is only half the battle. The other is getting the consumer to the site.
Most consumers start the buying process searching on a word or phrase. The problem is that spider technology used by search engines can't query and find search keywords on every Web site because most Web pages are dynamically generated, says Craig Stevenson IBM's worldwide WebSphere E-commerce manager.
He says the new feature WebSphere Commerce release drove search engine results from three to 278 hits for an unnamed company that worked with IBM to develop the technology.
The feature will ship as an integrated function in WebSphere Commerce v. 6.0, scheduled for release sometime between April and June 2005. Customers who have purchased v. 5.6 are eligible for an update.
Source: Information Week
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 users can choose to switch the default or add multiple search providers such as Yahoo Inc.
"Given the importance of search, we decided to add search functionality to the start page itself," Baker wrote in her Weblog on Monday. "Google has long been recognized as a leader in search experience and so we chose Google."
Baker mentioned that Mozilla could receive additional funding from Firefox's integrate search features but did not elaborate on how that would occur. Mozilla officials could not be reached to explain the funding.
But major search engines such as Google and Yahoo also operate search-based advertising programs and share revenues with partner sites that drive clicks to sponsored-link ads.
"We expect to see some funds come to the Foundation as a result of our integrated search," Baker wrote. "We'll use any funds that result to help support the Mozilla Foundation's non-profit operations."
Source: eWeek
The first two spammers ever to be convicted of a felony for sending fraudulent and unsolicited spam e-mail have just been convicted to nine years in jail.
Jeremy Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot, a brother and sister team, were convicted in a Virginia court Wednesday of sending AOL users millions of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages while evading AOL’s filters.
DMNews report that jurors recommended that Jaynes receive nine years in prison and fined DeGroot $7,500.
DeGroot was convicted because prosecutors proved the domain names used for sending the spam had been purchased on her credit card. A third defendant, Richard Rutkowski, was acquitted of similar charges. Formal sentencing has been set for February next year.
Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore called the convictions a victory in the fight against spam. “This is a major victory for Virginians and all Americans,” Kilgore said. “Spam is a nuisance to millions of Americans, but it is also a major problem for businesses large and small because the thousands of unwanted e-mails create havoc as they attempt to conduct commerce.”
Jaynes and DeGroot were spamming AOL members with get rich opportunities and work from home offers such as being a ‘FedEx refund processor,’ which they claimed would allow people to earn $75 an hour working from home.
According to evidence, Jaynes received 10,000 credit card orders, each for $39.95, during a one month period. Instead of this spammer sitting at home stuffing FedEx envelopes, he’ll probably be behind bars next year, where he belongs. Hopefully, with no access to a computer.
Source: Search Engine Journal
A national survey done in October warns that the buying frenzy is set to start sooner rather than later. Although the new "Shopping in America" report, just released by the Macerich Company, concentrates on offline shopping trends this holiday season, online marketers and retailers should pay special attention — because their sales season comes even faster, and ends even quicker.
Over 40% of the 6,200 respondents said they would begin their "serious" holiday shopping before Thanksgiving, and almost 30% will shop on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving.
The survey also found that shoppers will spend an average of $898.38 on holiday-related purchases, which includes $608.15 on holiday gifts — up 4% from the $584 average consumers spent on holiday gifts in 2003. This year, consumers say they will spend the remaining $290.23 on holiday decorations, parties and other related purchases.
"Despite some industry predictions of a modest season, the Shopping in America report shows that over 80% of consumers plan to spend the same or more than last year on holiday gift purchases," says Garry Butcher, Macerich VP. In fact, only about 19% of shoppers surveyed plan to spend less than they did in 2003.
Nationally, shoppers will spend an estimated $58.48 for each recipient on their 10.4-person gift list. The survey also revealed that shoppers in the Southern region of the US plan to spend the most on total holiday gift purchases, at $630.20 while those in the Midwest will spend the least, $582.70.
In a finding that might be of special interest to online retailers, since online household income demographics still skew slightly higher than the national average, the survey indicates that planned holiday gift expenditures rise with annual household income. Shoppers in the highest income level plan to spend the most at nearly $900.00.
In its soon-to-be-released Holiday Shopping report, eMarketer projects online spending in the holiday months — November and December — will total $16.7 billion, up from $12.9 billion last year, representing a rise of 29.3% for the year.
According to Senior Analyst and author of the report, Jeffrey Grau, "As consumers gain online shopping experience, their expectations rise. With holiday shopping beginning very early in some cases, e-retailers will have to be extra nimble and ready for high traffic volumes to occur soon."
Bricks-and-mortar stores are breaking out the holiday decorations now. Online retailers should also be preparing because it looks like the holidays are coming early this year.
Source: eMarketer
According to projections released by JupiterResearch, online retail sales will reach $21.6 billion this holiday season. Such numbers would mark a rise of 19 percent over 2003, the market research firm said.
Nearly 86 million Americans are likely to make purchases online this season, compared with 73 million last year, it said.
JupiterResearch is also predicting a 2 percent jump in spending per buyer compared with last year.
In addition, U.S. consumers will expand their range of purchases beyond the traditional top-selling categories of toys, books and apparel.
"Over half of online holiday shoppers say they will use the Web to get gift ideas or to seek better prices," Patti Freeman Evans, a JupiterResearch retail analyst, said in a statement.
"To capture these customers this holiday season, retailers are wise to use e-mails to alert customers who have left items in their shopping carts or wish lists when the price changes or inventories get low on those items."
Jupiter's projections are at variance with the data released by Forrester Research recently.
Forrester predicts holiday sales to be around $13.6 billion. However, Forrester defines the holiday season as between Thanksgiving and Christmas, while Jupiter's holiday projections cover the whole of November and December.
But like Forrester, Jupiter's predictions indicate slowing growth in online holiday sales. Jupiter recorded a 31 percent jump in holiday sales from 2002 to 2003.
"Despite the strong online sales forecast, many offline retailers are expecting a 'tight back-end,' or a challenging fourth quarter, due to the back-to-school sales bust," the Jupiter report stated.
"The positive September retail sales results notwithstanding, continuing economic, employment and global political uncertainties have influenced retailers to plan their inventories carefully this year."
Source: C-Net News
Copernic announces the creation of a new separate company, Coveo Solutions Inc.
The company will focus exclusively on providing easy-to-use, powerful and secure enterprise search software to businesses, organizations and government entities.
The creation of Coveo is in response to overwhelming market demand for its flagship product, Coveo Enterprise Search (CES), formerly known as Copernic Enterprise Search.
Currently, CES is being used by more than 3,000 businesses worldwide. These businesses and organizations require robust document-level security, low total cost of ownership, and superior relevance with one, unified approach from the desktop, across the enterprise and the Internet.
“Copernic is pleased to have seen tremendous success and growing demand for both its consumer and enterprise products.
Based on the differing needs of each audience, we felt it was imperative that we align strategically to effectively address these distinct market opportunities” said Martin Bouchard, Chairman of Copernic.
“Copernic will continue to focus on the consumer market and Coveo is the answer for the enterprise.”
Coveo will leverage its seasoned search specialists and R & D staff to quickly react to growing market expectations and to drive innovation for the core enterprise search solutions.
By streamlining operations and focusing exclusively on enterprise search solutions, Coveo will develop and market the most precise, secure and cost effective search software to ensure that customer’s needs are met.
According to a recent IDC Technology Assessment Report, CES is in a position to disrupt the current search market because of its favorable price point, rich set of features and short implementation time.
Laurent Simoneau, formerly COO at Copernic Technologies, Inc. has been appointed President and CEO of the newly formed company. A 10-year search industry veteran, Simoneau was deeply involved in every milestone of Copernic Technologies.
Other executive appointments are Eric Negler, VP Sales; Richard Tessier, VP Products; and Marc Sanfacon, VP Technologies. Martin Bouchard will serve as Chairman, David Burns will continue to lead Copernic Technologies as CEO.
Source: Copernic
Microsoft has started offering a Google search tool for download from the Microsoft website.
Google's Deskbar is included in Microsoft's Partner Pack for Windows, a collection of Microsoft and third-party products released last week that Microsoft describes on its website as "the ultimate application package" for a Windows XP PC. (www.microsoft.com/windows/partnerpack/).
The Deskbar adds a search box to the Windows taskbar, allowing users to search the web with Google without having to start a web browser (deskbar.google.com/).
Other applications in the Partner Pack include Computer Associates International's eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005 and Post-it Software Notes from 3M.
Microsoft's promotion of the Google Deskbar comes as it works to deliver a beta version of its own MSN Search engine and a desktop search application by the end of this year.
"We should see some good MSN search technology in this calendar year, probably late in the second half, and we're going to have a heck of a great race in search between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo," said Microsoft chief financial officer John Connors.
Inclusion of the Google Deskbar in the Windows Partner Pack is an example of how Google can be a partner for Microsoft's large Windows group while at the same time a rival to MSN, a relatively small Microsoft group that in June ended its first profitable year ever, said Joe Wilcox, a Jupiter Research senior analyst.
"While MSN Search may be in hot competition with Google, for the Windows platform Google is a valuable partner," Wilcox said.
With Windows XP adoption lagging, Microsoft's biggest challenge right now is promoting Windows XP's capabilities, Wilcox said.
"Over the past couple months, Microsoft has stepped up XP evangelism, in part by showing the capability of partner products that extend the operating system’s capabilities. The products available with the Partner Pack are consistent with that approach," he said.
Another reason for Microsoft to include the Google Deskbar in Partner Pack was because it was built using Microsoft technology.
"Microsoft is pleased that Google recognised the potential of the Windows platform and the .net Framework and chose to use it to enable the delivery of a great search application," a Microsoft spokeswoman said.
Google spokesman Steve Langdon said bundling the Deskbar in the Windows Partner Pack is an example of industry collaboration. "From time to time we work with Microsoft and this is an example of that," he said.
Source: Computer Weekly
Pew Internet and the American Life Project closely analyzed almost 1,400 Internet surfers and users in the US during the summer of 2004, in an effort to better gauge the country's use of online rating systems.
Overall, 26% of adult Internet users in the US have used online rating systems, or about 33 million people. A look at the demographics of those users shows that most groups displayed the same general level of use (usually between 20% and 30%), with a few exceptions. Among the demographic differences:
1) Men used online rating systems more than women by seven percentage points
2) Younger Internet users rated things online more than mature users (for example, 30% of Generation Y users had done online rating, compared to 11% of those over 69 years-old)
3) Hispanics did more online rating than blacks by five percentage points, with usage by whites falling in-between the two groups
4) Those with higher household incomes reported did more online rating than lower income households
5) College graduates and those who had completed some college used online rating systems more than high school graduates and non-high school graduates by about 10 percentage points.
Broadband users rated products online more than dial-up users.
Web sites use online rating systems for a variety of products and in a variety of ways.
Popular online auction site eBay lets users rate those who they do business with, helping potential buyers and sellers decide whether someone on eBay is trustworthy enough to do business with.
Other sites, like Amazon or Epinions, allow consumers to rate an almost limitless number of products, aiding other customers who are winnowing their purchase down to one product.
Similarly, sites like Citysearch lets users rate restaurants, bars, stores and other services, while the Internet Movie Database features movies ratings by those who have (it's assumed) seen a film.
Finally, sites like HotorNot.com offer anyone a chance to rate the physical attributes of anonymous people and assign a numeric score.
As this varied list demonstrates, these sites are not only useful as a source of buying advice, but can be a source of both entertainment - from reading humorous reviews to the tackiness of HotOrNot.com, for example - and as an engaging or even self-gratifying activity, such as when a user writes reviews and dispenses wisdom to others.
With so many applications and facets, use of online rating systems by US consumers is sure to rise even further.
Source: eMarketer
Today, Prudential Securities just raised its price target for Google's stock to $200 from its previous target of $130.
Google cited a "blowout third quarter as net revenue growth returns to triple digit."
It also raised its fiscal 2004 earnings estimate to $2.62 from $2.22 and boosted 2005 estimates to $3.67 from $2.91, the official told CNN/Money by phone from London.
Google stock has nearly doubled since the No. 1 search engine went public in August at $85 a share.
The shares soared 8 percent in after-hours trading Thursday, after rising during regular trading, following Google's first earnings report as a public company.
Google posted strong gains in sales and earnings, and the stock rallied as investors applauded the solid sales gains, which outpaced those at rival Yahoo!
The stock continued to gain ground early Friday, rising as high as $165 in electronic trading, Reuters reported, after moving above $161 in after-hours trading Thursday.
Source: CNN FN
The results of a new survey done by the Dieringer Research Group, show that in the past year US consumers spent $1.00 online for every $1.70 they spent offline, after doing online research using a search engine.
The survey was conducted in the 12 months between Q2 2003 and Q2 2004 among 3,000 US consumers in order to determine multi-channel consumer behavior. In total, $180.7 billion in offline purchases were made after consumers had conducted online research, a figure bigger than the $106.5 billion in purchases made online.
Not only were more Internet-influenced offline purchases made than online purchases over the 12-month time frame, but the percentage of offline purchases influenced by online research has grown faster than online purchases.
Online sales increased by 14% from 2003 to 2004, while Internet-influenced offline sales rose 31% in the same period.
A recent survey by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) shows that people favor doing product research online rather than offline by a large margin — 76% say they prefer finding product information online rather than in offline media, like magazines, compared to 21% who feel neither is better and 3% who favor offline methods.
The DRG study indicates, however, that when it comes down to actually making the purchase, people seem to prefer doing it offline.
Source: The Dieringer Research Group and eMarketer.
After an economic slowdown lasting more than 10 long years, Japan's eCommerce sector experienced faster growth than in the United States in the first two quarters of 2004, an important recovery that made front-page news in many economic circles.
To ensure the long-term health of the economy, the Japanese government launched e-Japan Strategy II last year, a plan for creating a vibrant and world-class e-commerce environment.
Japan is targeting seven sectors for development, from medical services and food safety to finance for small- and medium-sized businesses and education. The program represents a huge opportunity for US and other foreign companies.
The two recognized drivers that fuel consumer e-commerce growth — experienced Internet users and broadband adoption — are in place today in Japan. The percentage of households in Japan using broadband is set to grow to over 70% by 2007, according to eMarketer estimates.
"Broadband usage is on an upward trajectory," says Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report. "But Internet user growth is leveling off."
eMarketer estimates that by the end of this year there will be 72.8 million Japanese Internet users online from either home or work, but Internet usage in Japan has moved from a rapid growth stage to a mature stage.
In 2001, the number of new Internet users increased by 29% over the previous year. The annual growth rate this year is slated to be 12%, and by 2007 it will slow down to 4%.
Declining Internet user growth is a natural outcome of a highly penetrated market. In 2001, only 38.4% of the Japanese population used the Internet, providing room for growth. This year, an estimated 57% of Japan's population of 127.6 million people will be online.
"With improved speeds and access opportunities, Japan's Internet population will demand more sophisticated services, which explains the government's strategy.
The online marketplace in Japan is mature. Now, the country's goal is to add depth and range to what it's doing online," Grau said.
"There is no question that the e-Japan Strategy II holds promise for US and other foreign firms who are looking to enter the second largest national economy in the world," says Mr. Grau.
"With its emphasis on developing innovative Internet applications that touch people's lives in fundamental ways, there is potential for entrepreneurial IT companies and application service providers."
"However," cautions Grau, "doing business in Japan requires patience and a long-term view.
Firms will encounter many hurdles, and anyone who wants in had better plan ahead to minimize the problems — because there will be problems."
Source: eMarketer
A press released was announced today from SEMPO that they have elected three new board members.
"The new SEMPO Advisory Board members are Chris LaSala, the Search Engine Marketing Channel Manager at Google; Neg Norton, the President of the Yellow Pages Integrated Media Association, and Safa Rashtchy; a managing director of Piper Jaffray and well known industry analyst."
In the press release it discusses Danny Sullivan's and Chris Sherman's resignation from sempo and then goes into more detail on the new board members.
SEMPO has made from some widespread discussion in many of the forums. Many of the posts I covered here in the past.
One such thread I did not mention as of yet is a thread named SEMPO Gone To The Dogs? over at SEW forums.
This thread was instrumental in the creation of a mock SEMPO site named SEMPO TAHOE.
The forum members are having a blast with this new site. I then started a thread named Will SEMPO Survive? with a poll that asks the question (not to SEMPO members but to individuals in this industry).
"How Long Will SEMPO Survive?". So far over 50% voted SEMPO Will Close within a Year, 17% said SEMPO Will Close within 3 Years and an other 17% said SEMPO Will Close within 90 days, only 11% so far said SEMPO Will Survive Forever.
This entry comes of way of an entry by Danny at the SEW blog named SEMPO Gets New Advisors & Parody Site.
Source: SEO Roundtable
In February 2003, Opera vowed never to produce a browser that worked with Microsoft's operating system for mobile devices.
Now the Oslo company said it will design one, citing strong demand for the software from makers of cell phones.
"We're going back on that because our customers are asking for it," said Rolf Assev, executive vice president for business development, marketing and strategic alliance from Opera's headquarters in Oslo. "Now is the first time that we see a demand for Microsoft from the operators and from the handset manufacturers."
Assev attributed new demand for Microsoft-compatible browsing software in part to Windows Mobile's appeal to makers of high-end phones, which make up a small but profitable part of the cell phone market.
A study performed this year by market research firm Canalys found Microsoft had a mere 4 percent of the smart phone market for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. That market remains dominated by the Symbian operating system, found on 94 percent of smart phones.
Microsoft did not return calls. The Norwegian software maker declined to say which handset manufacturers had asked for a Microsoft port, but said at least three major companies had requested a Windows version, but had not previously asked for one.
Opera has sustained itself selling browsers amid Microsoft's dominance of that market by focusing on cell phones. It also markets a desktop browser that has a small but loyal following among those who dislike Internet Explorer, Microsoft's market-leading browser.
The Oslo company has maintained a contentious relationship with Microsoft, sparring repeatedly over compatibility issues between its browser and Microsoft's Web sites.
In May, Microsoft settled Opera's claims with a $12.75 million payment. Assev said Opera's decision was unrelated to any detente between the two companies, and said the company had received only technical and not financial support from Microsoft in preparing the new version.
Source: C-Net News
A similar variant of the MyDoom virus crashed Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos on Monday and continued to hamper e-mail accounts around the world. The new version, variously dubbed MyDoom.M or MyDoom.O, was first detected early Monday morning and quickly went on a tear, flooding many mailboxes with hundreds of messages.
It has also slowed Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos to a crawl, because once it infects a PC, the virus automatically performs Web searches on those search engines.
E-mail screening company MessageLabs said it had intercepted more than 23,000 copies of the variants in the first five hours of their existence. McAfee Avert, the virus-tracking squad at the antivirus software maker, rated the worm a "medium on watch," or right below a high-risk vulnerability. Tens of thousands of PCs have been infected by the worm, which was first detected just before 6 a.m. PDT. The biggest impact, however, has been on the search engines.
Google, Lycos and AltaVista hav been sporadically out of service all morning, while Yahoo has been slow. That's a function of how the worm spreads, said Craig Schmugar, a virus researcher at McAfee. Once installed, the virus searches for e-mail addresses on the host computer's hard drive, and then it looks for more by running queries on all four search engines.
"It is kind of an inadvertent (denial-of-service) attack," he said, because the search sites are being knocked out in the quest for more e-mail addresses. This is a twist on MyDoom: Earlier variants looked for e-mail addresses only on the host hard drive.
The worm uses the search sites to find any published e-mail addresses with the same domain name as the main e-mail address on the infected computer, said Vincent Weafer, senior director for security company Symantec's security response center. If you're infected, and your main e-mail address ends with @mycompany.com, for example, the worm will mainly attempt to propagate itself to other mycompany.com addresses.
The technique offers several evolutionary advantages, Weafer said, most significantly the psychological advantage of having infected messages look as if they come from co-workers. "It's really the special engineering aspect of making you think it's coming from someone inside your company," Weafer said.
Keeping infections in-house may also be a technological advantage, Weafer said. "We've seen from other viruses that if you propagate on the local network, it's just faster," he said.
Among other antivirus firms, McAfee explains one way to remove the virus from an infected computer.
Security experts said the new variants first surfaced in Europe and spread quickly, thanks to several factors. Messages sent by the variants pose as either a "returned mail" message from a postmaster or an alert from an internal IT administrator. Although the bounced mail spoofs weren't likely to prompt a second look, said Joe Telafici, director of operations McAfee, those posing as a corporate IT missive were realistic enough to fool some workers.
"It appears close enough to something your IT department might send you that it could fool some people," Telafici said.
The worm also delivers a mixed payload, with only a handful of messages going through with a .zip attachment, a recently popular technique used by virus writers to avoid corporate security systems. MyDoom.M mainly arrives as a simple executable program file, Telafici said, making it more damaging for anyone who gets fooled into opening a message. "It takes fewer steps to infect yourself, which is helping (the worm) spread," he said.
Individuals may not notice a huge performance hit on their own PCs if they are connected to broadband and have a computer that is only a few years old, Schmugar said. The queries are fairly low-impact events. However, only a few medium-on-watch risks come up a year, he said, and the search engines are feeling the pinch.
The original MyDoom surfaced early this year and quickly ranked as one of the worst e-mail pests ever. The original worm has since spawned numerous offshoots, including one specifically programmed to attack Linux antagonist SCO Group.
Marty Lindner, senior member of the technical staff at the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University, added that the virus also comes with a back door that potentially enables a hacker to take control of an infected system. Several worms open back doors and harvest e-mail addresses. The novelty of this latest variant is that it appears to be able to launch queries. Linder, however, stated that CERT has not fully confirmed the query function as yet.
Source: C-Net News
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
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
The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming.
The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users.
The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing. It will debut with natural-history programming, including clips that focus on plants, animals and birds.
"The Creative Archive is fuel for the creative nation," said Paula Le Dieu, co-director of the initiative. "It allows people to download these excerpts and be able to edit them and incorporate them into their own creative works."
Other organizations, including some small music publishers in the United States, have begun to offer their content to users under liberal licensing terms.
In contrast to record companies and Hollywood -- which are trying to lock down their content with help from legislators -- these organizations believe that liberal licensing terms will generate even more interest in their content.
In fact, in the BBC's case, access to its programming archive is part of its charter. In the United Kingdom, anyone who owns a television must pay a BBC-allocated fee, so the public owns its programming.
In the past, the BBC has not been efficient at making its archives accessible, Le Dieu said, but the Internet makes it much easier. In addition, digital distribution and editing tools now enable audiences to modify the content for their own creative endeavors.
The BBC archive would only be available to British citizens who pay the yearly TV license fee. Anyone who tries to visit the site through a foreign IP address won't be allowed to log on, Le Dieu said.
She said the BBC is working on ironing out various legal and contractual issues. The BBC plans to license its materials using a system similar to Creative Commons, an American organization that has developed a set of flexible copyright licenses for creators of digital content.
But clearing the rights is a significant challenge. Some clips contain elements like musical soundtracks, which may require getting permission from the copyright holders.
"Much of our programming is interspersed with other programming owned by other people," Le Dieu said. "We completely understand the audience's interest in getting the full programming. We're trying to balance that desire with the rights of the (content) ownership."
Those technical and legal challenges may render the archive incomplete, some fear.
"We want to make sure that the archive is more than just shagging marmots," said David Tannenbaum, coordinator for the Union for the Public Domain. "There's been no public discussion of how they are going to get beyond these nature clips."
Tannenbaum said the group hopes to build support to change the BBC's charter in 2006, when it comes up for review, so that the BBC will commit more fully to open access. Also, the group wants the BBC to clear rights with other copyright holders in its future contracts, so that the BBC can freely distribute other producers' works.
But observers expect commercial broadcasters to oppose the archive and the expansion of liberal licensing efforts, arguing that they cannot compete with free programming.
"We hope that by getting this into the charter, that people within the BBC will be able to stand up to the objections that get raised as time goes by," said Cory Doctorow, European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"They will have the ammunition they need to say, 'This is exactly what the BBC is there for: to really move public broadcasting into the next century and define what public broadcasting looks like in an Internet world.'"
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, said the BBC's plan would help the world understand that there is more at stake in the copyright war than "piracy."
"If the archive succeeds ... then that will drive demand for computers, broadband and software to enable that creativity," he said. "Businesses -- beyond the content industry -- will recognize just what's at stake."
The BBC hopes others will follow its lead. "We hope that we can provide a model so other rights holders can do something similar," Le Dieu said.
Source: Wired News
A DNS service outage at Akamai Technologies prevented access to some of the Internet's major Web sites Tuesday, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, according to The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center.
The DNS (domain name system) servers that content hosting company Akamai uses to host DNS services for some customers stopped responding at around 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time in the U.S., leaving Web surfers who were trying to reach those sites high and dry, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer at the Internet Storm Center.
Andy Ellis, Akamai's chief security architect, declined to comment on Tuesday, but did not deny that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company was experiencing problems.
An Akamai spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Akamai offers an "Enhanced DNS" service, in which customers use Akamai's network of DNS servers to resolve Internet requests for their domain, such as Google.com. The distributed, worldwide network of servers is marketed by Akamai as a more stable and robust solution than internally managed DNS servers, which are susceptible to failure or attack.
However, users began reporting problems Tuesday reaching popular sites, like Google.com and Yahoo.com, that use the service. The Internet Storm Center received reports of troubles from across the world, including Asia and South America, Ullrich said.
An investigation into the problem revealed that Akamai's DNS servers were not responding to requests. The problem appeared to affect the company's worldwide network of DNS servers, suggesting that the problem may have been with caused by a problem within Akamai rather than an external attack on its DNS servers, Ullrich said.
"It could be anything -- somebody tripping on an power cord. I think an attack is unlikely, unless somebody was able to hit a central control node," he said.
While some Internet users were prevented from reaching the affected sites during the outage, others were unaffected, due to the distributed nature of the DNS infrastructure.
DNS, which translates reader-friendly names like "Yahoo.com" into numeric Internet Protocol addresses used on the Internet, is a tree-like structure of distributed servers, each with its own frequently-updated list of server and domain addresses.
Problems in one part of the DNS system often do not affect other parts of the infrastructure for hours, or more, Ullrich said.
The hiccup in Akamai's service is the second in less than a month. In May, a software glitch slowed Akamai servers used to host customer Web pages and other information, making it difficult to reach some of its customers' Web sites for around 90 minutes, Akamai acknowledged.
Akamai blamed that service interruption on a bug in content management software that Akamai customers use to update content on Akamai servers, said Jeff Young, an Akamai spokesman.
Yahoo.com, Google.com and Microsoft.com were all reachable again within two hours of the reported interruption.
Source: IDG News Services
Baidu has beaten Google, in becoming the fourth largest Internet website in the world in terms of web traffic, according to the latest Alexa traffic rankings.
Another leading Chinese search engine, 3721.com, ranked seventh.
Baidu.com claims that it has become the world's largest Chinese language search engine with over 300 mln Chinese language website pages, and over 60 mln page hits every day.
In China, it covers over 95% of Chinese netizens, with more than 80 mln users. According to Shanghai-based Internet research house, iResearch, Baidu.com has a market share of 48.2% in China in terms of search engine traffic, while the global Internet search giant Google.com accounts for only 29.8%.
Baidu.com has accelerated its expansion in China, with staff numbers doubled to over 300 from around 100 one year ago, Zhu Hongbo, COO of Baidu.com, told Interfax. Apart from traditional search services, the company launched or is planning to launch several new services.
The latest addition to its services, "Posted Message Bar", enables users to search messages on various Chinese BBS, while the under-testing "Download Bar" service enables users to share files with other netizens for free mutual downloads.
Other new services include weather information, with which a user can search a city's weather and have exact weather information displayed on the top of the search result list, rather than from a link to this information.
"All these new services aim to bring convenience to netizens. They are free of charge, but they will be helpful to boost our page views and improve our website popularity," Zhu pointed out.
Source: Interfax
Although the Internet has given the person on the street access to more information than ever before, business users need even more.
So argues Clare Hart, boss of search firm Factiva which was formed in 1999 from Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing.
Factiva brings together information from more than 9,000 sources including newspapers, newswires, transcripts of news programmes from the BBC and other broadcasters, plus historical stock market data.
It is a program for desktop machines that lets customers search for information among this pool of sources.
In its pre-Factiva incarnation, it was used by librarians and other information professionals whose job it was to find and supply facts to other people.
The growth of the web as a vast corpus of data threw that role into question. "In 2000 and 2001 so many times we had customers saying to us that most of this is available for free on the web," said Ms Hart.
But, she said, 60% of what Factiva offers is not online for free. And, said Ms Hart, even if all the sources were available online she is sure that Factiva would still have a role to play.
The reason for this is because, as Google and others are starting to realise, the sheer number of results a search system can serve up are not enough.
"When you do a search you're not interested in quantity," said Ms Hart, "you want relevant research and quick access to relevant results."
"I think people get very frustrated by Google results," she said. "The lack of quality results and the fact that they have to register with more and more websites."
As a business tool, Factiva knows that if you search for Orange you will be looking for the phone firm rather than the county or fruit.
What is important to Factiva users is the fact that they know the sources it uses have a history and legitimacy that many on the web do not yet possess.
Also information tends to make it on to the wires long before it gets on to the web.
But, said Ms Hart, many firms use both Google and Factiva side by side. And the growth of the web and the success of search sites has forced firms like Factiva to react, said Ms Hart.
Factiva, like Google and many other search engines, can be queried via a toolbar and the service has been reworked to reflect users' growing familiarity with the net and the tools it is creating.
Now, for instance, news feeds that come out of Factiva are in web formats allowing them to be put into documents and pages to provide up to data information.
"The web has turned everything upside down and has made it so much easier to get access to information," she said. "Everyone has become a searcher."
Source: BBC News
Football and soccer fans now can find the latest football and soccer news and sports websites, with the launch of a new search engine dedicated specifically to these games.
Megasoccer Search, which claims to be the world's first search engine devoted to football, has an index of over 6,000 soccer websites.
The engine only searches footy content that has been reviewed to provide users with “the most relevant, up-to-date results for all queries”. Using the Advanced Search page, you can set strict rules on language, search terms and the numbers of results.
Mike Flynn, chief executive of Fast Web Media (the company behind the engine), said:
"The technology which has been applied to Megasoccer Search enables users to get the information they want on soccer without trawling through pages of unrelated sites, setting Megasoccer Search apart from other generic search engines."
Megasoccer Search has tied up a partnership deal with Premier League site 4thegame.com and search boxes and buttons will also be distributed to other global soccer sites.
Source: Web User.co.uk
The first-quarter estimate significantly outpaced online ad sales for the same period in 2003, when they accounted for $1.6 billion, a nearly 40 percent increase, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said.
Furthermore, the first-quarter returns were higher than those recorded for the fourth quarter of 2003, when the market reached $2.2 billion.
The fourth quarter is typically the most successful period for ad sales across all communications and publishing mediums.
The IAB said Monday that online ad sales reached almost $2.3 billion in the first quarter of 2004, the highest three-month total since the group began tracking the sector in 1996.
Greg Stuart, president of IAB, said he was "surprised" by the strength of the sector's performance and cited research from New York-based eMarketer that indicated Internet penetration will overtake cable TV market numbers this year and that the online ad sector is ready to bloom anew.
"You have more users, better advertising platforms and fewer ads that make more sense, which is a nice environment," Stuart said. "If you combine those factors with some of the other Internet statistics we're seeing, such as broadband access overtaking dial-up in the next year or so, it gives you an idea of the market's potential."
Many researchers have already predicted strong years ahead for the Web ad space. eMarketer expects U.S. online ad sales to reach $8.4 billion for 2004, an increase of more than 15 percent from last year, and higher than the 2000 peak of $8.1 billion.
Search engines are expected to provide a significant chunk of that revenue. Search advertising more than doubled to $2.3 billion in 2003. Banner ads and other types of traditional Internet advertising dropped slightly last year, to $4.9 billion.
Stuart credited the recent upswing to momentum gained over the last three years, as opposed to short-term market factors. While the executive remained bullish on innovative advertising strategies used by market leaders such as Google, he said the most effective catalyst for growth has been consistency.
"Can you look at the market from one year ago and say things are really different in a lot of ways? I'd say no," he said. "The fact is that there is a lot of wind at our backs because the message has been consistent for at least three years that the Web offers advertisers the most cost-effective alternative."
Stuart highlighted the significance of the quarter-to-quarter growth versus the final period of 2003. He said he has never seen advertising media "override seasonality." The first quarter is often the toughest across the industry. He is now expecting annual growth of 30 percent or more for the sector, an amount that exceeds predictions by many financial analysts, ranging from 15 percent to 24 percent.
Looking forward, Stuart said he expects more companies to begin fighting for the increasing number of dollars at stake in the sector. He also predicted that some companies will return to business models from the golden era of the Internet, or roughly five years ago.
"I think you'll see some people dust off older business models and bring back some ideas we heard about a few years back," he said. "It should be pretty entertaining."
Stuart said the local advertising segment, which has become a major focus for some of the Web's largest companies including Google, should continue to see success.
IAB's research is conducted by the New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which compiles data supplied by companies that sell advertising on the Internet.
IAB's first- and third-quarter revenue reports are estimates. The actual figures are released along with second- and fourth-quarter data.
Source: C-Net News
ValueClick Media launches ChannelSearch, a solution that enables advertisers to leverage the power of contextually-targeted ads and search.
ChannelSearch simplifies the online media buying and management process, while providing advertisers with access to two online marketing channels. Based on a flat-rate cost-per-click (CPC) pricing structure, ChannelSearch delivers targeted visitors through a combination of distribution methods, including:
Standard Graphical Ads
Strategic placement of web-based display ad units across the most contextually-relevant of 17 targeted content channels on the ValueClick Media network, which reaches 66 million unique users in the U.S. and 120 million worldwide.
Keyword Listings
Premium placement of text listings based on 17 predefined categories of keywords within ValueClick's Search123 pay-per-click search network.
SimpliContent Ads
SimpliContent is a new rich media ad unit that combines standard graphical ads with search listings, by dynamically displaying a marketer's text listing, logo and product image within banner ads appearing on contextually-relevant content sites throughout the ValueClick Media network.
The SimpliContent ad unit dynamically pulls an advertiser's Search123 listing into a category-based banner ad, and targets the ad across contextually-relevant sites. The rich media ad also includes the option to display the advertiser's logo and one additional product image.
"ChannelSearch delivers highly targeted visitors by blending two of the most powerful forms of online direct marketing -- search and contextual ad placement," said David Yovanno, general manager, ValueClick Media.
"ChannelSearch allows our clients to benefit further from our core competencies in search and contextual advertising through a simple, unique package, and builds upon ValueClick's reputation as an innovator in performance-based online marketing."
Source: Value Click
Internet advertising revenues have risen to the highest quarterly total since the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) began tracking revenues in 1996, marking a pronounced recovery from the dot-com doldrums.
The previous record was set in the fourth quarter of 2003. Before that, interactive ad revenues hadn't seen such heights since 2000.
First quarter estimates represent a 3.9 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2003, an especially significant jump due to the holiday spending typically associated with the fourth quarter.
The first quarter estimates also showed a 39.8 percent increase over the $1.6 billion brought in during the first quarter of 2003.
"All through 2003 we published positive revenue results for Internet advertising and the trend continued through the first quarter of 2004," said Tom Hyland, partner and chair of the New Media Group at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The researchers estimated the revenue figures by surveying the top 15 online ad sellers and extrapolating to calculate the total industry revenue figure.
The IAB and PwC typically release estimated top-line figures in the first and third quarters. They then provide actual figures with additional detail in the second and fourth quarters. Actual first quarter revenues are expected to be released in July, 2004.
Source: Click Z
Well-funded competitors like Yahoo and Google are only starting to target the local market, so local media still have time to respond.
However, newspapers still face long-term damage to their business from online local-search products, far greater than the damage done to classified advertising revenue by competitors like Monster.com and HotJobs.com, a new study, “The Geo-Google Threat: Search Engines Target Local Advertising,” reported today.
The study, by The Neil Budde Group and the Advanced Interactive Media Group, reports some newspapers may be forced to drop from daily to less frequent publication and that print margins are likely to erode as advertising migrates online and advertisers opt for pay-for-performance and self-service ad models.
In addition, it states, yellow pages may become more immediate competitors to newspapers, noting that in two countries the leading yellow-page publishers have purchased large classified-advertising publications for integration into online search services.
“For local publishers, which have already been fighting the ‘new monsters’ eating away at their classified advertising, this may be a far greater challenge than the first Internet wave,” said Neil F. Budde, one of the report’s lead authors.
The 59-page report, prepared with data compiled by eMarketer, reviews the threat from yellow pages, international dot-coms like Google and Yahoo’s Overture, and direct, targeted ad placement online by key local advertisers like car-care shops, plumbers and restaurants.
It includes a four-page “action plan” to help newspapers and other local media meet the competitive challenge and even grow their market share of ad spending.
“The ability to directly target advertising at consumers, and to determine exactly what the response to those ads has been, gives local advertisers more power than ever before to focus their spending where it works,” said Peter M. Zollman, the report’s other lead author.
“Few local publishers have realized yet how this will endanger their business, and even fewer have responded with effective local search tools for their advertisers.”
Source: Onrec.com
New York-based DoubleClick said it would pay $58 million in cash for search engine marketer Performics, plus additional payments of up to $7 million based on future earnings.
Performics helps clients automate and track the performance of paid placements in search listings on multiple search engines.
Performics clients include Time Warner Inc's (NYSE:TWX - news) Internet provider America Online, cellular phone maker Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news) and retailer Target Corp (NYSE:TGT - news) and expects to see revenues increase by 50 percent in 2004 from a year ago.
Once the acquisition closes, DoubleClick said it would combine Performics' search marketing technology with its DART system for tracking and analyzing online advertising including banner ads and more sophisticated rich media ads.
DoubleClick said it expected an additional $10 million in revenue over the second half of 2004, with search management revenue accounting for slightly less than half of that amount. Adding Performics' business would raise operating expenses and cost of revenue by nearly $9 million in the second half of this year.
DoubleClick said Performics would have 130 employees by the time the acquisition closed and that additional employees would be hired for that business by the end of the year. The acquisition is subject to approval by antitrust regulators.
DoubleClick shares traded 13 cents lower to $7.91 on the Nasdaq.
Source: Yahoo News
The Viewpoint Toolbar shows the usual search result as a web page but in addition to it, it fetches thumbnails of the shown search results.
There are search toolbars and then there is Viewpoint Toolbar. It does what an average search toolbar does and takes it one step ahead. It uses Yahoo! search engine technology to display results but the difference is the visual representation of the search results.
The good thing about the thumbnails is that you can make out if it’s a content rich site or just another keyword spammed site filled with advertisements. Since the generation of thumbnails is done in real time, the process can be quiet painful on a normal dial up connection so they do let you disable the thumbnail display and use the toolbar as a regular search toolbar.
And it does the other functions of a search toolbar pretty well too. There is the usual popup blocker with one interesting extra option (allow non ads popups) which sounds pretty ambitious. I would need some more tests before I can actually fall for that claim. Then there is a search save feature that functions as a visual bookmark, where your searches are saved as clickable thumbnails.
Shortcomings? Pretty apparent. It is supported only on Internet Explorer. Not surprising considering all the popular ones out there are IE only. It needs a good fast connection to properly exploit the features. Should not be a big problem now considering broadband is cheap. And it eats a big chunk of your browser window while displaying the thumbnails. Though it offers you three sizes to choose from.
Is the technology revolutionary? I beg to differ. I don’t know how old this toolbar originally is, but I remember using an Internet Explorer utility way back in 1999 called girafa. It showed you the thumbnails in the sidebar.
The website still exists so does the tool and the technology is apparently used by MSN to show search previews. So, it’s a good idea implemented well which works fine for people like you and me who want more than just results as links!
Download the Viewpoint Toolbar for free at http://search.viewpoint.com/
Source: Search Engine Journal
Espotting Media today reported preliminary results for the calendar quarter ended March 31, 2004.
'We are delighted that Espotting has reached profitability and that we have had the most successful quarter in the Company's history' commented Daniel Ishag, CEO & Founder, Espotting Media. 'As we approach our merger with FindWhat.com, Espotting's performance is stronger than ever.'
Net revenues were over $30 million in the first calendar quarter of 2004, compared to approximately $18 million in the same period of 2003.
This represents a 67% growth in revenue. Espotting's results for the first calendar quarter of 2004 are preliminary results, prepared by Espotting's finance department. Espotting continues to finalise the audit of its March 2004 fiscal year. Espotting's fiscal 2003 results have been audited by Ernst & Young.
Espotting reached profitability in the first calendar quarter of 2004, for the first time.
Espotting's advertiser base grew by 14%. The number of active advertisers receiving targeted traffic from the Espotting Network was 22,700 in the first quarter 2004. This compares to 20,000 in the third calendar quarter of 2003.
Espotting's volume base of queries grew by 26% in the first calendar quarter of 2004, to nearly 4.3 billion, up from 3.4 billion in the fourth calendar quarter of 2003. The volume base of queries is the number of impressions where Espotting's listings can appear and thus represents the opportunity to reach potential customers.
Daniel Ishag, Espotting's CEO & Founder, has been short-listed as a finalist for Ernst & Young's London Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The award celebrates entrepreneurs who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses. Ernst & Young run a global awards programme, covering over 35 countries.
On February 10th 2004, Espotting announced its amended merger agreement with NASDAQ listed FindWhat.com (NASDAQ: FWHT). It is currently anticipated that on 2nd June 2004, the shareholders of Espotting, and on the 4th June 2004, the shareholders of FindWhat.com, will be meeting, independently, to vote on the merger.
Source: Espotting Media
Media company Primedia Inc. on Tuesday plans to unveil an overhaul of its About.com Internet portal, a revamp that follows the appointment of a new chief executive of the unit late last year.
Primedia is giving About.com, a provider of consumer-focused information on topics such as travel, food and health, a make-over in an effort to draw in more readers and build brand identity, the company said.
The relaunch is part of a series of changes at Primedia, which hired new Chief Executive Kelly Conlin last October and has sold high-profile magazines such as New York in an effort to focus more on special interest and business-to-business publications. Primedia earlier this year reorganized into four new business units to try to bolster performance.
"Previously, the About branding wasn't as strong as it should be ... " Peter Horan, About.com's CEO, said in an interview. "We want folks to view more pages on the site, and spend more time every time they visit us."
About.com ranked as the 14th most visited brand online in March with 21.4 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. But many people discover its pages through Internet searches and do not know what Web site they are looking at, said David Card, an Internet analyst at Jupiter Research.
"One of the things they are trying to do is make it like a network so that they would have kind of a hub site where you would start off .. and then you might dive deep into the different categories," he said.
As part of the overhaul, the new site will offer more targeted advertising based on a user's profile, so that advertisers can in effect follow a user with specific ads wherever that person clicks on the site.
The stepped-up advertising comes after Primedia sold its online ad service Sprinks to search engine Google, the No. 1 Web search company in the United States. The October deal called for Google to become the exclusive provider of targeted and search advertising across About.com.
Primedia bought About.com for about $690 million, a much-hyped deal in late 2000 billed as a marriage of traditional publishing and new media. However, the company's Internet expansion came just as the Web and advertising markets suffered a steep downturn.
Source: Yahoo News
FindWhat will offer "Pay Per Call" ads to appear in search and directory result pages for businesses that don't have websites.
In recent years, paid listings have taken an increasing share of online advertisers' budgets, but have not been an option for businesses without a website.
Through the combination of Ingenio's patented technologies with the FindWhat.com Network(TM), non-web-oriented businesses can now take advantage of online, performance-based marketing opportunities. In addition, Pay Per Call(TM) provides current online businesses another advertising vehicle to generate sales, with the actual connection occurring offline, over the phone, directly with the merchant.
Plans call for participating merchants' Pay Per Call ads to appear in search and directory results whenever a consumer conducts a keyword or keyword phrase query, similar to the appearance of current paid listings in the FindWhat.com Network.
The online advertisements will contain special phone numbers, provisioned through the Ingenio Platform, which connect to the merchant's location. A phone call from a prospective customer, as opposed to a click, will become the true billing event.
Under the proposed service, merchants will agree to a Pay Per Call fee based on an open market bidding system, with the top bidder's Pay Per Call ad appearing first, and all others listed in descending order of their bids. This pricing mechanism will allow each merchant to determine how much they wish to pay based on their goals, budget and lifetime value of their customers.
There were approximately 22.9 million small businesses in the U.S. in 2002. Estimates project search revenue to grow from $1.5 to $7.0 billion by 2007, while local search revenue should grow to $2.5 billion by 2008 (Source: US Bancorp Piper Jaffray March 2003 and The Kelsey Group December 2003, respectively).
Local commercial searches - those seeking merchants "near home or work" - represent over 25% of all commercial searches being performed by online buyers.
The Ingenio/JupiterResearch findings (March 2004, 336 businesses) indicate that 48% of small businesses surveyed are very/somewhat interested in using Pay Per Call, and that 40% would be very/somewhat likely to allocate new advertising budget dollars to take advantage of this new product.
Under the terms of the agreement, FindWhat.com plans to incorporate Ingenio's technology, processes and systems to offer the Pay Per Call advertising platform and services to its advertisers, distributed through the FindWhat.com Network. Additionally, FindWhat.com and Ingenio plan to develop and co-market a unified pay-per-click and Pay Per Call solution (PPC2) to companies seeking to utilize both forms of performance-based advertising opportunities.
"FindWhat.com follows a strategic direction of aligning itself with the best-of-the-best - like Ingenio - to develop and provide high quality performance-based marketing and commerce enabling services for businesses to find prospects, get those prospects to become customers, and then keep them through retention-based marketing efforts," said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, chairman and chief executive officer of FindWhat.com.
"Together with Ingenio, our services can offer millions of small-to-medium sized businesses (SMEs) the ability to connect with new customers, through phone calls and/or clicks driven by paid listings on the Internet."
"Industry leaders like FindWhat.com are recognizing the need for different types of advertising solutions. There are many segments of advertisers and merchants in the market; each with their own set of needs. Those companies who are first to deliver products and services to address those needs will benefit most," says Mark Britto, CEO and president of Ingenio.
"We believe online marketing is not just about the technology, it's about rational and measurable customer acquisition... that is why merchants advertise in the first place. Our role is to enable companies to better monetize their paid listings networks while helping merchants to grow their businesses and prosper."
The companies expect the service to launch in Q3 of 2004, as they work to deploy the Ingenio platform through the FindWhat Network.
Source: Yahoo Financial News
Mamma.com Inc. said Tuesday U.S. securities regulators have launched an informal probe concerning recent activity in its stock, which has almost quadrupled over the past month in highly volatile trading.
The Montreal, Quebec company, formerly Intasys Corp., said it is cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry and knows of no nonpublic information that might "bear upon the recent activity."
"We are confident that all information and disclosures are fully compliant with all applicable accounting practices and all SEC and other regulatory disclosure requirements," David Goldman, executive chairman of Mamma.com, said in a statement.
Mamma.com (MAMA: down $0.68 to $14.98) shares fell as much as 15 percent Tuesday before bouncing back a bit. It closed at $15.66 Monday on Nasdaq, up from its $4 price range at the beginning of March.
It began its spike in the two days after the company said it swung to a quarterly profit as revenue more than doubled, rising to a high of $15.80 per share March 3.
After easing back gradually to close at $7.86 on March 15 the stock again jumped more than 24 percent March 16 after Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team, said he owned a 6.3 percent stake in the company.
The company, which sold the assets of its Intasys Billing Technologies business in February, provides Web-search marketing services to online advertisers and aggregates search results from search engines such as market leader Google Inc.
Source: CNNfn.com
The move marks the latest stage in a rapidly maturing online ad market and follows the decision by many large sites, including MSN and Ask Jeeves, to ban pop-ups.
Ask Jeeves, the UK's third-largest search engine, is removing all banner ads, saying they put people off using its site.
Until recently banners were the most widely used ad product on the site. Now, although existing deals with advertisers will be honoured, all banners should have disappeared by the end of the year.
It's also further evidence of the growing importance of search engine marketing within the advertising mix.
Chris Babayode, VP of sales and business development for Ask Jeeves UK, said he expects the UK site to follow the experience of its US parent, which stopped taking banner ads in January last year.
'Banner ads dissuaded people from visiting,' said Babayode. 'More people will come to our site to search and we'll increase the frequency of searches if we take off banner ads, and our other ad products will do better.'
These include the Branded Response display ads and text-based Answer Links, both of which appear within the search results.
Ask Jeeves has refused to discuss the revenue implications of the loss of banners. However, Babayode said it should be possible to accommodate most of its current advertisers within the other types of ads it sells.
'A lot of people take a mix of ad types with us. We'll be able to realign their needs,' he said.
Ask Jeeves reaches almost 18% of the UK's Internet audience, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, and within the search market trails only Google and MSN in the size of its user base.
Source: New Media Age
Vivisimo announces the release of Cluster Med™, a powerful research tool that allows biomedical and life sciences researchers to search the MedLine database far more productively and efficiently.
ClusterMed(TM) organizes the long list of results returned by PubMed(R) into hierarchical folders allowing researchers to hone in on the most relevant results quickly.
By organizing results into categories, users discover the main themes relating to the subject of the query and can easily reach relevant articles buried deep in the chronological list. In addition, similar articles are grouped together, rather than scattered throughout the results.
Using ClusterMed(TM), drug discovery researchers save mission-critical research time and discover insights that previously required long hours of browsing through results. Results can be organized by author or source allowing researchers to customize their queries based on their research needs. This feature can also profile the research specialties of an author or institution. For additional flexibility, results can be clustered by date of publication or MeSH headings.
The enormous amount of information being produced today by the life sciences industry requires new, sophisticated tools to help users synthesize that information into timely, actionable knowledge. "Imagine intelligently organizing in seconds -- under your control -- all the PubMed research literature on a specific topic," stated Don Taylor, Senior Director, Life Sciences Solutions, Vivisimo. "For example, searching PubMed for 'apoptosis and breast cancer' returns 2,536 articles in a chronological, one dimensional list.
ClusterMed enlivens this unwieldy list into meaningful, hierarchical folders in which PubMed article number 1,432 may appear within a ClusterMed folder just 2 clicks away. We expect ClusterMed to swiftly become the most affordable, mission-critical knowledge management tool in the industry."
ClusterMed builds upon Vivisimo's extensive experience with several of the largest pharmaceutical firms, Journal of Biological Chemistry, JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, PNAS, and other top biomedical journals and societies and is currently in trials at several life sciences companies.
A free demonstration of the product is available at http://www.clustermed.info
Source: Vivisimo
Global peer-to-peer telephony company Skype Technologies has announced it has added a conference calling feature to its P2P telephony system, allowing up to five people to talk with each other simultaneously, regardless of geography.
The new Skype Beta 0.97 version of the Skype P2P software also includes a multiple call-hold feature that allows for 16 callers to be simultaneously put on hold by a single user.
Skype’s programme, downloadable for free from its website, allows users to exploit peer-to-peer networks similar to those used to download MP3s to provide free voice telephony over their broadband internet connection.
Estonia-based Skype was beta-launched in August, 2003 and is currently offered in 15 languages and has around 3m users in 165 countries. Skype is currently averaging approximately 15 new user registrations per minute.
Like previous versions, the latest offering is free to download and the calls are unmetered.
As Carl Sagan might have put it, there are billions and billions of Web pages out there. So it comes as no surprise that the results lists from search sites are getting longer.
That's given rise to a new breed of solutions to help manage the information overload. One of the most ambitious recent entries is a major update of Groxis' Grokker, a program that is now a useful adjunct to any major search engine.
Grokker 2.0 converts text lists of search results into a map of floating spheres and other graphical representations (see the photo, which shows a Grokker window after searching for "Wi-Fi"). You can drill down on each object individually, and each is labeled according to organizing principles, including date and context, so you get what amounts to a visual relational database that includes Web pages, documents, and pictures.
"We do it not just by putting the results in files and folders," says R.J. Pittman, CEO of Groxis, "but by using color, shape, size, position, and order." John Seely Brown, of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center fame, helped develop Grokker 2.0.
The graphical approach lets you locate related information at a glance. Grokker now supports all the major search engines and can do custom, simultaneous searches as well as views of unstructured enterprise data. It also lets you rearrange results. Because it's a Java program, Grokker works on Windows and Apple systems.
Meanwhile, Chicago-based Dipsie is working on what it claims will be a more complete index of the Web than Google has. Dipsie promises to deliver more relevant results when it debuts later this year. No one is revealing exactly how it will work, but the Dipsie bot is already crawling the Web.
Source: PC Magazine
Playboy Enterprises will have its day in court over accusations that search engines sold its trademark as advertising without permission.
Dealing a potential setback to the Web search advertising market, a federal appeals court has reopened a lawsuit challenging the unauthorised use of trademarks in ads linked to search-engine keywords.
The Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Wednesday found that Playboy Enterprises can pursue charges that Excite and Netscape Communications violated its trademark by selling banner advertisements triggered by the terms "playboy" and "playmate." The decision reverses a district court ruling that dismissed the suit without a trial in 2000.
Playboy "clearly holds the marks in question, and defendants used the marks in commerce without (its) permission," a split three-judge panel wrote in its majority decision. "Some consumers, initially seeking Playboy's sites, may initially believe that unlabeled banner advertisements are links to Playboy's sites... Once they follow the instructions to 'click here,' and they access the site, they may well realise that they are not at a Playboy-sponsored site."
The decision comes at a time when search engine-related trademark cases are mounting, thanks to the growing popularity of keyword-auctioned advertising programs pioneered by Yahoo-owned Overture Services. Google, the darling of Internet search engines, faces trademark complaints from advertisers of its popular keyword-auction programme that charge misuse of their trademarks. In December, Google asked a court to rule on whether its keyword-advertising policy is legal as a result.
Wednesday's court opinion backs up a recent decision related to another form of online advertising: pop-ups. In late December, as part of a lawsuit filed against WhenU by 1-800-Contacts, a New York district court granted a preliminary injunction that prohibits WhenU from triggering pop-ups when people visit 1-800-Contacts' Web site.
Scant trademark law exists when it comes to this type of advertising, and the opinion is the first on the issue from an appellate court, according to attorneys following the case.
John Baum, a partner in trademark and copyright law at San Francisco-based Townsend and Townsend, who is not involved in the case, said trademark owners stand to benefit from the decision, which offers a needed clarification of trademark rights in search engine marketing.
"The good news is that by reversing the... summary judgment for the defendant, the Ninth Circuit has confirmed that valuable trademark rights have to be respected," Baum said. "Some trademark owners will certainly welcome yesterday's decision as it leaves open to them trademark infringement and dilution arguments if someone uses their trademarks in a tag that links to a banner ad for competitive and even noncompetitive products."
The lawsuit centres on the search engines' practice of "keying," or selling and displaying ads related to search terms. Advertisers can buy the right to appear above or adjacent to search results related to specific query terms, such as "books" or "digital cameras." That means that when a visitor searches on the term "travel," for example, he or she might see an ad for an airline company. But advertisers also can use the system to prey on rivals' trademarked terms and poach their traffic.
In Playboy's case, it charged Excite with trademark infringement when it sold banner ads to adult-related sites keyed to the terms "playboy" and "playmate," arguing that it created consumer confusion and diluted its trademarked names. Playboy also claimed that Netscape violated its marks by displaying the same ads in partnership with Excite.
An earlier court decision dismissed the case on the grounds of fair use, among other arguments. The Ninth Circuit's analysis supports enough of a case for consumer confusion and brand dilution related to Playboy's trademarks that a trial likely will be heard.
Barry Felder, Playboy's counsel and a partner at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner, said that the opinion is significant because it upholds traditional trademark law on the Internet.
"This type of analysis would apply no matter what the method of advertisement, with the key issue being whether or not a trademark is being used in a confusing manner," Felder said.
Defendants' attorney Jeff Riffer, a partner at Jeffer Mangels, said he was disappointed in the opinion, but that it could be precedent-setting.
"There's not much law in this area," he said. "This court said you need a trial to determine whether there's confusion around trademarks [as it applies] to keyed advertising that does not display the name of the advertiser."
Source: ZD-Net co.uk
Google, Inc. is now offering their Google AdSense program for content web pages in Japan. The first Japanese partners using Google AdSense are Nifty Corp., Impress Corp., and Recruit About.com Japan.
These companies, which began using the service in December, join the growing network of Google AdSense partners. NEC Corp. launched Google AdSense this week and Jiji Press Ltd. will also launch the program on its site shortly.
Google AdSense is a program for website publishers that want to generate additional revenue from relevant advertising on their sites. Google crawls the publishers' site to identify the meaning of the web page, and then serves precisely targeted text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to the specific page that the user is viewing.
Hitwise releases a report found that Internet users have shited their focus ot travel sites, now that the Holiday season has ended. Hitwise data for late December 2003 and early January 2004 reveals that U.S. visits to travel websites has increased by 23% and visits to shopping websites has decreased by 12%.
The travel category registered a 1.4% share of all U.S. visits for the week ending December 20th; travel has experienced a 23% increase and now accounts for 1.7% of all U.S. visits for week ending January 10th, 2004.
Compared with the same point last year, visits to travel sites have increased by 12%. Expedia, travelocity and orbotz were the top three travel sites, week ending 1/10/04.
UK search company Espotting Media has struck a deal with Emap to provide paid listings to the company's internet properties. Emap publishes titles including FHM, Smash Hits and New Woman, and is the UK's largest consumer publisher. Emap Interactive represent 15 Internet properties that generate over 60 million page impressions each month. As part of the deal, Espotting will provide paid listings across Emap's 15 sites, power search functionality, and provide contextual advertising.
Source: MediaPost
Yahoo on Wednesday said it will drop search partner Google during the first quarter of 2004 in favor of its own technology, opening a new phase in the battle for Web search dominance.
The announcement from Yahoo CEO Terry Semel caps more than a year of speculation over the move, which has been widely expected since Yahoo announced plans to acquire search provider Inktomi for $235 million in December 2002. Inktomi has developed so-called algorithmic search technology similar to Google's that indexes Web pages and ranks them based on search terms.
"We've been hard at work with the assets that we've acquired to develop our (own) algorithmic search engine," Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in a phone interview. "We'll be swapping that out in Q1."
Although expected, the announcement highlights the changing market for Web-based search, which has been transformed in the past two years thanks to fast-growing and profitable advertising programs.
Google currently processes approximately 80 percent of all search requests on the Web through distribution deals with Yahoo, Time Warner's America Online and Ask Jeeves, according to market share data compiled by research firm Comscore Media Metrix. When Yahoo ends its deal with Google, that share is expected to drop to about 54 percent. Yahoo's reach, meanwhile, could jump to 42 percent, based on its own search traffic and a deal that provides Inktomi results to Microsoft's MSN Web portal.
Analysts said the shift means that, overnight, Web search will change from a near monopoly situation to a two-horse race.
"Competition-wise, this sets Yahoo up to take Google on," said Search Engine Watch Editor Danny Sullivan. "The minute Yahoo bought Inktomi, the idea they were partners and friends fell by the wayside. But Yahoo has not given consumers a strong reason to think of Yahoo as different from Google. They need Inktomi out there to get their own voice and differentiate themselves."
The change will likely have only a small impact on Google's and Yahoo's businesses, at least in the short term, Sullivan said. Google earned just $7.1 million in fees from Yahoo in 2001 for providing its algorithmic search results, he said.
The real money in search comes from advertising revenues. Keyword searches made up 31 percent of the $1.66 billion in U.S. online ad sales for the second quarter of 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), an industry trade group.
Since November 2001, Yahoo has run advertising search links on its site from Overture Services--which it acquired last year for $1.6 billion--meaning Google won't see any loss in its advertising reach when the deal unravels.
"This will mean virtually nothing to Google" from a business perspective, Sullivan said. "I don't know how much money they were making, but I'd be surprised if it was in the tens of millions. The real money in search is in ads, but Yahoo never carried Google's ads...What you really want to understand is the reach of their ad networks. That's not changing."
Sullivan said things will get even more interesting when Microsoft gets its Web search act together, something he said he expects by the end of the year.
Semel on Wednesday said that Yahoo has expanded its deal to offer Overture's paid search results to MSN's sites throughout Europe and Asia, adding to an existing deal throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.
But the boost from the MSN deal could be short-lived, Sullivan said.
"By the end of 2004, MSN will get their act together," he said. "Then the worry for Yahoo is that MSN will prove to be a temporary boost for them."
"Competition-wise, this sets Yahoo up to take Google on," said Search Engine Watch Editor Danny Sullivan. "The minute Yahoo bought Inktomi, the idea they were partners and friends fell by the wayside. But Yahoo has not given consumers a strong reason to think of Yahoo as different from Google. They need Inktomi out there to get their own voice and differentiate themselves."
The change will likely have only a small impact on Google's and Yahoo's businesses, at least in the short term, Sullivan said. Google earned just $7.1 million in fees from Yahoo in 2001 for providing its algorithmic search results, he said.
The real money in search comes from advertising revenues. Keyword searches made up 31 percent of the $1.66 billion in U.S. online ad sales for the second quarter of 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), an industry trade group.
Since November 2001, Yahoo has run advertising search links on its site from Overture Services--which it acquired last year for $1.6 billion--meaning Google won't see any loss in its advertising reach when the deal unravels.
"This will mean virtually nothing to Google" from a business perspective, Sullivan said. "I don't know how much money they were making, but I'd be surprised if it was in the tens of millions. The real money in search is in ads, but Yahoo never carried Google's ads...What you really want to understand is the reach of their ad networks. That's not changing."
Sullivan said things will get even more interesting when Microsoft gets its Web search act together, something he said he expects by the end of the year.
Semel on Wednesday said that Yahoo has expanded its deal to offer Overture's paid search results to MSN's sites throughout Europe and Asia, adding to an existing deal throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.
But the boost from the MSN deal could be short-lived, Sullivan said.
"By the end of 2004, MSN will get their act together," he said. "Then the worry for Yahoo is that MSN will prove to be a temporary boost for them."
Story by Evan Hansen and Jim Hu
Source: C-Net News
Espotting Media today announces a deal to provide paid listings to the internet properties of Emap PLC and publishers of titles including FHM, Smash Hits and New Woman.
Emap is the UK's largest consumer publisher, and Emap Interactive represent a suite of 15 Internet properties that generate over 60 million page impressions each month, from 2.5 million unique users. Deal highlights include:
Exclusive deal sees Espotting provide paid listings across Emap's network of 15 internet sites, including the internet properties of FHM, Smash Hits, Q, Kiss, Aloud, Kerrang, New Woman, Bliss, Max Power, Empire and Mojo.
Espotting will power search functionality, in addition to providing its Content Monetisation Solution (also referred to as contextual advertising) throughout the channels of Emap's websites. Channel implementations will be customised to each site, and relevant Espotting listings will feature alongside editorial content and product reviews; on FHM.com for example, Espotting's mobile phone related listings may appear under the 'FHM.com recommends' banner next to reviews of the latest mobile technology in the channel Manstuff > Reviews. All channel implementations will match the look and feel of Emap's current websites.
Espotting's content solutions are vertically focused, delivering precisely targeted users to advertisers' websites. Espotting pioneered content monetisation in Europe, and this deal will see implementations covering a range of demographic verticals.
The deal can be extended to any new Internet properties that Emap launch.
The implementation is expected to go live mid January.
'This is the first time we have worked with a paid listings provider, and we wanted to work with the best.' commented Niall Hogan, Interactive Sales Director, Emap. 'As the European market leaders, and the pioneers of content monetisation in Europe, Espotting were the obvious choice. We are happy to offer Espotting's advertisers the ability to take advantage of the unique demographic profiles provided by our internet properties, and Espotting's successful history of content implementations allows us to seamlessly integrate relevant content whilst staying true to Emap's many brands.'
'This deal sees the coming together of two leaders in UK media.' commented Seb Bishop, co-founder of Espotting Media. 'Our many-faceted partnership with Emap reflects Espotting's commitment to providing our advertisers with highly targeted users through vertically specific content implementations. We work closely with our affiliates to ensure that each implementation is customised to mirror their brand, and meet their specific needs.'
Source: e-Spotting
Bid prices in PPC (and hence the cost per click) are going up, but this can be explained by the rising awareness of PPC's potential effectiveness.
In Sebastian Junger's book "A Perfect Storm," three storm systems combine to create a deadly situation for the crew of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail.
Each of these meteorological events would have been difficult alone, but in Junger's narrative, all three combine to cause extreme mayhem in the North Atlantic.
Such is the scenario that's beginning to emerge in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. While the result may not be entirely lethal, it could be a marketing deathblow to those dependent on Internet promotion.
In Storm 1, the turbulence is relatively mild. Bid prices are going up. It seems that ad click traffic is continuing to grow, but fewer visitors are clicking through.
Likewise, Storm 2 looks typical enough. Search properties like Google are increasingly using affiliate sites to serve up more ads than they could on just their own search sites in order to extend their reach. So far, there's nothing to get terribly excited about.
But when you toss in Storm 3, the brew gets a bit headier. It seems that ad click traffic is continuing to grow, but fewer visitors are clicking through to either take some kind of meaningful action or actually transact business. In other words, clicks are increasing, but conversion percentages are declining.
At first glance, the anomaly seems to be tolerable, much as the turbulence in Junger's North Atlantic initially appeared. However, further investigation reveals a subversive undercurrent in the form of PPC affiliates employing "pay to click" personnel to artificially bolster PPC hits, and ultimately, revenue.
Needless to say, that's certainly not the way it's supposed to work, and it appears that the latest round of search engine affiliate programs may be to blame.
Overture Services has made its living by providing the technology that underpins the PPC ads on such giant sites as parent company Yahoo, MSN Search, InfoSpace and AltaVista. Google's more recent AdSense program is designed to one-up Overture by covering a broader spectrum. AdSense affiliates the owners of high-traffic Web sites, including many that you probably have never heard of.
At first glance, everyone wins. The PPC providers get more exposure and more revenue, the Web site owners get a percentage of the cost per click, and the advertisers get more eyeballs and, presumably, more traffic.
But recently, there's been a growing crop of Web ads and low-level spam offerings targeted at recruiting people to surf the Web and click on ads, using their own computer and an Internet connection. Whenever a new medium is introduced, there are invariably people who seek to circumvent its conventions and subvert its intent for short-term gain.
With just a small coterie of such people using a variety of individual Internet Protocol addresses, it is almost impossible to determine which hits are real and which are "paid to play."
Admittedly, there is no direct evidence linking Google to such practices, but those disturbing spam ads are still out there, threatening to undermine the PPC environment and ultimately, if the storm becomes big enough, the future existence of PPC advertising.
Unfortunately, it seems that whenever a new medium is introduced, there are invariably people who seek to circumvent its conventions and subvert its intent for short-term gain. One only has to think of the payola scandals in the early days of rock 'n' roll or the floods of current e-mail offers for body part enlargements and shady refinancing deals.
Of course, self-policing is the first line of defense, and obviously, some affiliates are more reputable than others. Likewise, some PPC vendors are more circumspect about choosing their affiliates than others. But as we've seen with the enormous proliferation of music online, once certain floodgates are opened, they cannot easily be closed again. As with the Andrea Gail at the end of its journey, the realization only belatedly dawned on the sailors that the storm that had been willing to let them in would no longer let them out.
We do not want to get to that point with PPC. It is a very effective medium to advertisers and, in an Internet advertising environment known for annoying banner advertising and pop-ups, a welcome source of promotional relief.
There are precious few fish to be harvested from today's troubled economic waters, and it would be a shame to see another medium sink in the swirl of uncontrolled controversy.
But, left unchecked, advertisers will, at a point, abandon PPC if they lose their trust in the process and begin to feel like victims in waiting. And if that happens, the first to go down will be those too shortsighted and obsessed with immediate gain to play the game fairly.
Story by Hans Riemer
Source: C-Net News
VeriSign Inc. is planning changes to a Domain Name System (DNS) component responsible for coordinating updates to the .com and .net domains throughout the DNS system, according to a company spokesperson.
The changes are intended to prepare .com and .net for more frequent daily updates of information such as new subdomains, address changes and the culling out of obsolete subdomains. Internet users and organizations managing Web sites on .com and .net will not notice the change, VeriSign said.
However, some networking experts worry that the change, which is scheduled for Feb. 9, may have unanticipated consequences that could interrupt traffic to some .com and .net Web sites and other online services.
The modifications will change the way part of a DNS component called the Start of Authority (SOA) Record is generated for .com and .net domains, according to information posted to the Nanog networking discussion group by Matt Larson, of VeriSign Naming and Directory Services and confirmed by Pat Burns, a VeriSign spokesperson.
SOAs are used to manage DNS zones, areas of an Internet domain that are managed by a single DNS server. The records contain identifying information about the zone, such as the name of the primary DNS server for the zone, the e-mail address of the person responsible for the zone and a unique serial number that can be used to compare whether the zone information in one DNS server is newer or older than that managed by other, secondary servers.
Burns denied that VeriSign would be offering the more frequent updates as a paid service. "From our perspective, this is just a way to prepare to offer a more efficient domain name registration process," he said.
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services will change the serial number format in the .com and .net zones' SOA records. Currently, the serial number format is YYYYMMDD, plus an additional two-digit number (00 to 99) that is updated whenever the zone data is updated.
Under the new system, VeriSign will change the serial number to a unique value equal to the number of seconds since 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time on Jan. 1, 1970, Larson said.
That will allow VeriSign to make better use of its Advanced Transaction Lookup and Signalling (ATLAS) system technology to make more frequent and efficient updates to .com and .net, from the current system of two daily updates, Burns said.
VeriSign does not anticipate disruptions stemming from the change, Larson said. But the company did allow that "processes that rely on the semantics of the .com/.net serial number" could be affected.
For example, companies that have created scripts to monitor domain change on .com and .net will almost certainly need to make changes to account for the serial number change, said Thor Larholm, senior security researcher at Pivx Solutions LLC of Newport Beach, Calif.
Also, companies that have incorrectly formatted their DNS servers to get information directly from the DNS root servers maintained by VeriSign will stop receiving updates on Feb. 9, leaving those servers and the Internet users who rely on them out of step with the rest of the Internet, he said.
"The damage won't be catastrophic, but some DNS servers could stop receiving updates," he said.
While there is general agreement within the technical community that VeriSign has the right to make the serial number changes, there is also suspicion about the move, especially after the feud over VeriSign's controversial Site Finder service in 2003, which redirected requests for nonexistent Web addresses to a Web site maintained by VeriSign.
VeriSign complied with an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) request to shut down Site Finder after ICANN complained that Site Finder hobbled antispam filters and automated tools like Web spidering applications, and hampered the ability of some applications to determine whether or not an Internet domain existed.
"There's distrust of VeriSign on a basic level and (the Site Finder dispute) removed any level of trust for many system administrators," Larholm said.
Story by Paul Roberts
IT World Canada
Yahoo and Google are offering new search tricks for Web surfers, with the ongoing goal of becoming indispensable.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo on Friday started offering visitors the ability to search for flight information directly from the search box, matching a similarly new capability from rival Google's search engine. Google, in turn, embedded a technology shortcut for visitors to find information on domain names and their owners, helping people circumvent the WhoIs database of domain names.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google also started displaying shopping-related listings from Froogle.com, its e-commerce reference site, at the top of general search results when it associates a query term as commercial. That development signals the growing importance of shopping search to visitors and, likely, to Google's future.
Other new features from Google include dictionary search and a tool for locating packages in the shipping cycle from Federal Express and United Parcel Service.
The latest search shortcuts join a parade of technology advancements in Web navigation. Search providers are increasingly trying to deliver a wealth of information onto results pages quickly, rather than having people sift through numerous Web sites to find answers. The more successfully they can do this, the greater the likelihood that people will return and develop a loyalty to that provider.
Examples of innovation include tools to retrieve weather, travel, package tracking and math equations on the page of search results. Google, for example, has introduced search features for math equations; news alerts; and the Google Deskbar, which lets people search for movie reviews and stock data from their desktop without using a browser. Yahoo lets people call up listings for Yellow Pages, weather and maps directly from the search bar with corresponding commands.
But the challenge for Yahoo and Google is educating Web searchers on their advancements.
Search shortcuts typically work by typing a simple command before the query term into the search box. Google's WhoIs shortcut requires the term "whois" and then a domain name, such as "Google.com," to call up whether the address has been registered, or the owners' name and contact information. It draws the information from the Global WhoIs database.
Yahoo's flight shortcut simply calls for the airline name and the flight number to access its status. For example, typing in "AA (for American Airlines) 44," calls up the latest landing time or in-flight status.
Yahoo's flight tool draws on data from Sabre-owned Travelocity, its travel partner. Company spokeswoman Diana Lee said that it was created with Yahoo's own technology. "This shows a great way that we have integrated our assets from the network."
Google did not respond to calls for comment.
Source: C-Net News
Google DomainPark allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory.
DomainPark delivers targeted, conceptually related keywords and advertisements to parked domain name pages by using Google's semantic technology to "understand" the meaning of each domain name.
DomainPark currently powers over 1 million domain names.
Web sites must generate more than 750,000 page views per month to qualify.
Forrester Research reports that customer e-commerce spending will lead the IT spending charge in 2004, growing by 4.8% this year. Buy-side e-commerce spending will grow by 1.9%, projects Forrester. In fact, Forrester estimates that three-fourths of companies will maintain or increase their IT spending for e-commerce initiatives. Forrester bases its estimates on the survey of 212 e-commerce decision-makers.
In-Stat/MDR estimated last month that small business IT spending totaled $161 billion last year and would reach $215 billion by the end of 2008.
Yankee Group estimates that there are over 5 million small businesses in the US. For further insight into the small- and medium-size businesses in the US, stay tuned to eMarketer for the Small-Medium Business IT Spending spotlight report.
Source: e-Marketer.com
Rival Internet service providers (ISPs) keen to acquire the once-ailing European operations of Time Warner Inc.'s America Online (AOL) division may have to look elsewhere to expand their operations.
Speaking Tuesday at a Smith Barney investor conference in Phoenix, Time Warner Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Richard Parsons called AOL Europe "a pretty interesting success story" and said rumours in late 2003 about him holding talks to sell the European business were off the mark, according to a report published Wednesday in the online edition of The Washington Post. Smith Barney is a division of Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
"In this overheated media environment, anytime you have lunch with somebody who is not related to you by blood there is speculation that there must be some deal being worked on," Parson said in the media report. Those remarks came on the same day Olivier Sichel, chairman and CEO of French ISP Wanadoo SA, said in a radio interview that he is interested in all opportunities to expand his company's European presence, including a purchase of AOL Europe. Sichel said he expects further consolidation in the European ISP market.
"We have held no talks with Time Warner about AOL Europe but as we have said all along, we aim to strengthen our business in Europe and that means we will study all options," a spokeswoman for France Telecom SA said Wednesday. France Telecom, which spun off Wanadoo into an independent unit a couple of years ago, remains the major shareholder.
The French aren't the only ones waving a flag at AOL. Rumours abound that Deutsche Telekom AG remains interested, even if Chairman and CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke denied holding talks to acquire the Internet company at a news conference in November.
Rumours of T-Online AG & Co. KG going shopping for ISPs have flourished since the German Internet company confirmed surplus capital of more than four billion euros (US$4.7 billion) days before the news conference with Ricke. Helping fuel speculation, T-Online CEO Thomas Holtrop said some of that money will be used for acquisitions in the months ahead.
"We are generally interested in increasing our market presence in Europe and are taking steps in this direction," said T-Online spokesman Michael Schlechtriem, pointing to the December acquisition of Swiss ISP Scout25 AG.
Source: IT World Canada
Yahoo's Overture Services will hand more control to advertisers later this month, letting them bid for contextual listings independently from search listings.
Received wisdom in the industry contends that users are less likely to purchase goods or services after clicking on contextual ads, which appear on content pages, as compared to those that appear on search results pages.
The proof will soon enough be in the pudding, or at least the conversions, as Overture advertisers will be able to make different bids for Content Match keywords later this month. (Content Match is Overture's name for its contextual advertising product.)
"We've always had the intention of creating a separate marketplace for the product because inherently it's a different experience," said Paul Volen, Overture' VP of partner product marketing. "We got information from advertisers that they would like to control it separately." It's all about control, Volen maintained.
If advertisers take no action, their bid rate on Content Match will remain the same as it was before the change. The 20 percent discount in effect since Content Match's June launch will end with the launch of the new product.
Though contextual listings, which competitor Google offers through its AdSense program, are said to bring advertisers more traffic, many find such listings lower their ROI. This has led to the demand for the ability to bid for each product individually.
Will Google follow Overture's lead? At present, Google does not separate out the search and contextual listings. Kevin Lee, CEO of search engine campaign management company Did-it.com, says it might.
"They may. But you can make the argument that Google doesn't have to. They have over 100,000 advertisers. Let's say contextual advertising works as well for half of them, so half shut it off. You still have a lot of money coming in. So why make life more complicated with a whole separate auction you have to watch?" said Lee.
Lee maintained that results from contextual listings vary and advertisers should keep an open mind.
"Marketers and advertisers should use the tools and technologies at their disposal to figure it out by themselves," Lee said.
Source: InternetNews.com
Google Inc. hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to arrange its initial public offering, a sale that may raise as much as $4 billion, a banker involved in the transaction said.
The sale by Google, the world's most used Internet search engine, would be the biggest IPO since CIT Group Inc.'s $4.87 billion deal in July 2002. It ``will certainly be the deal of the year,'' said Sanford Robertson, who founded investment bank Robertson, Stephens & Co. before starting private-equity firm Francisco Partners LP.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will lead a group of underwriters that includes Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Thomas Weisel Partners LLC and WR Hambrecht + Co., two bankers in the sale said. They spoke on the condition they not be named.
Mountain View, California-based Google may sell a stake of about one-third in the IPO, giving the company a market value of about $12 billion, the bankers said. The company will probably register the shares for sale with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month and sell them by April, they said.
Google spokesman David Krane, Morgan Stanley's Melissa Stonberg and Goldman Sachs spokesman Andrea Rachman declined comment. Citigroup spokesman Duncan King, CSFB spokesman Pen Pendleton and J.P. Morgan spokesman Brian Marchiony also declined to comment, as did Clay Corbus, head of investment banking at WR Hambrecht.
Thomas Weisel Chief Operating Officer Blake Jorgensen didn't return a call seeking comment. The fees generated from Google's IPO may be as much as $280 million if the company raises as much as $4 billion based on a 7 percent fee. Fees for the biggest IPOs are usually lower than the standard 7 percent. On CIT's sale, bankers collected commissions of 4 percent. That's still more than the 0.9 percent for corporate bonds and about 0.3 percent for advice on mergers.
There's ``a lot of buzz around'' the Google sale, said Reed Taussig, chief executive officer at Callidus Software Inc., a San Jose, California-based company.
Morgan Stanley has taken public at least six companies backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Google's venture investors. Those sales included Netscape Communications Corp., whose August 1995 IPO ushered in the Internet boom. Goldman Sachs has arranged IPOs for at least four companies backed by Sequoia Capital general partner Michael Moritz, a venture investor in Google.
Those sales include Google competitor Yahoo Inc., Webvan Group Inc., PlanetRx.com Inc. and Etoys Inc. Goldman also arranged the IPO of Google rival Ebay Inc., which has a market value of about $42 billion.
Merrill Lynch & Co., which has the biggest brokerage force in the world, lost its bid to help arrange the sale. The assignment for WR Hambrecht, which sells shares via the Web through an auction process, will be its biggest ever. Its share of the Google sale may exceed the $309.2 million of IPOs it has done since its first in April 1999.
In WR Hambrecht's Internet-based IPO bidding process known as the ``OpenIPO,'' individual and institutional investors enter the amount of shares they want to buy and the price they are willing to pay. The bank finds the clearing price by tallying all bids and finds the highest price in which all shares can be sold.
``You need only so many banks in a deal,'' said Scott Appleby, president of mergers and acquisition advisory firm Appleby Group Inc. ``The top four banks in one deal may not be the banks in the next deal.''
Google's Internet site is the most-used in the world for Internet searches, according to research firm ComScore Networks. Google was used for 35 percent of Internet searches by U.S. users in October, ComScore said. Google's search results are also available on other companies' Web sites, including Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, which pay Google licensing fees.
Google was founded by Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 and now employs more than 1,000 people. Google generates most of its revenue from a service known as sponsored-search advertising. Customers pay Google for the right to have their Web sites come up at the top of search results. Those results are set off in colored boxes and labeled ``Sponsored Links'' to distinguish them from those businesses haven't paid to influence.
Google probably had revenue of about $1 billion in 2003 and net income of about $200 million that will increase to about $1.5 billion of sales and net income of $300 million in this year, according to Eric Martinuzzi, an analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group in Minneapolis. ``Any Internet site who wants to create revenue uses Google,'' Martinuzzi said.
Source: Bloomberg.com
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said Monday that the company has "only just begun" with its grand plans to grow its Web search business, highlighting 2004 as a year when search will become omnipresent throughout its family of sites.
Semel's comments, made during a question-and-answer session at Smith Barney Citigroup's Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference, come after a year marked by high-profile acquisitions in the search arena. The Web giant acquired algorithmic search provider Inktomi for $235 million and then closed a $1.6 billion purchase of Overture Services to add the lucrative paid-search business.
The acquisition spree highlights the rivalry with Google, which competes with Yahoo despite powering a significant volume of Yahoo's algorithmic search results. The competition will only increase now that Google has named bankers to manage its initial public offering, according to reports Monday. Google has supplanted Yahoo as a name synonymous with Web search and has created a lucrative paid search business that mirrors Overture's.
"We woke up in time and we saw search ever present in the entire network," Semel said during the session, which was broadcast live on the Web. "We saw an enormous opportunity to be the other major player in search."
Semel added that the Overture and Inktomi acquisitions will allow Yahoo to more widely spread its search services throughout its many content sites. The move would prevent audiences of popular areas such as finance, news and music from defecting to outside search providers such as Google.
"Why not have music search in music or finance search in finance?" Semel said. "The answer is we will."
Many industry watchers expect Yahoo will replace Google's search technology with its own, given moves such as the Inktomi acquisition and related development efforts.
During his keynote, Semel praised other areas at Yahoo that have grown since he took the helm in May 2001, namely the area of paid services. Semel said Yahoo now has 5 million paid users after starting from nearly zero when he began his tenure. He added that he is "not at all concerned" about his goal of 10 million paid users, a benchmark set during his first analyst day in 2001.
"We had no infrastructure and no direct sales," Semel said during the conference. "We fundamentally sold advertising."
Central to this paid services business is Yahoo's partnership to bundle its content and services into SBC Communications' DSL (digital subscriber line) service. Last quarter, SBC reported a gain of 365,000 new subscribers for a total of 3.1 million. All of the new subscribers were also counted as new Yahoo subscribers.
Despite aggressive DSL price promotions by SBC for as low as $26.95 a month, Semel said Yahoo will continue to benefit every time a subscriber is added.
"Generally speaking, the more subscribers we sign, the more lucrative it is to Yahoo," he said.
Source: C-Net News
Some intriguing technologies are getting better at bringing order to all that chaos, and could revolutionize how people search the Web for information.
As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they have a pretty big flaw. They often deliver too much information, and a lot of it isn't quite what we're looking for. Who really bothers to read the dozens of pages of results that Google generates?
Software now emerging analyzes search results and automatically sorts them into categories that, at a glance, present far more information than the typical textual list. "We enliven the otherwise deadening process of searching for information," said Raul Valdes-Perez, co-founder of Vivisimo Inc., which quickly puts search results into clickable categories.
Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo sells its technology to companies and intelligence agencies, and offers free Web searches at Vivisimo.com. Valdes-Perez describes his company this way: If the Internet is a giant bookstore in which all the books are piled randomly on the floor, then Vivisimo is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense.
Consider it a 21st century Dewey Decimal System designed to fight information overload. But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical analysis, a method that even works with other languages.
A similar process powers Grokker, a downloadable program that not only sorts search results into categories but also "maps" the results in a holistic way, showing each category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear as more circles that can be clicked on and zoomed in on.
It takes a few minutes to get used to Grokker. But the value of its nonlinear approach quickly becomes clear. Let's say, for example, you're curious about accommodations in France and enter a search for "Paris Hilton."
Google recognizes this as a search in the category of "Regional-Europe-Travel and Tourism-Lodging-Hotels" but still produces page after page with links about celebrity socialite Paris Hilton and her exploits. That's because Google's engine ranks pages largely based on how many other sites link to them, sending the most popular pages to the top.
If you run the search on Grokker, however, the resulting circle shows all the possible categories of information the Internet offers on a search for "Paris Hilton" - including reviews, maps and online booking sites for the Hilton hotel in Paris, which are all but buried in the Google rankings. Now you've much more quickly found not what is popular among Internet gawkers, but what is genuinely useful to you.
Groxis Inc., the 15-person company that introduced Grokker last year and released an upgraded, $49 second version in December, is not out to replace Google. Grokker is not in itself a search engine - it only analyzes and illustrates search engines' results.
For example, Grokker2 can categorize and map files on your hard drive - arranging them by content, not by the folders you happened to put them in - or listings on Amazon.com. If you use Grokker2 to search the Web, it combines results from six search engines - Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Wisenut, Teoma and FAST, a business-focused product by a Norwegian company.
In 2004, Grokker plans to release up to two dozen downloadable plug-ins that will set its colored circles loose on a wider variety of databases, including the Library of Congress, news Web sites and yes, Google itself. "We now have the capability to `grok' anything," said R.J. Pittman, chief executive of Sausalito, Calif.-based Groxis. Would-be Grokkers, a note of caution: it requires Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS X.
The Google plug-in is partly a market test; Google and Groxis will analyze how well it works and then consider whether to work on developing a service together, Pittman said. Google spokesman Nathan Tyler declined to comment on Groxis. Nor would he say whether Google is exploring its own measures of sprucing up search pages with categorization tools like Vivisimo or visualization aids like Grokker.
Another visualization possibility is offered by TouchGraph LLC, which has a Google plug-in that shows links as an interconnected web, an appropriate image for the World Wide Web. Such tools have been applied by the Manhattan firm Plumb Design in its Visual Thesaurus, which maps a word's meanings, or in a navigation tool it developed for a Smithsonian Institution exhibit.
Meanwhile, a number of search sites have gotten hip to honing results. For example Teoma, which is part of Ask Jeeves Inc., suggests ways to refine or narrow a search. That means a Teoma search for "Las Vegas" will serve up roughly the same links as other sites, but it also suggests "Vacation Packages" and "Vegas Wedding Chapel."
"Search has to evolve," Pittman said. "It can't just be Google sitting there with a stash of places they've crawled on the Web. People are becoming more astute and demanding better results, and they're demanding a more powerful search experience. People like to get a landscape of information once they've found out there's one available."
Source: Seattle PI.com
FindWhat.com has acquired Miva for approximately $8.0 million
FindWhat.com today announced the completion of its acquisition of Miva Corporation.
Under the terms of the agreement, announced September 3, 2003, FindWhat.com has acquired Miva for approximately $8.0 million, with Miva shareholders receiving approximately $2.7 million in cash and approximately 165,000 shares of FindWhat.com common stock, while FindWhat.com assumes approximately $2.5 million in Miva liabilities.
FindWhat.com is increasingly focused on the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses (SMEs), and with the completion of this acquisition, is poised to offer a more complete and comprehensive business solution to SMEs in the U.S.
According to the Kelsey Group, U.S. SMEs this year will spend over $3 billion of their advertising budgets on developing, building, hosting and promoting their websites.
FindWhat.com plans to allow the tens of thousands of advertisers on the FindWhat.com Network to have access to the e-commerce shopping software, related plug-ins, modules and hosting services available through Miva Merchant and its partners, while offering the tens of thousands of Miva merchants the ability to promote their websites through the FindWhat.com Network.
FindWhat.com plans to continually advance state-of-the-art technology, solutions and services for SMEs. "We continue to be very impressed with Miva's ability to provide best-of-breed e-commerce applications to the SME marketplace," said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, chairman and CEO of FindWhat.com.
"We look forward to working on integrating our products, and providing a scalable and customizable solution for online businesses globally."
Joe Austin, president and CEO of Miva Corporation, now joins the management team of FindWhat.com as general manager of its Miva division. The Miva division is based in San Diego, CA.
Source: Biz Yahoo.com
The online retail sector experienced significant growth during 2003 due to record holiday sales, a strong travel market and increased consumer confidence, according to a new report. Revenue for online retailers in 2003 reached $93 billion, a 27 percent increase over the same period last year, research firm ComScore Networks reported on Monday.
The growth in sales was spurred by a record fourth quarter holiday buying season, typically the largest sales period for both online and brick-and-mortar vendors. ComScore said that online retail spending during the 2003 holiday season totaled $12.5 billion, a 29.5 percent gain over the same period last year.
The online travel segment continued to outperform the rest of the e-tail market, with ComScore counting $41 billion in sales for 2003, a 35 percent gain over travel revenue recorded in 2002.
The firm reported that for several weeks during June and July, the peak vacation season, travel spending exceeded all other e-commerce product categories combined.
ComScore analyst Graham Mudd said the fastest growing areas of the e-tail market beyond travel included sales of big-ticket items such as furniture, appliances and jewelry, indicating increased confidence among consumers.
The apparel and accessories market also showed signs of renewed growth after falling off for the last two years, further evidencing a shift among online shoppers.
"Despite some weakness earlier in the year related to the Iraq war, increased consumer experience and programs allowing buyers to interact with physical store locations for returns or service helped to drive sales," said Mudd. "Renewed performance of the apparel market after two years of flat numbers also indicates that buying patterns may be shifting again."
ComScore said that consistent performance over the last two months of the year were crucial to overall growth in the e-tail segment and estimated that consumers spent an average of $200 million per day online throughout November and December.
The firm's holiday numbers appeared conservative compared to other researchers' figures. The eSpending survey published last week by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen/NetRatings indicated that consumers spent $13 billion during the holidays, a 46 percent increase over its own 2002 figures.
The positive numbers stand in contrast to a Commerce Department report released in December that found a 3.1 percent month-over-month decrease in orders for durable goods for the month of November.
Source: C-Net News
Christmas is a luckyday for everybody, but for Sootle, its something else.
Right on Christmas day, Sootle, a 7 month old search company, announced its re-launch. This time, the re-launch is going to stay permanent.
This re-launch is predicted to be more successful, We have added new features, such as Text Cache, A more "Advanced" search page, Clustering, Domain limiting and heaps more.
There will also be new services such as Paid 48 hour refreshes, Paid Site Search, Site Search and a Internet Explorer toolbar.
The new launch sets Sootle into "Alpha", which means - A so-called "Test" version, it will go in "BETA" next, and then, it will fully re-launch.
"Christmas is a very lucky day for a re-launch, we hope this brings us good luck and success" says Sid Yadav, the founder of Sootle.
"I believe we can lead Sootle from darkness into greatness, from dialup to broadband, from 19th century to the 21st century!" says Tom Toth, the new Sootle president.
There will be a number of changes around the corner for Looksmart in 2004. Some of their new features are already rolling out. Below is an overview of the new features.
Beginning in January 2004, MSN will be removing the Web Directory Sites section of its search results, and will no longer have a direct partnership agreement with LookSmart. Current LookListings may still appear on MSN through the distribution partnership with Inktomi, but paid inclusion traffic will be reduced at that time. The LookListings will also continue to provide traffic from more than 85 other LookSmart partners such as Lycos, About.com, Road Runner, InfoSpace and CNET. Looksmart is negotiating with other portals and ISPs for additional distribution of LookListings.
Looksmart recently launched Sponsored Listings, a bid-for-placement keyword product. Sponsored Listings are fully integrated with LookListings, so you can use your existing login and password, get started with just a few simple clicks, and monitor the performance of all of your paid inclusion and pay-for-placement listings together in the LookSmart Advertiser Center.
LookListings now has other important new features, designed to give you greater control and flexibility. Starting December 16th, you can now pinpoint customers with specific keywords. Or reach a broader audience using relevancy-based inclusion targeting.
Create keyword-targeted listings
If you provided Relevancy Keywords for your LookListings campaigns, you will now see those Relevancy Keywords displayed as new keyword-targeted listings in your account. These new listings will appear in search results when users search for the associated keyword across the LookSmart network. If you did not provide Relevancy Keywords for your campaign, you may now access your account and add keywords to your existing LookListings campaigns to improve the precision of your targeting.
Combine targeting options in one campaign
You may combine two different targeting options within the same LookListings campaign. With "Inclusion Targeting" your listings will continue to be displayed whenever they are relevant across the LookSmart network, just as they were previously. Now, by adding "Keyword Targeting," your listings will only appear for searches that match the specific keywords you choose. Use both targeting options together to tailor messages to specific groups of customers.
You now have the ability to bid for higher placement on your LookListings keywords. Take advantage of the new "Max CPC" feature with auto-discounting: Set the CPC ceiling you are willing to pay for any given keyword. The actual CPC you are billed will be discounted to the minimum value necessary to maintain your desired position in search results. This means you will never pay more than you need, to show up where you want.
No fees to create or update listings
It is now free to create new listings, add keywords, and update your campaigns.
It will be interesting to see what new announcements Looksmart makes in the New Year prior to their deal with MSN ending on January 14th.
Resource:
Looksmart Looklistings
Jason Lane B.Sc.
Senior Search Marketing Strategist
jason.lane@enquiro.com
It was one year ago today, December 23, 2002, when Yahoo! announced that it planned to acquire Inktomi. Which leads to the question - What has changed?
The answer is; not much on the organic front. Yahoo! still displays Google as its'' primary organic results, and have not made any announcements as to their plans with Inktomi.
A while back I speculated that they would switch on Inktomi and boot Google, but to date it has not happened yet. Looking back, my logic was flawed somewhat. I predicted that they would try to switch within a year of the acquisition and while they did announce the acquisition on this date a year ago, it wasn''t actually approved by Inktomi shareholders until March of this year. Which leaves Tuesday January 13th open.
But back to my original question - what has changed?
As I mentioned, Yahoo! still displays Google organic results which have gone through a major transformation recently so Yahoo! has in effect changed it''s rankings as well.
It is noteworthy, however, that we have seen increased activity with Slurp, Inktomi''s crawler, in the past few months. This is an obvious sign that Yahoo! is ramping up the Inktomi database. What the final results will be, or when the change will happen is anyone''s guess.
This also doesn''t take into account what future plans Yahoo! has for Overture, which they also purchased this year. While they are busily signing new contracts worldwide with advertisers, they have not disclosed what their plans are for their North American properties, as they relate to Overture or Inktomi. (An interesting side note on this - Overture just announced today an agreement between Overture and Yahoo! with Lycos Europe, despite the fact that Lycos in the US is suing Overture because they were bought by Yahoo!).
12 months later and still no change on the organic side of Yahoo! This should make 2004 an interesting year for the popular search portal.
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning specialists
India has long been a place to turn to if you need inexpensive quality programming. Microsoft has done it for years. Now it appears that others are looking to India as well including search engines.
Google recently announced plans to set up an engineering research and development office in India early in the New Year. AOL also announced recently that, much to the chagrin of laid off AOL developers; they are looking for developers in India as well.
In addition, many other large technology companies have stated that they are going to begin or increase development using contractors and companies in India.
Despite Dell pulling out some technical support jobs from India, others such as Microsoft, Aviva, HSBC Bank, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, National Rail Inquiries of UK, Siemens and Bank of America are moving thousands of jobs to India. IBM Global Services India doubled its manpower last year while UK-based Vertex (which services Cable & Wireless services to the UK) also plans to double its capacity in India next year. Infosys, an India based company, will be adding around 7,000 professionals during the current fiscal year, the highest in its history.
The reason for this migration? Indian development tends to cost less than North American development; as much as 80% less. This can make a huge difference to a company’s bottom line.
So, while AOL and Google appear to be the leaders in terms of outsourcing search engine technologies development I don’t believe they will be the last. Microsoft already has a campus in India so it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine them moving some or all of their search engine/portal development to the India campus, dubbed the MIDC (Microsoft India Development Centre).
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
www.Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning specialists
Google is now featuring its shopping search engine more prominently, just in time for the end of the Chrismas shopping season. It is not only advertising Froogle directly on the main Google page, but at the top of some search results (only for specific query words), Google will list "Product Search" results. They have been experimenting with this since earlier this month, but these results are now live. As with other recent Google initiatives, it is a bit of a guessing game when the Product results will show. A search on wooden spoons had no Product links while tea kettles had the standard three (even though wooden spoons has more than 100 results in Froogle).
AlltheWeb and AltaVista are now owned by Yahoo! when they bought Overture. For now, AltaVista and AlltheWeb continue to be available at their historic locations and have separate databases for their Web search results. However, since at least sometime in November, AltaVista and AlltheWeb seem to have merged their image, news, and video databases. Both continue to have differences in the search interfaces and search features but the content appears to be the same. The audio searches are getting more similar and perhaps share a portion of their database, but the Web results still are quite different.
Google has added a few more shortcuts for specific number searches and for airport travel conditions. Basically, five databases will have shortcuts: U.S. Patents, UPS Tracking Numbers, FedEx Tracking Numbers, FCC Equipment IDs, and FAA Airplane Registration Numbers. Note that some require a prefix like patent, fedex, or fcc while others do not and the airport weather needs the suffix of airport. Not all of the examples given work, or they only work at some data centers, but since it is a new feature, those bugs should be worked out soon.
Also, Google is trying out a new design and look on a very small portion of searchers. Whether Google will decide to implement the new look in this screen shot (or here or here) remains to be seen. But based on these samples, it looks like they are experimenting with doing away with the tabbed interface and moving those links above the search box, removing the color background on ads, and adding a "define" link after the search terms. Or is this just a response to Danny Sullivan's predications of multiplying tabs?
Since the most recent Google Dance started around Nov. 15, this update of the Google database nicknamed Florida has created quite a stir in the ecommerce Webmaster community. The major complaint has been the significant change in the ranking of results and many pages no longer show up in the top of the search engine results. For those with time, read the thousands of postings about it in the Update Florida discussions at WebmasterWorld.
Certainly, the ranking changes will also have an impact on searchers, but even more significant to me is the experimentation that Google is now doing with automatic stemming. Discovered first in the Cre8asiteforums, Google changed its Basic Help page to announce that it is now using stemming.
Basically, Google now takes search terms and looks for grammatical variants of SOME of them. Unfortunately, Google does not make it clear which terms it stems and which it does not. I found no plural or singular variants but did find some examples of verb variants. For example, a search on drink water matches pages with 'drinking' and 'water' while run linux also finds 'running.'
You may be able to identify when it happens by looking for the highlighted terms in the search results, but it is not always obvious when this occurs especially if the hits do not rank high enough to appear on the first page. The stemming does not seem to occur on single word searches or on phrase searches (yet another reason to use quotes for phrase searching whenever possible).
Does this help relevance? Maybe for some searches and searchers, but for precision searching it can also be frustrating. Plus, the searcher is not given the choice of when to use it and when to turn it off. MSN Search has offered a stemming check box on its advanced search page for years. Since Google does not say when they will turn on the stemming and when they do not, they could at least give searchers the choice of when to use it (at least for those of us that use features like the preferences and advanced search options).
Overture Services on Wednesday reported better-than-expected second-quarter revenue as it signed up more advertisers willing to pay for placement in search results.
The commercial search company reported second-quarter net income of $7.6 million, or 12 cents per share, on revenue of $265.3 million. That compares to net income of $17.5 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $152.5 million during the same period of 2002. Analysts had expected the company to earn 6 cents in the second quarter, according to a survey by First Call, which tracks analyst forecasts.
Overture attributed the sales boost to a larger number of "paid introductions"--or the number of times Web surfers clicked on an advertiser's ad--and a rise in the average price advertisers paid for those introductions. The company has also focused on expanding internationally and developing new services for advertisers.
"Our second-quarter results provide clear evidence that we continue to drive the core business while rapidly transforming Overture from a one-product company to a multi-product enterprise operating successfully on a global scale," Overture Chief Ted Meisel said in a statement.
The earnings announcement comes nearly a week after Yahoo said that it will buy the company for about $1.63 billion. With the acquisition, Yahoo will shift from being one of Overture’s biggest portal and search distribution partners to becoming a major player in search-related advertising. Yahoo has reported that Overture provides roughly 19 percent of its revenue.
Overture said its advertisers' links were clicked on 646 million times in the second quarter, compared to 515 million in the comparable period a year ago. In addition, advertisers paid the company an average of 40 cents for each paid introduction during that time, up from 30 cents a year ago and 37 cents in the first quarter of 2003.
The company also said it added 7,000 advertisers in the second quarter, for a total of 95,000. That's up 42 percent from the same period last year and up 8 percent from the first quarter.
Overture has $113 million in unrestricted cash and liquid investments, including cash payments made to complete acquisitions of the Web search unit of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista.
Source: Business Week
Report finds Top 100 NZ company websites are a waste of money. Shock New Zealand survey reveals how firms are 'sabotaging' their own ability to be found on the Internet.
Christchurch, 23-Jul-03 - Respected search optimisation company Web Rank has today launched a study on the search engine compatibility of the websites of the country's leading organisations. The study reveals that every website belonging to New Zealand's Top 100 businesses contains significant design flaws that make it harder for them to be found in search engines, thereby negatively impacting the potential revenue of the organisation.
"In designing their sites as they have done, nearly all of New Zealand's top performing companies are sabotaging their own ability to be found by their target market(s)," says Director Kalena Jordan. Most Internet users rely on search engines to find product and service providers. Unless they know the exact website address (URL) or search by the company or brand name, they will try to find what they are looking for by using keywords that describe a product or service's features, benefits or attributes.
Web Rank's extensive analysis, which is available at www.webrank.biz/Top100NZ.htm, reveals where major New Zealand corporations have overlooked search engine visibility in designing their websites. The report also advises how these websites can be improved to help potential customers find their sites easier and increase business generated online. Amongst the many findings, the report revealed that:
Every top 100 Kiwi company website had defects that hindered their ability to be found in search engines. A quarter could not be found for their chosen search terms in either US or New Zealand search engines. 34% are not listed in popular New Zealand search engines. Almost a third are not listed in popular US search engines, and one-in-eight use techniques that could get their site penalised on search engines for "spamming."
The authors say it is amazing that firms may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on website design and related marketing, but that they often overlook search engine compatibility. "What is the point of paying so much money for a web site that will never be found?" asks Ms Jordan.
Why is search engine optimisation important? Search engine compatibility is loosely defined as employing design elements that help search engines index a website and "understand" it's relevance to a search query. To make a site more compatible with search engines Web Rank, and other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts correct design flaws and implement techniques to ensure a website attracts highly relevant, targeted traffic via those engines.
"Search engine optimisation is the technique of attaining a higher ranking in search engines and directories for relevant search queries, via changes to a site to make it more search engine compatible," explains Ms Jordan. UK studies by Forrester Research show that four-fifths of people find websites by using search engines. According to Australasian market research firm, RedSheriff, four of the 20 most popular New Zealand websites are search engines. In addition, 55% of online purchases in the US are made on websites found through search listings.
How to improve the search-ability of a website
Every effective website should include within the HTML code for each page a TITLE Tag, a META Description Tag, a META Keywords Tag and text-based content. Search engines rely on this information to determine how relevant a website is to any given search query. These elements are often overlooked by webmasters, or are too short and generic to be effectively picked up by many search engines in connection to a search query. Search engine optimisation of a website involves changing the code to include more keywords and phrases that relate to the products and services offered by the business, as well as changes to the site's structural design to ensure it can be indexed and matched to relevant searches.
Web Rank's report "Search Engine Compatibility and the Top 100 New Zealand Company Web Sites" offers businesses comprehensive suggestions on how to improve the search-ability of their website. Using case examples, Web Rank highlights typical mistakes and advises on how these could be improved. The report considers how to use graphics, correct tagging, the right keywords in text, how important links from other sites can be and how firms can avoid being penalised in the search rankings from the inadvertent use of "spam" techniques.
"By ignoring the most important method used by people browsing the Internet, these companies are sacrificing an enormous opportunity to attract more traffic to their websites," says Ms Jordan. "Websites are often a very large expense for these companies, ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. To invest such a massive amount of time, money and effort into an online presence and not ensuring it can be found is like constructing a storefront without any doors."
She continues, "It is obvious from the findings of this study that New Zealand companies need to invest in search engine optimisation services to ensure their sites are more search engine compatible and therefore visible to their target markets."
Source: High Search Engine Ranking
Visitors to Google's news-search site can now look up stories by date, location, exact phrases or publication.
Google on Monday unveiled refinements to technology for searching daily news, in its latest effort to become the Web's hub for headlines. Google's new service, called Advanced News Search, allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets publishing on the Web.
Advanced News Search adds to the company's ever-expanding set of Web navigation tools and improves on its specialty index, Google News, which was introduced last autumn. For example, Google released a new browser toolbar last month that lets people block pop-up ads and easily update their blogs as they surf the Web. For its part, Google News has proved immensely popular, with roughly 2.5 million unique visitors in June, according to Nielsen-NetRatings.
Advanced News Search lets visitors search for headlines using several parameters. Among other features, people can locate stories that contain an exact phrase, within the Unites States or abroad, or written by a specific publisher such as The New York Times. For now, it only allows people to search by date from June and July 2003.
Still, Google's news update follows advancements at rival search sites. AltaVista, for example, allows visitors to search by region, time frame and publication. In addition, specialty sites such as NewsNow search more than 10,000 news sources, in comparison to Google's 4,500.
Source: ZD Net UK News
Yahoo on Monday introduced a specialty research service that allows retailers to track offline sales spurred by online ad campaigns, the Web portal's latest invention to woo advertisers.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Net giant partnered with AC Nielsen, one of the United States' biggest media measurement companies, to introduce Consumer Direct, a market research tool. The service taps a panel of Yahoo Web surfers to divulge how effectively online advertising from companies such as Kraft Foods and Unilever drives people to buy in stores.
Consumer packaged goods companies "care about how much they sell (offline), but there's been a question in their minds about how effective their online programs are," said Robert Tomei, senior vice president at VNU, the parent company of ACNielsen. "This program allows them to put the two together.
"This is the first (service) in the industry that really links offline purchase behavior to online site visitation."
Yahoo's research fits into a broader industry offensive to prove the value of Web advertising, a still-hobbled industry after the dot-com fallout. Trade groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Online Publishers Association have organized research on the viability of the medium in the last year. In addition, Net publishers have adopted technology that helps them evaluate the backgrounds and preferences of site visitors to better sell ads.
Yahoo itself employs a research team and technology underpinnings to pinpoint prime audiences of interest for advertisers. By partnering with Schaumburg, Ill.-based ACNielsen, the Web giant will be able to tie retail sales back to types of people that saw its online ads, thereby helping marketers find their best target markets.
Consumer Direct, the first major partnership between Yahoo and ACNielsen, will track the Web surfing habits of 15,000 to 17,000 Yahoo users. These people also are part of ACNielsen's Homescan program, in which they scan the products they buy in stores. ACNielsen will tie both activities together to come up with its research. The company will use the data to determine the return on investment for an online ad campaign, including finding its effect on retail sales and brand loyalty.
Article by Stefanie Olsen
Source: C-Net News
Today more than ever, in the field of search engine optimization (SEO), there is a very important step that needs to be taken in order to help a website's visibility in the major search engines. That important step is to submit it to DMOZ, or sometimes called the Open Directory Project or ODP.
DMOZ provides a lot of search results for a good percentage of the most important search engines and directories, including Google. First, DMOZ is NOT a robot-driven crawler but rather a large, human-edited directory of the Web. For any submission to be successful, a few important points need to be taken ahead of time:
Step A)
Your full contact information needs to be there. Make certain that your full contact information is easily accessible, preferably with the help of a clearly identified contact button. An e-mail address is certainly not enough. Many ODP editors will tell you if they don't see a real physical or postal address or telephone number, then that website in its particular category is usually tossed away and probably will never make it inside the directory.
Most importantly, if you are wishing to sell anything, you need to build credibility and honesty with your clients. In such a case, giving proper and full contact information on the site is imperative.
Step B)
Do not attempt to SPAM the directory. You should only submit your site once and forget it for at least two to three months. According to DMOZ rules and regulations, you are only allowed to submit to one category. However, in certain isolated cases and if your website happens to be a very large one and offers lots of information, you may be able to submit a second section of it to a different category. As a rule of thumb, it usually takes time for most submissions to be processed.
This is especially true of categories where there are many daily submissions. It is not recommended to submit a website more than once, as it could end up on the lower bottom of the large list of sites to be reviewed and approved, since they are processed according to their submissions dates.
Step C)
Your website needs original and good content. During the course of your work, if you are only trying to publish an assortment of affiliate links or if your site happens to be a "mirror-site" of other websites that are plentiful on the Internet, then you are increasing your chances of your submission being rejected.
If in fact you really have to deal with affiliate products or services, we recommend that you add lots of new content, perhaps a product review category, an industry news section or any other additional information that will tell the DMOZ editors that your site has something original to offer and has lots of great content that will be of good use to their users.
Step D)
Double-check your website for spelling errors or typos. As much as the DMOZ editors are looking for great content, all are only human and will probably be irritated by some typos or spelling mistakes. Our experience with the ODP tells us that professionally written and carefully built websites with great content, usually always make it into the directory eventually.
Step E)
Keep good records of your submission to DMOZ. We strongly recommend in keeping a complete record of the date a website was submitted to the Open Directory Project and to which particular category it was submitted to. If the category you want to submit to has an editor, you should always make a note of who that editor is. Such information would be useful if later you need to inquire about the status of your submission.
Some of you might ask: "How long does it take to get listed?" Recently, we had one site listed within three weeks of submission and, on other less fortunate occasions, we waited over six months for other sites. It is extremely hard to predict anything.
Step F)
Select the proper category for any submission. In Google or Alta-Vista, when people submit a URL to such robotic search engines, there really is not much to think about, since their crawlers or "spiders" will visit and index your site automatically, normally over a rather short period of time. However, when submitting to a directory such as DMOZ, a critical part of that submission process is choosing the right category. One good thing that is recommended is to go online and look where other websites similar to yours have been placed in the directory.
When you get to the category that you think is best, press the "add URL" button. In other categories, sometimes the DMOZ editors might put a note mentioning certain restrictions to that category. It is recommended that these notes be read carefully and that you don't submit to these restricted categories if your site doesn't meet the parameters mentioned.
Step G)
Always contact DMOZ through the proper channels. Finally, a word of caution: if the category where you want to submit does have an editor, it will usually be written at the bottom of the page and you normally should be able to send that editor a message. There is another way to contact the DMOZ editors through their online forum.
Once there, you can ask about the status of your submission, but you must always give them the category and submission date of your last attempt. Additionally, you can always ask a few questions about general DMOZ procedures and rules.
Try your best to meet their rules and regulations and normally your site should eventually be included in their directory.
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Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
If you need to write for the search engines and your site visitors too, the following nine tips can be of good help. Always remember that all search engines are like humans: they want good relevant content that will help everybody in the end.
Step No. 1:
First, start by writing attention-grabbing tag lines, written using H1 or H2 tags. This will help you a lot with the search engines. Google gives additional importance to title tags in bold H1 or H2 tags. Additionally, most people are overwhelmed with information from just about everywhere they look, so they "scan read", particularly on the Web.
Always remember that if your headline doesn't get their focus and attention, everything else you write may go unread. Your title and headline must highlight the features and benefits of whatever product or service you are trying to sell on that particular page.
Step No. 2:
Choose just one and unique benefit of your product or service that you wish to underscore above everything else. This is your basic selling mission. In order to help you make the best choice of what that unique benefit should be, you should ask yourself what particular benefit makes your product or service different from your competition.
What truly makes it better or unique? Is it of better quality? Is it easier to purchase? Is it less expensive than competing products? Does it have a longer warranty? What value-added features or benefits does it incorporate?
Step No. 3:
Always remember that testimonials sell. People want to hear from other users our customers that are already using your product or service. Honest, serious testimonials from real humans will help increase your sales, particularly on the Internet where building good credibility is a daunting task.
If you would like additional credibility, ask permission to your testimonial clients if you could include their contact information along with their experience in using your product or service. That last step should really convince your visitors to buy.
Step No. 4:
On your first paragraph, start with your strongest selling features and benefits. The first few paragraphs are particularly important, not just for your users but also for the search engines. When Google spiders a web page, it tends to read the first two paragraphs more and will usually give them increased importance than the rest of the page. Write these paragraphs to initiate a strong desire for your product or service by briefly describing the major features and benefits it will deliver to your client. Don't make the mistake of going into too much detail up front.
You will have plenty of time for explaining these benefits in more detail later. Get your "main artillery" out early if you truly want to succeed.
Step No. 5:
You should write a complete list of all the features and benefits of your product or service, then you should translate each one of them into a direct benefit for the customer, one that he or she will really be able to relate to. One way to effectively accomplish this is to look at each feature, one by one, and then ask yourself: "So what?" Put yourself in your customer's shoes: Why should you care about this feature or benefit? You should ask yourself: "What's in it for me?"
For example, just saying that your product is fast, an underlying feature in itself, you should tell your customer that it will provide them with more free time, hence, a real benefit they can all relate to. You could effectively empower that mental image by putting a picture on that page of people enjoying themselves, reading a book, going to the movies, relaxing or whatever.
Step No. 6:
Always write marketing text and copy that truly underlines the real benefits in a way that makes a strong emotional connection. For example, if your company is trying to sell auto insurance, instead of using sentences such as: "Our company is one of the oldest in the industry", try using: "Avoid the financial risk and uncertainty of insufficient collision coverage, insure your car with us".
Step No. 7:
Try to carefully detect and identify who it is you're writing for and why... What would be the best "tone" to convey, ie: serious or light hearted? Will there be any level of technical terms discussed or more detailed technical topics that will be written? If so, will your audience be able to understand it? What if their level of knowledge is only basic? You should always adapt the language used to your intended audience.
If there are technical terms or topics on your website, it might be a good idea to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) or a Glossary of Technical Terms Used.
Step No. 8:
You should always write with as much a natural style as you possibly can. However, never try to be over friendly or pretentious! Simply just write your text the way you would say it if you would be in front of your client or prospect.
Step No. 9:
Lastly but not least, always end your page or section with a clear call to action, one that will also give them perhaps a sense of urgency, such as: "Click here to order now" or "Call us toll free to reserve now". Some site owners and webmasters even include calls to action earlier in the page and get some very good conversion results too. Do whatever you think is appropriate. Your ultimate goal here is to have your prospect order or buy your product or service.
Conclusion
In retrospect, and by reading these nine tips, it would appear to some people that good and efficient website marketing techniques involve "manipulating" in a certain way the emotions of your visitors. Well, to a certain degree, we think it does too, but always remember that selling is a basic form of emotional control that implicates convincing your prospect that they really have to buy your product or service, as it will truly make their life better and that they want to do it now!
Could this be looked at as unethical? Well, it could be, depending on where exactly you draw the line. If you look at step nine, we said that your sales message could perhaps include a sense of urgency. Some would tell you that an often-used practice on the Internet is to include a statement such as: "This offer closes today".
However, most people will also tell you that if you go back to the site the following day, week or month though, that same offer will usually still be available! For most people, being tricked by such a statement does not give much confidence, now does it?
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
Everyone is aware that Inktomi is soon likely to grow in importance due to it having been being bought recently by Yahoo! Although no firm date has been given as to when Inktomi results will be integrated in to Yahoo's search listings, it is pretty much accepted that the time is drawing close.
In addition, MSN are likely (despite the recent launch of their own MSNBOT spider) to be at least 18 months away from being in a position to launch their own search engine's results, which seems to tie-in to the surprise announcement earlier this year of a lengthy extension to MSN's contract with Inktomi. Over the past few weeks, Inktomi has also been gaining new partners - most notable being the prestigious contract for the supply of results to the BBC web site (www.bbc.co.uk). Although the future now looks quite bright for Inktomi, they have spent the last few years fighting off (and losing to) the ever growing Star of Search, Google. People tend to forget that in 2000 (a mere 3 years ago), Inktomi seemed to rule the roost in terms of search. Their results were used by many leading search destinations, from AOL to Yahoo! For a webmaster, if you couldn't get listed on Inktomi - you were condemned to almost total invisibility on the web.
Most SEOs had to cut their teeth on preparing client sites for Inktomi's spiders (Slurp - in its' various forms), as well as those of AltaVista (Scooter) and other engines. Googlebot (Google's spider) was an interesting new spider and Google a search engine with "potential" - but was largely ignored for day to day SEO purposes. Now the situation is reversed! The majority of webmasters are focussed on optimisation for Google and many are bemoaning the fact that optimisation for Google doesn't seem to work on Inktomi (or other engines).
Fortunately, those of us who knew how to design pages for Inktomi had learnt early on, that those pages worked very well for Google (and other engines) provided the off-page factors that Google use in their algorithm were taken in to account. In all my years of doing search engine optimisation across the widest spectrum of site themes imaginable, I have never had to prepare a different page for Google (or any other engine) to the one I prepared for Inktomi first. This rather cuts across the argument put by Ammon Johns in a recent article (sorry, Ammon) - but is my experience after the production of many thousands of pages and hundreds of sites.
So, people have asked me, why optimise for Inktomi first? Why not chase the ultimate goal of Google before turning to the others? The simple answer is PFI. By optimising a page for Inktomi and using PFI, I can adjust the page to get a decent ranking on Inktomi within a matter of days. I then know that provided I can get decent links to the site on which that page resides (Yahoo, DMOZ, and Joeant etc.) - I can be fairly certain that I am going to get a first page listing on Google without having to adjust anything for Googlebot! The rankings on Inktomi give an indication of the ultimate positions on other engines. This is far better than having to wait weeks or months to see what the results are going to be like on Google first. Due to this, Inktomi has been my "secret weapon" for SEO for all the years that people have been ignoring it! Like any SEO procedure, optimising for Inktomi is not rocket-science. Inktomi looks for on-page content laid out in a manner which allows it to understand the page content comprehensively. The facts laid out below are "back-to-basics" SEO, but they work - pretty much every time! A page should consist of:
a) Title Tag - I normally use around 10 words incorporating as many keyword variants for that page as I can, while making it a compelling title. An example for a car hire site could be: "Car Hire Las Vegas, Rental Cars from Auto Rentals Specialists". The above is focussed on all forms of ways that someone is going to search for looking for car rentals Las Vegas and should appear for: Car hire las vegas, rental cars las vegas, auto rentals las vegas, hire cars las vegas etc., etc.
b) Meta Description Tag - I use around 15-20 words re-emphasising the keywords used in the title tag. Example: Great rates on car hire in Las Vegas. Check our rental cars and choose your auto rentals from the specialists at MMT Rental!
c) Meta Keyword Tag - Inktomi still recognises this - just! If in doubt, leave it out - but I (usually as the last thing I do) add the tag for the core phrases I want the page to rank for. Example: Car hire las vegas, rental cars las vegas,auto rentals las vegas,hire cars las vegas.
Note the use of commas and no spaces after the commas. I was always a strong proponent of not using commas in a keyword meta tag - but Inktomi guidelines state this is the way to do it - so who am I to disagree!
Now we move on to the visible body text. I usually design a page so that there is a visible page heading appearing close to the top of the HTML in an H3 Tag. This is a repeat of my Title Tag. Example: H3: Car Hire Las Vegas, Rental Cars from Auto Rentals Specialists H3.
The first sentence of the first paragraph is an edited repeat of my description in Bold. Example: Bold: We have great rates on car hire in Las Vegas. Use the information below to check our rental cars and choose the auto rentals for you from the specialists at MMT Rental!
Then the page should have around 200 words of text describing your services. If you are mentioning models e.g. car types, I put these in list elements (li), with a possible link to the appropriate site section relating to descriptions of the model. This would re-emphasis that the site was about a specific type of car hire in a specific location with words in the list element getting a boost along with the use of the phrase in anchor text.
All images on the page should use alt tags with a single phrase in the tag e.g. the first image may have "car hire las vegas", the second "hire cars las vegas" etc. At the end of the text, I add a final sentence in bold which is a rehash of the first sentence I wrote at the beginning of the body text.
The page is done - well almost! Make sure that the page is user friendly and makes sense. It is pointless obsessing about the absolutely perfect page if it becomes meaningless to the surfer in the meantime! The idea is to incorporate the rules of optimisation in to the overall design of the site. Make sure the page is linked to by the appropriate index page.
Do not be tempted to create doorway pages using garbage content as "filler" around your key phrases. It won't work in the long term for two reasons: Inktomi has the most sophisticated grammatical parser I have seen for detecting auto-generated content. I know, years ago I tested ways to get around it - and couldn't.
Inktomi checks for incoming links -even on PFI pages. If a page is deemed to be an orphaned doorway page with no incoming links, it will drop like a stone! My next step is to put the page in to PFI and 48 hours later it should appear on sites like MSN. 9 out of 10 times - there it is, on the first page of the search results. If it isn't, I adjust slightly and wait another 48 hours. When satisfied, I leave it alone.
I then concentrate on ensuring the site I am working on gains the off-page factors necessary to help it in other SEs like Google. Submissions are made (if the site is not already included) to Yahoo, ODP and other directories including those which are specific to the industry being targeted. I do not look for "un-natural" links like guest books or link farms. I never, never ever crosslink - tempting as it may be! I also don't submit to Google. In fact I haven't used the Google submit button for years. The site will be found (provided you are successful with your directory submission) by all the major crawlers - and in 6-8 weeks time will start to appear on other SEs, with the full strength of the off-page factors kicking in about a month after that.
I have been successfully using this method for the past 3 years and it has worked consistently. There should be no surprises really, it is just laying out content in a manner which search engines like. It is just that on Inktomi, you can test the results of your efforts a little quicker. Try it - it should work for you to!
Article by Barry Lloyd
Source: Search Engine Watch
Overture Services has added an additional year to its contract to provide paid placement search results on Hewlett-Packard notebooks and PCs shipped to U.S. customers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The company, which is being acquired by Internet portal giant Yahoo! (Quote, Company Info) for $1.6 billion, also expanded the scope of the deal to include computers sold in Canada. Those listings will begin in late summer. Overture senior vice president Bill Demas said, "This agreement underscores Overture's commitment to building deeper, more strategic relationships with existing partners in new and exciting distribution channels."
The previous U.S. agreement was also a one-year deal, Overture spokesman Al Duncan said. Overture listings are generated from 88,000 advertisers who bid for placement on keywords relevant to their business. The company screens the listings and distributes them to its partners -- Yahoo!, MSN, CNN, and Lycos.
HP users can access the pages through a "Search the Internet" keyboard button or a "Search the Web" box on the default homepage of HP Pavilion PCs. Also, users may access Overture results via the search icon on their Web browser toolbar. HP, which boosted its presence in the PC market with the purchase of Compaq Computer, shipped 2.29 million machines in the United States during the second quarter, according to preliminary research released today by IDC.
The strong quarter gave the company a 16.2 percent U.S. market share, second only to Dell, which holds 17.8 percent. Figures for Canada are not yet available, an IDC spokesman said. In addition to the United States and Canada, Overture operates commercial search networks in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and South Korea.
A spokesman for Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP could not be reached to comment on whether the company's relationship with Overture might be expanded to other countries. Additional distribution deals could significantly boost the potential viewers of Overture's paid placement links. Overture's Duncan declined comment on possible future expansion of the deal outside of North America.
Source: Silicon Valley Internet.com
In the early days of the supposed dot-com revolution, online retailers promised to save you a trip to the mall. Now a crop of new services promises to save you a trip to even those Web sites.
In what has become another lucrative niche on the Web, price-comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping-search sites, are simplifying life for bargain hunters — and making a tidy profit in the process. "We're Consumer Reports and the Yellow Pages on steroids," said Iggy Sanlo, chief revenue officer for privately held DealTime.com Ltd. It's the No. 1 shopping-search site, with 6% of the market in Web site visits, says researcher Hitwise.com.
"Shopping search is the nexus of search and e-commerce," said Sanlo. Buoyed by the key holiday season, it was profitable in the second half of 2002. DealTime, Pricegrabber.com and MySimon are among shopping-comparison services that say they're profitable. And while the all-important holiday shopping season is six months away, many merchants are already factoring these sites into their retail plans.
Think of it as shopping in reverse. Instead of clicking through a morass of retail Web sites, online merchants come to the consumer. The shopper types in what he's looking for, and gets a list of vendors. The sites often compute sales tax and shipping prices, and show how other shoppers rated the product. From there, the user picks one and is taken to the checkout area of the seller's site, which pays a click-through referral fee. Some sellers pay extra to be listed higher as a "featured merchant."
Such sites have been around for years. But consumers, who don't often have personal shoppers offline, are only starting to get used to the idea of virtual aides for online buying.
Shopping-search sites are often lumped into the $1.4 billion paid-search market with sites such as Google, so it's hard to measure their growth. But according to researcher I.think Inc., nearly 60% of online shoppers start at so-called aggregators — which include shopping-search sites, portals and big retailers like Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) — rather than individual stores. And half of those shoppers use search engines or shopping-search sites. The appeal to consumers is clear. But search sites are also a marketing deal for merchants.
According to a May study by Forrester Research, shopping-search sites have become the Web's fastest growing marketing tool, as measured by the number of merchants using them. Twenty-eight percent of sellers use them, and 86% found them to be very effective. That beats banner and pop-up ads, e-mail promotions and deals with shopping portals. Smaller merchants can go head-to-head against giant rivals without the huge marketing budget of a national brand. And since buyers can do all their product and merchant research on the site, most who click through one of the listed prices are ready to buy.
"We're winnowing out the browsers," Sanlo said. "We only send the shoppers." Most of those shoppers come for the bargains, analysts say. The sites make plain which merchants offer the best deal and can alert users when an object of desire falls within reach.
That could squeeze online retailers' already tight margins. "The classic argument about the Internet is that improved transparency drives down price," said Matthew Berk, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "The more visibility you have into pricing, and the easier it is — literally, in a single click — to go to one merchant vs. another, the more price is a consideration."
Price isn't the only issue. Kamran Pourzanjani, president of Pricegrabber.com, says that despite the site's name, 70% of the site's users don't click on the lowest price. Most look at the seller's feedback from other users and often favor better-known vendors. "People don't have a problem paying a little more for a recognized name or highly rated vendor," he said. That's especially true of the site's business users, who make up 55% of Pricegrabber's audience. They use the site to cut costs, but can't afford to deal with late shipments or lousy service. DealTime kicks off merchants who don't maintain ratings of two stars (of a possible five), and Pricegrabber.com has booted dishonest vendors.
These, by no accident, are often sellers with the lowest price. Pourzanjani won't detail sales or earnings for the privately held firm, but says it's profitable and is growing more so. Despite starting with a small pool of angel investment, it's already bringing in enough to pour money back into better technology, advertising and more staff. Still, comparison-shopping sites face e-tail giants such as Amazon.com, which also offer a range of products through a bevy of outside vendors, plus better name recognition and marketing muscle.
Alternative To Amazon, EBay
"Amazon and eBay are still larger than any of the aggregators," said Nielsen/NetRatings analyst Lisa Strand. "And when people think of online shopping, often eBay and Amazon are the first names that come to mind." Another challenge is e-commerce portals, such as Yahoo's Inc. (YHOO) shopping site. Like DealTime and Pricegrabber, these multistorefront virtual malls offer quick product searches and, in some cases, vendor comparisons.
Big retailers, shopping portals and shopping-search sites may not seem to be direct rivals at first, Strand admits. They appeal to different types of shoppers and have distinct business models. They don't even act like competitors. Pricegrabber advertises on Google, for instance, and counts eBay as a featured vendor.
But as time goes on, they're copying many of each other's features and vying for the same audience. Standing out will become even more important, Strand says. She won't have to convince CNet Networks Inc. (CNET)-owned MySimon, ranked by Hitwise as the No. 6 shopping-search site.
MySimon aims to stand out as a "warm and familiar environment," said Tom Jones, CNet's senior vice president for shopping services. The effort includes the friendly face of its namesake mascot, Simon, and reviews and other content from CNet's other sites. That's helped it, more than any other site, attract women shoppers, a prized retail constituency. This month it's beefing up its technology by adding soon-to-be-announced features. It also plans to promote the site more heavily through its network of news and review sites.
CNet also runs comparison-shop site Shopping.com, targeted to a different, more technical audience. The firm doesn't break out financials for its units, but officials say MySimon is profitable. General-purpose search engines are dipping their toes in the market, too. Google is tweaking Froogle, a product-centered version of its search engine. It lets users search printed mail-order catalogs scanned and indexed by its system.
But Jupiter's Berk doesn't see search engines taking the place of shopping sites soon. What makes them good for searches — finding a needle in a haystack — makes them ill-suited for broad product and vendor comparisons. New entrants, however, could pose a bigger problem. It doesn't take much money to get a shopping-search site up and running, which could prove a big headache for firms that have spent millions to join the big leagues.
Many have already turned to print and online ads to build their brands. Though setting up a Web site is easy, gaining critical mass is the real challenge. As DealTime's Sanlo points out, the market is a virtual "pet cemetery" of failed brands, including RUSure and Productopia. "If it were that easy, AOL, MSN, AltaVista, EarthLink, ATT, Excite and iWon wouldn't outsource their shopping searches," he said.
Source: Investors.com
Switchboard To Integrate Relevant Content-Targeted Advertising Into Local Search With Google AdSense.
Switchboard Incorporated, an online yellow pages portal, today announced an agreement with Google, developer of the largest performance-based search advertising program, that integrates content-targeted advertisements through the Google AdSense program into the Switchboard Yellow Pages.
As one of the pioneers of local search, Switchboard provides a highly optimized platform for integrating content-targeted advertising with local content. In addition, Switchboard will share in the revenue generated when their users click on Google advertisements. Using Switchboard’s enhanced merchant information - - rich data about a businesses’ product and service offerings - - Google will serve relevant content-targeted advertisements on yellow pages results and a variety of other pages throughout the popular online directory.
The alliance will provide Google’s advertisers with broad exposure to Switchboard’s more than 5 million unique online users executing local searches each month. “Content-targeted advertising has been typically targeted at editorial and informational content. With Google AdSense, we are moving content-targeted advertising to a new level of performance and relevance, because Switchboard’s users are ready-to-buy," said Dean Polnerow, president and founder of Switchboard Incorporated.
“Our extensive local merchant content and the local orientation of our users’ searches provides Google with a unique opportunity to target content-targeted advertising on our local business search results pages." "Switchboard’s extensive local content enables Google’s advertisers to reach a very targeted audience through relevant yellow pages results," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations for Google. “By adding Switchboard to our growing network of AdSense website publishers, we continue to validate the effectiveness and importance of content-targeted advertising as a medium to reach qualified customers.”
Google's other high profile AdSense partners include Blogger, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Earthlink, Amazon.com, and BurstMedia.
Source: WebAdvantage.net
Dominance in Web search may be determined by the scope of a company's patent portfolio, rather than its ability to shuttle people to Internet sites.
At least, Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel seems to think so. With the Web portal's proposed $1.63 billion buyout of commercial search specialist Overture Services on Monday, Yahoo would acquire 60-plus patents related to technology and processes for indexing the Web, as well as for pay-per-click and bidding systems to grant sites higher placement in search results.
In his brief comments to investors Monday, Semel highlighted the role intellectual property (IP) played in his decision to buy Overture instead of building a rival system to replace its two-year partner. "We'll add...to our technology assets Overture's impressive intellectual property portfolio of both algorithmic and sponsored search patents," he said. "These are some of the key reasons we have opted to acquire Overture. We believe that the advertising industry is in its earliest days of a great future."
The search market is expected to be reap $4 billion in revenue by 2005, according to researchers. As the industry matures, the competition for a piece of that large pie could lead companies to bulk up their IP legal teams, much like in other industries such as online advertising sales during the dot-com bust. "Yahoo has been giving this issue more weight than others," U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy said.
Overture has already filed two lawsuits against rivals Google and FindWhat, and plans to "vigorously protect its patents," the Pasadena, Calif.-based company said Wednesday. Overture, formerly called GoTo.com, claims the rights to a system and method for Web sites to influence their rankings within search results. The company auctions keywords, giving the top bidders the highest placement in searches that use those terms. Overture's system also uses a pay-for-performance model, under which advertisers pay the bid price only when someone actually clicks on a displayed link.
The business was ridiculed at first, but proved its worth in recent years, eventually attracting America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN as customers. AOL recently dropped Overture in favor of rival Google. Behind the scenes, Overture has long sought to protect its growing market dominance, having hired a staff of IP experts and aggressively wielded its portfolio of pay-for-performance search patents against rivals.
Overture sued FindWhat.com in February 2002 after FindWhat filed a summary judgment request in a New York federal court in an attempt to fend off any potential infringement charge from Overture. Two months later Overture filed a second lawsuit, charging Google with patent infringement in its pay-for-performance ad system. According to the Google lawsuit, Overture's patent covers 67 separate claims, including exclusive rights to a "system for enabling an advertising Web site promoter using a computer network to update information relating to a search listing within a search-result list generated by an Internet search engine."
Overture CEO Ted Meisel on Monday touched on the growing importance of IP to the company. "We…have been No. 1 based on (our IP), have engaged in some licensing of that," he said, adding that it’s "not at this point material, but I think it's just indicative of the value of the IP in that area." Google declined to comment on the IP issue.
Overture insiders say that when the company bought AltaVista and the Web search assets of Fast Search & Transfer, patents played a big role in the decisions. With respect to AltaVista, Overture owns some of the oldest patents on Web search. When Altavista was part of Digital Equipment Corp., it secured seven patents related to Web crawling technologies, seven on indexing and two on query processing. It has 16 patents pending related to forward-looking search technologies.
The push for patents
Overture and Yahoo aren't alone--all of the key players in search have been amassing patents lately. Earlier this year, Google was granted a patent from the U.S. Patent Office for a method of determining the relevance of Web pages in relation to search queries. Google founder Larry Page patented PageRank, its formula for calculating the importance of Web pages based on the number of other pages linked to it. Google also has three outstanding patent applications.
Meanwhile, Microsoft holds general search-related patents including methods for searching directory listing information, a system for improving search area selection and a third for "concept" searching using a Boolean or keyword search engine. Online retailer Amazon.com also has a patent application that could affect search-related advertising. In March, it updated a patent application for a method of auctioning advertisements that appear on a Web page to the highest bidder.
Business method patents, such as Overture's bid-for-placement system, are common but controversial within the computer industry. A U.S. appeals court significantly expanded the definition of business processes that can be patented in a 1998 decision in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group. The ruling opened the floodgates to patent applications from e-commerce companies seeking to protect their services. Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and Expedia are among the major names to become entangled with patent suits, most of which ended in settlements.
Lately the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been curtailing its grants of various business methods patents because of criticism that the patented ideas were overbroad and obvious. Patent cases are notoriously hard to win. If patents are too broad they can become obsolete and if they're too specific it can be hard to prove infringement.
"No matter what, this industry is growing so large that if someone has a valid patent on a fundamental part of search or paid listings it will have a big impact on the industry," said Phillip Thume, chief operating officer of FindWhat.com. "But only when someone tries to enforce them do you find out if they are valuable." Because of the uncertainty over patent enforceability, companies often seek to secure patents as a defensive measure aimed primarily at preventing rivals from threatening them with infringement suits.
"Having patents on your own technology, business and inventions is invaluable in today's competitive market, even if you're not enforcing your rights directly against others, they become invaluable when you get sued or threatened," said Neil Smith, senior partner at Howard Rice and a specialist in IP litigation. "You can have counter claims for infringement of your own patents, or cross-license with" the plaintiff. "It gives you something to trade or helps you stay out of trouble when you're dealing with companies that are competitors."
But other legal experts said they are worried that advancements in search technology might be stifled due to patent conflicts. "If (search companies) turn around and offensively try to shut down competition then you could see significant lags in innovation and dimishing the quality of people's access to information," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Story by Stefanie Olsen
Source: C-Net News
People sneered in 1998 when Web ad pioneer Overture Services Inc. introduced the Web's first all-commercial search engine. The idea of moving advertisers' links higher in search results based on how much each advertiser was willing to pay outraged purists who said paid placement would spoil the search experience.
But in the serendipitous way the Web evolves, the search engine originally known as GoTo.com tweaked its strategy and soon became the Internet equivalent of the Yellow Pages. Its commercial links were presented as enhancements rather than replacements for Web search results, much as Yellow Pages list all businesses in alphabetical order and allow some greater visibility if they pay for special ads.
Rather than marketing itself as a stand-alone Web site, Overture offered its paid listings to big networks on which people already did a lot of searching, such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo. Thus was born the business that Yahoo said it plans to buy this week for $1.6 billion in cash and stock. The purchase is widely regarded as an effort by Yahoo to gird for competition with Google, the popular search engine that also was born in 1998 and has risen to become the top resource for searching the Internet.
Google last year developed its own advertising system to compete with Overture and began distributing sponsored links to America Online, EarthLink and other Web sites. One clever part of the two systems is that advertisers pay only when users click on their links and visit their Web sites. Another is that advertisers bid against each other for links, setting ad prices in dynamic auctions. The success of the innovation has not been missed by Microsoft. Nearly one-third of the 4 billion Web searches conducted in May were run by Google.com, compared with 25 percent by Yahoo, 19 percent by AOL and 15 percent by MSN. Google's share was only 25 percent as recently as January, according to market researcher ComScore Networks.
Microsoft has announced plans to create its own Web search engine, even as rumors flew that Microsoft was considering making an offer to buy either Google or Overture. Google and Microsoft have been mum on that subject. The jockeying feels so 1999ish, doesn't it? Overture's sponsored search results, after all, are so new that it's hard to explain exactly what the company does. And that, you may recall, was routine in the 1990s, when unproven Internet companies used their price-inflated stock to buy start-ups that were even younger and more unproven. Most investors didn't even understand what the big dot-coms did, much less what the peewees they spent billions to acquire claimed to accomplish.
One difference now is that Yahoo and Overture are profitable and therefore hardly unproven. Yet their pending marriage nonetheless shows how key questions about the Internet media business remain unsettled long after the dot-com bubble burst. It's still not clear, for example, which pieces of the Internet puzzle media networks really need to own, rather than simply "renting" from partners. At one time the hot asset was Internet access -- dial-up lines that propelled AOL to fame. At other times it has been traditional media content -- that stuff that led AOL to its disastrous purchase of Time Warner. These days the asset everyone is scrambling to control -- Web searching -- is the same one that was hot before the Web went commercial. During the dot-com frenzy, sites such as Yahoo that began by organizing directories of Web sites decided it was better to collect content to keep people on their sites longer. Yahoo and rivals paid other companies to display their search results, viewing search as a commodity they didn't need to own.
But after Overture and Google showed how effective ads could be when placed alongside relevant search results, the role of Web searching in Internet commerce seemed bigger. Consider, for example, that researchers at ComScore Networks recently found that people who click on sponsored links in search results are twice as likely to buy something as people who click on unpaid search results after running the same query. ComScore also found that paid search links had four times the click-through rate of unpaid search results for the same queries.
"It shows search represents a viable marketing opportunity that is well suited to the Web," said James M. Lamberti, a ComScore vice president. "It gives marketers an opportunity to communicate with the consumer at the very moment they express an interest or a need." Google and Overture have expanded their sponsored-link systems into areas besides search, attempting to show relevant ads based on what kind of Web page someone is viewing, such as sports scores, stock quotes or news about Chinese politics. That strategy was originally attempted by several big Internet ad networks that delivered banner ads to thousands of Web sites in the 1990s; most died when the stock market crashed.
Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, noted that both Microsoft and AOL, at least for now, have fallen far behind Yahoo and Google in the race to exploit the value of Web search to Internet commerce. "Google and Yahoo are creating a duopoly in Web search and going at it full force," Rashtchy said.
What a turnaround from just three years ago, when AOL was still king of Internet advertising, Microsoft was its key rival, Yahoo was perceived as an Internet lightweight and almost no one had heard of Google. But on the Internet, change regularly rolls through like a tornado and turns everything topsy-turvy. So hang on to your mouse; more twisters are coming.
Source: Biz Report.com
Google News extracts articles from more than 4,500 sources worldwide, then automatically clusters them into groups by subject matter.
Krishna Bharat, the Google Senior Research Scientist who conceived of the idea, answers questions about the history and future of Google News.
"Relevance is determined by information retrieval techniques that look at the distribution of words in the article and surrounding pages on the web," he says. "If the article matches the query well it is deemed relevant and gets a high score. Other factors include the importance of the source, timeliness of the article, and importance of the news story, relative to other stories in the news currently."
Cyber Journalist.net
Yahoo struck deals with Oracle and with Internet content gatherer Moreover Technologies to bolster its product for building corporate Web site portals. Under the agreement with Oracle announced Tuesday, the database company will integrate My Yahoo Enterprise Edition into its 9i Application Server software.
The partnership with San Francisco-based Moreover should widen the range of information available through Yahoo's corporate portal application.
Steve Boom, senior vice president of Yahoo Enterprise Solutions, said that Yahoo is pursuing deals with companies that can supply information important to a wide range of business users. "The part of the market that is not being addressed is finding the right mix of content for the average knowledge worker," said Boom. "There's a lot of content out there for highly specialized workers, but we're working on content that has broad appeal."
My Yahoo Enterprise Edition is the Web giant's latest portal software, which is used by companies to consolidate and filter information from a range of sources into a single interface that can be seen by employees, customers and business partners.
The system offers an array of "portlets," which allow users to drop links to industry news, stock quotes and Web-based applications into their own portal sites. The Yahoo deal could help drive sales of Oracle's database, application server and business software. According to the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company, some 16,000 users are already using Oracle9i Application Server.
Yahoo has also formed relationships with business software companies such as BEA Systems, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Tibco Software. Boom said Yahoo is in partnership talks with a number of other portal software makers. Customer demand will direct Yahoo's ally-making decisions, he said, noting that users had been putting pressure on the company to establish a deal with Oracle.
A free demo of My Yahoo Enterprise Edition is available for download, and a 30-day trial version of the application will be offered for users of supported portal software platforms in August, according to Yahoo. The deals come as Yahoo continues to gobble up pieces of the Internet search market. On Monday, the company announced it would buy rival Overture in attempt to garner a larger slice of the online advertising market.
Story by Matt Hines
Source: C-Net News
Yahoo! Inc. and Overture Services, Inc. today announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Yahoo! will acquire Overture.
The last piece of the search battle has been put into place, but the war has only begun. All the competitors except for one are now in position and ready for the beginning of a serious and interesting battle between the titans of the online world. Here is the line-up of competitors that looks much smaller now with the battle really coming down to three companies Microsoft MSN Search (coming MSNBOT), Google and Yahoo. The AOL camp seems to be the glaring hole in the brewing battle. The other search players like AllTheWeb.com, AltaVista.com and HotBot.com are so far behind that they hardly register on the radar screen.
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have been battling for years to gain online users and some have even become partners. The best example is that Yahoo used Google results for many years and then Yahoo acquired Inktomi search technology. Google gained dominance from riding the back of Yahoo for years and ultimately drove Yahoo to be concerned about Google’s fast growth. I think Yahoo felt threatened by the fast growth of Google and that it would eventually capture all or most of Yahoo’s users. Yahoo was right in thinking Google could sink the Yahoo franchise. I think because Yahoo relied on Google so much that they may have lost millions of users to Google, but I also must say that Yahoo may not have made it through the last few years without the Google search technology.
Then you throw in Microsoft’s interest in keeping MSN an important online brand and their recent announcement that they are building a crawler-based search engine and sponsored link program.
AOL and MSN should have long-term worries about the online power of Yahoo and Google. It appears that the major dial-up ISP’s AOL, MSN and Earthlink are running behind Yahoo and Google. MSN appears to be the one in the lead in this battle to make the needed transition from being a dial-up ISP to a provider of online broadband services and content. In my opinion, Yahoo and Google are sitting in a much better long-term position than any of the major dial-up ISP’s to dominate the online space.
This battle will ultimately decided by high-speed cable and wireless Internet access providers. I just don’t see AOL keeping its present dominance. I do see a clear separation coming between Internet access provider and content provider. AOL and MSN will not hold on to dominance online as ISP’s but as content providers to wireless telco and cable TV providers.
I think the Internet will be the technology used to deliver what we know today as cable TV, telephone and radio communications. We will most likely see major streaming media channels and online services being provided through those wireless telco’s, cable TV and radio network providers like digital radio and XM Satellite radio. The brands we know today will mostly be the brands we know in the future. My 5 year prediction is that the top online brands will line up like this: MSN, Google and Yahoo with AOL bringing up the rear.
I think MSN will be the ultimate leader online because of its coming search technology and its growing strength in content and streaming media. Google is about to go public and that will give them the cash they need to acquire more content technology. It will be fun to watch Google expand its wings and user base over the next few years. I think Google or Yahoo will acquire Real Networks and that will give them the leg up on AOL. It is a real possibility that Google could be the ultimate in online giants.
Article by Rob Greenlee
Source: Web Talk Guys Radio
Yahoo! announced that it will acquire Overture, one of the largest providers of paid listings to search engines and other web portals.
Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding common share of Overture will receive 0.6108 shares of Yahoo! common stock and $4.75 in cash, reflecting an aggregate purchase price of approximately $1.63 billion.
"The combined assets position Yahoo! as the largest global player in the rapidly growing Internet advertising sector," said Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. "Together, the two companies will be able to provide the most compelling and diversified suite of integrated marketing solutions around the globe, including branding, paid placement, graphical ads, text links, multimedia, and contextual advertising."
We'll be updating the story throughout the day today as it continues to unfold. Danny Sullivan will take an in-depth look at the acquisition in tomorrow's Search Engine Update. Meanwhile, here are some links to other sources of information about the transaction.
Source: Search Engine Watch
This year, Macromedia -- the company that makes Flash and Shockwave -- has posted a $305 million quarterly loss, laid off 110 people and lost a $2.8 million copyright infringement suit to Adobe.
But for all the company's apparent troubles, in the last week there's been a lot of good feeling directed toward the firm, with people saying that Macromedia is one of the few companies to appreciate the new topography of the Web. Not only has the company started to tailor its software to the needs of people who run their own weblogs, but it's also dived headlong into the much-hyped "blogosphere" itself, setting up its own weblogs as a way to nurture ties with its customers.
Macromedia calls this "the blog strategy," and some see the company's moves as the start of a trend. These days, it's almost unfashionable for a self-respecting Webophile to not have his own blog; if Macromedia's effort is any indication, soon a tech company that doesn't embrace weblogs may seem equally dated.
(For the uninitiated, a weblog, or blog is a frequently updated website of personal ideas, thoughts, musings, news, information, or discussions of what one has eaten for breakfast.) Late last month, when Macromedia released new versions of four of its applications, it expected that its customers would have lots of questions about how to use the new stuff, said Tom Hale, the company's vice president in charge of developer relations.
Macromedia's software -- Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Cold Fusion -- builds and maintains websites, and the many new features in such complex applications can take some time to get used to.
"We were releasing a tremendous amount of software to the Web," Hale said, "and you pretty much don't know what's going to happen when you release that much that quickly."
The firm needed a way to quickly respond to questions developers might have as they use the new products -- and although some at Macromedia thought about creating a blog on Macromedia's site to address customers' questions, "we decided to experiment with the (third-party) blogs," Hale said.
Sites of interest: Business Blog
Serge Thibodeau Live
Source: Wired News
Global Internet company Yahoo! on Monday announced the opening of a software development centre in Bangalore, its first such facility outside the United States. The Bangalore centre will focus on product innovation and leading-edge technology development for Yahoo! worldwide, Yahoo Software Development India Pvt Ltd CEO Venkat Pachapakesan and COO Bharat Vijay said.
The Bangalore centre, to be launched next month, plans to have 150 highly skilled software engineers by the end of 2004, they said. Panchapakesan and Vijay said the Bangalore centre would be engaged in the area of software technology for its parent Yahoo! Inc, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
It would focus on key engineering areas for Yahoo, including development of its key products like finance, search, mail and messenger, data mining and research, e-commerce, security, core infrastructure and database technologies, they said. To a question, Panchapakesan said for the Bangalore centre, Yahoo! Inc has no plans to move jobs from the US.
Recruitment for the India centre would be made locally as the country had a vast pool of talented engineers. The India centre, which would primarily focus on software development and internet-based product innovation, is already in the process of recruiting around 100 software engineers, he said.
The new facility would work in tandem with the US R&D centre to keep up with the growing needs of the industry, they said, adding, it would help build products for Yahoo's business units across the globe.
It would work on development of highly scalable server technology, UNIX/C/C++, Server technologies, Middleware, TCP/IP networking, FreeBSD, Apache, Oracle/MySQL DB and Data Mining Algorithms, among others, Vijay said.
Source: Rediff.com
The Ph.D.s, tie-dyed shirts and colorful decorative balls of the Googleplex will soon be moving to one of Silicon Valley's biggest office parks, a further sign of the search star's growing prominence in the tech world.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google said this week it will sublease the Amphitheatre Technology Center from Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), which has occupied the space for about five years. The property, which is about 506,000 square feet, is across the highway from Google's current headquarters and includes amenities such as volleyball courts and a fitness center. Google, which will move in phases over the next several months, is relocating to accommodate its growing staff roster.
It employs more than 1,000 people, with 800 in its Mountain View offices, and has nearly 150 job openings posted to its Web site, not including those at international offices.
SGI is relocating its headquarters to nearby Crittenden Technology Center, where it leases additional space. SGI expects the new lease arrangement to reduce its net occupancy costs by $14 million to $17 million per year, starting in July 2004. The company, which is under financial hardship, has to reduce costs in order to break even.
Source: C-NET News
As the paid inclusion market heats up, Internet search company LookSmart yesterday announced a multi-year agreement with Terra Lycos, the global Internet network, for search distribution on Lycos.
As part of the agreement, LookSmart will provide its new high-relevance commercial search product to Lycos beginning late in the third quarter of 2003. LookSmart will become the primary provider of general web search results for a large number of commercial terms. In addition, Lycos will have the option to resell LookSmart's LookListings to thousands of Lycos InSite customers, Lycos's paid inclusion and paid placement search engine marketing platform.
The deal with Lycos comes as LookSmart competitor Overture Services girds up for a paid inclusion product launch. In related news, earlier in the week LookSmart announced its New LookListings, designed to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to purchase cost-effective traffic and manage their campaigns across the LookSmart Network of distribution partners. LookListings replaces the company's former "Small Business Listings" and "Large Business Listings" products.
"Ever since we launched our online small business product last year, we've been hearing from customers who want to list more than just their homepage and have more control over their campaign management, yet didn't have the budget to qualify for our large advertiser solution," says Peter Adams, cto for LookSmart. "New LookListings will let these customers drive traffic to any number of category and product pages, increasing sales and improving ROI, while also giving large advertisers increased flexibility in the way they manage their campaigns."
Source: Technology Marketing.com
Like other online publishers, The New York Times charges readers to access articles on its Web site. But why pay when you can use Google instead?
Through a caching feature on the popular Google search site, people can sometimes call up snapshots of archived stories at NYTimes.com and other registration-only sites. The practice has proved a boon for readers hoping to track down Web pages that are no longer accessible at the original source, for whatever reason.
But the feature has recently been putting Google at odds with some unhappy publishers. "We are working with Google to fix that problem--we're going to close it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital, the publisher of NYTimes.com. "We have established these archived links and want to maintain consistency across all these access points."
Google offers publishers a simple way to opt out of its temporary archive, and scuffles have yet to erupt into open warfare or lawsuits. Still, Google's cache links illustrate a slippery side of innovation on the Web, where cool new features that seem benign on the surface often carry unintended consequences. The issue is particularly relevant at Google, a company that prides itself on creativity and routinely floats trial balloons for new features and services. Its culture of innovation may become increasingly risky as Google, which draws millions of visitors to its site daily and redirects them to others through secretive search formulas, cements its position as one of the most popular and powerful companies on the Web.
At the heart of Google's caching dilemma lies a thorny legal problem involving a core Web technology: When is it acceptable to copy someone else's Web page, even temporarily? Google's cache, a feature introduced in 1997, is unique among commercial search engines, but it's not unlike other archival sites on the Web that keep digital copies of Web pages. Google's relatively little-known feature lets people access a copy of almost any Web page, within Google's own site, in the form it was in whenever last indexed by the search giant. That could mean the page accessed is either minutes or months old, depending on when Google last crawled it.
Unlike formal Web archive projects, Google says its cache feature does not attempt to create a permanent historical record of the Web. Rather, the company actively seeks to delete dead links; once a Web page disappears, the search engine seeks to purge that record and any related cached page as quickly as possible. Still, Google's cached pages have proven to be a treasure trove for investigators seeking to recover data pulled from public Web sites. In one high-profile example, security and privacy expert Richard Smith copied Web pages detailing the backgrounds of Dr. John Poindexter, head of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office (IAO), and other officials, from the Google cache days after they were removed from the IAO Web site. The pages were deleted after public reports surfaced on the office's development of a massive computer system to spy on Americans and potential terrorists.
"When something's been yanked, Google cache is a good place to grab it and save for posterity, because you don't know how long Google will have it," said Smith. Google claims its caching feature benefits Web surfers by letting them access a site that may be malfunctioning or offline. Also, its cached pages highlight terms that match a search query "to make it easier for users to find relevant information," according to a spokesman at the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.
Lawyers, start your search engines
As seemingly benign and beneficial as it is, some Web site operators take issue with the feature and digitally prevent Google from recording their pages in full by adding special code to their sites. Among other arguments, they say that cached pages at Google have the potential to detour traffic from their own site, or, at worst, constitute trademark or copyright violations. In the case of an out-of-date news page in Google's cache, a Web publisher could even face legal troubles because of false data remaining on the Web but corrected at its own site. For this reason, search experts and copyright lawyers expect the issue to come up in a court of law, joining the leagues of copyright disputes that have surfaced because of technology innovation.
"It's very much an issue that has yet to be tested, and I fully expect that it will be," said Danny Sullivan, industry pundit and editor of Search Engine Watch. Admittedly, Google's cache is like any number of backdoors to information on the Web. For example, proxy servers can be the keys to a site that is banned by a visitor's hosting Web server. And technically, any time a Web surfer visits a site, that visit could be interpreted as a copyright violation, because the page is temporarily cached in the user's computer memory.
The digital universe is constantly changing, but its content can be either fleeting or permanent. Several Web sites, including the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and the Sept. 11 Digital Archive, have surfaced to preserve information on the Web and to keep permanent historical accounts of events and Web pages. Yet, many more pages, and even those in Google's cache, are eventually lost in the digital ether. The average lifespan of a Web site is 100 days, according to estimates by the Internet Archive. Still, copyright lawyers and industry experts say that there are legally uncharted waters around a commercial caching service.
"Many of us copyright lawyers have been waiting for this issue to come up: Google is making copies of all the Web sites they index and they're not asking permission," said Fred Lohman, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "From a strict copyright standpoint, it violates copyright." Most search engines make a statistical record of a Web page when they "spider" it, or use "robots" to scan the page for meaning or context to related queries. For example, the engine can point to specific information contained on a page that's related to a search term, but it often doesn't have the complete picture of the page. Google goes one step beyond, however, by taking a digital picture of pages and making it available to visitors in cached links. Those pictures exist temporarily on its site until the next time Google crawls that particular page, which can happen in a few days or in six weeks or more.
Legally, what could differentiate Google from other archival sites that record pages is that it is a commercial site and that it has enormous scope and influence on the Web. But what's kept the feature off most Web sites' radar is that, anecdotally, most people don't click on the cache. Even Google says people only "occasionally" click its cached links. If more people did, Web publishers might lose visitors--and potentially advertising dollars, which no one can afford to lose as Web publishing gets back on its feet.
Practically speaking, Web sites can "opt out," or include code in their pages that bars Google from caching the page. A tag to exclude "robots" such as "www.nytimes.com/robots.txt" or "NOARCHIVE" typically does the job. And that's largely what's kept the cache feature from being controversial. Search Engine Watch's Sullivan said that, even though some publishers are wary of the caching feature, many don't block Google's robots for fear of losing favor in the company's powerful search rankings. He said some Webmasters believe there's a stigma associated the "no cache" tag, because many sites that use it have been accused of attempting to use banned methods to manipulate Google's rankings. Google said the "no cache" tag does not affect rankings.
Some legal experts say Google may be on shaky ground by caching first and asking questions later. A provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) includes a safe harbor for Web caching. The safe harbor is narrowly defined to protect Internet service providers that cache Web pages to make them more readily accessible to subscribers. For example, AOL could keep a local copy of high-trafficked Web pages on its servers so that its members could access them with greater speed and less cost to the network. Various copyright lawyers argue that safe harbor may or may not protect Google if it was tested.
"Most people agree that the caching exception in the DMCA is obsolete," Lohman said. "I don't think it would cover Google's cache. Google is not waiting for users to request the page. It spiders the page before anyone asks for it." Still, other lawyers argue that Google's practice would be protected by fair-use laws. A judge might look at the market impact of Google's caching and find that it's valuable, given that it could ultimately drive traffic to the cached site. Or the reverse could be true, depending on the nature of the page.
For its part, Google is confident that the service is within the law. "We've evaluated this from a legal perspective, including copyright law, and have determined that Google's cached page service complies with the law," a Google spokesman said. A similar issue has played out in the courts in an image-searching case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, filed in April 1999. Leslie Kelly, a photographer, sued the company for copyright infringement when its visual search finder cataloged thumbnails and full-sizes of his digital photos and made them accessible via its own search engine.
The court initially ruled against Kelly based on the "established importance of search engines," but Kelly appealed and won. In Feb. 2002, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Arriba's use of thumbnail images of Kelly's photos was fair use, but its display of full-size images was not fair use, because it was likely to harm the market for Kelly's work by reducing visits to his Web site and by allowing free downloads. But the opinion on full-size images was remanded by the 9th Circuit Court this week and is set to go to trial in the lower court of central California. Judith Jennison, defense lawyer for Arriba Soft, said that one of the issues in the case is that Arriba Soft, in its process of indexing the Web, made copies of Kelly's photos and saved them for 24 hours in its servers. The 9th Circuit Court agreed that creating that copy is fair use under copyright law, she said, adding that there would be a slightly different analysis in a case related to Google. Also, the fact that the search site has an opt-out program would likely illustrate that the market for original copyrighted works can be protected, which is a significant factor in fair-use analysis.
"In Google's case, the result would likely be the same, because the temporary caching for indexing purposes would be fair use per Kelly v. Arriba Soft," Jennison said. While it seems that many Net publishers haven't formed an official policy on Google caching, they say they are examining how it affects their business.
Randy Stearns, executive producer for ABCNews.com, said he's somewhat concerned about his company's news pages being archived temporarily on Google, because readers might access information that is not up-to-date or, in the worst case for a daily news outlet, is inaccurate. Theoretically, if a news report was issued with errors and was subsequently fixed on the publisher's site, but the erroneous report still existed in a cached version, it could raise legal issues for the publisher, he said. Other publishers dismiss any threat, saying that not enough people actually click on those links to be a detriment to traffic. "People who find objection to what Google does likely spend enormous amounts (of time) on their content and refresh it regularly," said Harry Lin, head of ABC.com.
In contrast with the priorities of some news publishers, Web archivists say preserving pages as they first appeared can offer important documentary records for historians and others. Brewster Kahle, head of the Wayback Machine, said many people use its archive for patent research, or "prior art" searches. Designers and students have used the archive to see the evolution of Web site design and display, he added, and the Smithsonian has used subsets of the collection in the Presidential Election memorabilia room.
News publishers agree that Google's cache is also valuable if, for example, their site was inaccessible because of technical difficulties. "It's a great, wonderful feature, and I don't know that copyright laws would protect them," said Search Engine Watch's Sullivan. "But most people are concerned about getting into Google, not getting out of it."
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Blogging buzz is all about links, which are always increasing, and about Google rankings, which are largely based on link popularity. There's something wrong with this picture.
What about Joe surfer -- does he actually click on these blogs? The first two graphs below are based on page views of blogs. A blogging software company shows on-the-fly daily counts of their top blogs on a regular web page. We fetch this report at the same time toward the end of every day, and add up the counts to generate this graph. Each of the blog owners places a JavaScript clear GIF counter on any of his pages that he wishes. This technique means that crawlers and other automated devices tend to be excluded, which leaves real eyeballs using actual browsers.
We're interested in long-term trends. At Google Watch we suspect that the blogging buzz, fed as it is by perpetually-increasing linking juice, is not justified by the number of actual readers that these blogs receive. We started collecting traffic data for blogs on June 16, 2003. The first graph shows daily totals, while the second is based on weekly totals. The last day shown is always yesterday, and the last week shown is always the week that ended yesterday.
The average that defines the 100 percent line consists of all of the data shown on each graph, and is specified in the upper right corner.
Click here to read the whole story on Google-Watch.org
Microsoft has hired top scientists in a quest for search algorithms that will allow it to compete directly with Google.
Microsoft is actively working on new search algorithms it will use to power its own search engine to take it into competition with Google, according to the head of the company's Theory Group. Speaking in Sydney at the Fifth International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, professor Jennifer Tour Chayes said Microsoft is patenting new search algorithms with a view to replacing the Inktomi technology currently powering MSN's search with Microsoft's own.
"Since Yahoo acquired Inktomi, Bill [Gates] has decided we need our own capacity," she said, adding that the company is already patenting new algorithms it believes have the potential to power a new search engine. Microsoft last month launched a new search program called MSNBot, which trawls the Web to build an index of HTML links and documents -- functions previously left to Inktomi and other partners.
It is believed to be the first step in a multi-year plan to build new search technology that encompasses home and business users, with the ultimate goal of the technology being to bind Microsoft's various Web sites, applications and the Windows operating system. Beyond search, Chayes believes filtering is the next killer application that will require the input of high mathematics. "As computers become more pervasive, we are going to be assaulted as we walk around," she says. "To take advantage of all the good things IT has to offer, you will need a filter. We can't all have a secretary do the filtering for us, so there'll be a theoretical solution."
Founded to perform blue sky research -- one of Chayes' speeches to the ICIAM is entitled "Phase transitions in combinatorial optimisation" -- Microsoft's theory division has already contributed directly to product development, notably the new version of Active Directory shipped with Windows Server 2003. "The product team asked us for assistance with a bottleneck where an algorithm was preventing us from working with larger networks," she said. "One of our team, Laszlo Lovasz, developed an improved algorithm in a day."
Despite this incredible service, the theory group is not a resource available on tap within Microsoft. "We have people dedicated to interfacing between the product and research groups, so that when a problem comes to us it is very well described" Chayes says. Perhaps the best reason for this is the stature of some of the team's researchers: Lovasz is a winner of the Wolf Medal, one of the world's leading mathematics prizes, and is also a former Yale Professor. Others in the eight-strong permanent team have won the Field Medal, mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prise.
And what of phase transitions in combinatorial optimism? Chayes explains that understanding how phase transitions -- for example from liquid to gas -- can be expressed mathematically may make it easier to solve problems like load balancing servers, so that limited processing resources can be applied to multiple tasks more efficiently. Understanding this phenomenon, she says, means a thorough understanding of how water boils may help enterprises wring more out of their servers.
"We're a very far out group at Microsoft," she says. "It could be 50 years from now before some of this work is used."
Source: News ZD Net
Paid inclusion leader LookSmart (Quote, Company Info) announced on Tuesday that it would combine its separate products for small and large businesses into a single offering called LookListings.
LookListings will give small advertisers more options for building their paid inclusion programs, allowing them to add search listings for multiple Web pages. Previously, small businesses could only list their site's homepage, and couldn't link directly to product pages. "The marketplace has changed," said Dakota Sullivan, LookSmart's vice president of marketing. "Today, there's a lot of demand even from very small Web sites to list multiple pages."
The move comes as LookSmart awaits company in the paid inclusion market. Paid search heavyweight Overture Services has plans to launch its own paid inclusion product shortly, which will compete directly with LookListings. In addition to opening up multiple Web page listings to all advertisers, LookSmart said the new program would give small advertisers access to its reporting center, where they can gauge the performance of their campaigns.
LookListings also overhauls the pricing model. Previously, small advertisers were charged 15 cents per click for 5,000 clicks. Large advertisers would negotiate their click rates. Now, all advertisers can have 5,000 clicks at 15 cents each month. Beyond that, the cost per click is now set according to category. For example, for each click online gaming sites pay 75 cents and book sites 23 cents. "We believe that a category-based model give complete transparency and futher levels the playing field," Sullivan said, adding that the category prices still reflected a 20 to 25 percent discount on comparable keyword listings on Overture or Google.
LookSmart provides paid inclusion for MSN, About.com, and CNET Networks, among others. Like its brethren in paid search, LookSmart has assiduously courted small businesses. Last quarter, the company reported that its small business segment grew 13 percent to 38,000 advertisers.
With paid inclusion, an advertiser pays to have certain Web pages included in a Web search crawl. Unlike paid search, it does not guarantee placement on the results page, but paid inclusion listings appear in the main search results. The market for paid inclusion is small but growing quickly. Investment bank First Albany pegs the paid inclusion market at $200 million today. LookSmart has guessed the market could grow to be worth as much as $3 billion in 2007.
In May, LookSmart warned that its annual financial results would be hurt by increased competition in the paid inclusion sector. The company said the earnings hit was necessary in order to invest in product development.
Source: Silicon Valley Internet.com
Britains' largest Internet service provider, Freeserve, is no longer using Google as the default search engine on its portal.
Instead it is using pay per click listings from Overture coupled with regular search engine listings from AlltheWeb.
We love Google, but it is good to see that they get some competition, also in the UK.
Freeserve is part of the French Wanadoo group. Apparently all of Wanadoo's sites will switch to Overture/AlltheWeb.
Source: Webmasterworld and net4nowt
Ranking a website for sales and performance can be easy, if only you follow the right steps. There are no shortcuts, no easy way out, if you truly want to succeed. As with any serious undertaking, the right way to successfully optimize and position a site requires planning ahead and executing the project step by step.
If you follow all the advice given in our articles on the Rank for $ales web site, you will do extremely well; better than your competitors in many cases.
Start by the beginning: the right keywords
Even if your web site ranks number one in Google and most of the major search engines, it is of no value at all if it brings you unqualified, off-topic traffic. A properly optimized web site with all the right keywords and key phrases will not only bring you traffic, but targeted traffic.
People visiting your web site will have a real need for the products and services that you offer. Recent studies and market surveys confirm that most Internet searchers use the major search engines to rapidly find the products and services that interest them.
Using the right keywords and key phrases will insure that they will find your web site and they will purchase what they need from you. No successful and in-depth optimization project can be seriously done without the help of Word Tracker to effectively identify and use the keywords that are just right for you.
What may be good for one of your out-of-state or out-of-the-country competitor may not always mean it will be good for your business too. Local variations in the economy, geo-political concerns or a host of different factors can, to a certain degree, affect the optimum choice for the right keywords that should be used.
For example, if your website sells airline tickets, obviously those needs can vary a lot from one country or continent to another. The same is true for most industries. A steel products manufacturer in the US could have different keywords and key phrases than some of its European competitors.
Using a powerful search tool such as Word Tracker can help you a lot in the clear identification and definition of the exact keywords and key phrases you should in fact be using.
Avoid using spammy techniques
If you truly want to rank for performance, don’t resort to illegal methods or spam in an attempt to rank higher. That will just ban or seriously penalize your web site. Instead, write quality, search engine friendly content. Ensure that each page is structured so it is obvious to a search engine that the page is truly relevant to a specific keyword.
Also make certain that your pages and all the rest of your site can be read by a search engine spider.
Try in creating a reference point if you will, associated with your keywords. A reference point could be similar to a balance of an authority, which could have many quality links to it from other sites and pages associated with that specific keyword. In order to rank better, you need to participate in a reciprocal link exchange program (RLEP for short).
Actively try to get other quality sites to link to you. To be effective, be certain that those sites are in the same field as you are. Stay in the same industry. You can get excellent results by simply following the above rules.
Check that you are not being penalized unfairly for content that may be interpreted as spam, or for being on the same IP address as someone who has been barred from search engines for delivering spam. If possible, contact the search engines that are not listing you and check what is wrong. Let supply and demand decide. Market forces should mean that those search engines that produce the best, most relevant results will flourish, and those that don’t will ultimately die.
The current prevalence of spam is preventing this from happening. Finally, if you think you can calculate relevancy better than the current availability of search engines, don’t deliver spam to attempt to control their listings. If you do, in the end, you will lose.
How PPC programs can make a difference
Purchasing keywords and key phrases in Overture and Google could represent a faster way for you to drive fairly targeted traffic to a web site and could be most effective in testing or promoting new products, seasonal services or other short-term needs. Additionally, it can provide short-term results, to fill a certain vacuum between real ranking results and its underlying campaign launch.
But these benefits all come at a certain price, ie: a price that isn’t always under one’s control at any time. Hence, conservative investment in PPC programs is a crucial and permanent ingredient to any serious search engine marketing campaign and should be viewed as a supplement only to “native” SEO.
Given all these facts, and throughout your SEM campaign, as your natural visibility generated through native search engine optimization regularly increases, your dependency on keyword and key phrase purchasing should lower with the passage of time.
Always remember that search engine optimization is a science as well as an art. It is a delicate balance of the two that will help nurture the best results in the engines. Every PPC program analysis process, like native search engine optimization, is based on such things as keyword density, placement, optimization and general link structure in the whole site.
As with any other SEM program, it is crucial that a company first understands the actual surfing habits and buying styles that Internet searchers demonstrate when looking for specific services, products or information using today’s modern search engines.
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
For the past two or three years, many search engines such as Google and a few others have given less and less attention, and in some cases, no attention at all to Meta Tags. The sole reason for this is simply because in the past, in the go-go days of the Internet, ie: before 2000, many web site owners and webmasters stuffed their meta tags with useless information, basically spamming the search engines.
It wasn't long for the engines to realize they were victimized and since that time, many of them now pay little if no attention at all to most Meta Tags. However, what if some day they come back? What if, at a future date many of the major search engines decide that the "penalty" has served its purpose and that its now time to remove it? Not putting any meta tags in a website may not be a good idea, since it only takes a few minutes to write them in the first place!
Meta Tag definition
Making a true definition of Meta Tags is a lot simpler than explaining their functioning and by exactly which search engines. The only reason to this is simply because very few engines clearly explain with any amount of precision what they do look or don't look at and just how much importance they will actually give to any such and such parameters. Let's begin with the easy part: Meta Tags are snippets of HTML code concealed into the pages of a website that are used by the major search engines in an attempt to store certain data about that website.
Such meta tags contain descriptions, keywords and key phrases, important site title information, etc. Such meta data is part of the many things search engines are seeking when trying to properly index a website.
To be sure, meta tags are not truly necessary when a webmaster writes or creates new web pages, or makes any kind of modifications to them. There are a few observers in the search engine optimization industry who claim that meta tags are completely useless. Such strong statements can be a bit misleading. Of course, you are still free to believe them if you like, but that may not be such a good idea. While not technically mandatory, Meta Tags can, in certain cases, help the rankings of a given website, provided certain other essential rules of SEO are maintained.
Once a new website is created and put online, search engine crawlers (spiders) will visit that site and try to index it in their database. Most major search engines operate differently and, by the same token, they each weigh different parameters of a web site according to their own (proprietary) algorithms. As a few examples, Google places a lot of emphasis on its Page Rank algorithm, Alta-Vista will place a lot of importance on the description tag and Inktomi tell you in their terms of use that it indexes both the complete text of the particular web page submitted, as well as all the meta-tags of all pages.
At the other end of the scale, there are other search engines like Exact Seek that are "pure-vanilla" Meta Tag search engines which will spell out that: "Your site will not be added if it does not have Title and Meta Description tags." Inktomi also makes an extensive use of the keywords tag. Naturally, as can be expected, not all search engines work the same way nor do they have to. Certain search engines will place their importance on the actual overall content of the site.
Most major search engines have in excess of 125 individual elements and parameters they actually analyze when trying to rank and index any given website. Some of these important elements deal specifically with the way the pages were structured and also depend on other important factors such as keyword density, etc.
They will also take a note of websites that have omitted basic steps such as non-existent Meta Tags. For such search engines that have significantly decreased if not eliminated the importance of Meta Tags, there could be specific situations where the mere presence of Meta Tags could gain much more in importance. A good example to this could be websites making heavy use of rich graphics, or Flash content, but very poor or non-existent textual content anywhere on the site.
In the world of search engines, it is unfortunate to think that a picture is worth about 1,000 words to most people, but mean absolutely nothing to search engines. Search engines are totally blind when it comes to reading a picture or graphic of any kind.
When a website offers poor or non-existent textual content, the engines have to be more dependent on meta tags, in an effort to index it and add it to their database. With the most carefully written and designed websites, even if all the proper steps were taken to make certain the right Meta Tags are carefully edited and put in all the right places, unfortunately, some search engines will still completely ignore them. As helpful as some Meta Tags can be in certain search engines, good content in the site is still imperative.
Nothing can beat good, targeted & relevant content, filled with keyword-rich text spread evenly and categorized in all the carefully-defined sections of the site. As stated above, in such cases where the engine visiting your site depends on that content, it may be the only thing that will effectively work for your website.
The very best way to successfully use Meta Tags
To be really effective, Meta Tags should always be located in the HEAD area of an HTML document. That area is completely at the top of all pages. It starts just after the HTML tag and ends immediately before the BODY tag.
Additionally, you should always make certain that your meta tags don't have any line breaks. Doing that would trip the search engines as they will probably see bad HTML code and could ignore them completely. Also, try not to use any capital letters in your code, as well as any repetition of words, phrases or terms within the keywords tag. Don't make the mistake many webmasters are still doing by "stuffing" meta tags, as it could seriously penalize or ban your website.
How to effectively edit Meta Tags
The Meta Description tag is important as many major search engines will display this summary, along with the title of your specific page in their search results. This is usually what you see on the pages of Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista and most of the other engines after a query was initiated. It is recommended to keep this description reasonably short, concise and to the point. Also make certain that it's an appropriate reflection of that particular page's content.
Keywords represent the important search words and terms that people will enter into a search engine's query box. You must choose only relevant keywords. If these keywords and key phrases are going to be written in your keywords tag, they must appear in the actual body content of that specific page. With the exception of Google, most major search engines will actually compare your meta content with what is actually written on that page. If it doesn't match, your website could receive a penalty and thus suffer in the search results.
Almost everyday, we encounter commercial websites that have this tag written incorrectly. That Meta Tag is incorrect because some crawlers can't properly handle spaces between the words in the tag or the word "all". Most major search engines will assume by default that you want a website to be indexed and that all links are to be followed and indexed in its database.
Remember that using the wrong syntax can actually result in the crawler coming to a bad conclusion and wrongly penalizing that page completely. On the other hand, if you really do not want a certain page to be indexed or followed, then you must substitute "noindex" and or "nofollow" into the tag. It is also strongly recommended to properly use the Robots.txt file exclusion protocol.
Conclusion
The Web is constantly growing at a rate of approximately 6 Million new pages everyday! Google currently indexes in its database over 3.4 Billion pages all over the Web! With most of the search engines indexing only a small fraction of that great number, meta tags can be used as an additional way to reasonably ensure a proper categorization for any given website.
If you always use terms that are really relevant in all Meta Tags, you are significantly increasing your chances at a better ranking in the engines. Properly and effectively using the right meta tags could yield satisfactory results, both in the short-term and longer term periods.
Carefully implementing Meta Tags can only work for you, never against. In the future, if they become more widely accepted and most major search engines increase their importance in them again, you will be happy you used them properly. Additionally, you will be glad you won't have to re-write them all over again!
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
Overture Services Inc. on Monday launched a product that delivers ads linked to key words on Web content sites, as it battles rival Google Inc. in the lucrative targeted-advertising market.
"Overture plans to diversify both its product offerings as well as its revenue streams,” says Bill Demas, general manager of Overture’s partner business and solutions group.
Overture’s new contextual advertising product is called Content Match. Google and Sprinks, a property of magazine publisher Primedia Inc., already provide similar services.
Contextual advertising is an expansion of the highly profitable Web-search advertising model popularized by Overture and Google, the No. 1 Web search company in the United States.
Advertisers that subscribe to such programs bid for the right to have their ads tied to certain key words on content pages and pay each time an Internet user clicks on their ads, which receive prominent placement.
Pasadena, California-based Overture estimates that the contextual advertising market could grow to $2 billion annually by 2008.
Current users of Content Match include Overture partner MSN, Microsoft Corp.’s Internet property, automotive information site Edmunds.com and MyFamily.com’s network of genealogy Web sites.
Source: MSNBC
(Updated from our March 3rd, 2003 article). A lot has been said about Content Management Systems (CMS) in the past. Since search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are now such a growing part of the main marketing objectives for companies of all sizes, extra attention and caution must be used before the purchase of any such CMS software or programs.
When people today are looking to buy a certain product or service or need information on a specific subject, most use the power, speed and flexibility of Internet search engines. However, in the last two years, some companies have been developing their web sites and creating new or additional content with some of those so-called CMS packages. Some of the CMS programs available today may in fact negatively affect the visibility of your web site in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).
The main reason for that is some of them were not designed with search engines in mind. They were designed for what they are supposed to do: to help manage the contents of certain documents! That said, how can a company that has made extensive use of such CMS software reasonably insure itself that their site will do well in the search engines?
Some well-designed CMS solutions that give good attention to search engines when they were designed could possibly contribute to SEO work by standardizing its presentation, labelling of content and to a certain degree, its structure which is crucial to most search engines when evaluating how a particular page or site section should rank in the engines.
If a CMS package was truly designed with search engines in mind, it could be helpful for updating and some maintenance chores of certain dynamic sites, but even with some of these features present, there could be certain areas where it can still negatively affect some of the best SEO strategies. Rank for $ales advises caution in using them in such instances. Some CMS software packages can cost a lot of money, so be careful when shopping around and don’t be afraid to ask pointed questions, especially as it pertains to search engine visibility.
Whatever CMS software package you are analyzing, make certain that none of them create their own title tags, which are almost always off-topic. A good example to this would be the steel products manufacturer that is trying to use a CMS program that writes title tags such as: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, etc. Such title tags are completely useless to search engines. In this particular example, if the CMS program is well-designed for the engines, it will let YOU write informative and useful title tags such as: steel staircases, steel shelves, steel accessories, etc.
This detail may seem like negligible to some people, but it is very significant information for the engines and will make a drastic improvement in the results. An additional benefit to such standard SEO techniques is it will make the maintenance of the site much easier and faster. One problem with some CMS vendors is they don’t realize all of this as being their concern. Some don’t identify it is as even being a problem.
It would be almost effortless for a CMS designer or vendor to make its product search-engine friendly, as all the technology and the proper resources are already there. Some of the actual problem stems from the fact that the real needs are not being communicated effectively by most of the end-users and customers of some of the CMS programs.
PPC and Paid for Search
Today, the PPC and paid for search industry is growing rapidly. It basically offers businesses and companies a results-driven, value-added complement to search engine marketing techniques. PPC (Pay-per-Click) services allow web sites to bid for keywords and key phrases to be posted as sponsored links next to results pages. Companies can also pay to have their sites included in search-engine catalogues. In using such a formula, web sites that are of the dynamic type don’t have to make too many modifications to its basic structure, and can still yield a significant ROI.
As stated previously, there could be some benefit and some advantages to using certain, selected CMS products. However, when it comes to today’s major search engines, make certain you choose a product that will be truly “search engine compliant”. Additionally, always remember that some of them might still pose some problems, as far as SEO is concerned.
In light of all this, it is clear that CMS vendors, search engines, web site owners and professional search engine optimization companies must work together to make the whole process as rewarding it can be and in the most diligent fashion.
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
Web users are picky and impatient, typically visiting only the first three results from a query, with one in five searchers spending 60 seconds or less on a linked Web document, according to Penn State researchers.
“People make instantaneous judgments about whether to stay on a site, and if a site doesn't the give the right impression, users will bypass it," said Dr. Jim Jansen, assistant professor in Penn State’s information sciences and technology (IST). "A page has to be well-designed, easy to load and relevant to a searcher's needs." Otherwise, by the time three minutes have elapsed, 40 percent of searchers will have moved on. While some may have found what they wanted, others may simply have given up and moved to a different site, said the faculty member in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).
Jansen's conclusions are based on research that he and co-author Amanda Spink, Penn State associate professor of IST, conducted in February 2001. The two researchers analyzed more than 450,000 Web queries submitted to AlltheWeb.com in a 24-hour period, reviewing users' actions in chronological order. The length of sessions, number of pages visited and relevance of results were studied. He presented the research today (June 25) in a paper titled "An Analysis of Web Documents Retrieved and Viewed" at the 2003 International Conference on Internet Computing in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Several patterns emerged. Half of all users entered only one query with 54 percent viewing just one page of results in each session (a session was a query or series of queries submitted by a user during one interaction with a Web search engine). Only an additional 19 percent went on to the second page in sessions, and fewer than 10 percent of users bothered with the third page of results. A similar drop-off in numbers occurred when the researchers considered how many results searchers viewed per query. About 55 percent of users checked out one result only. More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results.
With more businesses opting to market through search engines rather than ads, those percentages illustrate why a good ranking on a major Web search engine can make the difference between commercial success and failure. To improve the odds Web users will visit a site, Jansen said it is imperative to get indexed by all search engines. A site's abstract that appears on the results page also can direct more users to a site -- provided the description is enticing and relevant specifics about the site are included.
"For site developers, if you want to be looked at, it is absolutely critical that the abstract be crystal clear about the purpose of your Web site," Jansen said. "Eight out of 10 times, the abstract dissuades people from going to the site." The researchers had news for consumers, too: They have a valid reason to be frustrated sometimes with Web searches. One out of every two results isn't relevant to what the searcher was looking for, Jansen said.
"As good as search engines are, there is room for improvement," Jansen said. "Niche search engines that focus on a narrow topic or search engines that cluster results by finding similarities and grouping them may be consumers' best bet for improving relevancy."
Source: Penn State University
As important and necessary professional Search Engine Optimization is today, other alternatives now exist to companies wishing to complement their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
Combined with a solid and well-structured, serious SEO program, SEM campaigns can be used to additionally increase visibility in the engines, as well as conducting some product-focussed marketing surveys on new services or products offered on a company’s web site.
PPC definition
To begin with, just what exactly is PPC(Pay per Click) and how can it help companies to more effectively broaden their exposure to the Web? For a start, both Google and Overture offer PPC programs which can help businesses in more accurately selecting keywords and key phrases to better target a specific market segment. Another effective use of a carefully planned PPC program could be aimed at directing a specific web address (URL) or to direct visitors to that address in an effort in evaluating trends or habits in those markets.
Some are aimed in submitting customized descriptions or titles for each keyword or key phrase, in an attempt to display them as advertisements posted in the search results of Overture and Google. Some PPC campaigns can also run in parallel to others of their associated network from other search engines.
A perfect example to this is Google's Ad Words program which will return search results in a separate box to the right of its regular “native” search engine results for a predetermined cost per click. However, as can be expected, the Google Ad Words program does not guarantee any particular order of placement for any of your listings.
In practice, the exact order is computed not only by the click-through rate but of the bid price of your ad as well. In real life, the Overture program presents its first few results at the top of the list of the “native” search results on various search engines. The listings appear in a similar format as the natural results and Overture uses an open-bidding technique to actually compute the order of the listings based on how much each bidding company is willing to pay per click on each keyword or key phrase.
The top bidding company receives first position, the second highest gets the second position and so on and so forth. Key phrases and keywords acquired through Overture's program will be delivered in the various search engines that depend on the Overture results.
Some Pay per Click program management services are offered by certain SEM companies with ongoing research and analysis to help identify the right keywords on a corporate web site that are already generating good visibility via natural search engine optimization programs.
These services are typically followed by some advice as to which keywords and key phrases to actually purchase and in which programs to make them work. The whole process then continues with the ongoing monitoring process of performance, budget and successfully updating these keyword purchases as your search engine marketing campaign evolves.
Purchasing keywords and key phrases can be done based on a variety of factors. The most important is ROI (Return on Investment).
Carefully analysing, dicing and truly measuring the exact returns from each of these single keyword investments are truly vital and are in fact one of the most important areas of the whole exercise. In such a scenario, it truly allows a business to effectively and accurately adjust and “fine-tune” keyword selection and bid pricing accordingly.
How PPC programs can make a difference
Purchasing keywords and key phrases in Overture and Google could represent a faster way for you to drive fairly targeted traffic to a web site and could be most effective in testing or promoting new products, seasonal services or other short-term needs. Additionally, it can provide short-term results, to fill a certain vacuum between real ranking results and its underlying campaign launch. But these benefits all come at a certain price, ie: a price that isn’t always under one’s control at any time.
Hence, conservative investment in PPC programs is a crucial and permanent ingredient to any serious search engine marketing campaign and should be viewed as a supplement only to “native” SEO. Given all these facts, and throughout your SEM campaign, as your natural visibility generated through native search engine optimization regularly increases, your dependency on keyword and key phrase purchasing should lower with the passage of time.
Always remember that search engine optimization is a science as well as an art. It is a delicate balance of the two that will help nurture the best results in the engines. Every PPC program analysis process, like native search engine optimization, is based on such things as keyword density, placement, optimization and general link structure in the whole site.
As with any other SEM program, it is crucial that a company first understands the actual surfing habits and buying styles that Internet searchers demonstrate when looking for specific services, products or information using today’s modern search engines.
Such buying patterns can be detected by analysing the most recurring search terms used within the various search engines and looking at site traffic log files everyday to find trends and occurrences that can be readily recognized.
Actual keywords & key phrases used can vary widely by the geo-physical location, by specific product, by the exact stage within the buying cycle, by web site, and by other such factors as the industry and a host of other elements in the equation. As a direct result, it is important for any company to have a clear understanding of just how various types of web searchers look for solutions before attempting any investment in any PPC program.
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
Google is in the process of releasing a new browser toolbar that lets people block pop-up ads and easily update their blogs as they surf the Web.
Google's Toolbar 2.0, set to be officially announced late Thursday, is the first publicly available software that incorporates the technology Google gained when it acquired Blogger creator Pyra in February.
The Google toolbar is a strip of function buttons that sits at the top of a Web browser and lets people access features such as search without going directly to Google's home page. Other companies, including Lycos and AskJeeves, offer their own such toolbars for download.
The new features of Google's Toolbar 2.0 include Popup Blocker, which stops pop-up ads, and AutoFill, which automatically fills out Web forms with information stored locally on a user's computer.
Another new feature is BlogThis, which lets people immediately create a posting on their blog about a site they are visiting. By clicking the BlogThis button on the toolbar, bloggers can automatically insert a link and highlighted text into their blog instead of having to move back and forth and cut and paste between the Web page and the blogging tools. Blogs are Web diaries that let people share their personal and professional lives through words, links, photos and so on.
Chris Sherman, associate editor at SearchEngineWatch.com, a site that tracks happenings in the industry, said Google's Toolbar 2.0 bucks a trend among search engines, which for the most part are stripping down and refocusing on search. Not Google, he noted. "Most of the features they've added really have nothing to do with search," said Sherman, who nevertheless said he liked many of the features, particularly the ability to block pop-ups.
Google said the features are in line with the company's goal to organize information on the Web. Tom Nielsen, the lead developer on the Toolbar 2.0 project, said the development team does a lot of what he called "soul searching" before it decides what new features to add. He said developers look at what types of features people are searching for on download sites and examine activities that will enhance browsing. He's excited about the BlogThis button. "A lot of people don't know what blogging is, and we thought it would be neat to introduce people to it," Nielsen said.
When Google bought Pyra, many people wondered how the company planned to incorporate the technology. BlogThis offers an early glimpse. The company is also testing its AdSense technology, which analyzes the content of a page to determine the best ad to serve up on that page, on pages created by Blogger members.
In addition, Google has offered Blogger technology internally to its employees, who've used it to share information about their projects as well as weave stories about their personal lives.
The new toolbar features are designed to complement those offered in earlier versions of the toolbar. The upgrade still includes buttons that send people directly to Google's search and news pages without having to type in the URL. And it will also allow users to retrieve information about a certain page and pages that are similar to it, and it will translate information into English. Toolbar 2.0 is in the beta, or test, phase, meaning the company is not offering technical support but is looking for feedback from testers. It is currently available only to users of Microsoft Windows.
Google's new toolbar features are sure to pique the interest of privacy advocates, who in the past have worried about Google's data-collection capabilities.
Google outlines its privacy practices regarding Toolbar 2.0 through several screens that pop up during the download process. Under a headline that says "not the usual yada yada yada," the privacy warning advises users that one feature of the toolbar technology, called PageRank, could send "information about the sites you visit to Google." However, the company said it would not trace the surfing information back to individual names and addresses. People who are apprehensive about using PageRank can turn the feature off, and they won't be tracked.
Source: C-Net News
WebTrends and iProspect surveyed over 800 marketers and determined that 41% are currently implementing search engine marketing (SEM) efforts.
Of those respondents, 41% track click-through and general traffic, while just 11% use a detailed ROI analysis. Do your online marketing efforts include search yet?
And, 41% of those marketers who are implementing SEM strategies are measuring such efforts based on click-through and general site traffic. Only 11% are using a detailed ROI analysis of their SEM efforts, which includes lifetime value as well as revenue by phrase.
WebTrends and iProspect surveyed over 800 marketers who participated in a web conference presented by the two firms. Attendees were surveyed, and the results indicated that of those people who are running SEM campaigns, 23% tell WebTrends and iProspect that it is a significant part of their overall marketing mix.
The survey also determined that 23% of marketers are not using SEM at all, but 35% are evaluating the option, pointing to a strong future for the format.
Source: e-Marketer
There is a new and powerful search engine that just appeared on the Internet. What makes this one unique is apart from being able to make a query in the search box like Google and all the others, you can also do a search by
industry.
Global Business Listing is a new search engine designed specifically for business people on the go. It is still in its infancy, but in the eyes of many, represents a lot of potential. Will it become the next Google or Yahoo? Well, it's still early to make such a claim, but the people at Global Business Listing are working as hard as they can to make it happen.
Global Business Listing is an initiative of the General Center for Internet Services Inc. (GCIS), one of Canada's oldest and largest Internet application developer and professional search engine optimization company. GCIS retains full ownership of the new search engine.
Global Business Listing is completely free to use by anybody and is a PFI (Pay for Inclusion) search engine & directory. Its submission fee is priced at $ 269.00 US, thus $ 30.00 less than Yahoo's submission fee. Additionally, listed companies also get a sign-up bonus. Global Business Listing has successfully secured a 10-year agreement with Sun Hosting, effectively giving all companies listed in the new directory a 10% savings on all their web hosting fees.
And that's not all. Each company gets its own personalized page, complete with its own logo and all its important corporate information. Text is also included for its main products and services. Additionally, every page is optimized for its main keywords and key phrases, which should help it as far as Page Rank is concerned. Some observers in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) field have commented that the way Global Business Listing does it for its members, it may help their web sites achieve better rankings in Google and most of the other major search engines. Time will tell, but we did look at the code and it does make sense. One note of importance: the new search engine was completely designed and programmed using exclusively the HTML language.
However, we must agree with the way it is being done. Companies listed in the new engine do get better visibility. In the next Google update, it will be interesting to see the new results coming out of the freshly crawled update.
So far, about 200 companies, mostly from the US have already signed up and are listed in the new search engine.
Source: SED Review
"Number one on the search engines became the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad; your company's very presence signaled you were the best in your industry."
Just a few years ago, when asked "How do you drive traffic to your website", many companies would name banner ads as their main marketing medium for increasing online revenues. In an effort to increase brand awareness, companies spent thousands of dollars on obnoxious banner advertisements on high profile websites in an effort to cement their reputation as the number one company or product in their industry.
It didn't seem to matter that very few people actually clicked on these flashing, animated billboards. What did matter was Internet users saw these ads wherever they went on the web; there was a sense of pride and vanity from having your company's banner appear more often than your competitors. Search engine vanity
Fast-forward to the present day and banner ads have fallen from grace with few companies buying banner ads purely for the sake of one-upmanship on the competition. In their stead, search engine marketing has become the medium of choice for companies looking to increase website exposure. With the steady growth of search engine use, thanks in part to the technology and reliability offered by Google, companies already know that obtaining top positioning on the search engines will result in qualified traffic to their website and increased online revenues.
However, there is a new phenomenon rising up to replace the battle once seen with banner advertising; Search Engine Vanity. Search Engine Vanity occurs when a company seeks to obtain number one search engine positioning for the simple purpose of one-upmanship on their competitors.
Traffic data, click-through-rates and conversions are all secondary considerations compared to the desire to ensure that when an Internet user searches for a product or service, their company website is listed above that of their competitors. Whether it's Apple and Dell vying for the top ranking for "computers" or Wal-Mart and Netflix battling for the number one spot for the phrase "dvd rental"; these and other companies know that being #1 on the search engines can be vitally important when demonstrating market share to the press or investors.
Search Engine Super Bowl
Companies can spend millions of dollars each year in advertising and branding. A single 60 second Super Bowl ad will cost you over $2 million and have little discernable benefit compared to the same amount spent on a series of ads elsewhere. Yet the prestige offered to a company that advertises during the Super Bowl cannot be denied. The same holds true when it comes to search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. Companies are acutely aware that being highly positioned within these search engine results will strengthen their brand and increase their credibility within their industry.
Take Alaska Airlines as an example. While they had great search engine exposure, with hundreds of search terms listed on the first page of the search engines, they knew that they needed to be in the top spot for "Alaska flights" if they were to solidify their position as the number one airline provider to Alaska.
Being somewhere in the first 5 search engine listings, was perfectly adequate to drive traffic to their website, but the prestige of being the very first site listed would have an intangible benefit. By being the number one listed site on Google, Alaska Airlines would immediately position itself as the Google's favorite, automatically ensuring brand dominance. Number one on the search engines became the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad; your company's very presence signaled you were the best in your industry.
The end of common sense?
So are companies throwing money at search engine marketing for the sole purpose of being number one, with little regard to actual traffic and revenues generated? Has Search Engine Vanity taken over from common sense? Yes and no. More and more companies are seeing search engine marketing as the latest trend, something they must do because their competitors are already involved. They fear being left behind and are rushing to secure top positioning for the terms that they believe represent their brand.
A company such as IBM, that has spent many years and millions of dollars to ensure that their name is synonymous with "computers", knows that the Internet offers a new playing field with different perceptions. In their efforts to secure their brand, it is important that they "own" the term "computers" and hence invest a lot of effort to ensure that ownership is carried over to the search engine results. However, like most companies you can be sure that IBM knows that the by-product of a number one position on the search engines is increased traffic and sales. With more than 500 million searches being carried out each day, being number one for a generic term or phrase not only increases brand awareness but also increases website traffic and ultimately, revenues.
As Penny Oslund, Executive Director, EMBA Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School put it, "we want to ensure that our OneMBA website is positioned above all other business schools to ensure the prestige of our program, the traffic will take care of itself". "Look at me, I am number one!"
So as search engine marketing becomes a valid and widely adopted marketing medium for companies of all sizes, not being positioned at the top of the listings is something business wish to avoid. Just as companies rushed in the mid 90's to secure a domain name that reflected their company image or brand, many businesses now seek to ensure that when the average Internet user searches at Google, it is their website that sits at the top of the pile, proudly announcing "Look at me, I am number one".
Story by Andy Beal
Source: Pandia
FindWhat.com said Wednesday that it will acquire Espotting in a deal that will meld two regional providers of commercial search services into a global network.
Under terms of the deal, London-based Espotting will receive about 8.1 million shares of Fort Myers, Fla.-based FindWhat's common stock and $27 million in cash. FindWhat also will offer 2.1 million shares of its stock to Espotting employees and affiliates at an exercise price of $1.73 a share.
If the deal is completed, Espotting will become a subsidiary of FindWhat, with operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia serving 40,000 advertisers.
FindWhat's CEO Craig Pisaris-Henderson will retain his title and role in the merged company; Espotting founder and CEO Doug Ishag will become vice chairman.
The merger is an attempt by two smaller commercial search engines to better compete against market leaders Overture Services and Google, which have become extremely popular with consumers, advertisers and investors in the past two years. Last quarter, portal giant Yahoo reported that 19 percent of its revenue was derived from a deal with Overture. And many investors are anticipating an initial public offering for Google when overall market conditions improve.
Paid search businesses sell keywords to advertisers that are seeking higher placement on their search pages. Each time a person clicks on an advertiser's link, the commercial search provider receives a fee. Providers of these paid searches have struck distribution deals with Web giants such as Yahoo, MSN and America Online.
The business is also picking up in Europe and Asia. Overture this year outlined plans to expand into international markets, and Google has signed deals with overseas portals.
FindWhat said the combined company projects 2003 revenue of $142.5 million and pretax net income of $24.5 million, on a pro forma basis. The merger is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2003.
A name for the combined company has not been determined, but the shares will be traded under FindWhat’s current ticker symbol, FWHT. In midday trading Wednesday, the shares were up $3.09, or 23 percent, to $16.78.
Source: Pandia.com
With the Robots.txt protocol, a webmaster or web site owner can really protect himself if it is done correctly. Today, web domain names are certainly plentiful on the Internet. There exists a multitude of sites on just about any subject anybody can think of.
Most sites offer good content that is of value to most people and can certainly help with just about any query. However, like in the real world, what you see is not always what you get.
There are a lot of sites out there that are spamming the engines. Spam is best defined as search engine results that have nothing to do with the keywords or key phrases that were used in the search. Enter any good SEO forum today and most spam topics in daily threads usually point to hidden text, keyword stuffing in the meta tags, doorway pages and cloaking issues. Thanks to newer and more powerful search engine algorithms, these domain networks that spam the engines are increasingly being penalized or banned all together.
The inherent risks of getting a web site banned on the basis of spam increases proportionately if it appears to have duplicate listings or duplicate content. Rank for $ales does not recommend machine-generated pages because such pages have a tendency of generating spam. Most of those so-called “page generators” were not designed to be search engine-friendly and no attention was ever given to engines when they were designed.
One major drawback of these “machines” is that once a page is “optimized” for a single keyword or key phrase, first-level and at times second-level keywords tend to flood results with listings that will most assuredly look as 100% spam. Stay away from any of those so-called “automated page generators”.
A good optimization process starts with content that is completely written by a human! That way, you can be certain that each page of your site will end up being absolutely unique.
How do search engines deal with duplicate content?
Modern crawler-based search engines now have sophisticated and powerful algorithms that were specifically designed to catch sites that are spamming the engines, especially the ones that make use of duplicate domains. To be sure, there are perfectly legitimate web sites whose situation can certainly be informative. However, and as the following example will clearly demonstrate, that is not always the case.
We will take this practical example of where there are actually three identical web sites, all owned and operated by the same company, where the use of duplicate content is evident. Google, Alta-Vista and most other crawler-based search engines have noticed and indexed all three domains. In this scenario, the right thing to do is to make use of individual IP addresses and implementing a server re-direct command (a 301 re-direct).
An alternative to this would be to at least provide unique folders or sub-directories and using the Robots.txt exclusion protocol to disallow two of the three affected domains.
That way the search engines wouldn’t index the two duplicate sites. In such cases, the Robots.txt exclusion protocol should always be used. It is in fact your best “insurance” against getting your site penalized or banned. In the above example, since that was not done we will look at duplicate content and assess where the risk of getting a penalty is the highest. We will list and describe the indexing of these three sites as being site one which is the main primary domain, site two and finally, site three.
The four major crawler-based engines that were analyzed were Google, Teoma, Fast and Alta-Vista. All three domain names point to the same IP address, which actually made it simpler to use Fast's Internet Protocol filter to discover that there was really no more than three affected domains in this example.
However, all three web sites are directed to the same IP address AND content folder! Such a scenario makes them in fact exact duplicates, raising all the duplicate content flags in all four engines analyzed.
Even if all three sites share the same Robots.txt file, the hosting arrangement and syntax in the Robots.txt file does nothing that is effective to help this duplicate content problem. Major spider-based search engines which rely a lot on hypertext to compute relevancy and importance as most do today, are best at discovering and dealing with sites that delve into duplicate content issues.
As a direct result, a webmaster runs a large risk of having duplicate content in these engines because their algorithm makes it such a simple task to analyse, sort out and finally reject these duplicate content web sites.
If a “spam technician” discovers duplicate listings, chances are very good they will take action against such offending sites. The chances actually increase when a person, often a competitor files a spam complaint or that a certain site is “spam-dexing” the engines. To be sure, any page caused by duplicate content can improperly "populate" a search query. The end result is unfairly dominating most search results.
Marketing analysis and PPC “landing” pages
In order to better analyse specific online marketing campaigns or surveys, some companies at certain times have in fact duplicate sites or operate PPC (Pay-per-Click) landing pages. It is important in such cases not to neglect to use the Robots.txt exclusion protocol to manage your duplicate sites. Disallow spiders from crawling duplicate sites by properly editing the right syntax in the Robots.txt file.
Your index count will certainly decrease, but that is the right thing to do and you are actually performing the search engines a service. In such a case, a webmaster needs not to worry of impending penalties from the engines.
If these businesses or their marketing departments are in fact running marketing tests or surveys, there is usually more than just one domain that could potentially appear in the actual results pages of the engines. In such cases, I strongly recommend writing or re-writing all content all over and making certain that no real duplicate content gets to be indexed.
One way to achieve that is to use some form of meta refresh tag or Java script solution to actually direct visitors to the most recent versions of pages while their webmasters get the Robots.txt exclusion protocol written correctly.
The Java script would effectively indicate where it is intended to redirect, assuring it can put the final document in its proper place. A “301 server redirect” command is always the best thing to use in these cases and constitutes the best insurance against any penalties, as it will inform the search engines that the affected document (s) have in fact moved permanently.
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
Google Inc., the leading U.S. Web search engine, on Wednesday said it expanded a program that helps operators of small Internet sites automatically place targeted advertising on their content pages and get paid each time a site visitor clicks on one of the ads.
While best known for its search technology, Palo Alto, California-based Google gets a hefty share of revenues from its paid listing business, which links advertising to key words used in Internet searches.
With its new contextual advertising services, Google aims to give the company's network of 100,000 small to large advertisers targeted venues through which to reach potential customers.
Privately held Google, which in March unveiled contextual advertising services for Internet sites with more than 20 million page views per month, on Wednesday rolled out its new self-serve program called AdSense.
The program aims to help operators of less-trafficked sites quickly format their Web pages to receive advertisements that match key words in the content of those individual pages.
When people visit the Web pages and click on the ads, Google and the site operators get paid by advertisers. Google said that dozens of Web sites participated in a trial of AdSense but did not say how many site operators were currently signed up or how much money they were making.
Google's main competitor for content-based advertising services is Sprinks, a property of magazine publisher Primedia Inc. Overture Services Inc., Google's rival in the paid-listing segment, has also targeted the contextual advertising business.
Source: Reuters
When Overture acquired both Fast's Web Search unit with its AlltheWeb search engine and the AltaVista search engine, the company laid the foundation for what can become one of the Net's most important search engines.
However, the Norwegian company Fast is still alive and kicking. It is now focusing on delivering search technologies to companies, which they may use for their Web sites, intranets and databases.
Here is an interesting swap: Fast is now acquiring the AltaVista enterprise search business from Overture!
According to Fast AltaVista’s customers will get uninterrupted support and maintenance on their current platform and "an opportunity to migrate to FAST Data Search".
There are no plans to integrate the AltaVista enterprise search technology with FAST Data Search, so it is a fair guess that Fast will ultimately abandon the AltaVista technology.
This is what Fast calls a consolidation of the enterprise search market, meaning that there will be fewer competitors.
Source: Pandia.com
AOL has added image search to its online services. It's based on the Google image search engine, and functions very much in the same way.
The result pages present scaled down versions of the pictures themselves, and a click on a picture brings up a split screen, with the original Web page in the lower part, and some information on where the picture has been found in the upper frame.
A click on the sized down picture in the upper frame brings forth the picture in its original size (as in Google), although sometimes we are presented with an Adobe GoLive LassoStudio logo only.
The filter for offensive content is permanently on. Resourceshelf reports that AOL is only using a small proportion of the Google image database, and active users of this service will therefore prefer to stay with the original.
Source: Pandia.com
This week ESpotting signed deals with Internet search firms Mamma.com and Euroseek to display paid search listings on both sites, extending their dominance of the European pay-per-click market.
Espotting signed a pan-European, geo-targeted deal with Mamma.com. Mamma deploys technology to geographically segment its users and chose Espotting to provide results for its European user-base. Mamma's geo-targeting technology analyses a user's IP address based on a list of known European addresses, and displays results relevant to the country of origin.
A separate deal with European portal Euroseek will see pan-European full implementation, consisting of all search results, and targeted content across all channels and directories. Euroseek, previously powered by Google, was founded in 1996 as the first European-focused search engine on the Internet.
"The deals with both Mamma and Euroseek show once again that no-one understands Europe better than Espotting." says Espotting Media COO, Jonathan Bunis.
"Espotting are committed to delivering value for our affiliate partners by providing new revenue streams through both paid for listings and previously un-monetised content; to driving cost effective, targeted sales leads to our advertisers; and to supplying users with the most relevant search results."
Source: High Search Engine Ranking.com
Sales Performance International recently announced a new series of webinars and executive seminars focused on helping businesses sell effectively in today’s uncertain economy.
The events will be offered in multiple U.S. cities and online through June and July. SPI CEO, Keith Eades, author of The New Solution Selling, will present information about rebuilding sales pipelines and improving sales organizations. Registrants for each event will also receive a free copy of Keith Eades’ book, Aligning with Buyers.
SPI partnered with WebsiteBiz to plan and launch an online campaign to drive attendance and registrations to the upcoming events. The campaign combined targeted email broadcasts and search engine positioning techniques to invite prospective registrants and promote the series in selected markets. Initial results from the email campaign have exceeded registration goals for the scheduled events.
“We are very pleased with the results of our partnership with WebsiteBiz…" said Tim Sullivan, Vice President of Marketing. “They listened to our short-term objectives and were able to quickly create and launch a customized campaign within budget and on target. The initial email invitation produced results that exceeded our expectations. Their proactive approach and responsiveness helped us meet deadlines and stay on schedule. We look forward to even better results from WebsiteBiz for each upcoming event.”
WebsiteBiz is a privately held Internet Marketing Agency founded in 1997. The company, based in Charlotte, NC, is focused on driving targeted traffic, delivering measurable results, and proactively improving conversions. Their services include Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Online Media Buying, and Website Usability Analysis. WebsiteBiz has helped companies like Bank of America, Shell Oil, Source Technologies, and Merz Pharmaceuticals increase customer acquisitions and improve return on investment for their online initiatives.
Established in 1988 and based in Charlotte, NC, Sales Performance International is a global leader in sales process consulting, training, management systems and sales process automation. Among the company's clients are Ariba, Bank of America, EDS, GE Capital/ITS, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, i2 Technologies, Lotus, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, US Bancorp Investments and Vignette. Visit www.spisales.com for more information or call 704.364.9298 to speak with Caroline Durham.
Source: d-Business News.com
First Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, and now a 'bot has beaten human journalists. Google News, the news site run entirely by computer algorithms, beat out BBC News Online, MSNBC.com, Poynter's Romenesko and allAfrica.com to win 2003 Webby Award for best news site.
There's still hope for humans, though. The People's Choice Webby Award for best news site -- chosen by Internet users who voted -- went to BBC News Online. The people have spoken!
What this really means is that the Webby judges decided that the collective work of all the world's media is more valuable than any individual publication. Hard to argue with that.
Source: Cyberjournalist.net
Google announced on Tuesday a deal with AOL Canada to provide paid listings for the online service and on its portal.
The deal calls for Google to provide three paid listings, generated from Google's 100,000 AdWords advertisers, under a "sponsored links" heading near the top of the AOL.ca and AOL service search results pages. The agreement complements Google's year-old algorithmic search agreement with America Online that included AOL Canada. (AOL Canada is a strategic alliance between AOL and RBC Royal Bank.)
"We considered three suppliers and we choose Google because we concluded they were the best," said Arturo Duran, AOL Canada's vice president of interactive services. "It was easy to work with them because they already knew my engine." The companies declined to reveal the deal's length or financial details.
The agreement marks a deepening of Google's ties with AOL, its No. 1 distribution partner. Last May, Google inked a deal with AOL for its then-nascent AdWords paid listings program, in a blow to Google rival Overture Services. The company is by far the most important partner in its distribution network, which also includes Ask Jeeves and EarthLink.
AOL Canada no longer breaks out its subscriber figures from the 35 million AOL counts globally. In its last subscriber count, in the fourth quarter of 2002, AOL Canada had 500,000. According to comScore Media Metrix, AOL.ca was the 11th ranked Canadian portal, drawing 1.1 million visitors in April. The top portals in Canada, MSN (15.7 million visitors) and Yahoo! (13 million), both use paid listings from Overture.
Despite AOL and Google's relationship, Overture has maintained its partnership with AOL Europe for paid listings, expanding that partnership in February to include in some of its country portals' search directories.
Source: Silicon Valley Internet.com
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has chosen Intelliseek's Enterprise Search Server (ESS) technology to power a research portal for BBC journalists, producers, and researchers who need single-point access to information currently stored in numerous, disparate sources.
Rather than searching separately for background information the BBC's communications professionals can now use a single desktop interface to gain access to news clippings, broadcast and recording archives, images, internal or specialty databases, and subscription content sources.
Intelliseek, based in Cincinnati, specializes in federated search technologies that capture, track, and analyze information from disparate sources and in multiple formats to provide real-time research and intelligence. By pooling disparate sources into a single interface with built-in relevance and continuous updates, ESS technology helps organizations cut the time necessary for research, decision-making, planning, sales, marketing, and product development.
Source: e-Content Mag.com
Infoseek Japan and Lycos Japan have decided to merge their portals into one on the 1st of September this year. The main reason is apparently to get a stronger position vis-a-vis the Japanese version of Yahoo!, which is doing very well at the moment.
Services that are now offered by the Lycos portal will be transferred to the Infoseek site. Both sites are owned by Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest Internet shopping mall operator.
Lycos is powered by AlltheWeb in most countries. In Japan, however, the search engine used has been Wisenut, owned by the LookSmart company. Wisenut is now loosing its foothold in Japan, as the new unified portal will be powered by Infoseek.
Search engine old timers will remember the American Infoseek, and the Japanese version is indeed an offshoot of that search engine. However, today it is purely a Japanese endeavor.
Sources: The Japan Times and Webmaster World
Innovation is the key success in the search engine industry -- Google has proved that beyond doubt. Due to this several companies invest heavily in developing new technologies, new ways of presenting results and new ways of gaining revenue.
Gary price has put up a list of 19 US search engine oriented patents or patents applications awarded since April 15, 2003 at his ResourceShelfPLUS site. What it shows is that "information retrieval research" is not limited to the search engine companies.
Microsoft, which -- mind you -- does not own the search engine powering its own MSN portal, is developing a system for detecting duplicate documents in Web crawls, presumably in order to be able to filter out identical sites from search results and stop the use of related spam techniques.
Amazon has developed a system for search query auto completion, meaning that the site will try to guess what you are searching for and complete popular queries for you.
There are also patents from Apple, Time Warner and IBM. Old timer AltaVista, now part of the Overture conglomerate, has patented a "method of ranking a plurality of pages identified during a search of a linked database". It is actually a new variant of the search engines' common attempt to identify authoritative sites and important "hubs". Links from such sites count more in the algorithm determining the order of search results.
Source: Pandia.com.
More and more is being said about Pay for Inclusion (PFI) search engines and Pay per Click (PPC) search portals. Today, there are a good number of ways that search directories and search engines are charging companies trying to get their web sites conveniently listed on the Internet.
What is really important to underline when talking about this popular topic is that funds invested into most PFI programs go mainly in getting your web site indexed into the various search databases. There really isn't much more to it. Some promise you to be listed within seven days, others tell you it may be sooner.
Companies can pay these directories as much as they feel like it, but PFI will not yield those web sites higher placement in the engines. It would be foolish to believe that the mere inclusion of a URL in such directories will propel any web site in the first position.
Business people should be extremely careful of hyped promises to be at the top, with just a directory inclusion. As you are about to find out, it takes a lot more than that to be at the top in the search engine results pages (SERP's) of any major search engine.
With any type of commercial web site or business in any field, companies have to pay Yahoo just in order to be considered for inclusion. After their editors have reviewed it, they will add the web site if they believe it is of good use to their searchers. If, on the other hand, the site in question is refused for any reason, they will still keep the $ 299 fee.
Now if you read their terms of service (TOS), they apparently call the shots and companies don't have other options to be listed in their directory. Having said that, and in most cases, Yahoo does a pretty good job at adding most submitted PFI sites, provided the submitting party isn't trying to spam their index in any way.
There's another PFI search engine on the block
Another pay-for-inclusion search engine and directory that is gaining a lot of popularity these days is Global Business Listing. Launched in the early part of 2003, what makes Global Business Listing truly unique is you can make a regular search just like any search engine using its query box, or you can do an industry-wide search using its extended directory of global industries and businesses.
Global Business Listing is priced lower than Yahoo at $ 269 for a whole year, plus you also get a fully personalized page, complete with your company logo and products & services description. Additionally, Global Business Listing members also benefit a 10% annual discount on their web hosting fees, thanks to a partnering arrangement with Canadian web hosting wholesaler Sun Hosting.
You could say that spamming includes (but isn't limited to) doorway or gateway pages and submitting duplicate sites or mirror sites that are very similar in content or that add no basic value to their index as a whole.
At Yahoo, after one of their editors decides that a web site complies to their generally accepted standards and then adds it to their database, that site gets no priority treatment in any way, as far as the quality of the rankings are concerned. That explains the reasons why it is very important to carefully prepare keyword and key phrase-rich text content before submitting the site to Yahoo for inclusion.
One important word of advice
Make certain of the category you want to submit the site too. After Yahoo has included it, if you are not happy with its overall description or category placement that it falls in, it is strongly recommended you email them to let them know. Conditional on the category changes you ask them to do and the exact reasons motivating them, Yahoo may or may not agree to your request. Be persistent if you know you are right. Demand to be treated fairly.
In terms of your placement and how high it is the Yahoo SERP's, it would appear that the more visible and the more popular any given site is on the web in general, and the higher its Page Rank, the better are its chances for a high placement in the Yahoo directory.
Again we will stress the real importance of building a web site that is search engine-friendly, filled with your most important keywords and key phrases.
The DMOZ index (or Open Directory Project)
The DMOZ or Open Directory Project (DMOZ or ODP) has no PFI program to speak of and mostly any categories of web sites can be submitted for free. There are no plans for a PFI program at this time. However, be prepared to be patient when submitting to DMOZ. Many sites take anywhere from two to four months to get listed! We have even heard of delays of 6 months and more.
Currently, the Open Directory Project relies strictly on volunteer editors to properly evaluate and index web sites in their respective directories. Click here for some important tips on how to properly submit any website to the DMOZ directory.
Almost all search engines that have web crawlers (or spiders) have some sort of PFI program in effect. Alta-Vista, AskJeeves-Teoma, Lycos-Fast and most of the Inktomi family of engines now have them. Most of these PFI programs are designed in a way that specific pages of a given web site will be included to a directory's main database, within a set period of time. Some will even be re-crawled on a regular basis, depending on the directory in question.
To be included in these PFI directories, costs vary by specific programs from about $60 to $299 (in the case of Yahoo) per website, for one year of inclusion in their directory. One word of clarification here: directory PFI differs from search engine PFI since the search engine crawlers pickup the information directly from your web site, as compared to just using the title on any specific page and description that somebody would submit to any directory.
A word of caution about any PFI programs
However, keep in mind that PFI programs will NOT improve your positioning in any way in the results pages. All they will do is make certain that your site is somewhere in their main database. As things currently stand, your website could be in the top twenty or it could sadly end up number 300 or lower. It is your responsibility to have your site carefully optimized in order for it to be in the top ten results.
Remember that search engine optimization is a science as well as an art. If in doubt on the correct way of doing any of this, you should consult a good and reputable professional optimization firm. Remember that certain web sites sometimes get penalized or banned altogether, for failing to follow the Terms of Use of most major search engines and directories. There are people who will still try to abuse or spam the engines, at the site's own perils.
On a more positive note, one benefit of using a PFI program is that most optimization work can be seen and appreciated fairly quickly, if it is done correctly. Lately, Google has taken longer and longer between most of its regular "deep crawl" monthly updates. This case was even aggravated in April of 2003, as the April monthly update at Google took almost six weeks to complete.
Also, remember that Google is still the most widely-used search engine, updating more than three billion pages of the web every month.
There are also PPC ad programs
On top of having PFI programs, some companies also offer PPC (Pay per Click) programs. Two of these are Find-What and Overture. Google now has Ad Words. There will probably be more such programs soon. These marketing programs are basically like publicity campaigns, as compared to classic search engine optimization.
More on the Google Ad Words program:- One major leader in the PPC landscape is Google, with its Ad Words Select program, or AWS for short. The Google Ad Words Select links are posted along the right-hand side of the results pages. You can see them in the little coloured boxes, clearly identified as "sponsored links".
Improving your marketing chances by bidding for key phrases and keywords on the Google AWS program is substantially different from PPC programs offered at Overture, even if most of the basic principles are the same for both programs.
On these PPC ad programs, businesses bid on certain pre-defined keywords and key phrases and if they happen to be among the top bidders, their ads appear in the sponsored-advertising section of these search engines and/or directories. What seems to make them work is many searchers apparently believe these ads to be actually relevant to their searches.
In essence, it doesn't hurt to try. Most companies or marketers should view PFI and PPC programs as a complement to the actual, real process of professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The downsides to using PPC
To be sure, there are some downsides to most PPC programs. One of them is that you will need to invest quite a bit of time in effectively managing all your bids to make sure that you are in fact getting the lowest possible cost-per-click price. Additionally, one major drawback in using most PPC programs is, once you stop paying for PPC key phrases and keywords, your web site will have completely vanished from the sponsored/featured listings.
In such a scenario, all present and future traffic will be gone forever, unless you re-initiate your PPC program as it was and start all over.
If you still choose to go the PPC way, it is strongly suggested you carefully optimize your web site so that it will still appear in the regular search results. In such an instance, if the overall budget and associated costs of managing your PPC program is still too high, at least you will still have the regular search results (SERP'S) listings in replacement, which, for all intents and purposes, should substantially improve your ROI.
Important reading
In this rare paper, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page explain the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine and its main functions.
Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003
There's just something about niche search engines on university sites that makes me happy.
Anyway, eBizSearch, at http://gunther.smeal.psu.edu/index.html , is described as "an experimental niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address various business and technology aspects of e-Business." The front page of the site is a simple keyword search with the option to search for documents or citations.
A search for "clickthrough" in documents found three results, while the same search in citations found one result. The citation search results look like a bibliography. The document search results contain a title, very brief excerpt, and URL. The three results I found for this search were all PDF files. A search for "popup" in documents found eight results, and while seven of them were PDF the eighth one looked like PostScript.
These were some very information-dense resources. Articles included "Advertising in a Pervasive Computing Environment," "Modeling the Clickstream: Implications for Web-Based Advertising Efforts," and "Preferential Partner Selection in an Evolutionary Study of Prisoner's Dilemma." I saw articles as far back as 1996.
Source: Research Buzz.com
Google, the Internet search company that defied dot-com tradition by surviving and flourishing, has no plans right now to go public, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Monday.
Google: Not quite ready for an IPO yet
May 6, 2003
Google, the Internet search company that defied dot-com tradition by surviving and flourishing, has no plans right now to go public, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Monday.
Asked at the JP Morgan Technology and Telecom conference here, what market or other conditions would be needed to persuade the company to make an initial public offering, Schmidt declined to answer, saying with a smile: ``that would be speculation.''
Schmidt said the company will stay focused on its core search technology, which it outsources to corporations, Web sites and Internet service providers such as Yahoo and America Online.
Source: ZD Net.
Thinking about optimizing your site for search engines? Make sure to consider OneStat.com’s latest findings -- most (nearly 30%) of worldwide Net users search online with two word phrases, while over 24% use three word search phrases.
According to a recent report from OneStat.com, nearly 30% of worldwide Internet users type two word phrases into search engines when searching online. In fact, over 24% use three word phrases when searching.
OneStat bases its findings on a past two-month period, as of the end of April 2003. Online product research is very popular among Internet users, especially those who are still too afraid to use their credit cards to buy online. For more on this topic, read today's article, "Online Future for Non-Credit Card Payments?," by Senior Analyst Noah Elkin. A March 2003 report from DoubleClick and Greenfield Online finds that over 40% of US Net users end up at the Web sites they use to research products by using search engines.
Source: eMarketer.com
Very few people have raised the issue of why Google Inc., through Google Labs is involved in Google Compute. Google Compute is an organization contained within Google Inc., to promote distributed computing projects.
Very few people have considered why Google Inc., is even involved in such a project. Microdoc News explores this issue. According to the Google Compute page, Google Labs is involved in a distributed computing project because Google Inc., have high expertise in the area of distributed computing:
The Google search engine uses more than 10,000 networked computers to deliver results to millions of users worldwide, making it one of the largest distributed computing systems in existence. In addition to providing leading search technology, we are also interested in solving other important computationally intense problems. While we're not experts on protein folding, we do know quite a bit about using networked computers to solve difficult problems involving terabytes of data.
Indeed, Google Inc., have capability in this area. However, one has to recognize that universities also have many heads thinking about a problem and that by aiding a university in solving an issue of obtaining enough computing time through Google Inc., clout with its users, Google Inc., also have access to these minds who are solving distributed computing problems. Google Inc., has much to gain from such cooperation.
Google Inc., are in need of staff -- look on the Google Labs front page and they have an advertisement ofr staff. And through working with a university of people who are working on distributed computing problems, Google Inc., gets to see the minds at work, and therefore ideal people to hire in the future. The benefits are more than this however. Distributed computing models are very effective in handling large amounts of data. And Google Inc., aare in the job of handling large amounts of data, whether it is in its mainstream business of search or in its Blogger business, Froogle business or whatever it is into. The more experience Google Inc., has in distributed computing the better off Google Inc., will be.
Added to this, however, is the fact that operating a voluntary distributed computing program, Google Labs gets to do some market research. How effective is volunteer distributed computing? What are the pitfalls? How many people does one need to be effective in extending the capabilities of an existing set of computers? Distributed computing is not new and there are numbers of distributed computer projects available on the Internet. In fact, there is a distributed computing project that uses volunteer computing time to create an extensive search engine database. Google at all times needs to evaluate the effectiveness of running a huge PC farm as against co-opting volunteer time, and what better way than to give back to the community and at the same time learn a lot about volunteer distributed computing.
Would Google Inc., use volunteer distributed computing for its crawling needs? I doubt it very much especially from comments about Grub:
"I don't want more computers or bandwidth," he said. "I want more clues about which page to look at rather than another page. The problem is how to rank the right pages. I don't think whether you are a distributed architecture affects that. The problem for us is how do we direct the crawl, not do we have enough resources to get the crawl."
Google is also experimenting with distributed computing. The Google Search Bar, which adds search capabilities to a Web browser's toolbar, donates spare cycles to Stanford's Folding@Home project, which simulates the ultra-complex process of protein folding. However, the director of search, Norving, did not say Google would not use distributed computing in the future. He simply said it was not applicable to Google Search at the moment.
Google Inc., is learning much about distributed computing, and it will always need to keep its options open as to how distributed computing whether it is voluntary or not, can be used in the future. Added to this, though, is the fact that blogs, the web, and in fact the Internet is largely composed through a distributed computing model, and in many cases a voluntary distributed computing model. It would not surprise me if Google Inc., came out with a voluntary distributed computing model of information collection from blogs - a way of sidestepping the need for crawling blogs.
Source: Microdoc News
Overture, a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, announced on April 22nd, 2003 that it had completed the acquisition of the Web search unit of Fast Search & Transfer, a leading developer of enterprise search and real-time filtering technologies.
Overture said it completed its $70 million cash purchase of the Web-search unit of Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer (FAST.OL). This is one of two key acquisitions in its battle for dominance in the fast-moving Web search and advertising market.
Under the terms of its deal with Fast, Overture acquired the company's AlltheWeb.com search engine and its "paid-inclusion" services for $70 million in cash. Overture also said the transaction includes an additional performance-based cash incentive payment of up to $30 million over three years.
Through the combination of FAST's Web search unit and AltaVista, Overture expects to offer customers a full suite of paid placement, paid inclusion and algorithmic Web search products and services for syndication to portals, ISPs and other search destination sites. Additionally, Overture also hopes that its own 80,000 advertisers will benefit through increased access to new products and sources of distribution to drive targeted leads.
As part of the agreement, Overture will use the new acquisition to test new approaches in the search process. The acquisition also will add to Overture's international presence, through FAST's key distribution relationships and advanced linguistic capabilities in about 50 languages.
Founded in 1997, FAST is based in Oslo, Norway and has operations in the United States (Boston, San Francisco), Europe (Norway, France, Germany, Italy, UK), and Japan. The acquisition includes FAST Web Search algorithmic search, AlltheWeb.com, and FAST PartnerSite paid inclusion services. FAST retains the intellectual property relating to its enterprise search technologies.
Source: Search Engine Optimization Ethics
In the latest quarterly report, we learned that LookSmart is still hovering around break-even and projecting a so-so year. A number of theories have been put forward to explain its weakness, ranging from lack of moral fiber to its dependency on MSN.
There may be some truth to those charges, but I'm surprised that no one has put their finger on what may be the fundamental reason that LookSmart's progress has stalled after it saved its bacon with a shift into the pay-per-click model: its failure to adopt the same market principle that has driven the growth of competitors Overture, Google Adwords, and Findwhat.
When LookSmart shifted from "pay for inclusion once" to a "pay for inclusion and then pay for clicks" model, it priced clicks at a flat 15 cents. Sound reasonable? It isn't.
Keywords and click-throughs all look sort of the same on paper, but the difference between getting exposure on the words "soy milk" and the words "mortgage refinancing" could be as different as getting exposure on a bus stop bench in a lightly-traveled road in a heavy-industry district and getting exposure on national television. It could be as different as dropping leaflets on a large city of illiterates and handing out free Blackberry pagers to Fortune 500 CEO's. You can't put a flat price on this stuff.
Because pay-per-click advertisers now track everything, they are aware of metrics like cost-per-customer-acquired, cost-per-order, cost-per-lead, etc. The price of the clicks is virtually irrelevant, except that for costs per lead to be in line with profitable targets and industry averages, some businesses need really cheap clicks (10 cents might be too high), and others will be willing to pay $1.50 per click to get exposure ahead of their competition who also track their results and are willing to bid as high as $1.45 a click.
What is probably happening right now, given the likelihood that LookSmart-generated traffic doesn't, on average, convert as well as Overture or Google traffic, is that a certain percentage of LookSmart advertisers have seen their conversion data and now know that fifteen cents is no bargain. So they suspend, or at least, fail to increase, their LookSmart budgets. The remaining advertisers - those who do turn a profit at fifteen cents - might be willing to outduel one another and bid prices up to 40 and 50 cents or more. But LookSmart is content to give it to them at fifteen cents, thus permanently limiting their upside.
That's not LookSmart's only problem, but clearly, adoption of the market principle is something that LookSmart must consider if they are to realize the same success with the pay-per-click model that others have. Clicks are worth vastly different amounts to different businesses targeting different consumers. Does a local television station charge $50,000 for a 30-second spot at 2 a.m.? More to the point, can you get a 30-second Super Bowl spot for $200?
The MSN dependency is a serious issue too. No matter how hard LookSmart works on its product quality, customer service, etc. - the fact is that when you begin charging by the click, you are now a little less like search and a little more like an advertising network. An advertising network must find places to put its ads. LookSmart currently is short on distribution partners.
Boxed into this tight spot, LookSmart could deke its way out of danger by merging with similarly-valued FindWhat. FindWhat could advise them on how best to implement the market principle in their product offering, and, of course, deliver a sizeable number of distribution partners to LookSmart. Lately, LookSmart has been acting like a company with $400 million in the bank, making "high-minded" acquisitions of little search companies and cool "projects." Time for a reality check.
Source: Traffick.com
Notching its fourth government contract, Ask Jeeves has been tapped to provide natural language search and navigation for the District of Columbia's municipal Web site. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The company's JeevesOne product will help residents, business owners, government employees and tourists find information about the nation's capital through www.dc.gov.
Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves, already counts the U.S. Navy, the state of Washington and the Municipal Association of South Carolina clients and sees potential in the public sector as cash-strapped governments look for ways to save money.
D.C.'s government will also use Jeeves Analytics software to study every question asked. The information will then be used to tweak the site's content and layout. By answering more questions online, the D.C. Government expects to field fewer calls and e-mail queries, freeing up employee.
Ask Jeeves said that's been the experience for Washington, a customer since 2001. The state handles more than 7,000 queries online daily. If each online query saves a three-minute phone call (or e-mail) to a state employee, it would total about 57,000 hours of staff time saved annually.
"The Web is a powerful tool for helping governments connect with and serve their citizens," said Scott Lomond, general manager of Jeeves Solutions. "For example, the State of Washington so values "Ask George" that they've given it top billing -- front and center real estate on Access Washington (the state's portal)."
Ask Jeeves' enterprise group competes against iPhrase and others. In the private sector its customers include British Telecom, Ford, Nestle, Nike and Visa.
Source: Internet News.com
Overture Services said it would release its paid inclusion and contextual marketing offerings in the next three months, as it tries to expand and diversify its product line.
The announcement came at the company's annual presentation for financial analysts, a little more than two weeks after Overture shocked investors by cutting its earnings forecast for the current year in half, in part because of a longer and more costly development of new products.
While making its name as the leading provider of keyword-based paid listings, Overture has embarked on overhauling the company to be a one-stop provider of a variety of search services, including algorithmic search, analytics, paid inclusion and contextual advertising. Paid inclusion and contextual ads will expand Overture's reach beyond the three or four keyword listings that appear on partner sites.
The rest of the page represents an opportunity to us," said Ted Meisel, Overture's chief executive. "It gives us the opportunity to create a better search experience."
Meisel, which described the new products as part of "Overture 2.0," sees big opportunities in search, which he estimated could be a $15 billion market by 2008.
Unlike paid listings, where a client is guaranteed placement on the results page, paid inclusion advertisers pay to have their Web pages crawled during a search. Contextual ads are served on content pages next to relevant text. For example, a sports-related Web site might carry keyword listings for team paraphernalia next to a story about a hockey game.
Overure's paid inclusion offering will be a hybrid of the paid inclusion technologies from Overture's two major search acquisitions earlier this year, Alta Vista and the search unit of FAST Search and Transfer. The two units will offer their paid inclusion products separately until then. (As a result of the Alta Vista and FAST integration, Overture said it would cut 100 positions, mostly from sales and finance.)
In the paid inclusion market, Overture faces entrenched competition, although not from Google. The market leader for paid inclusion is LookSmart, which has felt the pinch of rising competition. Earlier this week, the company cut its earnings outlook on account of higher spending on product development to stay ahead of the competition.
Overture said it would release Content Match, its contextual advertising service, later this quarter. Content Match also faces stiff competition, in this case from Overture nemesis Google. In late February, Google released its Content-Targeted AdWords. Already, the company has inked a number of deals, including a distribution agreement with Knight-Ridder Digital and ad networks Burst Media and Fastclick. Google upped the ante further with its acquisition last month of Applied Semantics, a contextual advertising pioneer and Overture distribution partner.
Like Google, Overture will allow advertisers to opt out of its contextual advertising scheme. Overture has not announced any distribution partners for Content Match.
Likewise, paid inclusion is not without its concerns. Advertisers are not guaranteed placement, but their Web pages appear without a searcher knowing they were included for pay. For this reason, Google has said it has no plans to offer a product.
In addition, Overture is at work on a local search product that will allow advertisers to target customers in a geographic area. The company said local search would be released by the end of the year.
Overture said the new products would boost its flagging earnings beginning next year. The company said 2004 earnings would be about double the 35 cents to 42 cents per share expected this year.
Source: Silicon Valley Internet.com
Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab.
CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement on Monday, at the JP Morgan Technology and Telecom conference. 'Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as "blogs,"' reported Reuters.
It isn't clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index. After a sticky start, Usenet veterans welcomed the new interface. Google recently acquired Blogger, and sources suggest this is the most likely option.
Bloggers too are likely to welcome their very own tab as a legitimization of the publishing format. But many others will breathe a sigh of relief as blogs disappear from the main index. "I just want a search engine that works," laments Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory.
"I can get a Google search with porn turned off; why can't I get blogs turned off too?" he asked on Slashdot. Google has strived in vain to maintain the quality of its search results in the face of a blizzard of links generated by a small number of sources. (Google searches 3,083,324,652 pages as of 4PM PT today. Assuming there are one million bloggers, and generously assuming they have a hundred pages each, that amounts to 0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google. Recent research by Pew put the number of blog readers as opposed to writers, as "statistically insignificant").
However, through dense and incestuous linking, results from blogs can drown out other sources. "The main problem with blogs is that, as far as Google is concerned, they masquerade as useful information when all they contain is idle chatter," wrote Roddy. "And through some fluke of their evil software, they seem to get indexed really fast, so when a major political or social event happens, Google is noised to the brim with blogs and you have to start at result number 40 or so before you get past the blogs." We'd noticed.
"Taking Usenet out of the general search was great, because it is not really interfering with general Internet searching," Roddy told us. "Usenet was a public forum in the first place." A Slashot discussion prompted a suggestion that Google add a -noblog option, which it effectively appears to be introducing by default.
Gary Stock, chief technology office for Nexcerpt, Inc. agrees. "A year or two ago you could hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and there was a good chance that you could find a good and authoritative page," he told us.
"It is less the case today. More and more people have more text to type, and may not have anything authoritative to say - they just throw up characters on the screen." He says that the link-based algorithm called PageRank™ was designed, at Stanford University, with very different assumptions about the quality of information.
"They didn't foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers," reckons Stock. "They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study - rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn't prepared."
Information Quality
For Stock and Roddy, the problem is that the resulting degradation in the quality of information makes it even harder to find primary source material. Roddy said the realization came after searching through 500 blog entries to find a primary source.
Exacerbating the problem, says Stock - who devised 'Googlewhacking', or the art of producing a search query that returns just one result - is the frequency with which the sites are indexed. "If they are really spidering all 3 billion pages, then they must have changed some law of physics," he explains.
"Someone has made a choice whether to go to a site ever hour or every three years. That begs the question - if I know something to be a high traffic site and I train my robots to visit often, do I discount it when I feed my information to PageRank?"
For example, he cites a hypothetical. "Suppose turtle-rescue.org has authoritative information about turtles. And it changes every month. Then BoingBoing puts up a page about turtles and that becomes a big deal.
"Each of us gets vote," jokes Stock. "And someone votes every day and I vote once every four years." "The blogs push up very quickly up to the top of the search results."
Databases
"To me the power of what Dave Winer and Ev Williams have done, and it's great, is that I can easily publish ResourceShelf in seconds, giving me time to do other things," says respected author and librarian Gary Price. Price doesn't regard his site as a weblog, even though he uses Blogger tools, now owned by Google. Price co-authored The Invisible Web, a guide to little-known about public resources on the Internet [Amazon - review].
"But what happens when the weblog fad dies down?" he asks. "The public think that they can put 2.1 words into Google and the best answer will appear, they don't ask how long is it taking them to get it. For the average person - its very good, but there are choices out there; and a lot of people aren't aware of them and don't know."
"You have to realize there are other information sources, and that information costs money." "This is why New York Public Libraries has a sign 'Here's where you find the stuff that isn't in Google.' and much of this is publicly accessible," Price points out.
Or as Seth Finkelstein reminds us,"Google is good, but not God." (We'll follow up what, and how to get it, soon).
Source: The Register
With the technology start-up boom over, the term Silicon Alley is fading into history, leaving behind a New York Internet industry that offers little excitement. But that has not stopped Google Inc., the Internet's post-boom darling, from planning to hire a team of about 100 software engineers for its Manhattan office.
"We came to the realization that not all the good programmers in the world lived in Silicon Valley," said Craig Nevill-Manning, a senior research scientist at Google who is relocating to New York. "And not all the good programmers in the world wanted to live in Silicon Valley."
The hiring spree by Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., offers little hope for New York's army of underemployed Web-design jockeys and e-commerce experts. Instead, Google is seeking the kind of advanced programmers who have been lurking around Wall Street's financial firms and New Jersey's corporate research labs for years. Mr. Nevill-Manning said, for example, that Google had already hired some programmers from Bell Labs.
Along with options to buy shares in Google, which is still private, the company is offering its engineer job candidates, as a break from their usual arcane research, the chance to work on practical projects like making improvements to its popular search engine. "They want to work on something their grandmother can appreciate," said Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology and the first employee hired by its founders.
The New York team will collaborate with the roughly 400 programmers at Google's headquarters and will also be free to develop their own projects, he said.
Until now, Google's colorful New York office near Times Square has housed an advertising sales group. Employees there have to do without the home office's cafeteria, where meals are prepared by the former chef for the Grateful Dead.
But Mr. Silverstein, who perched on an inflatable blue ball during an interview in the New York office, said the company was trying to make sure the staff there did not feel like second-class citizens. For example, employees on both coasts plan to take field trips to see the film "The Matrix: Reloaded" this week. And "we have free M&M's here as well," he said.
Source: New York Times
Google announced on Monday that it had created Google News UK, part of a move to upgrade its Internet news aggregation service by launching five new country-specific versions.
Similar local versions of Google News have also been launched in Australia, New Zealand, India and Canada.
Like the original Google News, these will gather news headlines and photographs from some 4,500 media outlets across the world, but it will prioritize those that specifically refer to each country's government, business, science and technology, sport and entertainment news. Google, whose Web search technology is also used by companies such as Yahoo, recently topped a list showing which portals and search engines are most popular with Internet users looking for information.
ZDNet UK's Graeme Wearden reported from London
Google has launched a separate version of its news search engine in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, India and Canada.
The database is not limited to local news sources, however, but presents a mix of some 4500 news sites from all over the world. Regional news is given top priority on the home page.
Unlike most news services of this kind, the stories are not selected by human editors, but by use of Google search engine algorithms.
Google News Search Australia
Google News Search UK
Google News Search New Zealand
Google News Search Canada
Google News India
Silicon Valley article
Source: Pandia Search World
The Web statistics software provider OneStat.com reports that Google now has a global average usage share of 55.2 percent.
According to OneStat the seven largest search engines on the Web are:
Google 55.2%
Yahoo! 21.7%
MSN Search 9.6%
AOL Search 3.8%
Terra Lycos 2.6%
Altavista 2.2%
Ask Jeeves 1.5%
Given that Google actually powers most of the various national incarnations of Yahoo! and AOL, between 70 and 80 percent of all search results are fetched from the Google database.
All numbers are an average of the last 2 months. Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day. There are no major changes compared to the previous measurement.
Source: Pandia Search World
Nearly one fifth of Yahoo's overall first-quarter revenue grew out of its partnership with Overture Services, a provider of paid search listings, the Web portal disclosed in a securities filing Thursday.
In a measure of the alliance's weight on Yahoo's earnings, the portal reported income of about $54 million from its partnership with Overture. That's 19 percent of the total revenue logged for the three months ended March 31 and more than double the roughly $23 million, or 12 percent of total revenue reported in the same period of 2002.
Overture provides payments to Yahoo for displaying its advertiser-sponsored search listings atop results pages. Each time Web surfers visiting Yahoo click on one of the sponsored links, Overture collects a fee from the advertiser behind the link and shares that revenue with Yahoo.
Yahoo has benefited heartily from the deal. In April, it reported its fourth consecutive quarter of profitability and its second consecutive quarter of growth in advertising revenue, partly because of cost-free revenue from Overture. Yahoo's recent filing illustrates how much influence the pay-per-click search provider holds with Yahoo. Without the reported $54 million in fees, Yahoo's profit of $46.7 million for the first quarter might have suffered.
As a result, industry analysts have speculated that Yahoo will eventually build its own paid search business and slowly edge out Overture, which has a contract with the portal until April 2005 with an option to extend the deal to 2011. Others have speculated that Yahoo might purchase Overture with its surplus cash of $750 million, a short-term interest-free loan it secured earlier this year.
But Safa Rashtchy, senior analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, said Yahoo benefits so nicely from the Overture relationship because it does not have to assume Overture's costs. The Web portal only reaps the rewards of revenue.
"This dependance on Overture for profits...is an indication of...the risk it will face if it were to build (such a service) in-house, since the level of monetization, and hence profits, will fall off sharply," Rashtchy wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com.
For the first quarter, Yahoo parsed revenue into three categories: marketing services, fees and listings. Marketing services, which encompasses online advertising and the paid search deal with Overture, jumped 38 percent year over year to $190 million. Executives said this revenue line got a boost from Overture and from traditional advertisers. Yahoo Chief Terry Semel said last month that excluding payments from Overture, marketing services revenue increased by a "double-digit percentage" over the same period last year.
In the filing, Yahoo acknowledged its reliance on Overture for revenue and highlighted some of the risk involved with its recent acquisition of Inktomi, an algorithmic search service that competes with Google. It said that by owning Inktomi, Yahoo is now in greater competition with AltaVista and Fast Search & Transfer, which are now both owned by Overture.
"We also generate a significant amount of revenue from our search and directory capabilities through an advertiser’s purchase of an enhanced placement in our results," the filing said. "If we are unable to provide search and directory services which generate significant traffic to our Web sites, to continue to secure an arrangement with a third party provider such as Overture on terms which are acceptable to us, or we are unable to develop our own ability to provide this service, our revenue could significantly decline.
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Ask Jeeves announced on Friday that Google has replaced Espotting as the paid-listing provider for its UK subsidiary, giving the search leader a key distribution outlet abroad.
The two-year deal calls for Google to provide the top three listings on results page of the Ask Jeeves UK search engine, ask.co.uk, under the heading "Websites I can show you." (The listings will be labeled as sponsored.) The two companies will split the revenues generated from advertisers' paying each time a user clicks on their listings. Further financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Ask Jeeves said it selected Google over both Espotting and Overture Services. Espotting signed a paid-listing deal with Ask Jeeves UK 18 months ago. Both Espotting and Overture will remain in Ask Jeeves UK's meta search results, at the bottom of the page. "The strength of the search advertising market, along with the value of our search traffic, resulted in a lively competition for our UK business," said Adrian Cox, Ask Jeeves UK's chief executive. "The performance of the Google program on Ask.com, coupled with the rapid growth of the AdWords advertiser base in the UK, make Google a valuable partner."
A Google representative declined to break out the number of UK-based advertisers the company has signed. Overall, Google boasts an advertising network of 100,000. Ask Jeeves was one of a key early group of distribution partners of Google's AdWords. At the time, Google was setting out to convert its strength in algorithmic search into a rival paid-listings program to that of industry leader Overture. Google replaced Overture in the July 2002 deal, having established itself in the prior months as a serious competitor through distribution agreements with EarthLink and America Online.
Nearly a year later, Google and Overture are neck and neck in generating paid listings, with comScore's qSearch service recently estimating that Overture has a slight lead in the market. Abroad, Overture has recorded a string of distribution partner wins when pitted against Google, establishing a foothold in three European countries and two Asian countries. Overture recently launched operations in Italy and plans to open in six more offices this year. Google has relied mostly on traffic to its local sites.
Ask Jeeves has profited handsomely from the booming market for paid listings, which is projected to grow from a $2 billion industry today to $6 billion in 2007. In the first quarter, the company took in $15.3 million from paid listings, a 210 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. While Google drove much of that growth through the U.S. deal, Ask Jeeves UK recorded $4.1 million from paid placement, a 320 percent increase from the first quarter in 2002. Ask Jeeves, which is among the top search destinations in the UK, will be Google's biggest distribution partner. In addition to its own popular search site, Google has distribution deals with ISPs BT Openworld and NTL. Google launched its AdWords program in the UK in September 2002. It said the Ask Jeeves UK deal improves its reach to 63 percent of the UK's online population.
The loss of Ask Jeeves UK comes as a blow to Espotting, which counted the search site as one of its top partnerships, particularly in the face of intense competition from both Google and Overture in its home market. Espotting retains distribution deals with Yahoo! UK and UK Plus. Overture still remains the dominant force in the UK market, having inked deals with FreeServe, MSN's local site, and AOL Europe. (Overture also has a distribution agreement with BT Openworld, which offers users the option of using Google or Overture.) Overture boasts reaching 80 percent reach in the UK. Its operations there have been profitable for five straight quarters.
Source: Internet News.com
Turbo10, the London based meta search engine, has been invited to demonstrate its so-called Deep Net search engine technology at the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference in Budapest on May 20 - 24.
This new technology is based on a technical paper titled The Mechanics of a Deep Net Metasearch Engine.
It's all about "the hidden Web", really, and how to reach it. The hidden or deep Web is the part of the Internet that is not reached by regular search engines, mainly because the data is only accessible if you make use of database search forms -- which normal search engines do not.
These sources include various specialist databases administered by universities, libraries and government departments.
Moreover, while most metasearch engines retrieve data from the regular search engines and directories, Turbo10 fetches information from hundreds of topic specific engines.
Nigel Hamilton, Turbo10's CEO and Technology Director, adds that there is a wealth of information in specialist databases that we are now just starting to access.
Source: Pandia
The search engine Google could soon be cataloguing the world wide web up to five times faster, thanks to new software tweaks developed by Stanford University computer scientists.
At the heart of Google's software is the Page Rank algorithm. It ranks how important a web page is by counting the number of links that lead to it, with links from a page that itself receives a lot of links weighing more heavily. Its fast, high-quality results have made Google the world's most popular search engine.
Ranking the more than three billion web sites now online can currently take days with PageRank. An individually customised ranking "would now take 5000 computers five days to do. It's not feasible," says Stanford researcher Sepandar Kamvar.
But even speeding up the process enough to allow ranking based on broad topics could be useful, he says. For example, a comedy buff looking for Marx would find much more about Groucho than Karl, making the search even more accurate than before.
Source: New Scientist
The All the Web search engine might have gotten bought by Overture, but apparently that hasn't stopped them from continuing to crank out the syntaxy goodness.
The first thing they're offering is a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet, in case you didn't know, is a little bit of JavaScript code that you can set as a bookmark. The difference between a bookmarklet and a regular bookmark is that a bookmark just opens up a page, while a bookmarklet does something -- in this case, it performs an "URL investigator" search on whatever page you're looking at.
For example. Grab the bookmarklet and add it to your regular bookmarks (You can get it for Netscape, IE, or Opera at http://www.alltheweb.com/info/news/2003.html ) and then go to http://www.newsisfree.com . Click on the bookmarklet. A new window opens up with an AlltheWeb page of information about NewsisFree.com, including the number of pages in AlltheWeb's index from this domain, the number of pages that link to it, and the number of pages that contain the term. This is handy when you quickly need information about a domain or about the scope of a Web site. (Remember, this bookmarklet only covers *domains*, not sub-domains.)
The second thing AlltheWeb offers is a new syntax: convert. Convert will do a query-box conversion between measurements. Type in, without quotes, "Convert: 3 ounces" and AlltheWeb will serve up a page of metric and imperial conversions for three ounces.
Source: Research Buzz.com
There is a battle raging over the control over the European pay-per-click search engine text ad market. The combatants are Espotting, Google AdWords and Overture.
Last week Espotting lost the Ask Jeeves UK account to Google, which was a serious, although not fatal, blow. Given that Overture has bought two important European players, AltaVista and the Fast Web search division, Espotting may soon find it hard to find major search sites and portals to carry its text ads.
Espotting is not giving up, though. Espotting has expanded its contextual advertising deal with Kelkoo, Europe's leading comparison shopping search engine, to cover a total of 30 "channels" (i.e. categories of goods and services) in four European countries: The UK, France, Germany and Spain. Espotting will deliver its top five results as "Top Sponsored Picks" on relevant Kelkoo channels.
At the same time Overture has announced that it is opening its sixth European office -- in Italy this time.
Source: Pandia.com.
Consumer Webwatch will shortly present a report that concludes that searchers find it hard to distinguish between paid pay-per-click text ads and regular search results.
In a discussion on "Building Trust on the Web" under the Consumer WebWatch's April summit on Web credibility, Leslie Marable of Consumer WebWatch told that according to one study of April last year 60 percent of the consumers they polled "had no idea that some search engines charged fees in exchange for prominent placement of search results."
It should be added that since then several search engines have started designating their pay-per-click search results more clearly, not at least because of pressure from the American Federal Trade Commission. This was clearly one of the reasons Consumer WebWatch commissioned a new study.
The new study is not based on a phone survey like the previous one. Instead Consumer Webwatch has opted for an anthropological/ethnographical in-depth study of 17 people. It turns out that all participants were surprised when they learned about pay for placement -- even the more "advanced" Web users.
Search sites often mark paid results as "sponsored". One participant noted that "A sponsor is someone who gives money to support programs," and he did clearly not read this to mean "paid text ads". This is not a representative survey. You need more than 17 respondents to achieve that. Still, we would not be surprised if a majority of searchers are unable to distinguish between pay-per-click text ads and regular search results -- especially when the text is formatted and presented in a similar way.
Does it matter? Well, a cynic may argue that "what they do not not won't hurt them" -- as long as they find relevant results that is. Both Overture and Google AdWords spend a lot of resources on ensuring that the paid text ads actually are relevant -- not only to avoid complaints from organizations like the Consumer WebWatch, but also in order to make advertisers happy. Relevant text ads results in more click-throughs and higher conversion rates.
But there is also the question of credibility. If this marks the start of a new debate on the legitimacy of pay-per-click text ads, the search sites may get hurt, as these ads have become one of their most important sources of revenue. Moreover, the success of a site like Google is built on a good reputation, and Google cannot afford to loose that.
Google has actually done a lot to distinguish the text ads from regular search results, placing them i colored text boxes set apart from the rest of the listings. However, they are still called "Sponsored Links". So why don't they just call the adverts "Adverts"? Our guess is that they are afraid that this will cause a drop in click-throughs and lower revenue.
In the long run, however, the risk of more bad publicity may make that a more sensible option. The searchers may like it as well. This especially applies to those that are searching for information instead of goods and services. People who want to know more about how to grow a lush lawn are not always looking for fertilizer.
For a presentation of last years controversy, see "Paid results have finally become 'Sponsored Links'" (The Pandia Post July 2002).
Source: Pandia.com
Northern Light sent out a press release on May 22 announcing "Northern Light, the tiny little search engine company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, emerged today from the chaos of the Divine bankruptcy, smaller but basically intact, its notable search, classification, and content integration technology still viable and ready to roll." (See the press release at http://tinyurl.com/cmub .) Northern Light was purchased by the former CEO, C. David Seuss.
A story about the purchase in the Boston Business Journal ( boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2003/05/19/daily35.html ) indicates that Seuss bought the engine for all of $81,000. It's not clear if the Web search is coming back, but Seuss said in the press release "We have started discussions with interested parties about ideas for new approaches to delivering on the promise of Web searching, ideas that represent a collaboration between others who have done innovative work and Northern Light. These ideas may result in uniquely useful Web search services."
If Northern Light does come back, and I don't think it's a bad idea, it needs to come back swinging. Even before its sale to divine it suffered from a too-low profile (in my opinion) and insufficient discussion of its good points (including e-mail alerts and a really nice news search engine.) Its partnership with Yahoo was just the boost it needed, but right on its heels came a sale to divine and all the associated problems there.
If I were C. David Seuss, I would get right out in front. More feisty press releases (the leading sentence on the Web page, "We are pleased to announce that we have escaped and are an independent company once again", is a good start.) Take a lead on something the other search engines haven't done too much with, like RSS feeds for search results or a support of an meta-data standard for news pages. Don't try to out-Google Google.
The Northern Light Web page ( http://www.northernlight.com ) offers sign up for three different Northern Light mailing lists but not much other information. Worth keeping an eye on.
Source: Research Buzz.com.
If you want to find what you are looking for on the web, use a single search engine and get to know its quirks.
US researchers studying the best way to find information online say trying the same query on different search engines rarely produces the best results.
Instead searchers should become more familiar with their favourite search engine and use its advanced features to refine results. The researchers found that only 10% of net seekers were tuning their searches using the extras offered by most search sites.
Smooth operator
The good thing about the net is the depth and diversity of information online. But this does mean that it is often hard to separate what you want from the mass of irrelevant webpages thrown up by almost every net search. US researchers Bernard Jansen and Caroline Eastman studied the way that people look for information online and found that the individual quirks of search sites make it hard to define a single strategy to find what you want every time. Here are some good search tips:
* Stick to one search engine
* Get to know its advanced features
* Be as specific as possible
* Put search term in quotes
* Use words like "or", "must appear" or "not"
"There are no wholesale rules about structuring a query that will work on multiple search engines," said Bernard Jansen, assistant professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State University. "And what works on one engine, such as narrowing a query, can have the opposite effect on other search engines," he said.
For instance, refining a search on Google using "or" significantly changes the results it returns but does not have the same effect on the MSN and AOL search sites. In their study of 600 queries the two scientists found that 60% of results returned for a particular set of terms will be the same across all search sites.
Instead of looking for the pages that every search engine returns when searching, Professor Jansen and his co-author recommend that users become as familiar as possible with one search engine and stick to it. The researchers found that only 10% of people refine the results served up to them using words such as "or", "must appear" or try to ensure their search terms are treated as a single phrase.
Refining a search with such words can make a big difference to the numbers of pages returned. For instance, looking up "monkey" and "tennis" on Google produces 109,000 hits. By contrast, searching for "monkey tennis" as a phrase returns only 2,200.
Professor Jansen said users who understood how best to search on one or two engines should use them until systems designers figure out how to personalise information retrieval.
Source: BBC News.
Fast, smart, personalized to suit every user's needs. And pretty. That's what the search engine of the near future will be.
Tweaking existing search engines and developing new ways to find specialized data were the subjects of two dozen papers presented at this week's 12th International World Wide Web Conference in Budapest. While search engines have improved steadily under the hood since the first days of the Web, they look and function pretty much the same as ever. But computer scientists are working on new search techniques and interfaces that could significantly alter most surfers' results pages. Expect, for example, to be able to sift through search results graphically, or to personalize Google results.
A team of researchers from Japan's Nec presented a paper titled "Mining the Peanut Gallery" describing (PDF) a tool that would allow consumers to automatically sort through product reviews. The Review Seer returns rankings of products based on user feedback culled from newsgroup and website postings. Surfers could further personalize searches by specifying what features and price ranges they are interested in.
There are still some issues to be sorted out with Seer, said Kushal Dave, a member of the team that developed the tool. One particularly pesky problem is dealing with reviews that contain a lot of negative comments, but wrap up with a final sentence exonerating the product. "Humans are so … random," grumbled one audience member.
Other speakers focused on new ways to present search results to users. Ben Shneiderman, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park, is convinced that most people are better at communicating with their computers when they can see data, rather than reading or writing it. He demonstrated several visual search tools, including the TimeSearcher, which allows seekers to see graphics illustrating search result data.
TimeSearcher allows users to define search terms on a graph, clicking and dragging to specify that results should, for example, be confined to data created or changed on specific dates. Any information that is tied to time can be searched with TimeSearcher. PhotoMesa and PhotoFinder are a combination browser and search tool specifically designed for searching digital images. Specialized search tools that work on one computer or across a private network are a step toward personalized searching of the Internet where results will be tailored to the express desires of each user.
Eventually, search engines will be able to consult cookies -- small text files placed on users' hard drives by Web servers -- and assume, from past searches, that a user is looking for one type of information and not another. The cookies could tell a search engine to return only new information, or only data targeted to the user's location. In any case, personalized searching won't be possible until Google, already known for running lightning-fast searches, is 10 times faster.
Google could increase its search speed using new techniques developed by Stanford University computer-science researchers, who presented a paper on their findings at the conference. "We've gotten a lot of press attention today from this work," said Stanford researcher Sepandar Kamvar. "Some of it is not quite correct. One major caveat: Google will not run five times faster if our research is implemented, but we do expect a 30 percent speed-up."
According to Kamvar, three simple-to-implement tweaks to Google would measurably boost search speed, "freshen" the results and -- if the research is further refined -- eventually allow for personalized searches. Google's owners haven't said whether they will adopt the Stanford research, but Google co-founder Sergey Brin was in the audience.
Source: Wired News.
There has been complaints about editors using the Open Directory (ODP) to forward their own interests only. ODP meta editors are introducing an abuse report system in order to defend the directory's quality and integrity.
There are search engines and there are search directories. While search engines crawl from one Web page to another using software based "robots", search directories are built by human editors that visit each and every one of the sites included. The mother of all search directories is, of course, Yahoo!. However, the Open Directory, a volunteer based initiative, is just as important -- or maybe even more so, as a listing in this directory may influence your ranking in Google in a positive way.
You may access the directory at a lot of sites, including Google and AOL. The Pandia Plus directory is also based on the ODP. In a large number of categories the Open Directory, or DMOZ as it is also called, provides some of the best collection of online resources available. However, it is no secret that there is a lack of editors in some areas of the catalog.
Moreover, there are webmasters that try to abuse the system, getting too many listings, entries that inappropriate etc. This abuse undermine the legitimacy of the database, and could -- in a worst case scenario -- lead Google and other search sites to abandon the directory. The DMOZ team has for a long time had a very strict policy against editors trying to use their position to promote their own sites. If found, they are normally kicked out. However, there are more than 57,000 editors and a very small staff. Quite a few cheaters slip by.
Now the directory is taking a new approach in the battle against both internal and external abusers. Users of the ODP (and hence of the Google Directory or Pandia Plus) may now report suspicions of abusive editors/conduct to DMOZ Meta Editors and Staff. "All reports will be investigated expeditiously and in complete confidence," ODP Meta Editor Ettore R. Peyrot says. "If abuse is found we will rectify it."
Users will be able to submit reports anonymously, although the ODP would like to have an email address, in case they need to ask for more information. According to the "Frequently Asked Questions About the DMOZ Abuse Report System", the following behavior is not accepted:
* Editors giving preferential treatment to their sites
* Editors adding inappropriate sites (e.g. pornographic sites)
* Sites listed in the Kids branch which present adult content
* Biased/slanted categories where some views are suppressed
* Editors accepting bribes
However, the ODP editors are not that concerned about spam techniques used to influence rankings in search engines. After all, these editors visit your site personally, and if they see a high quality site of relevance to their category, they will normally add it. Hence hidden links won't hurt you, but they won't help you either. The new system is currently in a beta testing phase, which is why it is not hosted on the dmoz.org servers.
However, it does have the "full blessing and support of the ODP staff".
Source: Pandia.com
You're not going to believe this, but a new search engine has just appeared and, well, it may be better than Google.
Obviously, that sounds slightly ridiculous but after having spent a day devising weird and wonderful searches and comparisons, not only has it stood up to the test but it's so good that you realise how much of an effect Google has had on your thinking when it comes to searching the Net. You can go try it now - it's at Turbo10.com - but for God's sake, before you start emailing and ranting and raving, read the rest of this story as it will probably cover what you're going to say.
The cons
First of all, let's get it out the way and slag Turbo10 off. One, it's called Turbo10 - brings to mind something slightly 80s with silver streaks. It's called Turbo because, spokeswoman Megan Hamilton explains "we wanted a name that connoted speed. Also the word 'turbo' has the same meaning across a number of major European languages". The "10" is vital to the search engine. Megan says: "The 10 is used because we show 10 results per page, we connect up to 10 target engines, and we show the top 10 topic clusters for every search." It's still called Turbo10 though. However, if you remember correctly, everyone thought "Google" was a bit of a silly name when it first appeared in Beta.
Turbo10 is cluttered. It's cluttered and the colours (dark blue and purple) will not be to many people's tastes. A far cry from the liberating white space in Google. Is this a return to the bad old days of over-complex search engines? No, because when AltaVista was king, all those extra bits were useless add-ons and got in the way. Every single bit of Turbo10's page has a very real and very useful function. The results are tightly packed in and the description of where your search request is in the document is not that great. It sometimes contains a meaningless jumble of words and it seems a little buggy in that it sticks the wrong thing in sometimes. We imagine this will be ironed out as it comes out of Beta.
Turbo10 does not let you use punctuation marks or logical expressions (well, it does, but they have no effect). Now, your immediate reaction is "that's rubbish - how the hell will I get at what I want?" But after playing with the site a bit, you realise that this reaction is due to the Google (and many previous engines) mindset you have for searching the Web. If you assume for a minute that you can get exactly what you want without having to use the various refining techniques that we have all learnt, then this non-use of logical expressions is a positive thing. Basically, Turbo10 has a different philosophy of Net searching and after a while you start to get it.
The pros
Let's give the Turbo10 PR information here. "Turbo10 has launched the first fully automated system that creates and maintains connections to online databases en masse. 'Connecting to 1000 engines is just the tip of the iceberg. By creating an automated system we can connect to thousands more,' Nigel Hamilton, Turbo10's CEO said." That's the start of the company's press release. The more interesting bit is further down: "Turbo10 searches the Deep Net - a vast array of specialist databases that range from business associations, universities, libraries, and government departments. These specialist search engines are inaccessible to traditional crawler-based engines such as Altavista.com and google.com who can only index static pages. Turbo10 is the first commercial metasearch engine to connect to hundreds of these specialised engines en masse, broadening the depth and range of search results for the online searcher."
That's it in a nutshell. Okay, so now you're thinking "this is just as academic, specialist search engine and it can't even be compared to Google". In fact, it can be compared directly to not only Google but also specialist search engines - plus the ones in between like Teoma. Turbo10 let's you select up to 10 search engines to run a search through. But unlike AskJeeves where all the results are irritatingly put in different boxes, Turbo10's genius to combine them all in one weighted listing - it's the search engine of search engines. So if you wanted, you could select google.com, google.co.uk and news.google.com to search in.
If you only select these three, Turbo10 will run a search and also choose another seven search engines it sees as best-fits for your search. Then, the results will be displayed according to either speed (Turbo10 doesn't want to be accused of being slow) or relevance, irrespective of search engine, but with the search engine that the result came from shown. Although we note that suspiciously few results come from Google itself. The reduction of search results from this initial list is then done by the use of clusters in a box on the left-hand side. So, for example, a search on "the register" - two very common words - gives Register.com as the first choice. TheRegister.co.uk only makes it to number eight. However, among the clusters on the left are "news" - which links mostly to news stories and is less help - but also "theregister content" - all of which links to stories on this site. Once you use the clusters a few times, you end up getting to what you're looking for faster than with advanced searches or logical expressions.
So what? Google still gives you everything you need and Turbo10 is too much trouble. Well, quite possibly true - but then Turbo10 has a lot of advantages.
New search mentality
Rather than list results in a long line, causing you to have to scroll, Turbo10 has ten fitted on the page and you use arrow buttons to move onto different pages. You may like this, you may not, it doesn't matter, it's there. But you will notice that there are only spaces for 10 of these pages - so, a total of 100 results for any particular search. In most cases however, there are only three of four pages - so just 30 or 40 results returned. Here again is where there is a different mindset. While Google tends to go "oooooooooo" right across the page, Turbo10 sticks to its guns and throws out very few.
This is the crux: if you want something obscure in Google and most other engines, you keep changing the search criteria until you get it or you finally find it on page 36. With Turbo10, you simply choose different search engines. When we first started trying out the engine yesterday, it had 1102 search engines available. At the moment, it links to 1108. But the time you've reached the end of this article, it will be probably be more.
The core of Turbo10 is that you select your own engines. This is all done simply online. You select the ten you want, give the "collection" a name, and stick on your email address (it promises to never sell it) so you can be recognised and then this is added to a list of "collections" that you can select using a drop-down menu on the main search area. So, basically, you could use the Turbo10 default setting (about, altavista, bbc, dmoz, encyclopaedia, goggle, msn, yahoo) for general Web searches but if you want a news story, you set up a collection of 10 news search engines and call it "news". You then select this one is what you want is news stories. Then, if you want say something technical, you set up another collection with 10 technical search engines.
It's a different way to find what you want, and if you think about it, far more logical than learning different search tricks and techniques. Plus - and this is the real killer - we reckon that aside from all the "how it works" and "what it means" stuff, Turbo10 produces BETTER results for a given search. In fact, after using it for a while, you tend to notice that Google slightly over-rates geeky and sub-culture comments in place of solid, useful links and facts.
Vision
Turbo10 has a vision for how search engines will work in the future. Spokeswoman Megan Hamilton confirms that Turbo10 is going for the broad market and so competing with Google. "We want to become the Hotmail of search - personalised to each searcher," she says. We're not sure that is the best comparison to make, but the idea is to use the latest Internet technology to make search engines less impersonal. Plenty of new features are in the pipeline. "We are going to use Amazon-style recommendation algorithms to further personalise searching. Searchers will be able to view their own search profiles which will also act as bookmarks. Most search engines have no idea who their users are - we want to change this completely - to user-focused search. Each user's search profile will interact with others ... we want to create a blog-o-sphere of search users and their profiles. More browsing options and result annotation will also be included." (Hopefully with this personalised approach, you will be able to change the colours.)
Of course, whether this plan is a truly wonderful and helpful idea or another irritating way for a company to learn too much about you depends entirely on how you view the organisation running it. Turbo10 is brand new and so has yet to build up trust with its users, so we'll hold off until time gives a better perspective. However, from what we've seen, this looks like a really good and useful search engine. Better than that, it actually provides a different philosophy of running Internet searches. With Google having come to dominate the market (to the extent that people seem to forget that it is a company and not some kind of United Nations for the Internet), the competition and new blood can only be a good thing.
I'm sure I've forgotten lots of bits and bobs but this review is too long already, so get out there and see what you think. Oh, Turbo10 doesn't have the Google cache feature complete with highlighted words, which seems to be becoming more important every day, which is a shame. Also, please don't bother emailing saying that there's no way this will put an end to Google: of course it won't, Google is Google and is pretty much here to stay. This is an alternative.
Apart from that, our only fear is that it will be knocked offline by the demand that will inevitably follow.
Source: The Register
A federal judge this week granted Google's motion to dismiss a suit that alleged the company manipulated search results in its powerful Web index.
U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange on Tuesday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction brought by SearchKing, an Oklahoma City-based Web hosting and advertising network that claimed Google unfairly removed links to its site and those of its partners from the index, causing financial losses. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds that Google's formula for calculating the popularity of a Web page, or "PageRank," constitutes opinions protected by the First Amendment.
"PageRanks are opinions--opinions of the significance of particular Web sites as they correspond to a search query," according to the decision filed in the U.S Western District Court of Oklahoma. "The court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given Web site is false," the decision said. "Accordingly, the court concludes Google's PageRanks are entitled to full constitutional protection."
SearchKing, which operates an advertising network, originally filed a grievance in October 2002. Its complaint centered on Google's PageRank algorithm and charged that Google devalued SearchKing's PageRank score, bumping it and its ad network out of listings. The Web-hosting company operated an ad network that sold text links on popular Web sites to get them a better listing in Google results. SearchKing sought a preliminary injunction against Google, asking to be restored to its previous PageRank and to be awarded $75,000 in damages. Late last year, SearchKing's top listing was restored on Google.
The judge denied SearchKing's request for damages, saying it "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted." Mountain View, Calif.-based Google countered in January with a motion to dismiss the case based on constitutional protections.
A Google representative declined to comment on the ruling. SearchKing CEO Bob Massa expressed disappointment over the ruling, but he didn't see it as a complete loss.
"We have been able to give the Internet marketing community a much clearer view of the inner workings of Google, their systems, their reach and their own view of themselves," he said in a statement. "SearchKing never broke a law, yet was accused, judged and executed without so much as a notice of intent. This affected thousands of innocent people without just cause." Massa said he is reviewing his legal options.
Article by Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Interview with Chris Ridings - Google PageRank expert
From Search Engine Blog.com:
Today we talk to the rather knowledgeable Chris Ridings about (surprise, surprise) PageRank , SearchKing and cowboys.
Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Chris. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What is your background?
Well, it looks like people are stuck with me rather than the "blind lesbian circus performers with a grudge" that you practically promised everyone last week. It's a shame, I was really looking forward to reading what they had to say.
I'm sure your readers will try to hide their obvious disappointment. I come from the silicon valley of SEO, otherwise known as the UK.
