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NuSearch utilises a Java applet that is embedded in the site that users have to opt-in to download before using.
NuSearch results are listed on the left side of the results page while the web sites themselves are in a Java powered window on the right side of the browser.
In the background, your browser has started downloading the first few target pages in your results list. Once each one is loaded, its entry in the list changes color and also gives you an indication of the size of the page.
The first page to be ranked is immediately previewed in the main area of the browser window. This means you get to see the page your searched for without having to go to it.
Once other pages are downloaded into the list, you can preview those too, simply by moving your mouse pointer over the list. The currently previewed item is highlighted.
NuSearch does offer some other cool features, like automatically sizes itself depending on the size of your browser window, an IE browser enhancing toolbar and an “Add UR"L function where users can submit their pages and have them indexed in realtime.
What else marks out NuSearch as revolutionary? According to Giles Chanot, Chief Software Architect at NuSearch “Well, that Applet that sits in the web page is really the key to the whole show.
Every time you perform a search and it downloads some web pages, it compares these with the copies on the NuSearch server.
If they’re new or have been updated, this information is sent back to the server (in a highly compressed form). This enables NuSearch to keep its index much more up to date than would otherwise be possible: the more people use NuSearch, the better it gets.”
At first glance the NuSearch rank indexing may need some help, but I think its a decent search tool with an interesting technology - best used with Broadband Internet Connections.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Various search engines and numerous databases provide instant access to an almost endless information stream on just about anyone or anything, but sometimes the search results can be deceptive.
To generate more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal government are using topic maps to index their data.
Topic maps are smart indices that improve search capabilities by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things. For example, William Shakespeare is a topic that would be mapped to essays about him, his plays and his famous quotes.
Today's the Day. Organizing content with topic maps provides context for words that can have multiple meanings, according to Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.
For example, searching Google for "Franz Ferdinand" mixes results for the alternate rock group and the doomed Austrian archduke for whom the group is named. If topic maps were used to organize the data, the musical and historical links would be separated, Durusau said. "The payoff (of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject," Durusau said.
Durusau said the Internal Revenue Service began developing topic maps to organize its tax forms about three years ago. Topic maps are used to help IRS representatives answer phone calls more efficiently, as well as to create the small-business CD that the agency sends to taxpayers. The IRS also uses topic maps to compare its data with that of the Social Security Administration, which "is structured completely different," he said.
Computer automation and human intervention are used in building topic maps, according to Michel Biezunski, president of InfoLoom and a consultant on the IRS project. He said an artificial-intelligence application groups the data into a preliminary map that is then refined by people, he said. "You need experts to build the relationships" between terms, according to Biezunski.
Biezunski, who helped write the topic-maps specification that was passed by the International Organization for Standardization, said several U.S. Department of Defense agencies are building topic maps, and that the legal and pharmaceutical industries are the next ones likely to index their data. "We are only at the beginning" of adoption, he said.
George Kondrach, president of software company Innodata Isogen, has been consulting with several U.S. intelligence agencies on how to use topic maps to overcome regional variations in spelling. Kondrach said agencies are working to define suspected terrorists as topics so that differences in agency spelling, such as "Osama" versus "Usama," would no longer prevent linking to vital information.
"The same problem exists in tracing genealogy," where last-name changes are common, Kondrach said. Topic maps can accelerate building family trees, as family members would be defined by all of their relationships, simplifying the process of tracking previous generations and extended families.
Eric Freese, a software engineer for research company LexisNexis, helped to create the World Wide Web Consortium standard for creating XML documents so that they can be easily incorporated into topic maps.
Outside the U.S. government, Freese said the most interest in topic maps is coming from Europe, where companies such as Ontopia, Mondeca and Empolis are developing commercial applications. "The fact that it is gaining ground in Europe has me optimistic that we'll figure it out here," Freese said.
The sagging U.S. economy has slowed the adoption of topic maps in the private sector, according to Freese. "In 2002 (when the XML standard was finalized), nobody was spending on new technology except the government," Freese said. LexisNexis has a few prototype applications using topic maps but has not yet updated its commercial databases.
Freese said topic maps would allow a LexisNexis query of the word "Iowa" to differentiate between the University, the state and the jurisdiction. "It makes sense to present the multiple choices (of context) before returning all of the results," he said.
Freese said search engines such as Google could take advantage of topic maps to increase the accuracy of web search without any changes to the web pages they are indexing. He said the Open Directory Project is already taking advantage of topic maps.
Source: Wired News
Is Snap revealing too much of its own numbers?
Silicon Beat interviewed Bill Gross earlier this month to see how his Snap new search engine is coming on.
Gross unveiled Snap at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco in early October and vowed to do something we'd not seen at another company: share the daily financial details of his company with its users.
Sure enough, looking at Snap's stats page today, we see that:
--- They've served 2.6 million searches since they first launched
--- Snap made $55.88 yesterday
--- They have 1,235 advertisers
--- Snap had 624 clicks on ads yesterday that generated revenue
Digging deeper, we find that the most searches in one day was 59,723. In early November, the number of advertisers shot up from single-digits to the 1,235 that Snap has today. Last month, Snap made $1,176.40 in gross revenues. So far, this month it's made $1,558.56.
Now that the business is up and running, we asked Gross if he'd changed his mind about this level of transparency.
Not in the least. "Now whenever I want to find out how we're doing, I just go to the home page," Gross said from his Southern California office at Idealab.
Although Snap's revenues and search counts are but a sliver of its competitors, Gross is thrilled with the speed with which the Web site has grown.
"We never thought we'd see a million searches this fast,'' he said. "But now that we have, advertisers are starting to see that there's a market.'' (Snap crossed the 2 million search mark shortly after we chatted with him.)
Gross said that once the site opens up its self-serve advertising service -- similar to what Overture and Google offer -- the number of advertisers will shoot up.
"As soon as that goes up, we'll have thousands. We have a lot of pent-up demand.''
We asked Gross if it really made sense for companies to be so forthright about their financial situation, particularly if they are new and off to a slow start.
Won't investors and potential business partners, sensing a dud, shy away when they see the numbers. It doesn't give new companies much time to build momentum.
Consider, too, how the stock market would react to a company's daily business diary. On the one hand, investors would get to see the daily life-cycle of a company. But how would investors react to daily or weekly blips in traffic or revenues? (Witness the dip and then spike in searches and revenues that Snap experienced around November 20 as an example.)
"That's a good point. I would countercontend that we make the marketplace more interesting to advertisers. I'm predicting this is the wave. You can't write that story for a year, but I'm predicting this is the way to go.''
"It's kind of scary to put that data out there,' he added. "But it's liberating at the same time. I think it's good in the long-term. I think it will be a trend. In every aspect, it's better to be open.''
Source: Silicon Beat
Desktop search features and newer computer indexing tools such as Google's Desktop Search could cause security risks.
The reason is simply because companies that use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL protocol) to remote access or VPN, these protocols could copy content accessed during any SSL session and make it available to anybody that later uses the same computer.
Caches created by PC search tools get around the security many SSL vendors have put in place to purge cached data from remote machines as secure sessions shut down. These so-called cache-cleaning agents wipe out temporary files created during SSL sessions, but they don't wipe out the copies made by the search tools.
"You could end up caching and indexing files you don't want cached and indexed on machines outside your control," says Dan Harman, remote access administrator for real estate developer Lewis Group in Upland, Calif., which uses SSL remote-access gear made by Whale Communications Ltd.
One touted benefit of SSL remote-access technology is that any machine with a Web browser can be used to access a corporate network securely. The downside is that the PCs might not be owned by the corporation, so any number of unauthorized users could have access to them. "This tends to negate user authentication," says Rick Fleming, CTO of Digital Defense Inc., a vulnerability assessment company.
Besides Google's product, such search engines are made by Blinkx, Copernic Technologies Inc., ISYS Search Software and X1 Technologies Inc. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are said to be on the verge of having them, too.
SSL VPN vendor Aventail Corp. says its Secure Desktop, a virtual desktop for SSL sessions that are destroyed when the session closes, prevents files downloaded during the session from being viewed by Google Desktop Search.
To solve the problem for its customers, Whale has a software upgrade that detects whether Google Desktop Search is running on a remote PC. If so, access to the corporate network is denied or restricted. The company is developing similar upgrades to address nine other desktop search engines, says Whale Chief Technology Officer Noam Ben-Yochanan.
Google Desktop Search makes it easier to find data on PC hard drives and doesn't address these security concerns, a Google spokesman says. Customers can manually turn off Desktop Search or put it on pause during SSL remote-access sessions to avoid having the sessions cached by the search engine, he says.
Ben-Yochanan says he installed Google Desktop Search on a PC, opened an e-mail attachment, altered the document, sent it as an attachment, then deleted the file from the hard drive. Desktop Search retained a copy of the original attachment and the modified version.
Fleming says such tools pose similar threats to shared PCs on corporate LANs. So a person working the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift could access all the data accessed by the person working the 8 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shift, including personal human resources data or Internet banking information, he says.
Similarly, if a network administrator uses a random desktop to reconfigure a firewall, a desktop search engine will record those settings and the password used to gain access, Fleming says.
It also makes it easier for attackers to search machines they have taken over, says Fred Felman, vice president of marketing for Zone Labs Inc.
Source: ComputerWorld.com
Creative Commons has updated the beta version of its search engine, which scans the web for text, images, video and audio files that are free to re-use on certain conditions.
Creative Commons’ announcement coincides with the Mozilla Foundation’s release of its industry-leading browser, Firefox 1.0, which now features the Creative Commons search technology in its toolbar alongside such leading search services as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Dictionary.com.
“The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer, and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online,” said Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons and the search engine’s product manager.
For example, a documentary filmmaker could use the Creative Commons engine to search for “images of the Eiffel Tower free for noncommercial use,” and incorporate any or all of the many photographs indexed.
A DJ seeking songs free to remix or mash-up could browse listings of MP3s by their legal terms. An entrepreneur seeking illustrations for her slideshow presentation could reduce costs and liability by using a Creative Commons image-specific search. An educator building course materials could include texts and videos found by the engine.
What distinguishes the Creative Commons engine from other search services is that all of the above are possible without the hassle of rights-clearance, licensing requests, or royalty payments.
At the core of the Creative Commons search engine are two key innovations, one legal and one technological.
First, Creative Commons offers authors and artists a simple, standardized way to mark their work as free to share or transform, on certain conditions.
By applying a Creative Commons copyright license and (cc) notice to her work, an author invites the world to make certain uses of it without giving up her copyright. Rather than the traditional “all rights reserved,” a Creative Commons license declares “some rights reserved.”
Second, and complimentary to this free legal tool, is Creative Commons machine-readable translation of the copyright licenses.
When an author affixes the (cc) copyright notice to her webpage or MP3 or image file, it is automatically marked with Creative Commons “metadata” as well.
It is this metadata – akin to a library catalog card describing a particular book – that the Creative Commons search engine then reads, processes, and presents to users as it crawls the web for their search requests.
The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org, an open-source search developer.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Mobissimo launched a new online travel search engine on Tuesday, and the company said it added an additional service allowing users to search for rental cars at the same time.
The site, http://www.mobissimo.com, allows users to search for flights, hotels and rental cars. A test version was first made available to the public in March.
Competitors to the privately held, San Mateo, California-based company -- whose name means "the ultimate in mobility" in Italian -- include SideStep, Yahoo's FareChase, as well as comparison shopping firm NexTag.
Elsewhere, Time Warner Inc. unit America Online last week said it made an investment in Kayak Software Corp., another travel search engine.
Travel search engines work like referral services, pointing users to where they can find bargains on the Web. The sites that get the business, in general, pay finders fees to the search companies.
They compete and sometimes partner with larger and more established Web travel service providers such as InterActiveCorp.'s Expedia, Orbitz Inc. and Sabre Holdings Corp.'s Travelocity.
Those companies are more like travel agents and aim to offer one-stop shopping by finding and selling hotel rooms, airplane tickets and rental cars.
Source: Reuters
A recent report from eMarketer.com expects rich media could overtake search to become a dominant form of Internet advertising by the end of the decade. Although paid search continues to be the main online advertising medium, with Google's soaring stock price and SEO revenue numbers higher than expected, could rich media overtake search before 2010?
The drivers behind rich media's rise will be the swift adoption of broadband by consumers and the migration of traditional brand marketers to the Internet.
On the consumer side, eMarketer's numbers indicate that by 2005, 53% of US online households will access the Internet via broadband. On the advertiser side, Yahoo! reports that its 200 largest brand-advertising customers spent 38% more on branding ads in Q1 2004 than in 2003's corresponding quarter.
The online advertising environment is changing — it is beginning to look more like traditional media every day. By presenting ads capable of swaying emotions, not just generating clicks, rich media will break down barriers and draw in large traditional advertisers.
In fact, the new eMarketer report, Rich Media predicts that rich media will overtake search to become the dominant form of Web advertising by the end of the decade.
Rich media ad spending grew by nearly 37% in 2004, and growth rates of more than 25% are projected for the next three years.
The resistance to new media is rapidly falling as advertisers learn which rich media formats work best for their goals, how to implement rich media-based campaigns and how to track the results of the online portion of their campaigns. As a result, the market is becoming increasingly valuable for advertisers, agencies and Web publishers alike.
"The single most important factor supporting rich media growth is the audience," says David Hallerman, Senior Analyst at eMarketer and author of the report. "More people are going online, they spend considerable time online and do more things there and more of them are accessing the Internet using high-speed connections that make rich media ads palatable, if not always welcome."
That the Internet is a mainstream medium, an effective place for branding-oriented advertisers to reach part of their audience, is implied in a recent Online Publishers Association report titled "Generational Media Study."
When the trade group asked 1,235 US adult Internet users to choose two, and only two, media outlets (and jettison the rest), 45.6% made the Internet their first preference. As the clear-cut second banana among the respondents, 34.6% picked TV as their first choice, with every other medium in single figures.
"While the survey reflects the fact that Internet users are making the Internet their first choice among media, it also indicates that once people get accustomed to going online, they tend to make it primary in their lives — or at least secondary to television," says Mr. Hallerman.
This trend toward choosing the Internet first will continue, since more than 50% of users ages 18 to 24 made the Internet their main choice among the eight media surveyed.
Furthermore, 74% of the OPA respondents use the Internet for entertainment. That's more than for print media, and starting to approach TV levels (at 86%). The best of rich media entices its audience through being, in some way, entertaining — much like television commercials.
Brand marketers not advertising on the Internet today are like their counterparts 10 years ago who failed to embrace cable television: "No thanks — we find the big networks give us all the market reach we'll ever need!"
Just like you rarely hear that today about TV, most brands will soon make the Internet an integral part of their campaigns. And for brand marketers working online, the greater engagement of rich media advertising is essential.
Whether that engagement means offering entertainment, moving the audience's emotions or creating unique interactive experiences, rich media combined with targeting gives marketers tools they can't find anywhere else — but online.
"Moving beyond the numbers," says Mr. Hallerman, "the implications of all this portents huge changes in online advertising, and advertising overall — because the growth of online brand advertising will mean less ad dollars in other media."
Source: eMarketer
Despite some improvements done recently to help the indexing of websites created using Flash technology, there are still many major roadblocks left.
For sites designed using Macromedia Flash technology, most major search engines are anything but friendly. The major crawlers (spiders) used to discover content rarely dig deep into Flash, often missing pages or, worse yet, ignoring those sites altogether.
But a pair of Web designers detailed a new approach on Tuesday at the WebmasterWorld.com World Search Conference here to change that.
They are investigating a way to abstract the content and presentation layers of Flash sites so that search engines can spider the HTML that they favor and sites can take advantage of the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash.
"We want [Flash sites] to act just like HTML Web sites," said George Shaw, creative director at DivinePenguin, in Los Angeles. "There's no reason philosophically why they shouldn't."
Shaw is one of the designers behind a project called RichMediaSEO. The other is Gregory Markel, founder and president of search marketing company Infuse Creative, of Santa Monica, Calif.
While demand remains high for Flash-based sites in industries such as entertainment, which want to display multimedia, the lack of full search-engine support creates roadblocks, the designers said.
"The only issue we're running into is verifiability of the content," Shaw said. "It's a trust issue at this point. The search engines need to trust that the content they're searching is the same as the Flash [sites] are displaying."
The options for Flash sites today, though, remain limited. Shaw and Markel agreed that sites should avoid Flash if search engine optimization is a top priority and if the multimedia and interactivity features of Flash are not necessary.
Even sites using Flash need to take a hybrid approach by combining Flash and HTML, rather than relying exclusively for Flash in their architecture, Shaw said.
The pair's efforts are not the first to try to tackle Flash's search engine problems, Macromedia Inc. in 2002 released a software development kit (SDK) for Flash to help search engines index the content.
Click here to read about multimedia search engine Singingfish's introduction of Flash support.
But the SDK has offered limited help, Markel said. He said that Macromedia in recent months has become more involved in figuring out how to optimize Flash for search engines.
Google earlier this year appeared to begin indexing Flash using its own SDK, but that effort has appeared to be on again, off again, Markel said.
Tim Mayer, director of product management for search at Yahoo Inc., said that Yahoo does not spider into Flash content for its Web index but could once it "helps our comprehensiveness."
Multimedia sites, though, can use Yahoo's paid inclusion program, Overture Site Match, to feed the content into its index.
"At this point, if you're using Flash you rarely are going to get a No. 1 listing, and that's a shame," Mayer said
Article by Matt Hicks
Source: eWeek
In the hours after Yasser Arafat's death on Thursday, the Web reacted with a lot of headlines, speculation and debate.
Arafat's death dominated nearly every major news Web site worldwide, including those of Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde and The New York Times.
Headlines ran the gamut form Al-Jazeera's "Israelis shed no tears for Arafat" to the Times' "State for Palestinians and peace with Israel left unrealized."
Web portal Yahoo listed its coverage of the leader's demise as its most heavily e-mailed story less than an hour after his death was first reported. The story also garnered the top spot among the most popular stories on CNN's international news site.
His death came as little surprise. Arafat was admitted to a French military hospital in late October, and rumors soon began circulating that his death was imminent.
The contentious nature of Arafat's reign over Palestinian politics sent Web surfers to Internet message boards to debate the leader's track record.
A quick scan of the various subject headers in Yahoo's discussion area threw light on just how divided sentiments about the leader remain.
Some posters lavished praise on the deceased chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. One subject line stated: "He stood up to the white man." Other posters blasted Arafat: "Why are we honoring a terrorist?"
Source: C-Net News
Bizrate and the Kelsey Group studied nearly 4,000 US consumers and found that 27 percent of total online searching is for local listings.
Ranking types of search sites based on familiarity, frequency of use, and loyalty, the study determined that Internet mapping sites are the most popular, followed by general search engines and Internet Yellow Pages.
Kelsey and BizRate surveyed 3,887 consumers whose average age was 44. Roughly 79% of respondents had been online for at least five years and 72% had high-speed Internet connectivity.
On Friday, November 5, eMarketer attended the final day of The Kelsey Group's three-day conference, "Interactive Local Media."
Panelists from the day's discussions addressed developments made thus far in the market as well as the potential for the future. Speakers on the first panel discussion of the day cited issues such as ad inventory, how different search advertising should be measured and the idea that Internet Yellow Pages could be doing more to get an audience.
The keynote speaker from media giant The Hearst Corporation made an important point that traditional print news media can adapt to the Internet era and create an online presence whereas the ever-popular search does not have the same flexibility.
Search cannot create a local presence, this giving print news an advantage publishers need to note. Hearst also made the point that the media no longer owns publishing and the key to success in this new environment is convergence.
In the final discussion of the day, panelists did not agree as to when digital would eclipse print in the Yellow Pages market.
A panelist from Yahoo noted that industry players were only "five minutes into" the development of the local search market, while a panelist from local-i made the point that if the end user is not served, conference attendees would be in the same place in five years as they are now.
An InfoSpace speaker was pleased that this conference centered more around the consumer than the advertiser, and a panelist from Google hoped that in five years, there would be more hard data on local search usage to review, rather than just market projections.
Yahoo recently released a study on "Newspaper Loyalists" in the US — those who read the newspaper at least three times per week — and found that 69% go online for local information like news, weather and event information.
Source: eMarketer
Netherlands based 4C Software launched a new meta search engine called DonBusca.
A meta search engine gives users the ability to simultaneously search multiple search engines from one interface. Meta search engines benefit users by saving them time and effort from having to individually visit multiple search engines in order to find the desired result.
Features available at DonBusca.com include:
-- Searching in four categories (Web, Blogs, News and Software)
-- Clustering results
-- Displaying Wikipedia articles
-- Displaying thumbshot
-- Providing 3 versions of the site for every result: Cached, Archive, Site
One of the more unique features of the DonBusca search results is the "Site Info" option which allows searchers to see the Google pagerank, Alex information, geographic data, link popularity, keyword density, and Whois information for each site in the results. No other meta search engine offers this menu of capabilities.
Further features include the ability to add each result directly to a favorite bookmark manager (Furl, Yahoo, Simpy), and a "Fast Surfer" mode which enables browsing through all search results without leaving current window.
Along with web search, DonBusca also a directory based on data from The Open Directory Project.
Searchers can displaying related categories for their search from DMOZ, and access the DMOZ directory with thumshots. An advanced search and 6 language interface is also available, as is a search voyeur which displays current searches and the 100 most searched for terms.
DonBusca.com was created by 4C Software, a Netherlands based firm specializing in developing windows application platforms and specialized internet applications.
Source: The URL wire
Koders launches a beta search engine specifically targeting open source developers and programmers.
The new Koders search engine indexes open source code spanning numerous licenses and in a variety of many programming languages.
The verticalization of search has been coming for some time with talk of all manner of specialized search engines that are either free or pay to play.
The idea, of course, is to separate the wheat from the chaff and access tightly focused results instead of seeing '2,398,789 results for your search term' (while arguments could be made for more advanced training on search methodology for the end user - that is an entirely different discussion).
Some interesting functions:
-- As you review results, you can select the project it belongs to and use a provided calculator in the browser to identify the cost to build (i.e. build versus buy). You can input the number of person months you would use, the percentage of functionality you need, and your monthly labor costs to evaluate.
-- Koders has an enterprise tool coming soon that will allow larger enterprises to implement a server appliance with what looks to be index and search logic similar to the public search tool.
The server can inventory all of the company's source code, regardless of language (behind the firewall) and better enable code management, reuse utilization and licensing compliance/oversight.
An interview with Koder's founder can be read at Newsforge.
Reporter Joe Barr makes an interesting comment after the interview - should or will Koders offer some licensing guidance and clarification on usage of the code discovered during searches?
Source: Sitepoint
FyberSearch has acquired feed search engine FeedPlex, in hopes of integrating it to its portfolio of search tools.
FeedPlex is a feed search engine that provides Internet users the ability to find data in XML/RSS format on the web.
“We are very happy to announce this acquisition, and to have such a diligent search engine ‘make something out of it’,” said Sid Yadav, former CEO and co-founder of FeedPlex.
FyberSearch has the mission to “To provide users with the level of control they need to find the results they desire". FeedPlex and other feed search engines reach an audience that a general web search engines such as FyberSearch cannot reach alone.
General search engines display search results by matching keywords against cataloged data from all types of web pages. This works well in many cases but sometimes a user would like to find only data taken from web pages similar news, articles and blogs. This is where FeedPlex comes in.
FeedPlex and other feed search engines catalog XML, RSS, ATOM and RDF files. These files typically contain rich data from all kinds of news websites and blogs.
“I am looking forward to completing the FeedPlex redesign.
It was and should continue to be another useful tool Internet users can use to find the information they need.” said Nathan Enss, Owner and Founder of FyberSearch.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Amazon's A9 search engine offers visitors a large collection of quality adult products available on Amazon's website.
Who says a shopping search entity can’t turn up the heat and still not bow down entirely to the porn industry.
As some of the major online shopping and search sites have been laying down the law on riskee sex driven sites, Amazon.com signs on one of the largest companies in adult products.
Adam & Eve, a leader in adult entertainment, and Amazon Services, Inc. announced that they have teamed up to offer Amazon.com users the ability to purchase over 1,200 of Adam & Eve’s top quality adult products.
Amazon.com, which recently launched the a9 search engine in conjunction with Google, offers customers the biggest collection of anything you might want to buy online.
Now they can add adult toys to that list with the recent alliance with Adam & Eve adult products. Adam & Eve products can be found by doing a search on the Amazon.com website. For instance if you search for “adult toys,” you will see a large display of Adam & Eve-related products (notice how we did not include a link).
According to a press release from Adam & Eve “This new addition to Amazon.com brings an exciting blend of enjoyment and edgy shopping that customers of Amazon.com have not had access to before.
The 1,200 Adam & Eve adult products sold on Amazon.com are displayed with Amazon customers in mind so that only products that appeal to that audience are accessible.”
Sean Trotter, Chief Technology Officer of Adam & Eve, said: “We are excited to offer Adam & Eve products on Amazon.com.
We are able to reach a new audience for our products with this new relationship with Amazon. For years Adam & Eve has been the best-known company in the adult toys business and now we are reaching new markets with alliances such as Amazon.com.”
Source: Search Engine Journal
In DoubleClick's latest quarterly eCommerce trend study, it reveals that 2.1 percent of consumers who visited a retail website's search engine made an online purchase.
Those numbers are up from 1.5 percent in the third quarter of 2003.
Online marketers and eTailers who sell to consumers would be well-advised to purchase premium placement in retailers' on-site search engines, based on the findings by DoubleClick's report.
In total, 9.3 percent of e-commerce sales came from the search function on shopping sites, compared to 6.6 percent a year earlier. Of those who bought products through on-site search in the third quarter, the average order size per online buyer grew to $126 from $100 in the same period last year.
Search engines are particularly important because most online consumers still don't know exactly what they want when surfing for products online, said Patti Freeman Evans, a JupiterResearch e-commerce analyst. "On-site search presents a tremendous opportunity to influence purchasing decisions," she said.
Freeman added that retailers can also use their sites to highlight items that are high margin, overstocked, or close to out of stock. She said that many large marketers have a site similar to Macys.com's "We Recommend" section, which gives marketers the opportunity for premium placements on their on-site search pages.
The report says that marketers should also be aware that consumers shop in different ways. "Marketers need to understand how consumers use [retailers'] on-site search engines," said Richard Fleck, DoubleClick strategic services manager. There are searchers who are actively searching for specific products, and others who are simply browsing--waiting for something to catch their attention.
Jupiter's Freeman added that some active searchers don't do a lot of research ahead of time, while others plan their shopping strategies very carefully, visiting product pages an average of 2.5 times before making a decision.
Fleck said that marketers should react to the different consumers in a similar manner: through a call to action that leads them down a certain purchasing path.
Freeman said that online retail marketing should always be proactive, but there should be a specific call to action for different demonstrated behaviors. To achieve best results, Freeman said retailers need to deploy sophisticated tracking tools to aid marketers to that end. Behavioral targeting, for example, is something several retailers are looking into, she said.
Other e-commerce report data said that shoppers are spending 10 percent less time on commerce sites during their shopping sessions. Third-quarter 2004 data said users spent 4.4 minutes at each site compared to 4.9 minutes a year earlier, and far less time on each page--29 seconds in 2004 versus 43 in 2003. Users are also viewing more pages during each site visit--10.3 pages versus 7.7 year-over-year.
Those results jibe with a report of the Online Publishers Association released earlier this week, showing that consumers are spending a smaller proportion of their online time at commerce sites (See MDN, "OPA: Users Spending More Time At Entertainment And News Sites" Nov. 2).
It is unclear how much of that change can be attributed to increased broadband adoption; Nielsen//NetRatings reported in July that broadband usage surpassed dial-up among Internet users. DoubleClick said the report did not differentiate between dial-up and broadband users.
The trend report shows that shopping cart abandonment continues to grow. Of those who initially add something to their carts, 57 percent abandon the carts without making a purchase--up from 53 percent a year ago. However, once shoppers start the checkout process, more are going through with the purchase. Checkout conversion increased to 63 percent in the third quarter--up from 59 percent in same period a year ago.
The data for the report comes from DoubleClick's SiteAdvance, a hosted Web site measurement and analysis product for online marketers.
The results are based on hundreds of millions of unique visitors, tens of millions of online shopping carts, and over $1 billion in total e-commerce sales. DoubleClick began collecting and compiling this data in second quarter 2003.
Source: Mediapost
IceRocket and Blog Search Engine have partnered to bring MoBlogs, a form of cell phone picture blogs into the search engine world with a new search feature producing image results of the latest MoBlogs images.
Blog Search Engine has over 10,000 blogs indexed in its blog directory and this new feature gives them a jump on other cutting edge search engines in the blogging world.
The partnership between the two companies utilizes IceRocket search technology to serve search results from TextAmerica blog entries - a MoBlog only blog hosting service.
While Google and Yahoo are trying to accumulate the largest web image search index, bloggers and site publishers are finding other targets for web search.
TextAmerica’s MoBlog service offers some of the latest and most rapidly updated images online. If one is looking for some online pics of a John Kerry or George W. Bush rally, it makes much more sense to search via MoBlogs than 3 month old image search engine indexes.
“IceRocket’s MoBlog search technology brings a new dimension to the Blog Search Engine which we never had before, we’re a much better blog searching solution now with our new search functionality” said Loren Baker, owner of the Blog Search Engine.
Blake Rhodes, CEO of IceRocket notes “Blog search is incredibly important, sometimes you like to know what other people think besides the traditional media.
Besides, MoBlogs are fun, they really let you see what others are up to.” If you’ve heard of IceRocket before, it’s the search engine that Mark Cuban of Broadcast.com fame and the Dallas Mavericks invested in earlier this year. IceRocket has been hailed by many for their approach to “pioneering commercial search by putting the interests of wants and consumers before advertisers.”
What are MoBlogs?
MoBlog stands for mobile weblog which consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA.
According to Wikipedia, much of the earliest development of moblogs occurred in Japan, among the first countries in the world where camera phones (portable phones with built-in cameras) were widely commercially available.
Source: Search Engine Journal
On Monday, Amazon's subsidiary A9 launched a version of its Internet toolbar for the Firefox Internet browser.
A9 said the toolbar, which is available for free download, will offer the same features to users of the Mozilla open-source software as it does for other browsers.
Those features include the "bookmarks" function, which lets users save favorite Web sites and access them from any PC, and "diary," which lets users save notes to themselves.
The toolbar can be used with Microsoft's Windows, Apple Computer's Mac OS and the Linux operating system.
Executives at A9 said the company had received a large number of requests from consumers looking for a version of the software to run with Firefox. The open-source browser has spurred considerable interest among Web surfers, who have downloaded 7 million copies of the latest release of the browser since September, according to Mozilla's estimates.
A9 was launched in mid-September after a lengthy test period. Unlike its rivals, the search engine organizes query results into expandable columns that each represent a specific type of search result, such as "images," "reference" and "movies."
The search engine is powered by technology from Google and Amazon's Alexa subsidiary, and it draws on reference information from GuruNet and the Internet Movie Database, among other sources. It also displays Google-sponsored ad listings.
While industry watchers continue to ponder how e-commerce specialist Amazon fits into the search engine landscape, the company is pushing into the market with new products such as the toolbar.
Amazon may have a leg up on the competition because of its shopping focus. Shopping has emerged as prime terrain among the search engine companies, because many consumers use search before making a purchase. Amazon's jump into the market highlights the perceived importance of search in driving e-commerce sales.
In related news, Google on Monday announced plans to release a version of its desktop search tool for Apple's Mac operating system.
Google launched the desktop tool earlier this month, throwing itself in the mix with Microsoft and other companies that are building advanced search software for retrieving everything from Web results to documents stored on a computer's hard drive.
Source: C-Net News
Internet users are making far fewer searches for pornography and sex, and instead are searching for eCommerce and business topics as compared to seven years ago.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997, now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored "Web Search: Public Searching of the Web" with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.
"It's a little bit more in Europe, 8-10 percent, but in comparison to everything else, it's a very small percent," Spink said. "People are using (the Web) more as an everyday tool rather than as just an entertainment medium."
Experts aren't surprised by the results.
"They're not getting excited about using the Internet anymore," said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto cyberspace researcher said of the findings. "Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride."
Or go shopping. Spink said her studies show queries for e-business or commerce increased by 86 percent in the past seven years.
"That makes sense because e-commerce in the last seven years has boomed," said Gary Price, news editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com, which reports on Internet surfing.
In one study detailed in their book, Spink and Jansen randomly selected thousands of search sessions from more than 1 million they culled anonymously from search engines such as AltaVista. They tracked the type of search terms used, how many search terms were entered and how deeply into the results computer users clicked for information.
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: Not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
"The searches are taking less than five minutes and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
That's one reason behind a proliferation of sponsored links that appear at the top of results pages, often highlighted or in bold print. And it's why search engine companies — and the creators of the Web pages they're sifting through — are trying to develop technology to help computer users hone in on desired results and filter out the rest.
Spink and Jansen have just begun a study on Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo.com. Their findings will be used to improve the "metasearch" engine, which culls results from other search engines and categorizes them for users.
"We were surprised that people weren't doing more complex searches," Spink said. "If you put a couple of words into the Web, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of results. I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
Source: Yahoo News
BellSouth's Yellow Pages Online unit is helping sell advertisements on Google's search engines, a move that underscores the growing emphasis by search engines to reach local advertisers.
The two companies plan to announce an agreement today, under which BellSouth Advertising & Publishing Corp.'s close to 2,000 sales people in nine Southeast states will sell online advertising packages featuring Google.
The deal, one of the first of its kind, is part of Google's efforts to sell advertising to more small- and medium-size local businesses. Some analysts have questioned how Google could significantly reach that group with its traditional Web-based, self-service ad-sales model.
The Mountain View, Calif., search company and rivals including Yahoo Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc., have this year launched special sites to allow consumers to search for businesses and organizations in their neighborhoods, moves linked to their quests for more local advertisers.
The search engines' revenue related to such local searches should climb from $45 million last year to $2.5 billion in 2008, according to the Kelsey Group, a Princeton, N.J., consulting and research firm.
BellSouth aims to simplify the process of buying search-related advertising for businesses, by providing flat-rate monthly packages.
Search engines generally require businesses to bid on key words and then charge based on the number of times consumers click on an ad, a system that can sometimes be unwieldy and unpredictable.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
A number of search engine marketing professionals have founded the Search Marketing Association UK (SMA-UK), with the intention of promoting search engine optimisation and positioning services in the UK.
The group temporarily headed by Barry Lloyd of MakeMeTop, is looking to establish itself as the principle organisation for search engine marketers in the UK.
It is looking to provide legal advice on search engine techniques, promote best practice, publish data on the search engine business in the UK and generally represent the industry.
Lloyd said 'The UK search engine market is currently the second largest in the world outside the United States.
It has became apparent that the UK should have its own association for this growing sector, set up in a manner to reflect the specific way that both businesses and trade associations operate in the UK and other parts of Europe.'
The Search Marketing Association UK can be contacted via their web site at http://www.sma-uk.org/.
Source: PC Pro.co.uk
Copernic announces the availability of Copernic Desktop Search 1.1, an improved version of its critically-acclaimed desktop search product.
CDS enables users to instantly search their personal files, emails and attachments, as well as pictures, music, and videos. The company also announced that CDS 1.0 has been named as an “Editor’s Choice” by CNET in a review that included desktop search products from Google, Microsoft (Lookout), Hotbot, Blinkx, and X1.
In the CNET review, CDS was lauded by CNET editors as being “fast and easy to navigate,” and its interface was described as “the best of the desktop search engines.” With CDS 1.1, users will benefit from an even more refined search experience, thanks to performance optimizations, new customization options, user interface improvements, and better compatibility.
“The response we’ve had from users, analysts, the press, and many sophisticated bloggers since the launch of CDS is simply amazing, and the recent recognition as Editor’s Choice by CNET is another great validation of our product,” said David Burns, Copernic CEO.
“We improved CDS by listening carefully to our user’s feedback. For those seeking the absolute best desktop search experience available, we are already the clear market leader. And we will continue innovating to further increase our competitive edge. CDS 1.1 is just a beginning.”
Copernic Desktop Search 1.1 Includes:
* Performance – Faster scanning of Outlook emails and contacts; better monitoring of computer resource usage to pause the indexer as soon as another application requires CPU time.
* Customization – Scheduled indexing options now customizable for each category with specific minute/hour/day intervals; new option to configure custom music, picture, and video file types.
* User Interface – Ability to perform one query in multiple windows simply by clicking on category buttons; improved and faster loading of preview pane with easier access to contextual commands for email attachments.
* Compatibility – Better compatibility with Office 2000.
Search engines, portals and browser systems are trying to get off of the Internet and your desktop and into your hard drives, email, and private files.
By taking advantage of a basically lame Windows Search tool used by Microsoft since the dawn of MS Windows, huge public monsters like AOL and Google as well as smaller software developers are introducing desktop and email search which is filling the demands of Windows users.
Source: Search Engine Journal
While 26 percent of Americans has used a search engine for finding drug information online, still only a few are venturing into the online prescription drug marketplace.
The prescription drug market is enormous and includes millions of Americans who go online to get information about the medicines they consume.
According to the new Pew Internet & American Life Project "Prescription Drugs Online" report, 64% of American households contain a regular user of prescription drugs, and one in four Americans (26%) has used the Internet to look for information about prescription drugs.
However, just 4% of Americans have purchased prescription drugs online, because, simply, most Americans do not fully trust the online prescription drug marketplace.
While 62% of Americans think purchasing prescription drugs online is less safe than purchasing them at a local pharmacy, only 20% think online purchases are as safe as local purchases. The remaining 18% responded that they did not know or that it depends on the situation.
In fact, even though one in five said online drug purchases are safe, only a fraction have ever bought prescription drugs online. The survey found a mere 4% of Americans have ever actually purchased prescription drugs on the Internet. To put that in actual numbers, of the 2,200 American adults surveyed just 93 people said they had purchased prescription drugs online.
When it comes to why people purchase drugs online, even though the sample size was small, Americans who have ordered prescription drugs online cited convenience and cost savings as the main reasons why they decided to take the leap. Privacy was the least likely factor of the choices offered in the survey.
When asked about the last time they purchased prescription drugs online, the majority of Rx purchasers said they visited a site that was based in the United States, and only a few visited a site based in another country. In addition:
-- Three-quarters of Rx purchasers said the last time they purchased prescription drugs online, they bought a drug for a chronic medical condition such as high blood pressure or arthritis.
-- One-quarter said their last purchase at an online pharmacy was to aid weight loss or sexual performance.
-- Most were satisfied with their last contact with an online pharmacy and plan to order prescription drugs online in the future.
All in all, the survey was upbeat about the future of the online drug market, stating that "Ignorance and mistrust of the online prescription drug market may be dispelled by further research and good experiences," and indicating that many Americans may soon change their minds about the safety of online prescription drug purchases.
Drawing an analogy to the growth in another large online category, the report stated: "[Prescription drug purchasers] who research a product online often become customers.
Convenience is the number one reason why banking became the fastest-growing activity between 2000 and 2002 — and it is the main reason why current Rx purchasers made the switch from offline to online ordering."
Source: eMarketer
Northern Light releases a new version of its business search engine available to individual users as well as to enterprises.
The new version, called the Northern Light Business Research Engine, is available at http://www.nlresearch.com/
The Business Research Engine searches the Business Web of 20 million pages from 16,000 editorially-selected websites of public companies, private companies, trade journal and trade associations, venture funded companies, venture capital companies, corporate law firms, MBA programs, and the agencies of the Federal Government that regulate business.
Industry commentary and analysis from 5 million articles from 1,400 trade journals with the full-text and all the graphics, charts, and tables from the articles Current news with over 7,000 stories per day from over 70 licensed newswires covering every significant event in the business world around the globe, with the full-text index updated every two minutes.
All content in the search database is tightly classified to over 40 industries so users can drill down into the information most relevant to their jobs.
Before Clusty, Vivisimo, and others Northern Light was a pioneer in clustered search with their little blue folders.
Northern Light didn’t quite make it past the bubble burst and was shortly sold then dismantled by Divine, the Chicago firm which went on one of the more spectacular acquisition sprees of the dot-com era, taking stakes in nearly 90 technology companies before running through $500 million in investor dough and filing for bankruptcy protection.
Northern Light’s orginal owner then bought it back from Devine an a bankruptcy auction.
Washington Posts’ Leslie Walker reports that Seuss had regained the search-engine company he had founded in 1985 and sold to Divine last year, Northern Light, for a mere $81,000, about half a penny on the dollar of what Divine paid for it.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Recently, IceRocket added two new tools that help to position it more as an alternative search engine.
IceRocket’s Blog Search marks IceRocket as one of the first top to mid tier search engines that has opened its doors to blog searching and an interesting live time search reporter called IceSpy.
Blake Rhodes, CEO of IceRocket, notes on his blog “Hopefully by now everyone knows what a blog is, it’s a personal weblog where people can express their thoughts and views, an online diary of sorts.
2005 will be the year of the blog, mark my words, many people are just finding out about them and soon everyone will be blogging. We felt it was about time that a search engine created a section specifically for searching Blogs, so we did it.”
IceRocket’s Blog Search index works from a database of RSS feeds from blogs only. When asked what made IceRocket get into blog searching Rhodes told the Search Engine Journal “It is something we have been planning for a while now.
Both Mark and I love Blogs, we recently launched an official IceRocket blog (BlogIceRocket.com) and of course Mark has his blog (Blogmaverick.com).
As I have said before 2005 will be the year of the blog and we felt someone needed to provide a blog search.”
Rhodes added that IceRocket’s blog search updates as soon as an indexed blog posts a new entry and by rolling out a blog search before Google and Yahoo that “this is just another example of how we will differentiate ourselves from the pack.
We have a few other things we are eager to unveil this fall.”
Blake is looking for feedback on IceRocket’s Blog Search.
IceSpy is a real time tracker of IceRocket searches which holds no bars in its reporting. So if a couple of X-rated terms leave you queasy, IceSpy does give its viewers a forward warning - “The following page may contain search terms that some may find to be obscene and/or offensive.
You certify that you are of the legal age in the jurisdiction from which you are accessing this page, or any pages, containing adult material.
You acknowledge all responsibility for viewing the material that follows.” Other than the occassional silly term, IceSpy is a cool way to see what people are searching for on IceRocket and the different niches of search queries which are performed on an ongoing basis.
IceRocket has also release a new toolbar offering their search box (of course) along with a news ticker, Alexa rankings, related links, site info, and a dictionary.
While most toolbars are available only for Microsoft IE browsers, IceRocket offers a version for Mozilla FireFox at IceRocket FireFox.
Besides Blog Search and IceSpy, Blake also tells the Search Engine Journal that IceRocket is not finished with its future plans “We are about to add a phone pics section with only pictures taken from cell phone cameras(moblogs).
We have a lot of stuff happening right now.”
Source: Search Engine Journal
Unreal Marketing Solutions thinks small e-tailers have to keep it real when it comes to search engine marketing.
That fact is a prime reason why the company is to launch a new hosted service designed specifically for small catalogers, chains and business-to-consumer e-commerce sites.
The service, which Unreal Marketing, a Philadelphia-based search engine marketing and interactive advertising agency, plans to launch later this year or in early 2005, will include software for reviewing, extracting and indexing products, indexing into search engines, and centralized reporting.
Pricing has yet to be determined for the paid inclusion portion, but will be less than the rate for larger retailers, which ranges from 35 cents per word to $3 and in different merchandising categories, says Unreal Marketing CEO Michael Stalbaum.
"Research we’ve seen indicates that almost 100% of small businesses see a web marketing presence as critical and 40% see search engine marketing as an important tool to drive traffic and convert sales," Stalbaum says. "There are a lot of small retailers who need these kinds of services now."
Unreal Marketing Solutions is a full-service interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization and online media. The company`s search engine marketing services, which include paid inclusion, natural optimization, paid listings management and keyword buying, are utilized by a number of Internet and multi-channel retailers such as Foot Locker, L`Oreal USA, and Artbeads.com.
Source: Internet Retailer.com
Intelliseek launches the first of its blog-analytics applications built on top of its BlogPluse analysis service.
Dubbed "Campaign Radar 2004", no doubt to coincide with this year's US presidential election, the software aims to track political buzz, trends and insights on popular blog sites.
Blogs, slang for Web logs, are diaries or journals published and shared by users online. The content posted in blogs usually contains "word of mouth" opinion and viewpoints on various topics.
Radar 2004 is being offered as a free Web service that draws on Intelliseek's BlogPlulse software which tracks over two million blogs per day. BlogPulse was launched in May this year to showcase Intelliseek's blog analysis competency. It analyzes and ranks key issues and phrases posted in blog content.
The new service will provide a daily list of hot topics and issues as well as two daily trend graphs (via the Blogsphere Campaign Radar) - one tracking the presidential candidates and the other campaign issues like the Iraq war and the economy.
Blogs represent one of the fastest growing areas of new content on the Internet. Companies, particularly marketing departments, are now looking to tap into blogs as an additional source of market intelligence.
"Bloggers serve as a form of early radar on key issues and trends," said Pete Blackshaw, CEO of Cincinnati-based Intelliseek.
Source: Computer Business Review
BlowSearch will provide users with the ability to obtain search results in Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish.
Users simply have to enter a search term in a language other than English and BlowSearch will automatically provide results in that language.
In addition, users can set preferences that direct BlowSearch to search in a specific language. The Multi-Language search tool also offers adult filtering, spelling correction and the ability to highlight query terms in search results.
"As developers of online tools, we have to recognize the fact that the Internet transcends borders and languages.
It has a culture all its own," said Richard Kahn, chief operating officer of BlowSearch. "If you don't offer your online product in multiple languages, you're turning away potential customers."
BlowSearch's Multi-Language search is the most recent addition to BlowSearch's family of Internet tools.
BlowSearch also offers a proprietary Meta PPC search engine and the BlowSearch Toolbar, an application that runs within a Web browser.
The BlowSearch Toolbar provides access to BlowSearch services such as weather, a live ABC News feed and pop-up blocking, while visiting any site on the Internet.
Source: TMC Net
More than 30.3 percent of U.S. visits to music retail websites in July 2004 resulted directly from search-engines.
According to a new report from Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, this high rate of search-driven music shopping compares with 19.2 percent for the overall retail category. July 2004 visits to music retailers from search engines and directories have grown by 49.0 percent versus the same period a year ago.
"Search engines have long played a vital role in helping consumers navigate the Internet, however they now are playing a monumental role in connecting music fans with music retailers," said Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise.
"For music shoppers, search engines and directories offer an effective and comprehensive means for locating music products and seeking the best deals. For the music retailers, a major new customer-acquisition platform has arrived.
And with the increasing popularity of the Internet for music distribution and listening, retailers have no choice but to engage it."
Highlights of the August 2004 Hitwise Online Music Report (All findings based on July 2004 monthly data unless noted otherwise):
-- Among the top 100 search terms, 50 percent of search queries that resulted in visits to the Hitwise Music retail category were brand related (i.e. "bmgmusic"); 21 percent were navigational (included a URL, i.e., "www.columbiahouse.com"); and 29 percent were generic in nature (associated keywords, i.e., "music downloads").
-- Over 53 percent of search queries resulting in visits to music retailer sites consisted of three or more words, compared to 48 percent for overall online retailers (for the 4 weeks ending June 19, 2004). According to Tancer this demonstrates that online music shoppers tend to more specific in their search goals.
-- Within the music-retail genre, download sites increased 20.6 percent in market share of U.S. visits during the period of January 2004 to July 2004, while traditional music retailers lost market share at a rate of 9.1 percent. Nonetheless, as of July 2004, traditional music retailers captured 3.9 times the amount of US visits than music download sites.
-- The predominant demographic of visitors to online music retail sites is between 25-44 years of age and earning a household income of $30,000 to $60,000. While females represent 49 percent of all visitors to the retail-music category, women are heavily represented on several major music catalogue sites: www.bmgmusic.com (60 percent) and www.columbiahouse.com (58 percent).
-- Sony promoted its new music download service Sony Connect (www.connect.com) through a joint promotion with McDonald's. As a result, Connect's market share of U.S. visits skyrocketed 1,426 percent (week ending May 29 compared to week ending June 19), jumping from number 68 to eight in the 'Shopping & Classifieds - Music' site ranking.
This increase pushed Connect ahead of leading competitors - such as iTunes, Napster and Walmart Download - for the following three weeks. Sony Connect received 9.5 percent of its traffic from search engines for the week ending August 28, 2004, well below the average (21.3 percent) of the entire music retail category for the same week. -0- *T Hitwise Data Number of words per search query resulting in visits to the Music retail category for the 4 weeks ending June 19, 2004.
Source: TMC Net.com
Wotbox, an independent search engine better known for its advanced geo-targeting technology, launches eight country-specific search properties.
Wotbox, which displays a flag of the country of origin next to each result on its search pages, is growing and has launched a new search engine for eight major countries.
It also offers many other advanced features including allowing users to zone in and search only in their chosen country.
“The logical next step on from this was to create a fully localized version of Wotbox for each country.”
Says Director Mike Nott, “We’re trying to give international users more choice by providing another local search option for them. We also wanted the interface for non-english sites to be in the native language, making it easier for local users.”
The new country-specific Wotbox sites are for:
Australia - http://www.wotbox.com.au
Canada - http://ca.wotbox.com
France - http://fr.wotbox.com
Germany - http://www.wotbox.de
Italy - http://www.wotbox.it
New Zealand - http://www.wotbox.co.nz
Spain - http://es.wotbox.com
United States - http://www.wotbox.us
Source: Search Engine Journal
A spirited Steve Ballmer said yesterday that Microsoft is really determined in challenging Google for leadership in the search business.
"It'll be a lot of fun for the rest of you to watch," Ballmer shouted to the delight of several hundred guests at a meeting of the Massachusetts Software Council in Boston.
Ballmer, who took over as chief executive from cofounder Bill Gates in 2000, came to Boston for meetings with customers. He also visited the Timothy Smith Foundation, which runs computer technology centers in the Roxbury area. There, Ballmer and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino unveiled a donation of $400,000 in Microsoft products.
At the software council meeting, Ballmer scoffed at the idea that the technology industry's boom times are over. "The next 10 years will bring more positive changes . . . than the last 10 years did," he said. Then he listed a host of challenges the industry has not met.
For example, Ballmer wondered why many of his listeners were jotting down notes as he spoke. "Why isn't this meeting being recorded electronically?" he asked. "Why isn't it being broadcast on the wireless network in this room? . . . It's just a question of software."
Ballmer also pointed to healthcare, which he called "one of the least computerized businesses in the world."
And despite those ever-present ads on the Internet, Ballmer said, online advertising can still be vastly improved, to produce systems that consistently show Internet users exactly those ads that might interest them.
"I see a world of incredible possibility and opportunity," Ballmer said. But he conceded that Microsoft has barriers to overcome. There's the long-delayed new operating system, code-named Longhorn.
Last week, the company set a deadline of late 2006 to complete the new software, but gave up on including a new technology for managing data files. It was once one of Longhorn's key selling points, but Microsoft officials decided it was too complex to finish Longhorn in time.
In the near term, Microsoft's biggest challenge may be the perception that its software is riddled with bugs that let computer vandals seize control of sensitive systems or infect them with viruses.
"That's a major impediment," said Ballmer, "and so we as a company have made security our job one priority."
Ballmer urged those in the audience to install the latest "service pack" for the Windows XP operating system. The service pack is mainly a set of modifications to Windows XP that are supposed to make it far less vulnerable to vandalism.
Meanwhile, Ballmer left no doubt that Microsoft has targeted Internet search services for the kind of all-out competitive push that the company once used to seize dominance in Web browser software.
Despite Google's popularity, "the search market is still quite fragmented," Ballmer said, and existing tools still generate lots of useless results. Ballmer said Microsoft plans to invent new search technology that will change this, and make life more difficult for Google and other rivals.
Source: Boston.com
FAST is expected to license its search technology for online directory sites.
FAST said it would begin offering its FAST AdVisor search application to online directory sites like ThomasNet and Norway's Findexa and to career sites such as CareerBuilder. The FAST AdVisor search platform can sort both database and Web content while letting users drill down for more information by category.
FAST sees the chance to use its enterprise search expertise already tapped by clients like AT&T, Dell and IBM to help online directories compete with new local search engines from Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo introduced sites in recent months that integrate Web search, maps and directory content to connect users to local information.
"This allows e-directories to give end users a much more robust experience and at the same time allow the e-directories to compete," said David Isaacson, a product manager for Oslo, Norway-based FAST.
FAST AdVisor has several advertising-related features. It lets the site determine for itself when an advertiser listing is shown, setting parameters such as the amount bid for placement or the length of time as an advertiser.
Isaacson said Internet directory sites have advantages over search engines in the emerging local search space. Directories already have vast databases of local business information as well as large sales forces to introduce small businesses to online advertising.
"We think coming in and helping the e-directories with that technology really puts them in a much better position," he said.
The 23.7 million U.S. small businesses are seen as prime candidates for the expansion of search marketing beyond the roughly 200,000 now using it. According to The Kelsey Group, the market for local search marketing could reach $2.5 billion in 2008. Jupiter Research, however, thinks it will grow much more slowly, anticipating $824 million in 2008.
Source: DM News
Microsoft will release its long-awaited update to its Windows operating system in 2006, but without its advanced file search capability, the company said last week.
The Redmond, WA, company said the new operating system, code named Longhorn, would come without WinFS, a system designed to search for information scattered throughout a computer in different file types.
Microsoft was expected to combine desktop search with the Web search engine it is also building. Instead, it will release a test version of WinFS with Longhorn, in a delay the company characterized as a "tradeoff" for making the operating system available quickly.
The combination of desktop and Web search is seen as a key to Microsoft cutting into the lead established by rival Google in search. Google is reportedly working on its own file search system.
Ask Jeeves in June bought Tukaroo, a startup that makes software to search users' hard drive, local network and Internet.
Microsoft's MSN unit aims to release a Web search engine by next summer to compete with Google and Yahoo. The company has pledged to spend $100 million on its search efforts.
Source: DM News
While Internet search engines struggle to merge their search results with local yellow pages, in an effort to cash in on billions in potential revenue, Martin Garcia explains, "Local search shouldn't be about pay-per-clicks or keyword advertising".
It should be about promoting your small business as efficiently as possible so that folks in your home town can easily find you-whether you're a deli, an auto dealer, or spa."
"FindLocalWebsites.com is fast, affordable, and user friendly," he continues. "Best of all, the business owner controls all the categories in which he wants to be listed-virtually on-demand-in just minutes."
Studies by SearchEngineWatch.com claim that ten million small-and-medium sized enterprises conduct the majority of their business within fifty miles of their locations.
MSN admits that fifty percent of all searches fail miserably. Martin Garcia can attest to the frustration associated with both these statistics. Garcia vowed that no one should have to feel helpless because of a lack of local information. "FindLocalWebsites.com was born out of a need to help companies and customers connect."
In the race to make local search an accurate and powerful tool for consumers, FindLocalWebsites.com stands at the finish line with the revolutionary new generation of search engine technology. Adds Garcia, "We've been there for years without annoying pop-up or banner ads."
"Local search," he concludes, "is about uniting community and commerce. FindLocalWebsites.com is the People's search engine!"
Chief Executive, Martin Garcia, invites you to discuss with him the new generation of search engine technology FindLocalWebsites.com, the People's Search Engine.
Source: W3 Reports
Startup X1 Technologies updated its desktop search application with support for more complex queries and broader indexing of file attachments.
X1 Technologies Inc., of Pasadena, Calif., first launched its X1 Search application in February as a way for users to quickly find e-mails, attachments, contacts and desktop files.
It is competing in a space increasingly drawing the attention of operating system makers Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., as well as Web search providers such as Google Inc.
Rather than a plug-in within an e-mail client such as Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook, X1 Search is a separate client that supports multiple e-mail clients, specifically Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Mail.
With the new release, called X1 Search 04.08, X1 has added the ability for users to search for specific phrases by putting a set of keywords in quotation marks and to use Boolean commands such as "AND" and "OR," said Mark Goodstein, X1's founder and executive vice president of business development.
"It's what we call the 'Google standards,'" Goodstein said of the additional query support. "We're supporting a much more complex search syntax."
Beyond queries, X1's new release expands its ability to index and preview file attachments in e-mail. X1 already supported the indexing and viewing of file attachments from e-mail in Outlook and Eudora, and the new version adds attachment support for Outlook Express and Netscape Mail, Goodstein said.
X1 supports about 255 file types, such as PDFs, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Available now, the new version runs on Windows 98 and higher. Pricing starts at $99 for a single copy.
Click here to read more about Apple's preview of a search feature called Spotlight for Mac OS X "Tiger."
Beyond the new release, X1 is working on a version that plugs into Outlook and is considering adding support for Lotus Notes, Goodstein said. The company also is working to license its technology to other technology providers.
Desktop and e-mail search have gained renewed attention as Microsoft promotes its plans for all-in-one search capabilities in its Longhorn release of Windows. Last week, it demonstrated prototypes of integrated search.
The desktop search field also has attracted other startups. One, Outlook Software Inc., developed a search plug-in for Outlook and last month was acquired by Microsoft's MSN division.
Another startup, Stata Laboratories Inc., has created a search-based e-mail client as an alternative to folder-based clients such as Outlook. On Tuesday, the San Mateo, Calif., company announced the availability of the professional edition of its Bloomba 2.0 e-mail client.
As with the personal edition released in June, the professional edition adds an integrated calendar and an improved contact
