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My 2 featured articles for the week ending December 10:

News archives for the week of Dec. 6, 2004

663 - December 10, 2004 - 11. 36 AM EST

Ask Jeeves moves to downtown Oakland

Ask Jeeves will move to downtown Oakland, which has struggled for years to draw major new businesses.

The Emeryville company, known for the old-fashioned butler on its ask.com search page, signed an 8 1/2 year lease to move 170 employees to the 555 City Center building on Dec. 1.

"Our move to the City Center offers financial benefits and a great location for attracting top Bay Area talent," said CEO Steve Berkowitz. "It came down to the convenience of mass transit and a good deal with a good landlord."

Posted on Businessblog™

662 - December 10, 2004 - 9.46 AM EST

Yahoo to launch desktop search tool

Yahoo will launch a desktop search tool in January. The Sunnyvale, California-based Web portal said Thursday that it will introduce free software in partnership with X1 Technologies that helps consumers search the contents of their hard drive, including email, Word documents, PDF files, music and photos.

The Yahoo-branded application, available in early January, will let people search their PCs as well as the Web via Yahoo Search, but future iterations will include navigation for Yahoo's instant messenger archives, address book and free email service.

Posted on Businessblog™

661 - December 10, 2004 - 8.55 AM EST

On Google, the average cost per click is 54 cents

On average, Google earns 9 cents for each click done on its search engine-- a pretty good return.

With the average cost per click being $0.54 on Google and 17% of all US users clicking on a paid link, Google has constructed a formula that many in the search community hope to adapt to their own engines.

Whether it be paid inclusion, AOL keywords, paid search, contextual advertising, or whatever, search is where the online marketing budgets are going.

Posted on Businessblog™

660 - December 9, 2004 - 12.54 PM EST

Is the market ready for a new search engine?

How much money do you think it might take to compete with Google, Yahoo or MSN? The market for search is currently so hot that another search engine, Accoona, tossed its hat into the ring. Bill Clinton presided over the launch and hoped everyone involved would "make lots of money."

Apparently, Accoona, using its infinity sign to either disguise or enhance its Google-esque double Os, is ready to dethrone Google as the Internet search king. Before you start wondering when the IPO is coming, let's take a moment to think about what's really going on here.

Posted on Businessblog™

659 - December 9, 2004 - 11.33 AM EST

Meta tag lawsuit initiated by a biotech firm

I've always said that placing trademarked keywords in your meta tags is a bad idea that could cause you legal problems. The following story is a perfect example of that.

A biopharmaceutical company that distributes plasma derivatives has initiated a lawsuit against a competitor, alleging that Health Coalition Inc. used the trade marked name “BDI Blood Diagnostics” as a meta tag in its website, according to a report by Law.com.

This, alleges Blood Diagnostics Inc., is a breach of its trade mark rights. Meta tags are HTML coding that web sites can use to let search engines know what their sites contain.

Meta tag abuse occurs where one site includes the names of its competitors in its meta tags to divert traffic to its own site. This can amount to trade mark infringement or, in the UK, a legal wrong known as passing off, where one business passes itself off as being associated with another.

Posted on Businessblog™

658 - December 8, 2004 - 12.33 PM EST

IceRocket launches new RSS feed builder

IceRocket just added a tool for site owners that helps them publish their RSS feeds.

IceRocket’s RSS Builder is an easy to use service to create RSS feeds for sites by providing a simple interface that lets you add topics, links and content, and then publish the RSS (v2.0) feed to your web server.

For publishers, RSS is a great way to present information such as news, headlines, or updates. If a publisher is not using an instant RSS building tool (or not happy with their current RSS feed), IceRocket’s RSS Builder is the answer.

Posted on Businessblog™

657 - December 8, 2004 - 11.58 AM EST

Google's AdSense to feature animated banners

Google announces a number of changes for its AdSense advertising program that has now become the standard in advertising for many sites and Web logs (blogs).

Infomercials

In what could be considered somewhat controversial, Google has announced an expansion of its banner advertising program by accepting animated GIF ads from a small test group of advertisers.

Other changes include the introduction of a new type of channel for account holders.

Google touts URL channels as allowing users to track the performance of individual pages, or groups of pages, without having to update code, and an expansion to the language options for AdSense for search, with the range of languages expanding to 21, including Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, Russian, and traditional Chinese.

Posted on Businessblog™

656 - December 7, 2004 - 6.55 AM EST

Yahoo branching out into consumer electronics?

This piece of news worries me a bit. I sure hope Yahoo isn't getting distracted from its core competency that is search.

Yahoo unveils a branded line of DVD players for sale on its website, raising the profile on a quiet initiative aimed at promoting its name a bit more. The products, which include DVD players and home theater systems, are manufactured by Diamond Electronics.

Yahoo portable DVD/CD/MP3 players range from $69 to $99. The players can store photos for viewing with a USB port, and can connect to a TV to play videos. The home theater systems include a DVD/CD/MP3 player, four small satellite speakers and a sub-woofer for surround sound and amplifier for $199 at the low-end, and $269 with more amplification.

Posted on Businessblog™

655 - December 7, 2004 - 6.01 AM EST

Keyword bid prices down on Thanksgiving

This comes as a bit of a surprise: consumers were shopping a lot over Thanksgiving weekend, but search marketers were shopping a lot less.

A drop in demand drove the cost of buying keywords down 3.6 percent during what is normally considered one of the most important holiday shopping weekends of the year, according to search marketing agency Fathom Online, which this morning will release its Keyword Price Index (KPI) for November.

Posted on Businessblog™

654 - December 6, 2004 - 3.46 PM EST

Domain names

Microsoft Search not up to the task

Microsoft isn't weak in anything and mostly leads in a lot of software applications, so when it released its new search engine, many were anxious to test it out.

First the good news: MSN Search has a few features that go beyond Google — laudable given Google's formidable head start. Now the verdict: Mr. Bill Gates, you're no Google. I won't be changing my search engine of choice.

Granted, the new MSN is still in a "beta" test phase — a work in progress. Early next year, Microsoft is expected to make the technology part of its main MSN site, replacing the Yahoo-powered search engine it now uses. By then, it might have resolved some of the troubles I had.

For now, it's generally disappointing. Among the MSN Search features that Google lacks are three graphical levers that help you refine searches. One moves between "exact match" and "approximate match," while others control results based on how often a site is updated or how popular it is.

Posted on Businessblog™

653 - December 6, 2004 - 1.34 PM EST

Citysearch launches its Pay per Call search engine

Local search service Citysearch rolls out its PFP-Calls product, in an effort to enhance its PFP advertising plan. The new product allows local merchants to track business leads through the number of phone calls they receive.

Merchants are charged a fee per call and when an advertising cap is reached the toll free number (which appears throughout the site) is removed and replaced with the local, non-metered number (which only appears on the merchant’s information page).

The new service is offered through Citysearch’s partnership with CIRXIT, LLC, an innovative new company whose platform for web-telephony integration is leading pay for performance telephony initiatives.

Posted on Businessblog™

652 - December 6, 2004 - 11.50 AM EST

New search engine for handwritten documents

Paid Inclusion

If you need to search handwritten documents, such as the approximately 140,000 pages that constitutes George Washington’s personal papers in the Library of Congress, you now have access to a new powerful new search engine, a first-of-its kind manuscript retrieval system developed at MIT.

The search tool has been developed by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval in the computer science department at UMass Amherst.

R. Manmatha, research assistant professor of computer science, along with graduate students Toni Rath and Victor Lavrenko, have created a demonstration of their search tool using 1,000 scanned pages of Washington’s manuscripts.

Posted on Businessblog™

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