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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Feb. 17, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of February 13, 2006

1107 - February 16, 2006 - 10.03 AM EST

The annual Super Bowl and search engines

Every year advertisers are willing to pay millions of dollars for 30-second spots on the Super Bowl, hoping to leave a good first impression with TV viewers all over the world.

In many ways, the Super Bowl has become a case study in how Internet search and television can work together.

Once its all over, "Monday-morning quarterbacks" in the advertising industry fully review and comment on the effectiveness of those spots.

A tradition that is relatively new in reviewing the impact of Super Bowl ads is measuring the impact of overall consumer interest by studying search behavior in the days that follow the annual and now very famous Sunday event.

We know that users go to their computers immediately following Super Sunday. Yet there are many advertisers that have yet to discover the connection between search and the Super Bowl.

On the surface, the concept of extending the connection between idiot box and search box seems simple. Search offers a natural enhancement to the time-honored tradition of engaging emotion and experience with television.

Why do many advertisers seem to be missing out while others embrace integration? Let's take a look at this year's activities to see if we can unravel the mystery.

According the online intelligence service Hitwise, share of domestic searches for the term "super bowl ads" increased by 1416 percent in the four weeks prior to the Super Bowl in 2006 over the same period in 2005. Furthermore, "super bowl ads" was the most common search phrase containing the words "super bowl" in the month leading up to the big event.

Viewers look forward to the Super Bowl advertisements. They start researching up to a month in advance, and in this behavior rests another great opportunity many have yet to explore. Capitalizing on search behavior after the fact is one thing, but why not stretch out that five million dollar per minute spend with a fraction of that budget on building anticipation with a connected search and content experience?

Hitwise reported that Super Sunday visits to the video destination IFILM, increased by 49 percent versus the previous day, and placements of Super Bowl ads on Yahoo Video Search provided a big contribution to the increase. Yahoo Video Search accounted for nearly 30 percent of visits to IFILM on the big day.

Yahoo has good reason to watch search activity around the Super Bowl. With ad revenues soaring in other media, Yahoo and other search providers want a piece of the big cash in. With video search accounting for a big chunk of follow up traffic, Yahoo representatives were quick to celebrate the few who took advantage Super Bowl traffic and those who didn't.

Posted on Businessblog™

1106 - February 15, 2006 - 2.51 PM EST

Yahoo improves My Web 2.0

Internet users can discover new features in My Web 2.0 by browsing what’s popular or interesting to them. Whenever users log on to My Web 2.0, they get access to their three most recently saved pages. The old homepage merely provided a link to “My Pages.”

Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 homepage has more help and tips available. That’s a good idea, because the user interface isn’t exactly intuitive.

Tagging bookmarks is an important part of this kind of service.

Tagging makes it easier for you to navigate large numbers of bookmarks.

At least equally important, tags make it possible for users to make sense of each other’s bookmarks.

Posted on Businessblog™

1105 - February 14, 2006 - 5.03 PM EST

When search becomes an enterprise application

BearingPoint is to launch a search solutions consultancy and is expected to work with Google Enterprise. BearingPoint's goal is to deliver search applications that can look deeper into corporate data networks and intranets.

Google says it has already trained about one-hundred consultants at BearingPoint, in an effort to better deploy its enterprise search appliances. More consultants are training to work within the search practice, which will take its place alongside other focus areas at the firm, including CRM, ERP and security.

BearingPoint believes the Google-driven search solutions will be especially sought after in certain vertical industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking, brokerage, high-tech and aerospace, BearingPoint Managing Partner Chris Weitz said.

"We've been telling our clients in an advisory role that search is now an application, and if they understand that and start customizing and applying [it] in that way, the mind starts to wander to all the things that can be done," Weitz said. "We believe we'll be quite busy."

The solutions likely won't involve the types of lengthy code-writing projects that earlier database search efforts might have demanded, Weitz said.

"There needs to be some pointing to the data to make it work most effectively," he added. "We think we're uniquely positioned, given the work we do with enterprises already, to provide those services."

For Google, the partnership is the latest element of a concerted, two-year effort to expand its footprint in the corporate world.

Google said the business -- it does not break out specific revenue amounts -- doubled during 2005. The search company is clearly benefiting from the fact that Google has become synonymous with search on the Web, and that employees are familiar with the look and feel of Google's search platform.

Click here to read the story.

Posted on Businessblog™

1104 - February 14, 2006 - 4.07 PM EST

Google's Desktop has security issues

The nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) warns that a new feature implemented on Google's Desktop presents a security risk. The method used by Google to store user data on its servers triggered the security warning by the EFF.

Google's new Share Across Computers feature stores Internet browsing history, Microsoft Office documents, PDF and text files on Google's servers, to allow a user to run remote searches from multiple computers.

However, according to the EFF, this presents a vulnerable target to malicious hackers.

"We urge Internet users not to use Google's new desktop feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password," the EFF said in a statement.

Google says it has to store the data on its own servers to deal with situations when one of a user's computers may be turned off or otherwise be offline when new or updated items are indexed on a different machine.

"We store this data temporarily on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search," the Web search giant insists.

Posted on Businessblog™

1103 - February 14, 2006 - 11.06 AM EST

Internet search up 55 percent

Nielsen//NetRating's latest research shows that the number of Internet searches is increasing at a very healthy pace.

There were approximately 5.1 billion searches in December of last year, an increase of 55 percent from the almost 3.3 billion searches made in December of 2004.

Of this, the number of Internet users rose only 3 percent, indicating that searching is becoming a significant and growing online activity.

Posted on Businessblog™

1102 - February 13, 2006 - 1.03 PM EST

The NFB sues Target.com

The NFB (National Federation for the Blind) and a college student launched a lawsuit against Target.com.

Those two parties also want to establish a class action suit over Target and its lack of accessibility for blind Internet users.

The lawsuit is specifically centered around Target.com’s lack of ALT text in its site’s images.

You have to wonder who’s doing their SEO, as ALT tags (or ALT Attributes) are a very important part of site usability and relevancy.

Not to point fingers at the National Federation of the Blind, but if you scroll over the navigational images at the top of their site, there are no ALT tags to inform the user of those images either.

The suit claims the following lack of accessibility on Target.com:

* Lack of alt text
* Images maps that neither have alt text or a functional equivalent
* Requirement of a mouse to perform various functions on the site

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

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