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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Mar. 3, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of February 27, 2006

1119 - March 2, 2006 - 4.16 PM EST

Google moving China search data to the US

Google has transfered its search history data out of China to the United States. The reasoning for the move of the search information was to prevent the Chinese government from accessing such private info.

Recently Google’s competitor Yahoo was forced to hand over information on Chinese suspected criminals and has come under International fire for having to comply with Chinese authorities.

Google is taking this preemptive strike against Chinese meddling in its data before the same happens to Google China, which has endured its share of bad press from the forced censorship of search results in China.

Posted on Businessblog™

1118 - March 2, 2006 - 11.59 AM EST

A new local map service for regional sites

Local.com just launched LocalConnect, a new mapping service for local Internet publishers.

LocalConnect is a private label local search engine service for regional and small local sites.

With local search growing into a major search and advertising channel, this tool from Interchane’s Local.com will be a surefire fit for local and regional news, search, and blog pubishers.

This is a smart offering from Local.com, filling a hole which competition like Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask have not yet targeted.

LocalConnect offers web publishers a “simple three-step process to customize and build a powerful local search engine for their site within days”.

Besides adding a new sticky service for local sites, LocalConnect also represents added revenue opportunities for publishers by allowing them to integrate and enhance their own advertiser listings with Local.com advertisers.

Seems that there may be a fee for the service and I’m not sure as to if the service can be hosted on publsiher domains or not.

Posted on Businessblog™

1117 - March 1, 2006 - 11.56 AM EST

Yahoo now offers geotagging

Yahoo just launched a new service that automatically provides images with a label, tag or caption that indicates exactly the place where the photo was taken.

Yahoo's Zonetag is a geotagging service designed mainly for Nokia S60 cellular phones.

It derives location data from the cellular sites of the place where the phone was connected at the time.

Posted on Businessblog™

1116 - February 28, 2006 - 2.10 PM EST

Jambo introduces Pay-per-Call Collect (tm)

Jambo introduces Pay-Per-Call Collect (tm), a billing and collection solution that enables businesses to settle their pay-per-call phone leads through their standard phone bills.

Jambo's billing system makes pay-per-call advertising easily accessible for small businesses and expands the revenue potential for search engines and lead generators by giving them credit for delivering to merchants via the phone.

For consumers, Pay-Per-Call Collect ensures more relevant search result listings by filtering out companies that don't want their calls -- trimming often unwieldy search results to provide consumers with a highly relevant list of responsive merchants.

Merchants listed with a directory or search engine participating in the Jambo Advertising Network (JAN), in product and service categories that primarily get new customers over the phone, will receive phone leads automatically -- requiring literally no effort on their part.

When a merchant receives a call from a consumer, generated by a Jambo partner listing, he or she can choose at that moment whether or not to accept the charges on a pay-per-call basis. Those charges will appear on the merchant's regular phone bill.

"All other companies use what I call 'the burden model' -- the burden is on merchants to take the initiative to create ads, choose keywords and manage the bidding process," said John Melideo, CEO, Jambo.

"But most local businesses don't have the resources or the inclination to do that. By tapping into a billing system that they already use -- their phone bill -- we're removing the need to set up and manage separate advertising campaigns with various publishers.

Instead, we're automatically including merchants listed in a JAN partner directory -- all they have to do is answer the phone and say yes or no to a qualified lead."

Posted on Businessblog™

1115 - February 27, 2006 - 4.31 PM EST

Teoma search engine redirected to Ask.com

Ask.com has redirected its Teoma search engine to Search.Ask.com. As we've detailed before, when Teoma was acquired back in late 2001, it was a pioneering, 7-person shop that had developed some next-generation algorithms and a promising search engine.

Since then, it has served as the heart of the technology underlying Ask Jeeves, and has been the foundation of our resurgence in search. The algorithm, one way we uniquely determine relevance, will be known as ExpertRank going forward.

We have exponentially grown the team, now known as the Ask Search Technology team, over the years.

They are still located in central New Jersey, near Rutgers, where Teoma was founded. (Though some AST employees also work in our Campbell, CA office, as Matt Cutts and Microsoft's incessantly cold-calling recruiters also know.)

Posted on Businessblog™

1114 - February 27, 2006 - 2.29 PM EST

Click fraud haunting Internet advertisers

According to a recent survey conducted by SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), more and more today, the growing concern of click fraud activity is worrying Internet advertisers and ad agencies worldwide.

SEMPO says three times as many Internet advertisers and search engine marketing (SEM) firms indicated click fraud was a very serious issue last year compared to 2004.

Of the 553 respondents to SEMPO's December 2005 "The State of Search Engine Marketing" survey, 16 percent of advertisers and agencies said they are tracking click fraud, and agree it's a significant problem.

That number is up from 6 percent who said so in SEMPO's December 2004 study.

Another 23 percent of advertisers and 33 percent of agencies surveyed have tracked fraud; and agree that it is a moderate problem. A third of advertisers and agencies are not tracking click fraud, but are still worried about it. A quarter of advertisers and 18 percent of agencies said it is not a significant concern, while only 2 percent of advertisers, all of them in larger organizations, had not heard of click fraud.

In 2004, 25 percent of respondents were tracking click fraud and found it to be a significant or moderate problem, 45 percent were concerned but not tracking it, and 31 percent either weren't concerned or had never heard of click fraud.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.