Search Engine Journal

After agreeing to a contract with Outland Books to run advertising for the George W. Bush (Mis)Speak Series of books and calendars, the giant Internet portal, Yahoo!, has decided to pull the ad campaign, according to Jim Pepe of Outland.
Kristen White, a Yahoo! representative, told Outland the action was taken because the content was “Deemed […]

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Speaking of Shopping Search Engines, a recent study shows that online holiday shopping should total to around a whopping $17 billion dollars this year.
The Jupiter Research Online Holiday Spending Study shows that online consumers prefer last minute shopping.
Indeed, consumers will shop online right to the edge of the holidays despite 46 percent of respondents […]

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Ask Jeeves and Google have dived into the Shopping Search Engine front, joining Yahoo, MSN, and other Shopping Search sites like Shopping.com, BizRate, and MySimon.
It only makes sense that catering to those who shop online will bring more revenue to these search monsters. This BizJournals article explores the jump to Shopping Search:
On Nov. 4, […]

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I was just visiting About.com and noticed that the previous Sprinks ads (keyword and content targeted text ads) are no longer running and they have been replaced by Google AdSense.
For example, if you go to this site http://vgstrategies.about.com/cs/trickstipssites/ about video game tricks, you’ll see the Google AdSense ads featured in the content.
Google signed a quite […]

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Microsoft Search Engine worries Google and Yahoo
With 3.3 billion searches conducted every month in the U.S., and a lucrative advertising market swelling to $1.6 billion this year, and expected to rise to $2.1 billion next year, search is one of the most attractive businesses on the Net. But a Microsoft expansion is likely to come […]

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A number of such services regularly email me offering keyword ownership of premium keywords for $300/year. They say that anyone can type the keyword I bought in the address bar of Internet explorer, instead of typing in a URL, and they will be sent directly to my site. In total it seems that there are about 2% of Internet users worldwide who have enabled one type or another of this system, spread out between a few competitive services.

Data shows that between 4% and 7% of search queries are performed by entering something in the address bar. By default for IE users, these searches are automatically routed through to MSN search. Many of us however have installed so much software over time, and unknowingly, some of this software has re-routed these search queries to other search portals, such as iGetNet, or others. This often happens if you’ve installed any file sharing software. We have all heard / read about how many extra ‘features’ come with programs like Kazaa. This means that your default search from the address bar may no longer be MSN, and may have been rerouted elsewhere, but the basic principle still applies. Of the queries that are actually run from an address bar, at least half of them are unintentionally instigated by people mistyping the desired URL. This means that between 2% and 4% of Internet users actually search via their address bar.

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According to Interactive Advertising Bureau’s and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Internet Ad Revenue Report, Search Engine Advertising is 1/3 of Online Advertising.

The study shows keyword search accounted a whopping 31% of all online advertising, making it the most dominant form of Internet advertising during the second quarter of 2003. Last year’s Q2 reports showed Search Engine Advertising at 9%, a huge jump in only one year.

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In the U.S. there are an estimated 10 million small businesses yet only 250,000 are currently participating in paid search. The question at hand is why so few and is there a way for search providers to tap into this seemingly huge market opportunity.

In order to understand the “why?” question, you must realize that many small businesses are localized. To them, online advertising has not made a whole lot of sense. “Why advertise to the entire globe when I only service the residents of Colorado Springs?” In order for the small business owner to understand the benefits of online advertising, who’s going to educate and sell to them?

These are the key dilemmas presently facing the key personnel in interactive local media. It’s not so much that there aren’t ways right now to target locally online, but reaching out to and educating the advertisers has proved challenging. For years, the traditional yellow page publishers have used local street reps to sell space in their books, but those same reps can’t necessarily be counted on to up-sell interactive. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Terra Lycos and LookSmart don’t even have street salesforces, and one has to wonder how much effort they’d want to put in for $500 ad buys.

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Television network NBC on Monday announced a two-year partnership with Overture Services for sponsored search, adding its name to the growing list of Web publishers that are lacing query results with ads.

Seeking to capitalize on Web search, Burbank, Calif.-based NBC said it is using new technology to power search on Internet properties NBC.com and BravoTV.com. That technology, provided by SLI Systems, is designed to learn from user queries and deliver more relevant results to visitors over time, NBC said.

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LookSmart is waiving its $29 account set up fee for the holiday season. One of the top web directories, it has had a hard time finding its identity. LookSmart has been criticized many times for its changing business plans. In the past few years LookSmart has changed its business model from 1 time fee to annual fee to flat rate cost per click to category cost per click, and now they are unleashing a full bid for placement keyword auction model.

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