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May 4, 2007


Search Headlines & Links: May 4, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on May 4, 2007, 5:43 PM | Permalink


Local.com on a Roll

No, that's not a menu item at Venture Frogs restaurant (the San Francisco bubble-era eatery that featured dishes named after tech companies).

Local.com has announced new enhancements to its SERPs including:

· Sort search results by rating, distance, business name and category
· View search results within a defined radius
· Filter results by related categories and nearby cities
· Sort by star ratings and read user reviews
· Access recent searches, which are now automatically saved for easy reference

This comes days after launching its Local Verified annual fee-based paid placement product, and weeks after launching the LocalPromote landing page product.

The SERP improvements should help the company continue to gain traction among users, as the site experience has improved a great deal. Although many of these features bring the site on par with the top local search destinations, rather than above or beyond, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. This has also included a move away from banner ads, to a more text ad oriented SERP.

On the advertiser end, LocalPromote will bring more small businesses online, in line with the webification trend that is driving a lot of product development in the local search space. It's an attractive landing page tool that takes a lot of the guesswork out of establishing an online presence for the majority of small businesses that aren't inclined to go out and build (or commission) a website.

This should help Local.com expand its addressable market, and the pool to which it can upsell a growing stable of ad products and formats.

Posted by Mike Boland on May 4, 2007, 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)


Is Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its terms of service for adCenter, with some key changes:

Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.

Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.

In a thread discussing the changes in the Search Engine Watch forums, user Mel66 notes that she's seen some other uses of "criteria other than keyword searches." Apparently, Microsoft is running ads through IntelliTXT, the much-maligned inline text ad provider. Mel66 clicked through on the ad to find it pointed to a search results page with one of her PPC keywords on it, which she believes is related to a recent drop in performance of those ads:

I wondered why we had a pocket of keywords with huge leaps in clicks and no resultant increases in conversions. This sucks. Is MSN really so desperate for traffic that they've resorted to running crappy ads for their own search results???

What this amounts to in my book is MSN running their own garbitrage ads. You click on an ad and get a page with more ads on it. This is bad, bad, bad, folks.

Mel66, whose real name is Melissa Mackey, is the search marketing director for MagazineLine, the magazine subscription division of American Collegiate Marketing. Mackey happened across a publisher site running IntelliTXT ads, and one of the keywords was "magazine," which is one of the keywords Mackey targets in her adCenter campaigns.

The IntelliTXT ad included a Live Search box, with "magazine" pre-filled, which links to the Live Search results page for the keyword:

IntelliTXT.gif

The ad is part of a campaign by Microsoft to bring new users to Live Search by highlighting the relevance of certain queries.

"We turned off Yahoo's content network over a year ago, partly because of IntelliTXT and its poor results," Mackey told SEW. "What makes this even worse than that is that it looks like MSN considers this type of ad to be search, not content. We have opted out of MSN's content network."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on May 4, 2007, 1:24 PM | Permalink


YouTube to Pay Top Users

Google's YouTube will begin paying top users for the video content they submit under a new revenue sharing partner program that will let the creators share in AdSense revenue generated by their videos.

“A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content,” Jamie Byrne, VP of marketing at YouTube, told Om Malik on Thursday. “This will help erase the stigma around the user-created content, and, to be honest, these guys are media entities in their own right.”

In a post on the YouTube Blog, the company said it is extending its partner program, previously only available to big media companies like CBS, Sony BMG and UMG and the NBA, to include "thousands of mid-sized to large content creators who range from video game companies to universities to production houses."

"Up until now there's been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here. Which is why we're adding several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community to our partnership program."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on May 4, 2007, 10:17 AM | Permalink


Yahoo Photos Shutting Down, But Who's Telling the Users?

Yahoo is shutting down its Yahoo Photos service, and encouraging users to migrate to its Flickr photo-sharing service, according to TechCrunch, USA Today, and other media outlets. The two services were among the overlaps in service mentioned by Brad Garlinghouse in his infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto.

The problem is, there's no mention of these changes yet on either the Flickr home page or Yahoo Photos, or on any official Yahoo blogs. That's no way to keep users happy, especially when you're about to force big changes on them by taking away a service they use and love. According to comScore, Yahoo Photos had 31.1 million visitors in March, while Flickr had 28.5 million.

The reports indicate that Yahoo will give users a choice of migrating to competitors' platforms as well as Flickr. It would seem that they've made that decision a bit easier for some users by the way they've mishandled this move.

UPDATE: Still no mention on the Yahoo Photos page as of Friday afternoon, but Yahoo informs me that they have posted a Q&A on the Yahoo Photos help page. That page says that Yahoo will begin the process of closing later this summer and will officially close this fall.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on May 4, 2007, 10:10 AM | Permalink


Yahoo and Microsoft Planning Merger Talks?

We've seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google's plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we've got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It's being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there's not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It's not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester's Charlene Li says it's a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. "Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won't be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared."

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. "If it doesn't, both Yahoo and MSN will die," he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: "Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It's not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions."

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

Mathew Ingram, technology writer for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, says the deal makes sense, but the idea of combining Yahoo with Microsoft is like "two icebergs, roped together":

It makes sense when you consider that Microsoft's search and related assets are running a distant — and I mean distant — third in the market. And Yahoo, for all of its faults, is a big property with a snappy new engine behind its search, which is (theoretically) supposed to close the gap with Google.

That's the “glass is half full” argument. The half-empty argument is that both Microsoft and Yahoo are lumbering behemoths with hardly an agile bone left in their sclerotic bodies. Most of their problems stem from the fact that they have accumulated immense bureaucracies — a big part of the impetus for Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse's infamous “peanut butter” manifesto — and a collection of legacy businesses that keep getting in the way.

They are like icebergs: not only is nine-tenths of them unseen, but they are slow-moving and difficult to steer. Impressive? Yes. Powerful? No doubt about it. But fast, or nimble or imaginative? No. Roping them together would do nothing but compound their problems.

VC Paul Kedrosky writes in his Infectious Greed blog that "the idea of Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, while in a sense inevitable, is still desperately difficult." He notes the stark differences in company culture, but says the real issue is that this would be a huge undertaking, and a merger of this size is difficult to complete for those with experience, and next to impossible for those without:

[Microsoft] can do the deal, in other words, but the subsequent carnage may be something to behold – which Google might actually end up applauding.

UPDATE 3: The WSJ is now reporting that the talks were going on earlier this year, and have since been called off:

Microsoft and Yahoo in recent months discussed a possible merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their respective strengths, say people familiar with the situation. But the merger discussions are no longer active, these people say. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on May 4, 2007, 9:27 AM | Permalink

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