Microsoft buys into Health Search

This is additive to my original post on Dr.Google. Microsoft today announced that it plans to acquire Medstory a California health search company in Google's backyard. What is Microsoft up to and can this translate into a meaningful advantage for Microsoft? I believe it could if integrated well. Medstory is back by some of silicon valley's savvy techrazzi. Microsoft's strategy is to integrate Medstory with the MSN constellation and present users searching for medical information a solution. Some of the biggest online advertisers per ad capita are drug companies. Older users are more likely to use this service and are more likely to have a higher incomes. Microsoft's strategy could be to get a foot hold into a small but very lucrative piece of the add pie and extend outwardly.

Google Blogs and Video on Rise

Interesting report card on how Google's search properties are doing indicates that Google Blogs and Video are doing increasingly well and Froogle and Local are not faring as well. Possibly a reflection of our times and trending in favor of the new new thing or a sign of where improvements can be made. I, personally, use the video search feature right up there with image search the most after web search. Read the report.

A similar study is expected to be released on Yahoo's Search features in about a week. Look forward to it and will keep you posted.

Add Google Video, News, and Local Search to Your Site

There are now more ways to Google-fy your site. You can now enhance your site's search capabilities, provide more content, and increase the interactivity of your site with Google Video, News, and Local Search using their AJAX Search Wizards which "allow you to add a video, news, and local search results to your web page without writing any code. Just tell us how you want the widget to display and what searches to automatically execute, and the wizard will generate the code for you to copy and paste into your web page". (Source: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/02/enhance-your-site-with-google-search.html). The displays are configurable to vertical or horizontal orientations, and customizable by way of modifying the CSS and JavaScript. Very cool! I have added the Video Bar to the right hand side of my blog and we also have the Map Search on the WebGuild directions page.

It would be super cool if users could search across the board one of these days e.g. search for an item and get a mashup of web, image, video, and blog search results; or better yet, select which search criteria they would like to search against such as video and web versus being siloed to only just web or image or video or blog searches, for instance.

Try it out for yourself!

UI Improvements to e-Payments System

This company, ACI, has improved the usability of their e-payments solution interface which seems to boast a lot of the features and capabilites we hear a lot about such as a dashboard-like control panel, personalization which is a huge area in the B2C and increasingly B2B space, better access to critical information which is a definite biggie for any site, and less back and forth action which is highly desireable and something that can either be afforded by way of portlets or via AJAX funtionality. They state "...customers can look forward to usability improvements that increase convenience. Examples include a re-designed dashboard with customizable display options; improved access to critical information with customized alerts and email notifications on action items; and an on-screen view of accounts while making payments, which saves the back and forth of moving to an account inquiry screen. Additional self-service capabilities include automated password resets and online, real time loan payments and drawdowns".
(Source: http://www.forbes.com/businesswire/feeds/businesswire/2007/02/20/
businesswire20070220005441r1.html)

Branding with Adwords Coming

Marketers interested in online branding using display advertising will soon be able to do so with Google Adwords. Google plans to introduce cost-per-click (CPC) ad buying in March, to give another payment option to its advertisers who use AdWords to place display ads on select sites.

Presently, display advertisers can purchase ads on a only cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis when using the site-targeting option to select specific sites on which to place their ads.

Some advertisers have been asking for a CPC option as they look for more flexibility in their ad planning and CPC makes it easy to measure ad campaign success.

Live Search Mobile Upgraded

At the 3GSM World Congress 2007, Barcelona, new features for Live Search on Windows Mobile were announced. The new features include "a unique, category-based search, which virtually eliminates the need to type text into the phone; an option to "map all results" so several listings appear on the same map; aerial imagery; and local traffic status in selected U.S. cities.

Live Search for Windows Mobile also provides additional new capabilities including satellite imagery, GPS integration and the ability to send search results to a friend." They are available in USA and UK, and to customers using Windows Mobile powered devices, Nokia Series 40 and Series 60 devices, the Motorola RAZR/SLVR family, and assorted LG and Samsung devices. The Live Search feature provides:

Category-based local searching: Based on their location, users can browse categories such as restaurants, hotels and accommodations, and shopping. Searches return local results with address and telephone details and provide easy options to save to contacts, map directions to or from, search nearby, map all locations, or call.

Maps and directions: Global positioning capabilities built into Live Search for mobile enable users to search and explore routes from their current location.

Traffic: Real-time traffic data is available for more than 25 U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Website Envy

Has anyone noticed how much the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama websites look alike?! If you haven't seen them yet, check out www.hillaryclinton.com and www.barackobama.com. Visually, it's quite striking initially. The homepages' color palettes are the same: red, white, and blue. The layout and features (not so surprisingly) bear a marked resemblance to each other's respective site. Hillary's is more structured, organized, and decided in layout and dare I say, more presidential, in appeal. Barack's is a little less polished and potentially more decided in its Web 2.0-esque appeal. It appears less structured and unintentional and more open and busy. Elements appear more loosely put together, it has the appearance of an almost user-generated content site, and it even utilizes fun, young web 2.0 applications such as Flickr and YouTube. Barack even has a blog going; Hillary has yet to launch her's.

Clearly, although the look and feel of their respective homepages are similar, the content and its ensuing layout are decidedly different, reflecting the personal styles, target audiences, and strategies of each candidate. Conversely, the website of the other democrat in the race, John Edwards, is quite different. The design, color palette, and layout are distinctly different from his other contenders and he seems to have a lot more features going on on his site. His site boasts a search feature which the others don't, he has a video blog, audio blog, photo blog, and traditional blog which most of his family seem to contribute to, his site is multi-lingual (available in Spanish as well), and he utilizes more web 2.0 applications including MySpace, and social tagging (Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.).

It is quite interesting. The look and feel and overall user experience of each of these respective sites is quite different and tell different stories. The boys in the race definitely have a head start in the use of new age web features; whereas, Hillary's probably provides a more streamlined UX but is seemingly less content rich. No prognosticating nor biases here but I wonder if it's possible to tell who will win based solely on their respective sites. Could a Site Ratings feature aid in determining who will win the race?!

Incidently, they all use multimedia, specifically, online video, quite heavily. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, attend the WebGuild's Online Video event tomorrow at the Googleplex. See you there!

Yahoo's New Ranking Model

Yahoo has officially roll-outed out its ranking model which is a major component "Panama", Yahoo's new initiative to complete and stay relevant in the online marketing space. With Panama both bid amount and ad quality will now determine an ad’s rank in search results.

The new ranking model is designed to help both search users and advertisers by generating better results, users will receive higher quality search ads. When users engage with these higher quality search ads, advertisers will receive more interested, valuable potential customers. We hope this further encourages you—our advertising customers—to continuously improve the quality of your search ads for users.

Check Out "Checkout"

Google Checkout icon will be updated to better image to the Google Checkout buttons used by merchants on their website. The new image will help shoppers to more easily identify Google Checkout merchants. It will also be appear on the shopping cart on ads in the Google advertising network.

Google Checkout helps users find convenient, secure places to shop through tight integration with AdWords, the advertisements on the Google search results pages. Merchants who decide to offer Google Checkout as a checkout option on their sites are identified by a shopping cart when their ads are displayed on Google.

Publishers Take Control FAST

FAST has introduced a new product called AdMomentum. AdMomentum provides, publishers with a private-label contextual advertising platform, eliminating the need for third-party services and enabling them to better monetize their content and serve their clients (advertisers).

AdMomentum is targeted at online media companies, retailers and telecommunications service providers. It enables them to better sell locally and nationally, to both their audiences and advertisers. Publishers can grow their revenues and reverse the tide of ad dollars that are going to third-party services.

“Publishers want to maintain control of their revenue, serving their advertisers and audiences more effectively, and this has been difficult to do with third-party platforms." said John M. Lervik, CEO of FAST.

“Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today,” said Sue Feldman, IDC's Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies. “Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue and AdMomentum provides this infrastructure for publishers to manage and monetize their online content. It's a digital marketplace in a box."

"Contextual advertising continues to drive the advertising economy, and publishers everywhere are looking for ways to deliver more qualified leads to their advertisers," said Stephen Baker, CEO of Search at Reed Business.

“To meet the needs of our customers, we have to meet the needs of their customers – the readers and advertisers that support their businesses,” said Dylan Fuller, Senior Product Director at FAST. “There’s a reason why contextual advertising has done so well with readers and advertisers, and now publishers will be able to make the experience even better. They know their customers better than anyone else, and with the right tools they can better serve them.”

New media getting more ad money

According to a study from the American Advertising Federation, as much as 73% of online marketers are reserving 20% of their ad budgets for new and emerging media. About 12% of those marketers say they reserve between 21% and 40% of their marketing budgets for new media.

Advertisers are betting on new mediums like television programs viewed over the internet, text messaging and social networking to be among the top categories. The study also indicates that marketers want new ways to use traditional media (78%), a balance of traditional and non-traditional media (75.5%) and increasing awareness of new media properties (57.7%) in order to remain competitive.

One surprising result from the study is that many of those polled believe traditional mediums are in need of a make-over. The respondents indicated that newspapers (51.4%), network television (34.5%), radio (33.8%) all needed to be overhauled to remain competitive with new media like social networking sites, online video and other consumer generated media.

Magazines are not exempt from the overhaul message that marketers are sending. According to the categories of business magazines (46%), women's service (25%), fashion and beauty (18.8%) and men's (17%) magazines are all in need of a make-over to remain competitive in today's market.

The WebGuild event on Feb 15, 2007 held at Google Headquarters examine Online Video: Revolutionizing Advertising & Marketing. The panelists will be;
YouTube Jordan Hoffner, Director, Worldwide Web Syndication, YouTube
AOL Timothy Tuttle, Vice President, AOL Video, AOL
Fox Todd Murtha, VP, Business Fox Interactive Media, Inc.
NBC John Saroff, Content Acquisition Leader, NBC
Moderated by
Daya Baran. Chief Gruuve, GRUUVE

AJAX and SEO

AJAX...you all love it and you know it! Web 2.0 has given us AJAX and its use has become very prevalent. It affords us some very cool dynamic features and functionality that improves the user experience and makes sites more responsive without the need to refresh the page. Good examples of cutting edge AJAX implementation include Google Maps and Earth. However, a much debated drawback has to do with its purported ability to encumber the indexability of content by the search engines. I searched for content on this topic and ironically there didn't seem to be a whole lot. The predominant technology behind AJAX is JavaScript, wherein valuable indexable content resides, however, the search engines are unable to parse that content from the javascript given that they don't run JavaScript on the pages they index. As a result, the SEO gains are impacted.

Some of the solutions being offered up out there include creating a plain and static html version of your site, adding your ajaxed content to noscript tags, and boycott AJAX altogether. Whatever the solution(s), this is spawning a whole new debate and giving rise to a whole host of solution offerings dedicated to addressing this issue. Would love to hear from some of you on your experience with this issue.