I am still catching up from last week, and have scores of interesting things in my “Blog This” folder. Here’s a sampling:
KK sends me this link to a headcount timeline from the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSFT).
The Kelsey Group’s annual survey of the Yellow Pages industry shows one percent growth in print, 33 percent growth online.
Microsoft’s newest trademark? Relerank, as found by Thomas Hawk.
“The Miva Principle.” This is the old Findwhat, declaring in a while paper that Yahoo and Google are bad for publishers. You have to give them your email to get a PDF, I’ve done that, will report if its worth reading. From the release: “Today, Google and Yahoo! are clearly thriving, and it is our belief that their success comes at the expense of the very publishers that partner with them on online advertising initiatives,” said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, MIVA’s chairman and chief executive officer.
The new Advolution engine/ad solution launches, citing my book as inspiration. Cool!
RawSugar – “an annotated collection of tagged webpages, to service a community of shared interests” – launched last month too.
The Washington Post and Yahoo launch del.icio.us integration. But – a well placed reader asks – why does the release not mention Yahoo, focusing only on del.icio.us?!
Video engine and platform Veoh is now in beta.
AOL loses Jim Riesenbach to Autobytel.
ReleRank is possibly a marketing tactic – because, it is very unlikely that any new combination of Algos MSN will create in the near future, have NOT already been considered and analyzed by Google and Yahoo
Neural Net, RankNet, PageRank, TrustRank etc etc are all a in a family of current buzzwords
MSN is possibly the most relevant it is going to be for the near future, everything else will probably Markting Gloss
ReleRank – Ranking by Relevancy – isn’t that what everyone is trying to do (duh!)
Nice wrap up. I like Advolution’s approach, but I can’t help but think the name will turn users off. The name seems more focused to advertisers than users. I am not sure I would visit a site called Advolution, as I would likely think it was simply for and about ads. From the looks of it, it is a search engine, and I like their approach, but I am not so keen on the name. Having “Ads” in a name I think is generaly not a good idea. The name good be something cool, and their ads program could be called “Advolution” (that would work for me) but it appears the company and homepage are called this. Just my 2 cents.
Advolution appears to be totally missing the key point of success for Adwords: the use of click-through percentage in the auction process. This is what ensures that the Adwords are relevant, and is what differentiated Google from Overture. Oh yeah, that and useful unsponsored search results.
Their model is effectively Overture without any useful guarantees on performance. Apparently they didn’t read your book closely enough.