Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Google Labs announced today they’ve enabled Froogle over wireless. Cool – now you can compare prices using your mobile phone or PDA….

From the release:

Users may find this service especially helpful when they’re out shopping at a retail store and are interested in searching Froogle to compare prices online…Using the Froogle wireless service is simple:
– From a WML-enabled phone, point the browser to http://wml.froogle.com
– Enter search terms in the box and select the ‘Search’ button
– Use the phone’s keypad arrows to scroll through the results.

Good overview of the local search market on SEW today, in particular a good summary of some of the hurdles to sustaining growth in what might be called the “Yellow Pages” sector – those really small businesses which account for billions in local radio, newspaper, and Yellow Pages advertising:

To achieve any sizeable revenues from the local market, paid search needs to gain small business advertiser adoption. But how much of the small business market will pay-per-click (PPC) be able to penetrate? There are some very practical challenges, which include:
* The complexity and time involved in keyword bid-campaign management
* Limited ad inventory and competition between national and small business advertisers for that inventory
* The absence of local sales channels to “push” PPC to small business advertisers
* The lack of websites among as much as 70% of small businesses

These are not insurmountable by any means, though they should not be minimized.

Read More

Pretty soon I’ll have to take the time to really grok FindWhat. The company has been on an acquisition tear, merging with espotting, buying Miva, and today announcing it has purchased Comet (best known for that cursor download in the late 90s, now a search/platform/web privacy company).

OK. So FindWhat, in the end, is a strong second-tier pay-per-click network. Like Overture or Adsense, they match buyer and seller via paid search keywords. They have a distribution network, and they have an advertiser base of tens of thousands. Their biggest client is Lycos. They serve a significant base of advertisers, and with the addition of espotting, which has 20,000 advertisers, they are now a force in Europe.

The also have an SEO business, and with Miva, which sells ecommerce software to small businesses, they are looking to be a force in the SME website building space. In essence, they hope to sell loads of SME services to their advertising clients. Yahoo has a similar play. With Comet, FindWhat has acquired a company in the metabrowser/privacy/OEM space. I’m not sure I get the play here, but I aim to find out when I head to the Search Engine Strategies conference next week in New York.

Read More

Via MediaPost, Neilsen Netratings reports that 39% of the US population used search engines last month.

The top five search venues in January were Google (59 million visitors), Yahoo! Search (46 million), MSN Search (45 million), AOL Search (23 million), and Ask Jeeves (13 million).

Scoble asks search giants for “access to the variables.” In other words, let users play with the guts of the engine, so they can tune the results to their liking. I hope the folks at MSFT are listening to one of their own. This kind of transparency, while problematic from a spam standpoint, would be most excellent.

About Yahoo Search. Interesting reading…

Beal points us to a WSJ article comparing the new Yahoo search with Google. The paper threads the needle and doesn’t have an opinion on who’s best, saying it depends. Sigh. We’ll have to wait till the pros at SEWatch do it right.

Seems Yahoo’s switch is now upon us, as most news outlets had been given an embargo of midnight EST last night (a reporter called me and told me as much), and Search Engine Watch is one of the first with a deeper take on the meaning of it all – the story is called “Birth of a New Machine”. In an email to me last night, Chris disagrees with my earlier post that “size matters” and I agree that in the end what matters most is relevance, but…perhaps I should have said “perception matters”. Expect the mainstream media to weigh in soon…

Chris’s take in one line:
Bottom line: I’m impressed with the quality of results that Yahoo is delivering. It’s a very viable alternative to Google and the other “last engine standing,” Ask Jeeves/Teoma.

Yahoo’s press release, issued 4 hours ago, is here.

Read More

In response to Google’s release today, SVP/Search Jeff Weiner told me: “We are extremely confident our index size is highly competitive.” My read on that statement is that when Yahoo unwraps its new search technology, the index will be at least 6 billion strong, if not larger.

Weiner took pains to add that “comprehensiveness” – ie big indexes – is only one piece of the total search quality puzzle. While the arms race to the largest index is something of a perception game, it’s an important one nevertheless. It’s inescapable: size does matter.