Category: Of Note in Search Biz

Bonnaroo and Memphis have my head spinning, stories bumping around asking to be let out. But for now, back to search. First up: the WebGuild is offering $200 off their conference later this month, which I cannot attend but sounds great. More info here…

PodZinger, which I’ve covered here, has rebranded as EveryZing and rolled out new services.

EveryZing is a media merchandising platform that helps content producers and web publishers dynamically increase the volume of consumable online multimedia content while simultaneously enhancing its monetary value.

Unlike other general web search and aggregation services that work only on meta data and tags, EveryZing leverages its unique speech to text, search, and optimization technologies to unlock the content within multimedia and automatically process and organize it to power a compelling ecosystem which easily connects media companies with publishers, consumers, and advertisers.

It’s a co branded engine for PayPal commerce sites … check it out. From the release:

TheFind, Inc. (www.thefind.com) today announced the launch of paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built specifically to enable consumers to browse products exclusively from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Just like results on TheFind.com, products will be shown to PayPal customers as visually compelling catalog-like images, not simply text links or thumbnail images. Unlike traditional comparison shopping sites, merchants will not have to pay for their products to appear in search results on paypal.thefind.com; instead, products from PayPal merchants will be indexed and become part of the natural search results.

Via SEW, a search service that gives you tons of options as to where you might search. Cool.

Bill Tancer has published this list:

It appears from this early analysis that the big winners for this new format are YouTube and Maps, while Image Search and News (which under the older format were occasionally featured top of page) are on the losing end.

Ask today launched Ask3D, which, according to documents sent to me by Ask, “synthesizes the best of our technologies across the three dimensions of search: Expression, Results and Content.”

All this is based on a new algorithm called Morph, which according to the reviewer’s guide, is “a new content-matching and ranking algorithm that literally transforms the entire page according to your unique query, presenting the right information, from the right sources, in the right place, at the right time. Morph, which deep-dives hundreds of structured databases, takes into account not only relevance based on source signals, but also previous user behavior for your query. Ask.com owns the patent on using click behavior to improve search relevance (via the DirectHit acquisition in 2000).”

Let me summarize it for you this way: This is Ask, a perennial 4th place player in an increasingly one player market, doing what only a 4th place player can do: Throwing caution to the wind and betting on a new interface, one that abandons the “ten blue links” approach that has dominated search for so long.

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From the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog:

Yahoo! Search Marketing is rolling out a new feature that we think will help enhance the quality, potentially reduce the cost and increase the value of traffic to you, our advertisers. It’s called quality-based pricing, and it measures the quality of traffic coming from our distribution partners—that is, the web publishers large and small that display your ads.

Previously, you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our distribution network. Now, with quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you otherwise would pay, depending on the overall quality of the traffic provided by our distribution partners. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

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