babasave´s world

More agencies and their parent companies are stepping up online
investments in what is known as search marketing or search engine
marketing, an estimated $5.1 billion category last year that has been
growing far faster than traditional advertising in media like
television and newspapers.

The goal of the agencies and agency
companies is to offer search marketing services internally rather than
requiring clients to go to independent specialist agencies.

more

Technorati Tags: investment, yahoo, media

Once again a good point that john has on the searchengine battelle

No one study should be seen as definitive, but it’s interesting nevertheless to see this study from French Professor Jean Veronis
and his students, which shows a tie between Google and Yahoo in terms
of relevance. What’s even more interesting: the study found that *all*
the engines failed, for the most part. From the post:

Google and Yahoo tied for first place, with a rating of 2.3, but
the most striking result is undoubtedly the extremely low level of user
satisfaction. None of the search engines even passed (2.5 out of 5) and
some of the grades were extremely low…

Technorati Tags: yahoo, google,

Bob Tedeschi’s New York Times “e-commerce report” column  yesterday highlighted the personalized shopping potential of RSS.

Paid search has been enormously successful. Yet click rates are at an industry average of just 2.6 percent, in part, because of the challenge of serving truly relevant ads against search queries. But what if there were a way for consumers to indicate very specific requirements to search engines or Web publishers and receive exact results directly in their e-mail inboxes or RSS readers? The clickthroughs and corresponding purchases would likely be many times today’s paid search response rates.

A system of alerts would boost the value publishers and search engines can deliver to advertisers by providing greater targeting and distribution. This “alerts” functionality exists today but is not widely used for commercial purposes. Though there are prominent exceptions, technical challenges and a lack of consumer awareness have so far prevented the widespread use of alerts as a commercial or shopping tool. It’s just a matter of time, however, before alerts functionality is built out on all the shopping engines and later on a broader array of sites, including classifieds.

a good point I’d say what do you think …

Technorati Tags: shopping, ecommerce, rss, feed,

mr prillo started a thing and a lot of people follow e.g. at wired main thing don’t you use the google engine …

# Searched for “Holy Grail” – trying to find out what the latest DVD edition happens to be, as Ponzi’s never seen the movie before (seriously). Narrowed my search slightly by adding “DVD” to the query string. Turns out, it’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Special Edition), which I believe I already own. We’re set. I’ll force her to view it before we watch “Life of Brian.” Rather disappointed that I didn’t get an image or suggestion for more information on the movie (at least, from Yahoo!).

# Luckily, I haven’t spent much time in front of the computer today – nor will I for the duration of the evening. We’re flying from NYC to Seattle this evening, and they don’t have Connexion by Boeing (but they do have 35 channels of live DirecTV programming).

# Just got called by a Canadian freelance reporter, who apparently is working on a story that should be printed in 11 of Canada’s more popular newspapers. I’m expecting Oprah to call next. Not.

prillo

Technorati Tags: google, fasting, wired, nyc, computer, newspaper, canada, boeing