Archive for September, 2007
In July 2007, Microsoft Corp. and Ask.com called on the online services industry to develop global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection related to search and online advertising. The two companies committed to engage in a dialogue with other technology leaders, consumer advocacy organizations and academics to help encourage development of global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection related to search and online advertising.
Discussions have ensued over the past three months with stakeholders, including policymakers and data protection agencies worldwide. In Montreal on Sept. 27, industry leaders and consumer advocates convened to discuss privacy issues surrounding search and online advertising at an event sponsored by Privacy International.
“The Montreal meeting brought together many key participants in the online advertising and search markets, who increasingly recognize the importance of privacy in online advertising and search,” said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. “The participants brought different perspectives, which underscores the need for continuing dialogue. This meeting was a good start.”
More such events are planned in the next few months. The Federal Trade Commission will host a Town Hall Nov. 1–2 to address consumer protection issues. On Nov. 8, Microsoft, Ask.com and others will participate in a roundtable hosted by New York University School of Law on the privacy issues surrounding online search. Also since July, many informal discussions have been held with industry leaders, privacy advocates and other stakeholders.
Already, dialogue has helped identify a need to start with a common understanding of key concepts. Some privacy concepts mean different things to different people. For example, some companies regard data as anonymous if only part of a computer user’s Internet Protocol (IP) address is associated with it. Others have discussed removing the entire IP address and all cross-session identifiers when they anonymize the data.
“When it comes to many privacy issues, working together makes sense,” said Doug Leeds, vice president of product management at Ask.com. “Industry communication is critical to helping support and amplify a sense of trust and integrity in the online domain. By laying some basic foundations around privacy, we can act positively on issues of online integrity for our users and for customers worldwide. We believe, more than ever, that the privacy and trust dialogue is moving forward, with the needs and expectations of our users in mind each step of the way.”
“It is important that industry come together around a common understanding of a set of best practices,” emphasized Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist. “We need to do the right thing for consumers on privacy. The goal is to provide consumers with greater transparency and control.”
In addition to Microsoft and Ask.com, others in the search and online advertising industry, such as AOL, Yahoo! and Google, have addressed related privacy issues in the past few months. The good news is that privacy in online advertising and search is on the agenda. Microsoft and Ask.com are cautiously optimistic that we will continue to progress toward industry principles.
September 29th, 2007
The Yahoo! Blog announced a search update earlier this week:
“We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.
This is the first update after the launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer. We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result. You will see further benefits in how your site is represented in the index from this update. Your input improves relevance and coverage for users in search results, particularly in relation to your site.”
The best web hosting service not only holds up any site design, but also offers option like ecommerce hosting. Companies like anhosting and dot5hosting are few of those that tend to satisfy their clients in this context. Even powweb offers a range of services like linux shared hosting as well. A webhosting domain should be all this and much more.
September 29th, 2007
Making coupons from the extremely popular Entertainment book available for the first time through a leading search engine, Ask.com and Entertainment Publications, Inc. (EPI) today announced the availability of Entertainment coupons on Ask.com. More than 150,000 Entertainment coupons — which offer steep discounts of up to 50%-off and high-value “Buy-One-Get-One-Free” offers — are now available through AskCity, Ask.com’s critically acclaimed search service that finds business listings, events, movies and maps. In early October, the companies will offer an additional 150,000 coupons to searchers, offering consumers millions of dollars in savings.
When people search on AskCity (http://city.ask.com) for business listings that offer Entertainment coupons, they can review offers and print coupons with a free 14-day no-obligation trial of the Entertainment book service. With the trial, consumers now have full access to the entire Entertainment book coupon database including discounts for everything from dining and shopping, to travel and entertainment across the country. For example, people who search AskCity for “LensCrafters” in San Francisco will see a coupon for $75 off all eyeglasses.
Consumer trends demonstrate that economic conditions could be leading to increased coupon usage in 2007. According to BIGResearch’s Simultaneous Media Survey, 86% of the U.S. population is using coupons, a 10% increase from the year prior.
“AskCity has been widely touted as setting the pace for local search. Once again, Ask.com is raising the bar by providing people with content that is increasingly relevant in today’s economy,” said Doug Leeds, vice president of product management for Ask.com. “Ask.com is happy to provide an easy way to help people find the businesses they’re looking for and save money on products and services they want.”
“EPI has been providing people with high-value, quality discounts for over 45 years, primarily through our flagship product, the Entertainment book®,” said MaryAnn Rivers, CEO of Entertainment Publications. “Now, those who prefer an online experience can easily access relevant offers via local search in hundreds of cities across the U.S. Our partnership with Ask.com clearly supports our vision to make it easy for more people to save when they dine, shop and travel.”
September 27th, 2007
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Camera Comparison
Microsoft is releasing an update to Live Search centered on improvements to core search technology and deeper advancements in the vertical search areas of entertainment, shopping, local and health. Collectively, these improvements mark a quality milestone based on the company’s focus on delivering a better search experience for consumers and advertisers.
“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month. We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers,†said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.â€
The majority of Live Search customer feedback has focused on improving overall search relevance to deliver richer and deeper results and investing in differentiated experiences in high-interest consumer areas such as entertainment, shopping, health and local search.
Richer and Deeper Results
Microsoft’s efforts toward satisfying its Live Search customers can be grouped into a few key areas:
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Over fourfold increase in index size. Nearly 20 percent of customer challenges came from the long tail of the Web, indicating a need for broader coverage to help ensure that the right results can be returned for the highest percentage of queries. The new Live Search has exceeded the goal of quadrupling its range of coverage, setting a foundation that will enable it continue to keep pace with the growth of the Web. |
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Substantial improvements in understanding queryintent. The new Live Search does a much better job in predicting the intent of the query to return the best results possible. New investments improve the search service’s ability to read and understand queries in a way that more accurately determines intent despite common problems such as spelling errors, stop words, punctuation and synonyms. |
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Significant enhancements to core algorithms.The new Live Search has incorporated more user click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes, yielding more relevant results across queries. |
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Increased focus on query refinement. Intelligence in the back end designed to help customers arrive at improved query suggestions helps Live Search deliver the best results, even making proactive changes to the query in cases where the engine is confident of the customer’s intent. |
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New Web data extraction model. Core search innovation enables Microsoft to build rich vertical experiences that update on the fly. This technology extracts information from across the Web on products (including ratings and reviews); businesses (including locations, contact information, photos, hours of operation, ratings and reviews); celebrities (including buzz, images and videos); and more. |
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Expansion of Rich Answers. Based on user feedback that sometimes people are just looking for a specific fact or answer, Live Search’s improved Answers platform provides specialized responses to queries about specific areas such as weather, images, celebrities and entertainment, sports, stocks, Yellow Pages, maps or quick facts from Encarta®. This specialized content has been more deeply integrated into the main search experience to add to custom searches such as images and mapping. |
Additional improvements to the service include a new, cleaner user interface that makes the results pages easier to read and use; a more robust Answers platform that provides instant access to information from trusted sources while increasing relevancy; and organization of results pages based on the high-interest search verticals of entertainment, shopping, local and health on one page.
High-Interest Verticals
With up to 40 percent of searches falling into the categories of entertainment, shopping, health and local search, the new Live Search has made deep investments to deliver specialized content presented in a compelling way across these key vertical search areas:
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Entertainment. Helps customers stay informed on the latest entertainment news with celebrity instant answers accompanied by images and a new video search feature that offers smart motion previews, facts and buzz and new xRank celebrity ranking. |
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Shopping. Helps customers easily find and discover products along with reviews, guides, prices and other relevant information. |
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Health. New health search functionality intuitively organizes and surfaces the most relevant online health content from trusted sources, allowing consumers to refine searches faster and with more accuracy. |
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Local. Allows customers to search local business listings for help with making informed decisions based on rich details and reviews. |
With improvements across the core search experience and infrastructure as well as new experiences and specialized content in key, high-interest vertical areas, the new Live Search puts in place a platform that enables Microsoft to keep pace with customer demand and continue to deliver new and innovative search experiences across a range of scenarios and devices. An early example of these new experiences is the mobile search client, a Software plus Services implementation for the mobile phone that puts the power of the Live Search service in the palm of the hand. Speech-based search combines powerful speech-recognition software on the mobile phone with the Live Search service over the Internet. There is still plenty of room for innovation, and Live Search is well poised to lead in this arena.
More information on these updates is available from the Live Search fact sheet and the Live Search team blog, located respectively at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/factsheet/LiveSearchFS.mspx and http://livesearch.spaces.live.com.
September 27th, 2007
Yahoo! today announced that all of its global, mobile properties will adhere to new mobile advertising guidelines announced by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) EMEA. Yahoo! worked closely with the MMA to establish the mobile advertising guidelines which enable Yahoo!’s advertising partners to enhance the consumer experience and launch global, mobile advertising campaigns effectively and with lower production expenses.
“Yahoo! has been at the forefront of the global mobile advertising industry since 2004, and we realize that the adoption of industry best practices and guidelines are a critical factor in the success of the mobile advertising industry,” said Michael Bayle, GM, Global Monetization, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “We worked closely with the MMA to develop guidelines that benefit our global advertisers and consumers alike and will continue to do so as the industry develops best practices for additional mobile marketing practices and formats such as games, video and search.”
The MMA EMEA mobile advertising guidelines were established to allow mobile advertisers to reach consumers while ensuring that advertisements display effectively on the majority of mobile devices without compromising the user experience.
“Companies like Yahoo! that demonstrate leadership in developing and supporting a single consistent global guideline for mobile advertising will help to drive the evolution of the mobile advertising industry and create a consistent and positive consumer experience on mobile phones,” said Laura Marriott, president of the MMA. “The EMEA guidelines were developed to establish a common global advertising framework including aspect ratios, banner dimensions, file formats and so on.”
The MMA’s new EMEA guidelines are also designed to limit the effort needed by advertisers to prepare global mobile campaigns, thus reducing the money and time spent developing multiple iterations for various regions of the world. With the option for two aspect ratios, advertisers have the flexibility of layout and context which are large enough to give the consumer a compelling experience but small enough not to be intrusive.
Yahoo! expects to complete the conversion of its mobile web properties and all of the mobile properties supported by Yahoo! by Q4, 2007.
To view the Mobile Advertising Guidelines, visit www.mmaglobal.com/emeamobileadvertising.pdf. For more information about Yahoo!’s mobile products and mobile business services, visit www.mobile.yahoo.com.
September 25th, 2007
Google today announced the introduction of Google Gadget Adsâ„¢, a new interactive ad format that is currently in an expanded beta with a select group of AdWordsâ„¢ advertisers worldwide. Gadget ads – non-traditional ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities – not only enable advertisers to target audiences in a flexible and timely manner via regular updates within the ad unit, but also allow users to engage with ad content in a way static ads haven’t facilitated in the past.Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both.
Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Googleâ„¢ content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale. Gadget ads are also built on an open platform, allowing anybody from individual advertisers to agencies to set up and run ads on the Google content network, the world’s largest global online ad network. Plus, gadget ads will not command any serving or hosting costs.
Feedback from preliminary beta participants, including brand advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola North America’s Sierra Mist, Intel, Honda, Six Flags and Paramount Vantage, has been overwhelmingly positive. Advertisers are enthusiastic about this fresh marketing solution that empowers them to interact with targeted users through rich, dynamic and engaging content.
“We’re always looking for new ways to engage with our consumers,” said John Vail, director, interactive marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America. “Google Gadget Ads allowed us to reach the right audience at the right time, with an interactive message that brought our light-hearted Sierra Mist campaign, ‘Squeeze More out of Summer,’ to life.”
“New and cutting-edge advertising opportunities are always of interest to Intel,” said Stephanie Dillard, global marketing manager at Intel. “Google Gadget Ads provided a unique and efficient means to further promote our Centrino Duo campaign. Our goal was to enhance visibility and engagement with the consumer while taking in key learnings of Google’s evolutionary advertising offerings. We look forward to utilizing the interactive gadget ad format with our new ‘Chips’ campaign that shifts focus back on the processor.”
“The introduction of this new advertising format provides advertisers and agencies worldwide with an imaginative, dynamic way to interact with consumers,” said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management. “Google Gadget Ads are built on an open platform that enables distribution across the Google content network and can be shared on iGoogle and other personalized web pages.”
In addition, users can build active communities with gadget ads by sharing them with each other and placing them on nearly any webpage, including personalized iGoogle pages. These portability and sharing capabilities simultaneously generate additional free traffic and help foster a sense of community between advertisers and users. Detailed interaction reports allow marketers to track dozens of actions within the creative unit and optimize toward their goals. To learn more about Google Gadget Ads, visit http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/.
September 19th, 2007
As part of its ongoing efforts to enable users to take advantage of the web for sharing and collaborating, Google today added features for presentations to the Google Docs application. At http://documents.google.com, users can create simple web-based presentations that others can update and view from their own computers, even at the same time. The presentation feature of Google Docs is also available to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to offer communication and collaboration tools to their users.
Presentations are a natural addition for Google Docs, as they are usually created with the intention of being shared. Web-based, collaborative presentations offer users much-needed relief from manually managing and compiling group members’ input in separate attachments, and they make it possible for multiple users to view a set of slides while a moderator controls the presentation. Users will see that these features are still in simple, early stages; the Google Docs team is making them available today in response to strong user demand for presentation-sharing, and updates and improvements will continue to roll out over the coming months.
Google Docs is an innovative, web-based platform for creating, sharing, storing, and publishing documents; it now includes capabilities for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Starting today, users can:
- Create and keep presentations in one place on the web that’s accessible anytime, from any Internet connected computer.
- Manage, update and share presentations with colleagues by sending them a simple email invitation.
- Edit together online and in real-time, or contribute at different times to the same presentation on the web.
- Present and control slide shows for all viewers over the web, with no special setup required. Chat with viewers in real-time via integrated chat.
- Import existing presentations to get started quickly.
- Quickly publish presentations to the general public or individuals of their choice.
“This new presentation feature to Google Docs will be an extremely useful tool to our users and gives us an easy way to — literally — get on the same page,” said Scott Smith, vice president, Envirolet Environmental Sanitation and Google Apps administrator for Sancor Industries. “In our business the better the process for sharing information is, the better we can illustrate to our customers the value of our products.”
“From student groups to sales teams, people are turning to the web for help improving both personal and group productivity,” said Sam Schillace, director of engineering, Google Docs. “Putting documents in the cloud surrounded by easy to use features for collaboration and sharing can save people hours of inefficiency and frustration and even enable new ways of working together.”
September 18th, 2007
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Price Comparison
Yahoo! announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, Inc. (www.zimbra.com), a leader in next generation e-mail and collaboration software. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will acquire Zimbra for approximately $350 million.
“Our industry-leading communications products, including Yahoo! Mail, are critical to the future growth and success of Yahoo!,” said Jerry Yang, chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. “Zimbra’s tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core Mail offerings, further strengthening our strong leadership position in this space. Additionally, Zimbra’s successful relationships with large ISPs are key as we expand our worldwide partner network and continue to focus on our commitment to being the partner of choice.”
The acquisition of Zimbra will help Yahoo! to expand its presence in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain. Zimbra’s offerings include rich, AJAX-based e-mail, calendar, and contact management features that can be used both on and offline. Their open platform enhances the user experience by enabling creative mash-ups called Zimlets that tie in valuable Web services to e-mail, and can be tailored to fit the needs of every customer.
“We are excited to combine ourselves with one of the world’s most successful Web mail services and extend Yahoo!’s credible brand and leadership in the e-mail business to universities, businesses and ISPs globally,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO. “With Yahoo!’s ad and content network, the possibilities for Zimlets and other applications are endless.”
Yahoo! Mail celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and continues to be one of the world’s most popular Web mail services with 250 million(1) users worldwide. The service provides people with more ways to connect to their friends and online contacts and is fully integrated with Yahoo!’s many other popular services to make it easy to access all the Internet services people need.
“As an industry leader, we are constantly approached for different e-mail solutions,” said Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president, communications and communities, Yahoo! Inc. “With Zimbra, we will bring the security, reliability and anywhere access of Yahoo! Mail to people at school, work and home, further enhancing our leadership position in Web mail.”
Following the acquisition, Zimbra will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!. Satish Dharmaraj will continue to lead the Zimbra team based in Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters and will report to Brad Garlinghouse. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval. It is expected that the transaction will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2007.
September 18th, 2007
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