Search Engine Reports

Search Engine Reports

April, 2005
4/30/05: Google announces the upcoming availability of site targeting. This will allow Adwords advertisers to choose which sites in the Google content network display their ads.

4/30/05: Adwords advertisers may now use animated gifs and Flash, as well as static images, in their ads. This may not be a boon to advertisers, since it effectively changes their text ads to banner ads, with abysmal conversion rates.

4/30/05: Google provides a "heat map" to help Adsense publishers determine the most effective placement for Adsense ads. Predictably, the area traditionally reserved for body content, in the center of the page, is the most effective, followed by navigation areas at the upper, left-hand, and lower part of the page.

4/30/05: Google begins testing the inclusion of Adwords ads in RSS feeds, for delivery along with news, blogs, and other information collected by RSS aggregators.

4/30/05: Amazon's A9 search engine adds five more cities to its Visual Yellow Pages, which debuted in January 2005.

4/28/05: The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers showing that pay-per-click and contextual ad spending increased 51% from 2003 to 2004 - from $1.3 billion to $3.85 billion. The report would be more useful if it had not lumped these very different advertising mediums together. Contextual ads are known for appearing in inappropriate venues, where the likelihood of conversion is low, and because they do not appear as the result of a keyword search, they may be more likely to attract browsers than buyers. Still, the report indicates tremendous growth in this area, in which spending seems modest, at least in comparison to the amounts spent on offline advertising: $50 billion on direct mail, $46 billion on newspaper advertisements, $33.5 billion on TV ads, and $6 billion on outdoor advertising.

4/27/05: Yahoo unveils a new and improved My Web Personal Search, introduced in beta in October 2004.

4/20/05: Dieringer Research Group publishes study finding that an online presence influences offline sales more than newspaper, television, or yellow pages advertising.

4/20/05: Google Labs presents "My Search History." This beta feature allows those with Google accounts to save queries and results for future reference.

4/19/05: A glimpse of the future is revealed with the debut of Podscope, a new engine that allows the user to search podcasts (audio and video) by keyword.

4/18/05: Overture, formerly GoTo, renames itself again, to Yahoo Search Marketing, clarifying its mission and capitalizing on the well-known Yahoo name.

4/18/05: MSN search results to be included in Infospace metacrawlers, Dogpile and the aptly named MetaCrawler.

4/15/05: Yahoo Shopping adds RSS feeds, to allow users to monitor products in popular shopping categories (electronics, computers, music, movies).

4/15/05: AOL launches a Pay-Per-Call program, similar to the one Findwhat unrolled last fall. See September 2004 search engine report to find out how pay-per-call advertising works.

4/13/05: Google solicits digital video submissions (excluding adult content). In the future, users should be able to search for a video file by meta data, pay to view the file, if payment is required by the owner, and view the file hosted on a Google server.

4/12/05: Google launches a mini-version of Local search for cell phones.

4/11/05: Ask Jeeves upgrades personalized search so that users can import bookmarks into MyJeeves; save images to MyJeeves; tag search results with meta data; organize content in folders; and access personalized search from the Ask Jeeves toolbar.

4/7/05: Google joins AOL, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo in launching Google Q&A, which excerpts answers to popular queries - usually in the realm of geography, pop culture, and science - from websites it considers reliable.

4/7/05: Fathom Online releases March Keyword Price Index showing cost of paid search increasing to an average of $1.75/click, up 9% from February.

4/6/05: Google confirms they are testing "Alternate Searches," a means of offering the user access to searches that are similar or related to the original query. Similar to clustering feature available at AskJeeves and other engines.

4/5/05: Yahoo releases a version of its Toolbar for Linux and Mac users; adds anti-spy functionality for Firefox/Windows.

4/5/05: Google adds satellite images to Google Maps and Local search, thanks to its October acquisition of Keyhole. This fills a niche abandoned by Mapquest, which discontinued satellite imagery some time ago.

4/5/05: Lycos partners with AlmondNet to deliver behaviorally targeted ads. It's done with cookies that collect non-personally identifying information. Still, this will raise privacy concerns.

4/4/05: Google announces plans to begin accepting personal video submissions sometime in the next few days. How this will dovetail with Google Video, which allows the user to find but not view video files, is not yet clear.

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