May 2002 Search Engine News

May 1, 2002 :: Overture Listings Goto Yahoo but Leave AOL
Sponsored Site listings appear near the top of search engine results of most search tools. Generally the three sponsored, or paid listings appearing in this section were drawn from the bid-per-click search tool, Overture. The deal with the AOL family of web-services ended last night. As it stands today, Overture will continue to supply sponsored results for: AltaVista, Lycos, InfoSpace, Ask Jeeves, and CNet.

The biggest deal announced by Overture is the new sponsored site listings at Yahoo! and MSN. As of this morning, sponsored sites listed at Yahoo! and MSN will be drawn from the top3 purchased positions at Overture.

Overture has also announced it will no longer supply sponsored sites for AOL, AOL.COM and Compuserve. Overture's deal to supply results to Netscape expires in August 2002. Overture will continue to supply results to the European versions of AOL. AOL will recieve its paid results from Google in the future.

May 2, 2002 :: LookSmart Works Out a Kink
For many of you the 'new' LookSmart system is completely new and unknown and considering this horrific promotion system that they imposed on their old and new clients. you should probably stay away. This newsbyte, however, is for those who already work with the new Looklisting accounts and may want to know what LookSmart is up to.

Did LookSmart group two or more domains into one account with each sharing the bonus advertising dollars they credited to clients?

Well this situation is a reality for StepForth and we have been on LookSmart's case to deconsolidate one account (with 2 domains) into two. When we first made this request our initial reply was that they would find a way to help us out but the current system did not support it. Only 2 weeks later they said that the system could now handle such a request and they wanted login and password information for the new separated accounts.

So, for all of you who think that they are stuck administering a group of LookSmart listings (that in our case were separate clients) from one account instead of multiple accounts this is great news now if we actually wanted to use LookSmart this may actually be useful.

May 3, 2002 :: Real Names = Real Debt = Real Dead? UPDATE!!!
Does anyone remember Real Names? This company thought it would be a good idea to assign common words and names to companies as if they were full URLs. When an Internet user would type the word into the address bar of their browser, the Real Names associated website would appear as if the correct URL had been used. It didn't work out for them it seems. The only major search tool that gave them the time of day and used their system was Microsoft. Real Names owes Microsoft $30Million, a debt that came due today, the same day Microsoft's agreement to use their system expired. The world will be better off without them.

May 5, 2002 :: VeriSign SCAM Warning!
We received an interesting billing from VeriSign today. This is evil, uncalled for and likely boarders on being illegal but they've gone and done it anyway. We URGE all clients who have registered their domain names through StepForth to visit this webpage before paying any VeriSign bills.
Veri-Scam Alert. CLICK HERE

May 15, 2002 :: Judge Orders VeriSign to Stop.
In excellent followup to our May 5th news posting it seems that VeriSign's latest promotion attempt has raised the ire of many a competitor. BulkRegister has successfully sued VeriSign over deceptive advertising, ultimately forcing VeriSign to discontinue sending 'Domain expiration notices' to BulkRegister clientele. This is, of course, only a partial win since VeriSign is still able to send notices to all of its remaining competitors. We expect this to change very soon now that precedent has been set.

Care to enjoy some levity at VeriSign's expense? We ran across these links last week: (in advance, we should warn you that there are a great many popups on link1)
link1, link2

May 31, 2002 :: AltaVista shrinks in Stature as it reinks its deal with Overture
AltaVista's roller coaster experience in the last year is indicitive of the entire search engine industry. Founded on venture capital and operated by a larger corporate entity CMGI, AltaVista's primary goal over the past 18months has been to find a revenue model that actually turns a profit. By linking AltaVista's search services with other Internet services offered by parent CMGI, the popular world wide web search engine began to present itself as a full-service portal to other aspects of the Internet such as Chat, Free Email accounts and News and Stock offerings. AltaVista wasn't the only search tool to try to emulate AOL's success by coping their business model however, as online reputations go, faith in AltaVista's primary service declined noticably. Viewership has declined to the point where AltaVista is often left off the Neilson Ratings TOP10 search engine chart!

Remember how they wish to turn a profit? In October 2001, AltaVista's submission policies changed to make paid-inclusion submissions practically mandatory for Top20 placements. Given the major decline in viewership, few webmasters are taking them up on the offer and AltaVista's viewership has declined further. Now, today, AltaVista has announced it is getting out of the Full-Service Portal business and rededicating itself to its original and primary function, providing search engine results and search technology. That is probably a good thing. As part of their reorganization, CMGI has renewed its Sponsored Sites contract with Overture for another 12 months. This means the first three listings seen under a specific keyword phrase on AltaVista will be fed from the popular bid-per-click search tool. If AltaVista begins to produce better search results and invests some more money in research and development, perhaps the SEO community will start to pay some more attention to this long-lost old standard.

May 31, 2002 :: RealNames Dies a RealHard Death
Real Names has closed shop. On May 3rd, we reported that Keyword monopolizer Real Names had lost it's one and only contract with OS monopolizer Microsoft and was likely to cease operations. It happened today. Sighs of relief could be heard throughout the literate world.