The search engine marketing environment is undergoing enormous changes as the industry and the Internet mature. The changes we’ve seen over the past six months are only the tip of a much larger iceberg as new technologies and innovations on established ideas radically alter how we look for information and how that information is delivered to us by search engines. For marketers and advertisers in the traditional world of print and broadcast media, change happens slowly, generally with enough warning to allow for long-term decisions and campaign planning. Read more…

About one month ago we noticed that a healthy chunk of our traffic was coming from a search engine in China called Baidu.com. In this case the actual site was mp3.baidu.com and the search engine had honed in on Jim Hedger’s mp3 recorded interview with the BBC regarding Google’s possible IPO. Since StepForth primarily promotes english-oriented search engines, this was the first time we had ever seen Baidu.com. So we decided to do a little digging on this search engine. Now according to an article from Reuters found on ZDNet, Baidu is among a host of Chinese search engines that are looking to make a dent in the search engine industry! In fact, the CEO of an up and coming search property bought by Yahoo! in November (anyone left out there?) said that his job is to “kick Google’s ass.” Read more…

Further to my AskJeeves Exclusive posted last week there have been some significant changes in the AskJeeves empire. For one thing it doubled in size on March 5th as it bought Interactive Search Holdings, a privately held company in Irvington N.Y. with over $100 million in annual revenues and 200 employees for between $362 million US. Interactive currently owns a family of popular web sites including Excite.com and iWon.com. As of this purchase, Ask owns the “12th-busiest group of Web sites in January, attracting a total of 23.8 million unique visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix, a research firm. Read more…

For those that dislike advertising and pop-ups Norton Internet Security 2004 is a dream come true, but for advertisers it could be your worst nightmare…

The newest version of Norton Personal Firewall includes a new web assistant that allows users to block ads and pop-ups, this setting is turned on by default and is stirring up some controversy, but how does this affect the PPC world? Read more…

We all know that incoming links are an important part of any search engine placement strategy. Exchanging reciprocal links is one of the easiest ways to attain links to your website from other webmasters and there are many sites out there willing to exchange links with you. That said, not all of them are valuable links that will benefit you – so where do you find them? Read more…

The search engine marketplace has undergone significant changes over the past 18-months but yesterday’s news from Yahoo! marks a turning point in the industry. Timed to coincide with the New York Search Engine Strategies conference, Yahoo announced a massive increase in paid inclusion fees and distribution of results. While Yahoo! and Overture issued press releases through their public relations firm, Fleishman-Hillard, their affiliates and resellers such as Position-Tech and Trellian issued press releases of their own, creating a confusing and at times messy mountain of uninformative information. Read more…

With all these changes surrounding Yahoo and the new Overture Site Match system, where do you stand to get the best bang for you buck as a small business?

First a quick glance at the new Site Match system. It is based on a combination of cost-per-click and paid inclusion. For $49 you can submit the first page to Site Match, for subsequent pages the cost is reduced. Read more…

Search provider Ask Jeeves announced today its plans to acquire Interactive Search Holdings, one of the largest privately owned online media and search companies, in a $343 million deal that is part of the company’s efforts to strengthen its grasp on the steadily growing search market.

Last December, comScore Media Metrix reported that Interactive Search Holdings was the ninth most visited United States property on the Internet. The company was launched in 1999 and is commonly known as “the Excite Network.”

Ask Jeeves will double in size with this acquisition, which includes web properties such as the search engine Excite.com and iWon, among others. This news comes after the announcement that Ask Jeeves will drop its paid inclusion program.

“The acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings will be an important step in Ask Jeeves’ growth strategy,” said Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz. “This acquisition will enable us to combine Ask Jeeves’ proven strengths in user experience, search technology and brand development with Interactive Search Holdings’ strengths in distribution and direct marketing. By leveraging these two complementary approaches to search, we expect to accelerate Ask Jeeves’ market share gains in 2004 and beyond.”

Right now AskJeeves has a search engine that, in my opinion, is truly impressive. The natural language processing and wealth of quality information in their database has become so good that searching by query actually provides relevant results 90% of the time! This is a vast improvement over the original natural language system that Ask had in place just a year ago. When asked what made AskJeeves so different from its competitors, Jim answered decisively that it was Ask’s search technology that put it in a category all of its own. Why the technology? Read more…

It appears that Yahoo!’s bold and less than brilliant foray into ” Looksmart-like ” paid inclusion may have been the final nudge that AskJeeves needed to shut down their paid inclusion program, Index Express (not Index Connect which is Inktomi). This significant shift of AskJeeves away from their 18 month-old paid inclusion program appears to be a timely distancing from the pending storm coming to Yahoo! after it announced its new Site Match system. Read more…