Next time you go shopping online and you see a price that seems too good to be true… it just might be. This seems like an obvious caveat, however, there is a certain amount of trust and respect attributed to major portals like Yahoo! Shopping so a cheap price might just seem like an incredibly good buy. In this case, however, the discount was a bit more than even the average imagination could have predicted. A mistake in the XML shopping feed at Yahoo! Japan prompted 100 million sales of an Apple eMac computer at a 98% discount! That’s right, the eMac was sold for the equivalent of $25 per computer, a discount of $1100 USD. When Catena, the Tokyo based computer firm discovered the mistake, chaos ensued as they contacted 20,000+ buyers to negate the sales. According to Catena they did not have to honor the sales because they did not confirm them by email.

So next time you find yourself with a 98% discount don’t get too excited until you receive confirmation of the sale

There have been a great deal of news since last week’s issue on the advent of Google’s controversial Gmail system created to compete with Yahoo! Mail and MSN’s Hotmail. The news can be summarized quickly; upheaval.

Here are some examples of what has occurred since our last newsletter (April 7):
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MSN has released new information on its forthcoming search technology.

MSN Blogbot & Newsbot

MSN product manager, Karen Redezki told Matt Hicks of eWeek that MSN will be launching a blog and news service to the public before its new algorithmic search engine is released. Read more…

On March 26, 2004, Yahoo! announced the pending purchase of the european comparison shopping portal Kelkoo.com.

According to Terry Semel, chariman and CEO of Yahoo!,”Kelkoo will add depth and breadth to Yahoo!’s integrated network of services for consumers, and adds another set of powerful tools for marketers seeking to reach them.” He also explained the purchase in more detail: “commerce has emerged as a key component of search, and the combination of Web search, product search and comparison shopping will help further Yahoo!’s goal to create the most comprehensive and best user experience on the Web globally. Read more…

Moments ago our PPC Expert, Scott Van Achte caught a quick preview of the latest Google rankings; it appears there is a serious Google Dance happening at this very moment. We noticed drastic differences in backlinks (link popularity) and placements. In our case, our links popped from 220 to over 750 in mere moments but then they were back to 220 a few minutes later.

It is clear that Google is updating their datacenters so brace yourself for a new round of havoc… lets hope this one is spam-free.

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…

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…

It seems that the Ask empire has been quietly innovating while the search engine world focused on the ever public battle between the top 3 search properties. Recently Ask launched “Smart Search” which VP Jim Lanzone noted as “more of an ideology than a brand name”. Read more…