Internet Marketing Course BLOG

IHT Technology
Original Article By Saul Hansell
The New York Times

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): The long-awaited arrival of MSN’s inhouse self-serve pay-per-click ad program (“adCenter”) is upon us, according to a story in the New York Times via the International Herald Tribune. MSN’s twist is the inclusion of demographic ad serving selection criteria (gender, age, location) based on (presumably) sign-up info provided by MSN members. Privacy advocates will be on high alert (as will PPC advertisers!) as this new service rolls out in the US sometime in October.

“Microsoft will unveil on Monday its own system for selling Web advertising as it struggles to compete with Google and Yahoo in the expanding Web search business. The system, to be used by MSN, is meant to improve on those of Microsoft’s rivals by allowing marketers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location.

The move is part of Microsoft’s broad response to the threat from Google, which is using its powerful advertising sales network to support an expanding range of free software products and Internet services. Last week, Microsoft announced a broad reorganization that placed MSN in the same group as its Windows operating system, indicating that it saw software delivered over the Internet – and possibly paid for through advertising – as central to its future.”

Read the entire article at:
Microsoft to Start own System for Selling Ads on Internet Searches

Technorati Tags: Business, Internet, Marketing

By Chris Sherman
Associate Editor
SearchEngineWatch

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): A comparison of of first page search results for 4 of the most popular search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves. It’s really quite amazing how much the results vary between any 2 search engines, and particularly, among all 4 of the engines. A must read!

“A new study suggests that the overlap between search engine results is less than it was even a few months ago, and that the voices of each engine are growing even more unique.

It’s easy to think of search engines as black boxes that all deliver more or less the same results. But that’s not an accurate view, according to a study released today by Dogpile and researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University.

The study looked at search results from more than 12,500 random queries on Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN search and Yahoo, and found that the overlap in first page results for these four engines was a scant 1.1% on average for a given query, suggesting that each of the four major search engines has a unique voice that’s not duplicated by the other services.”

Read more about the survey, including links to comprehensive survey results:
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3524411

Technorati Tags: Business, Internet, Marketing

by Dave Ingalls
Internet Marketing Course Blog
April 28, 2005

Here we go! Microsoft has officially launched its proprietary crawler-based search engine – click on the link below to take it for a test drive.

In particular, check out a unique feature of this search engine – the tie-in to Microsoft’s Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Enter the search phrase “population rome italy” (without the quotation marks). Look for the “Answer” entry right after the top 3 sponsored links – you get the exact answer you’re looking for fed to the search engine from the Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Pretty neat!

Try it out for yourself: MSN Search