Click fraud is getting more attention and media coverage lately. And now there's a cottage industry emerging around the perceived problem. My question is: Will this motivate or accelerate a move to an alternative model (e.g., cost per lead/action) that…
Loren Baker posted some information on the search engine competition going on in China. He cited a survey which showed that Baidu.com Inc. had boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google share was…
We noted with interest on RHD's latest earnings call that it has removed cover ads from its SBC-branded directories in Illinois, the logic being that cover ads make it harder for the publisher to distinguish its brand from its competitors.…
BellSouth put out a press release today quoting BAPCO CEO Ike Harris announcing that the company's RealPages.com IYP site has reached 20 million monthly searches. The press release also claims that search traffic has grown by 18 percent from 2004…
AdWeek reports this week that YellowPages.com has selected SBC's longtime advertising agency GSD&M to handle the advertising account for YellowPages.com, the company jointly owned by SBC and BellSouth. The magazine estimates the size of the account at US$4 million. This…
About a decade ago, I wrote a lengthy article for Link magazine (anyone remember Link magazine?) about the efforts of the U.S. Postal Service and others to crack down on bogus Yellow Pages scams, which exploit the inattention of busy…
For the better part of 15 years, TMP was the 900-pound gorilla of the national Yellow Pages market. Some time in the late 1980s with Andy McKelvey at the helm, TMP began an aggressive CMR acquisition roll-up strategy. By the…
Danny Sullivan asks the question of whether search engines becoming portals -- in part because they're so furiously competing with each other -- implies a potential decline in quality. Google reportedly announced its "fusion" strategy because users were requesting greater…
Ask Jeeves has acquired Excite Europe from Tiscali for 6.1 million euros (an apparent pittance). In March of last year, Ask Jeeves bought Excite.com in the U.S. Also today, Ask Jeeves and InfoSpace announced they had settled litigation associated with…
Search-engine marketing firm TrafficLeader, whose technology supports BellSouth€™s "Real Search Engines Solutions," announced a deal with the Houston Chronicle to sell search marketing to local businesses on a similar €œflat-fee, guaranteed clicks€ basis. We had predicted €œsimplified search€ would make…
No such luck. This was simply a Forbes.com headline designed to suck readers into a brief news story. Oh, and by the way, why don€™t you respond to the question, €œWhat do you think is the best search engine?€ For…
