EngineWorks, Inc.

Yahoo recently announced that it was buying BlueLithium, a behavior and demographic ad network, for $300 million in cash. BlueLithium claims to be the fifth largest ad network in the United States, and the second largest in the UK with a combined 145 million unique visitors every month. The company has two proprietary technologies called AdPath Behavioral Targeting and Selective Inventory Partnerships. The company was founded in 2004 and has 10 offices globally.

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Yahoo’s official search blog recently announced that Yahoo has made significant improvements to their crawl, index and ranking systems. The majority of these updates concentrate on improving the efficiency and comprehensiveness of Yahoo’s search crawler called Slurp.

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An interesting study was released last week claiming that consumers now express more satisfaction with Yahoo! than Google, Ask.com, MSN, or AOL. The study by the American Consumer Satisfaction index was reported in the article titled “Is Yahoo! Better Than Google?” on eMarketer.

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Here’s an insightful article released yesterday by Business Wire through Target Marketing Magazine, entitled “Yahoo! and comScore Study Finds Online Consumers Who Pre-Shop on the Web Spend More In-Store“, that reports that even though almost 90% of consumers shop for information online, not even 7% of retail sales actually take place on the Internet.

At the end of this post, I list the May 2007 market percentages of the largest players in the current online search industry. Once again, Google dramatically increased its lead in our space with an impressive 42.1% year-over-year growth rate in the month of April, to command more than 55% of the total search market.

What’s crazy to think about is, that when I entered our fledgling space back in the late 1990’s, Inktomi (purchased by Yahoo! in late 2002) was the T-Rex of the search engine landscape (with a combined market share of more than 42% at the time), and the now obscure Northern Light and AltaVista were nipping at its heals. Here is a snapshot of the other dinosaurs (and a one little furry creature) from August 1999:

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Interesting article today across the wire from The Associated Press titled “Microsoft,Yahoo become latest to improve Internet search privacy” proclaiming that the search engines are limiting the length of time that they retain potentially sensitive user data.  The article points-out that “the search engines all appear interested in staying a step ahead of regulators as the industry mines personal data to customize online ads tailored for the tastes and interests of each individual visitor.”

Yahoo! recently announced a new search suggestion feature. The Yahoo! search box now offers search suggestions as you type. For more information visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

This quote was stated today by Sheryl Sandberg, the vice president of global online sales and operations for Google, during a forum with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask at Fortune’s iMeme tech conference in San Francisco.  As CNNMoney.com also reported today, the four giants of search didn’t always play nicely during this presentation.

Check out “Search Leaders Get Defensive” for a little insight into the competitiveness of our space at the very top.

Yahoo Search Marketing rolled out some new features to the Panama platform today. These features include:

1. The ability to easily move & copy keywords from one ad group to another.
2. A revised keyword selector tool. The new tool provides an estimate of monthly searches on each keyword suggested.
3. An ad writing help guide. This guide will allow users to preview ads they would appear on the search results page.

For more details visit Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog.

In the early days of search, meta description tags were a significant part of search engine optimization. Years ago, they were one of the many factors used by the search engines to determine rank. Today, however, meta description tags are important for a completely different reason. Currently, today’s sophisticated search engines often display the meta description on their search engine results pages (SERPs). This, in turn, can have a significant impact on click-through rates (CTRs).

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