Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Search Engine Lowdown: Search Vortal's MySpace Agreement to Pay MySpace Users For Searches:
"The newly launched 'Search Vortals' offering enables site owners to monetize searches from their sites. The term 'vortal' is an unfortunate conflation of vertical and portal; despite the name I suspect we will be hearing a great deal about the company in the days to come as they conflate MySpace users (and web publishers at large) with the possibility for earning a little beer money...
...It has a "social search" function by which users can vote on the relevance of a given site within the SERPs which I found disorienting because it caused the page to reload. Also I was not "rewarded" by any indication that there had been a change made.
The results are a mashup of crawled data, the specific site's pages and backfill from Yahoo, AltaVista (isn't that Yahoo too?) and Google. They "auto rake and optimize" so that if I'm on a chocolate site and I search for books then SERPs appear with books about chocolate.
The search vortal algo was built initially by a team of 7 guys (in the early phase of the vortal push).
The motivation behind the Mainstream Advertising decision to develop a search engine lies in this statement by Daniel Kay: "it's easy to manipulate Google, Yahoo and MSN's results..." I can imagine how this brash assertion formed given the power of links in rank and the fact that Mainstream Advertising has more than 4 million domains in their portfolio (I should say 4 million VORTALS in their portfolio).
Clearly Mainstream Advertising saw the value in syndicating their 10,000 advertisers' paid search ads across the web - and as an ad network they serve more than 5 billion paid search results a month.
What I see happening is an early widespread adoption by online entrepreneurs and MySpace users. If it works we'll see companies like Eurekster and Rollyo adding a payout to those who run put their search boxes on their sites (if they can get the ad network behind them). This could possibly be a Google or Yahoo too (and would enable folks to monetize their meta-web portals).
Ultimately I think it will be user interface and relevance issues that will relegate Search Vortals to a second-tier on-site search API position though their high payouts will keep them popular with publishers. In short, the company itself will kick ass monetarily but is not likely to advance search or relevance theory very much (this opinion based tenuously on my single conversation with Kay. I'm open to having my opinion changed)..."
"The newly launched 'Search Vortals' offering enables site owners to monetize searches from their sites. The term 'vortal' is an unfortunate conflation of vertical and portal; despite the name I suspect we will be hearing a great deal about the company in the days to come as they conflate MySpace users (and web publishers at large) with the possibility for earning a little beer money...
...It has a "social search" function by which users can vote on the relevance of a given site within the SERPs which I found disorienting because it caused the page to reload. Also I was not "rewarded" by any indication that there had been a change made.
The results are a mashup of crawled data, the specific site's pages and backfill from Yahoo, AltaVista (isn't that Yahoo too?) and Google. They "auto rake and optimize" so that if I'm on a chocolate site and I search for books then SERPs appear with books about chocolate.
The search vortal algo was built initially by a team of 7 guys (in the early phase of the vortal push).
The motivation behind the Mainstream Advertising decision to develop a search engine lies in this statement by Daniel Kay: "it's easy to manipulate Google, Yahoo and MSN's results..." I can imagine how this brash assertion formed given the power of links in rank and the fact that Mainstream Advertising has more than 4 million domains in their portfolio (I should say 4 million VORTALS in their portfolio).
Clearly Mainstream Advertising saw the value in syndicating their 10,000 advertisers' paid search ads across the web - and as an ad network they serve more than 5 billion paid search results a month.
What I see happening is an early widespread adoption by online entrepreneurs and MySpace users. If it works we'll see companies like Eurekster and Rollyo adding a payout to those who run put their search boxes on their sites (if they can get the ad network behind them). This could possibly be a Google or Yahoo too (and would enable folks to monetize their meta-web portals).
Ultimately I think it will be user interface and relevance issues that will relegate Search Vortals to a second-tier on-site search API position though their high payouts will keep them popular with publishers. In short, the company itself will kick ass monetarily but is not likely to advance search or relevance theory very much (this opinion based tenuously on my single conversation with Kay. I'm open to having my opinion changed)..."
Comments:
Post a Comment
