Yahoo! Desktop Search launched out of beta this week, gaining a contextual search feature, "LiveWords," in the process. The new feature enables users who use the desktop search to retrieve documents from their hard drives to then highlight terms within those documents--and with one click, search the Web for pages related to those highlighted words. The results page, returned from Yahoo!'s search engine, includes sponsored links. Yahoo!'s desktop software, used for searching hard drives, can index content from over 300 different file types, including Microsoft Office applications, Adobe PDF, and assorted music and video formats. The beta version of Yahoo! Desktop first launched in January--after rivals Google and Microsoft debuted their own beta versions. Google was first to come out with a desktop search, releasing a product in beta in October of last year, and then launching it officially in March. Last month, Google unveiled an updated version of the tool; this latest edition, available only on Microsoft Windows, allows users to search and preview files on their hard drive or the Web, and view their Gmail and Google News selections directly from the desktop. Microsoft's MSN released a toolbar and desktop beta in December, and then launched officially in mid-May. New features include a preview window that allows users to drag and drop searched items into other applications; the ability to customize both the files indexed by the search algorithm and where the index file is stored; and the ability to download additional third-party plug-ins that allow different file types to be searched.
While the Internet appears to have many millions of Web pages available for ads, finding a place for streaming video ads remains a challenge, said speakers this week at OMMA East. "We cannot satisfy demand for online video," said Jeff Meyer, senior vice president, interactive sales at Scripps Network. "There is more money than the marketplace can handle right now for good, high-quality video." Meyer added that Web publishers can't turn a profit just by serving video impressions because there isn't enough online video to go around. Instead, networks such as his must package the streaming video ads with banners. Then they can go to clients and say, "This is how we integrate your idea in all of these platforms," Meyer told the audience at the panel discussion, "Online Video Programming: Is TV a Loss Leader?" But that situation might soon change, thanks to new and cheaper technology, said panelist Nicholas Ascheim, product manager for entertainment and video at New York Times Digital. "The price of producing video has come way, way down," Ascheim said. "It's easier to produce now than before." In fact, said Ascheim, Times technology reporter David Pogue recently began creating his own video reports, which are available on NYTimes.com. The endeavor has been "profitable right off the bat," Ascheim told the audience.
Search giant Google has started promoting its relatively new feature that enables advertisers to target individual sites and pay on a cost-per-thousand impression model, rather than Google's usual pay-per-click formulation. For now, Google has placed links that read "Advertise on this site" and on certain sites within the Google Network. Clicking on the link takes visitors to a landing page that details the program. Marketers that click on the link but don't have a Google AdWords account are walked through the process of establishing one before being allowed to bid on ad space on the site. A Google spokesman called the ads a "limited test" that was recently started on a small number of AdSense sites. In June, Google announced that it would allow advertisers to target individual sites and bid on keywords using cost-per-thousand impression pricing, rather than pay-per-click. Advertisers who bid on a price-per-impression basis on individual sites will compete directly in Google's keyword auction system with other cost-per-click bidders who are bidding on keywords across the AdSense network. Google will combine the pay-per-click rate with the ad's click-through rate to yield an estimated price-per-impression figure. That estimate will be compared to the marketer's cost-per-thousand impression bid.
Blog and RSS search engine and advertising network Feedster will within the next two weeks release a product that will allow small publishers to more easily place ads in their RSS feeds, Feedster Vice President for Sales and Marketing Chris Redlitz said during a panel at OMMA East this week. The product will be more self-service than Feedster's current RSS ad program, Redlitz said, and will allow publishers to place ads in their feeds in a manner similar to Google's AdSense. To complement the product, Feedster will also release a feed-profiling tool later this year. The product, Redlitz said, will profile a blogger's feeds using Feedster's index--and will deliver ads based on the overall content of the feed over time, not individual posts. For example, a blogger who writes about politics 80 percent of the time would still receive politically relevant ads the other 20 percent of the time when he blogs about, say, his cat. Redlitz said Feedster can glean a substantial amount of information about a publisher's feed from the index; marketers, in turn, can use that information to decide whether to advertise on particular publishers' sites. "Because for most of these properties we have their entire published history from day one, we have frequency of publishing, we have content--we can determine if they use profanity or not," he told OnlineMediaDaily in an interview after the panel. During the panel on Tuesday, Redlitz touted RSS for its potential to deliver targeted, opt-in, contextual, and spam-safe ads. But he cautioned against misusing the medium in the same way that e-mail has been misused. "We don't want to make some of the mistakes that have been made in the past," he said. "It's very easy to subscribe, but it's very easy to unsubscribe, too." In March, search giant Google released an AdSense for feeds product into beta testing, where it currently remains.