Bigmouthmedia search engine news: brand-protection

Google hints at new ad formats at SES New York

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

During a heated Orion Panel at Search Engine Strategies New York Google hinted that the search engine is developing advertising options suited to Universal Search.

Google's Universal Search blends traditional text search results with videos, news, maps and other data. John Battelle noted that Universal Search seemed to break Google's traditional revenue model of driving traffic to websites and monetising the click. In some cases Universal Search result pages offered by Google are the only page a searcher looks at as the searcher has no need to look any further.

In response to direct questioning from Federated Media's Battelle, Google conceded that the search engine had explored advertising options suited to Universal Search. The comments came from Jack Menzel, Google's Product Manager from Universal Search.

Menzel later admitted that he was surprised by statistical analysis provided by comScore. James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Search and Media at comScore, took the Search Engine Strategies' audience through analysis of over 1.2 billion search queries at Google. ComScore's figures showed that 17% of Google results ended in some aspect of Universal Search being shown. Of the original set of 1.2 billion searches over 220 million search results included one or more video, news, map, weather, stock or image results.

ComScore's data mining revealed that the number of clicks on Google's AdWords reduced whenever an Universal Search element was present on the results page. The panel, moderated by Search Engine Watch's Kevin Ryan, discussed whether this reduction of clicks represented a threat to Google's earnings.

Lyndsay Menzies, from the digital marketing agency bigmouthmedia, explained how Universal Search increased both branding considerations and tracking challenges in search marketing. Menzies noted that a shift in thinking was required from brands previously used to ROI and ROAS only analytic models from their search campaigns. Universal Search is both an opportunity and a threat to brands.

Mike Grehan, co-moderator of the panel, and bigmouthmedia's Menzies noted that the expectations of searchers are changing. Searchers are increasingly familiar with rich interfaces offered by web 2.0 sites and the vanilla "ten blue links" format traditionally offered by Google would begin to disappoint. Universal Search represented Google's efforts in offering the most relevant search results to this generation of searchers.

Taking the audience through a typical e-commerce scenario, Menzies described how a search for a laptop may begin with the user examining pictures of different laptops on Google Universal, then researching via organic results before completing a purchase through an AdWords link.

The debate concluded with comScore revealing that although paid search clicks reduced on Universal Search, conversation rates increased. Google also reminded the audience that the search engine intends to continue to experiment with search results formats.

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Verb Wars: Google Not Winning

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

In October 2006, Google's blog asked us all to help save Google. The search engine wanted to stop their name going the way of zippers, baby oil, brassieres and trampolines. The challenge was to keep 'Google' as a trademarked term and out of common usage.

Google's own Google Trends product allows us to see that the phrase "googled" spiked in usage round about the same time as the blog post and has shown no signs of declining since then.

Google does not object to the word "googled" as such but to the word being used as a generic replacement for the concept of web searching. Google's lawyers would object to the phrase, "I googled Steve Jobs and..." but not to "I googled for Andy Beal on Google and..." In fact, Google gives us examples of uses of 'googled' in which their lawyers are happy.

This month we have seen sites like Slashdot and even the New York Times using phrases like 'Googling Oneself' in the way that might start Google twitching.

A look at Google's own archive of news stories reveals that the phrase 'googled' was used more in 2007 by mainstream media than 2006. In 2007 news sites indexed by Google's own news engine used 'googled' some 2,300 times which compares to only 1,540 in 2006 or only 919 in 2005.

Google's news archives even suggest that the phrase was used as far back at the 11th century. That would pre-date Cricket, a sport which uses the term 'google', and which traces its origin back to the 16th century.

Popular information site Wikipedia even hosts a page describing the use of Google as a verb. It is unlikely that Google's new Knol product and rival to Wikipedia will publish a similar article. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster include 'Google' but it should be noted that the Merriam-Webster's definition of 'Google' explicitly includes Google; "to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web".

It seems more than likely that Google's trademark lawyers will be busy in 2008 as the search engine fights to protect one of the world's most famous brands.

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Is Facebook about to make new friends in China?

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMT

The registration of a local web address in China has created speculation that the social networking site Facebook is planning to target the World's second largest internet market.

At the moment, the domain name facebook.com.cn (".cn" being a commonly used suffix for Chinese domain names) redirects to facebook.com - and facebook.cn is registered by U.S based Facebook Inc. But what Facebook is actually planning to do with these acquisitions is yet to be seen and the enquires of Reuters.com have yielded no answers from Facebook as of yet.

Maybe Facebook are just staking their claims early to avoid the copyright issues that have hampered Google in China. Or maybe they are intending to release additional language interfaces and enter the Chinese market, as reported on the Chinese website China-cbn.com .

China's love of social networking sites, unsurprising considering the extent to which Chinese society is built on personal connections, make it a lucrative market to crack - especially with more than 162 million internet users to target. Facebook currently claims to attract 250, 000 new users a day and has recently benefited from a deal struck with Microsoft, who valued the firm at $15 billion.

Many of the existing social networking sites in China have been condemned as 'copycats' of the big western players. Isaac Mao, an internet investor and a Chinese blogging pioneer told Economist.com that about 10% of the 200 plus YouTube copycat sites in China are backed by venture capital while comparisons have been drawn between xiaonei.com and Facebook. The Chinese paper Diya Caijing Riabao claimed that Facebook is planning to acquire one of these existing sites - but the recent domain name acquisition could suggest a different game plan. Either way, if Facebook can tap into China's social networking market, they may have a whole lot of new friends to add to their collection!

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Google fails to dismiss American Airlines lawsuit

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Attempts by Google to dismiss a lawsuit brought by American Airlines have been rejected by a federal court judge, Computerworld reports.

The US-based airline filed the lawsuit in August in an attempt to prevent competitors using its trademark to trigger their own advertising on Google.

Commenting on the decision, American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner said: "We are pleased by the judge's order denying Google's motion to dismiss our claims.

"American would not have brought its lawsuit against Google if we did not believe in the merits of our claims and the court's order ... ensures that we will have an opportunity to develop and pursue those claims."

Meanwhile, Google expressed disappointment at the verdicts, saying it believed the American Airlines trademark suit "lacks merit".

A spokesman stated: "Google's trademark policy strikes a proper balance between trademark owners' interests and consumer choice and has been validated by prior court decision."

Earlier this year, the search engine successfully defended its practice of permitting advertisers to bid for keywords for trademarked items when American Blind & Wallpaper Factory dropped its four-year legal case.

The settlement, in which Google did not pay any money, was one of a series of lawsuits in which the company overcame objections to its trademark policy.

At the time, Eric Goldman, an assistant law professor at Santa Clara University, issued a warning to firms saying that the capitulation of American Blinds may serve as a reminder that it can be irrational to bring lawsuits over keywords.

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$9.5m for racy domain name

Fri, 18 May 2007 12:00:00 GMT

The internet industry recently saw its second highest payment for a web address, after porn.com was sold by Moniker to MXN Ltd for $9.5 million.

The rights to the domain name were secured in an auction, which represented a huge rise on the $47,000 paid for the address back in 1997, but it was denied record-breaking status because similarly racy domain sex.com was previously bought by Boston-based firm Escom for around $12 million, the largest ever cash-only domain sale in the internet's history.

Moniker has sold a number of common noun domains in recent years, including Cameras.com and Scores.com for $1.5 million and $1.2 million respectively. Scores.com was sold by the company at the recent Casino Affiliates Convention, where Poker.com was also up for grabs. Poker.com is reported to have attracted a lot of interest and is expected to earn Moniker over $20 million in after-auction negotiations.

By comparison, another high profile domain address, business.com, sold for $7.5 million eight years ago.

Moniker chief executive Monte Cahn said: "The sale of Porn.com further reinforces the growing trend of businesses that place a high strategic value on generic domains related to their industry.

"Porn.com will prove to be a valuable asset for MXN Ltd because of its significant number of daily visitors, established type-in traffic [and the fact it's] the top domain in the adult industry."

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Video search specialist announces copyright detection

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Video search specialist LTU Technologies has announced that it is to expand its current customer base by highlighting its potential to help media firms find copyrighted material.

The company's Image Seeker engine has previously largely been used by law enforcement agencies to tackle child pornography and counterfeiting.

Television companies are taking an increasingly active stance against unauthorised use of their content in user-generated videos however, and LTU says that its technology will help scan social networking sites for illegal use of TV clips.

"When you're dealing with tens of millions of images... you need a way to automate that process of evaluating the known non-permissible content and focusing on very specific filtering criteria," Paul Kevin Smith of LTU told ComputerWorld.

The Image Seeker engine uses similar principles to the human eye to build up a directory of image attributes such as colour, shape, movement and texture said Mr Smith. This image 'DNA' is then used to scan through thousands of images for similar content.

"We are comparing that individual reference's DNA to a profile that has been built... of 50,000 images commonly identified as porn," Mr Smith added.

"The algorithms have been tuned to identify the content that is represented in each of those 50,000 images. We can feed back images that are consistently being missed as false positive or false negatives to train the algorithm... so the images will be caught in the future."

LTU Technology is currently partnered with a number of North American law enforcement agencies.

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Rival to YouTube planned by NBC and News Corp

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:00:00 GMT

A consortium of media and internet companies have come together to produce a rival to the user-generated video site YouTube.

Media giants NBC Universal and News Corporation hope to use AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! as distribution partners to launch the largest internet video distribution network yet, with content from television and film.

Users will have unlimited access to a "vast" library of content, including long and short-form video, an announcement from Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corporation, and Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal revealed today.

Films such as Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, The Devil Wears Prada, as well as numerous TV shows, will be available on the service.

Advertisers already signed up for the new platform include Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco, Esurance, Intel and General Motors.

"This is a game changer for internet video", said Mr Chernin.

"We'll have access to just about the entire US internet audience at launch. For the first time, consumers will get what they want - professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live."

Microsoft said in a statement: "Our investments in MSN Video and SoapBox over the past couple of years have shown us that video is an amazing driver of user engagement and excitement, both for consumers and for advertisers."

Viacom was also pursued to join the group, according to reports, but has instead opted to file lawsuits against Google for YouTube's "massive copyright infringement".

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (£883 million) in October 2006.

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Lycos re-brands itself for a crack at the US Web 2.0 market

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Back in the heady days of Web 1.0, Lycos was a big player on the internet. However, since its inception in 1994 it has been subject to numerous takeovers and in more recent times has found itself lagging behind the behemoths of web-content and search engine providers - Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

At the height of its powers, Lycos was one of the most visited online destinations in the world, with a global presence in over 40 countries and several region-specific web portals. Lycos also acquired nearly two dozen high-profile internet brands, including free web-space providers Tripod and Angelfire, search engine Hotbot, finance website Quote.com and HTML Gear, a site which provided web-page add-ons. But having been faced with burgeoning competition from similar web portals, Lycos has increasingly found itself becoming eclipsed by other search engine operators.

Now, Lycos Europe - owned jointly by German media company, Bertelsmann and Spanish telecoms provider Telefonica - is looking to make an new impression on the US market with a new service which combines search, email, chat, photo and file storage, phone texting, blogging, VoIP and other services which have given rise to the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and are proving increasingly popular with young internet users. Meanwhile, the company will continue to forge ahead under its own name as a leading chat service and Internet portal in Europe. The company claims it has 31 million users across sites it owns as well as on partner sites, with around half of its users located in Britain, Germany and France.

Lycos Europe will re-brand itself for the American market via the brand and services of Jubii, its Danish search and community business. Lycos Europe cannot use the Lycos brand in the US, which is down to the fact that Lycos Inc - the name given to the US web portal - is not owned by either Bertelsmann or Telefonica. The trademark is, in fact owned by South Korean-based Daum Communications, and so Lycos Europe are unable to trade under this name in the United States.

Despite constantly reinventing the Lycos brand and posting losses in 27 out of 28 trading quarters, Lycos CEO, Christoph Mohn is confident that Jubii can bring the company back to profitability. He believes the company, which employs 700 people is finally back on track. In an interview, he said:

"I am confident we will have many profitable years... this company is a little bit behind the large players in terms of being nicely profitable, but we really started again in 2001."

Mohn refers to the period where the company ceased being a completely advertising-driven business, and with Jubii, alongside other new products, Mohn claims that Lycos Europe has moved to a 50-50 mix of advertisements and premium services. However, with similar established services already in operation, some internet experts harbour reservations that Jubii can help Lycos to recapture lost glories.

With Google, Yahoo! and MSN all investing vast amounts of money on search technology, advertising media and other services, the gap between the big players and the rest of the market is growing. Lycos are firmly in the 'rest of the market' bracket and are seen as unlikely to be able to make up lost ground on the market leaders, but Mr Mohn disagrees, stating:

"Give us two or three years. You'll see a lot different Lycos Europe than you see now."

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Less Spam, more Phish: Social networking latest target for phishing and identity fraud

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:00:00 GMT

It used to be Spam that most perplexed the online community. Although Spam never really went off the menu, for the true connoisseur of web threats, the current Dish of the Day is Phish.

It's been well know for a while now that there are distinct advantages in infiltrating Social search and networking sites such as MySpace.

As early as July this year the Washington Post ran stories of how fraudsters were using MySpace to "tap into your network of trust". By using compromised MySpace accounts as a bridgehead into online networks of friends, they could introduce Trojans to target victims computers to record username and password data for other sites, such as online banking.

Online security site Netcraft this week reports that the MySpace site has been compromised with a spoof login form hosted on a cleverly named account hompage, which redirects the MySpace logins to a phishing server with a Spanish registered domain hosted in Paris, France. According to Netcraft, "it is convincing and even security-conscious users are at risk of becoming victims". At the time of writing, the MySpace account in question had been deactivated, however the principle on which the threat was based remained.

It's early days, but to users of online banking and services such as PayPal, this kind of activity will already be familiar and the direction it is moving only too clear.

Earlier this year, MySpace clearly saw the writing on the wall and hired a Web Security expert to address this new threat, in response to reports from Websense Inc of a similar compromise.

However, MySpace is simply only one amongst many such social networking sites, which can target almost any arena including news and web search. It's a red-hot area, new social sites now appear and proliferate at an astonishing pace, and web marketers are scrambling to exploit the new opportunities they offer.

However, clearly there value to fraudsters as a shortcut to establishing misplaced trust online makes many of them a prime target and many sites will be nowhere are prepared as forward thinking MySpace. Addressing threat of phishing and safeguarding users may be the biggest challenge that social sites now face.

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To "Google," or not to "Google"? - that is the question

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:00:00 GMT

For several months now, Google Inc has been a bit touchy about the word "Google." As more people have come to associate the world of online search primarily with the services offered by the world leading search engine, the term "to Google" has rapidly appeared in the online lexicography. Instead of performing an online search for information, people have started to "Google" for it. Most companies - and their marketing departments - would surely love to have their brand name be associated with the product on offer - but not Google.

Following a series of news stories concerning the inclusion of the verb 'to google' in various online dictionaries, the company has sought to stop the word being used in a manner that they view as inappropriate. This led to the company's trademark protection lawyers getting involved, and lexicography sites such as Word Spy receiving stiffly worded letters from the firm after having added "google" to their online lexicon. In these letters, Google requested that the definitions be deleted or revised to stand in accordance with the "trade mark status of Google."

But some interested parties, such as lexicographer Sidney Landau, believe that language is organic and constantly changing, with words emerging and being redefined as part of natural usage. She stated:

"Dictionaries should reflect the use of words and their authors shouldn't be afraid to identify that and define it as generic".

Other parties, like Ken Storey of the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, support Google's position by pointing out that, "Everyone has the right to protect a trade mark".

Google clarified, "A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device that identifies a particular company's products or services. 'Google' is a trademark identifying Google Inc., and our search technology and services. While we're pleased that so many people think of us when they think of searching the web, let's face it, we do have a brand to protect, so we'd like to make clear that you should please only use 'Google' when you're actually referring to Google Inc. and our services."

So why does Google see this as such a serious problem? For most companies, especially within the online market, the brand image is paramount to achieving success; and as people search for products using brand names rather than simply generic terms, the issue of brand ownership can influence whether a company succeeds or fails in the future. Once a brand name ceases to refer to a single company, the value of that brand name and all the associated marketing spend can erode - as is the case with Hoover. A quick search for "Hoover" on a price comparison site like Pricerunner provides 729 product results from 73 different retailers; however the first actual Hoover brand vacuum cleaner doesn't appear in the listings until almost the bottom of the second page of results. This is a big problem for the once market-dominant company, as it means that despite all their spending to promote their own brand, anyone searching using the specific company brand name will instead be presented with 45 products from other companies before Hoover even make their first appearance.

To this end, Google have now issued a "quick semantic primer" on their official blog, indicating what Google Inc. believe are acceptable ways to use the word 'Google'.

While this may help clear up some potential confusion concerning how the term should be used in the US, it does not address the situation - and is unlikely to change the language habits of the general public - in other countries such as the UK, where the trademark is still pending.

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