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Yahoo! Search Marketing

Type	Yahoo! subsidiary
Industry	Internet
Headquarters	Burbank, United States
Website	searchmarketing.yahoo.com www.altavista.com was www.overture.com

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.

Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc. (formerly GoTo.com). GoTo.com was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service following previous attempts that were not well received.^[1][2][3]

Origins of GoTo.com[link]

GoTo.com was an Idealab spin off and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service.^[1][2][3]

In February 1998, GoTo offered advertisers the option of bidding on how much they would be willing to pay to appear at the top of results in response to specific searches. The bid amount was paid by the advertiser to GoTo every time a searcher clicked on a link to the advertiser's website. By July 1998, advertisers were paying anything up to a dollar per click.

GoTo's business model was based on the idea that its paid listings would make it more relevant than other services, especially for general searches, and web sites that pay more are probably better sites. A similar service had been offered by Open Text in 1996, but this precipitated outcries and bad publicity because searchers at the time did not want the search process more commercialized.

In contrast, GoTo's pay-for-placement model was very successful. Commentors theorised that the web had matured in the intervening two years, and these type of economic models were more acceptable since the web was no longer just a place for academic research, but also a place for buying products. GoTo founder Bill Gross (entrepreneur) speculated at the launch that GoTo would succeed because, as a relatively new service, it had no reputation to taint with paid listings, unlike Open Text.

On October 8, 2001, GoTo.com, Inc. renamed itself Overture Services, Inc.^[4] GoTo's chief operating officer Jaynie Studenmund said "We also felt it was a sophisticated enough name, in case our products expand."

Through partnerships, Overture enabled portals such as MSN and Yahoo! to monetize the hundreds of millions of web searches made each day on their sites. Indeed, these partnerships proved highly lucrative, and in a period otherwise marked by dot-com failures, Overture became a substantial profit driver for portals like Yahoo!^[5]

This success enabled Overture to acquire web sites such as AltaVista and AlltheWeb.^[6]

Acquisition by Yahoo![link]

In 2003, Overture was acquired by its biggest customer, Yahoo!, for $1.63 billion.^[6] The old brand name of Overture has now been phased out as Yahoo! re-brands many of its products under the Yahoo! name. The exception to this is in Japan and Korea where the local businesses continue to use the Overture brand.

Details of current service[link]

Dead external links may exist in this section. You can help by finding suitable replacements. (May 2012)

GoTo.com's and Overture's original services provided only a list of search results ordered according to the bid amounts paid by the respective advertisers. Yahoo!'s Search Marketing's latest iteration, code named Panama, was released early in 2007. It replaced the old formula with one more similar to what Google AdWords^{[citation needed]} uses to rank advertisements against search results. The exact formula is secret, but it is basically Bid * Quality Score = Ad Rank, where quality score is based on the ad's CTR (click-through-rate), the relevance of the ad to the creative (known as "Quality Index"), and the 'quality' of the landing page the ad is sending the user to. ^{[7][dead link]}

Yahoo! Search Marketing also provides features such as Geotargeting, Ad Testing, Campaign Budgeting, and Campaign scheduling. ^{[8][dead link]} It also supports a RIA application which allows larger customers to manage their Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns from the desktop.

Patent litigation[link]

In May 1999, GoTo.com filed a patent application titled "System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine". The patent was granted as US 6269361  in July 2001. A related patent has also been granted in Australia and other patent applications remain pending.

Prior to its acquisition by Yahoo!, Overture initiated infringement proceedings under this patent against FindWhat.com in January 2002 and Google in April 2002.^[9]

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections - a tactic that had some similarities to Overture's search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.^[10]

Adware partnership[link]

Dead external links may exist in this section. You can help by finding suitable replacements. (May 2012)

In April 2003, Overture announced a three-year partnership with Gator Corporation, (now Claria Corporation) an adware company. Under the partnership, Gator's software monitored a web-user's activity on web sites and search engines (even sites such as Google that are not affiliated with Overture) and grabbed search keywords. These keywords were submitted to the Overture search engine. As a result, advertisers who paid for listings in Overture found their products advertised through Gator's Search Scout software, even if they wanted nothing to do with Gator. Overture faced a great deal of criticism for entering into this partnership.^[11]

When Yahoo acquired Overture, the Claria software impaired the operation of Yahoo's services. For example, when a user with a Claria application installed used Yahoo Search, they received a standard set of Yahoo results with sponsored listings at the top supplied by Overture. The user would then receive a full-screen pop-under window from Search Scout. Since Search Scout uses Overture's paid listings as well, Claria's window has exactly the same listings as the Yahoo search results.^[12]

Subsequently, Yahoo! came out with the Yahoo! Toolbar, which allows users to remove adware and spyware from their system. The toolbar affected the operation of Claria's software and may have put stress on the relationship between the two companies.^[13] Claria's website does not list Yahoo! as a partner and a March 2006 press release states that they are exiting the adware business. ^{[14][dead link]}

See also[link]

• Ad serving
• Espotting
• Google AdWords
• List of search engines
• Microsoft adCenter
• Pay per click
• Search engine marketing

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website

v t e Yahoo! Inc. Acquisitions Criticism Advertising APT from Yahoo! Panama Right Media Search Marketing Development Developer Network Next Query Language UI Library Search BOSS Directory Finance Kelkoo Maps Movies Music Music Radio News omg! Search SearchMonkey Shopping Sports Communication Answers Groups Mail Rivals Upcoming Voice Publishing Associated Content Fire Eagle Flickr GeoCities (Japan only) Meme Pipes Video Software FoxyTunes Messenger releases Toolbar Co-branded ISPs AT&T BT Rogers Others Games Delicious Time Capsule Discontinued 360° Auctions Wallet Babel Fish Briefcase blo.gs Broadcast.com Buzz Dialpad Gallery GeoCities (outside of Japan) Go/Mobile JumpCut Kickstart Live Mash Music Jukebox Music Unlimited MyBlogLog Photos Podcasts Publisher Network RocketMail The All-Seeing Eye WebRing Widgets Annual revenue  US$6.4 Billion (2009) Employees 14,100 (2012) Stock symbol NASDAQ: YHOO Website Yahoo.com

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (February 2012)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization (both on-page and off-page) as well as through advertising (paid placements, contextual advertising, and paid inclusions).^[1] Depending on the context, SEM can be an umbrella term for various means of marketing a website including search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or it may contrast with SEO, focusing on only paid components.^[2]

Market[link]

In 2008, North American advertisers spent US$13.5 billion on search engine marketing. The largest SEM vendors were Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.^[1] As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.^[3] Because of the complex technology, a secondary "search marketing agency" market has evolved. Some marketers have difficulty understanding the intricacies of search engine marketing and choose to rely on third party agencies to manage their search marketing.

History[link]

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text^[4] in 1996 and then Goto.com^[5] in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name^[6] to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers^[7] for search engines. In a market dominated by Google, in 2009 Yahoo! and Microsoft announced the intention to forge an alliance. The Yahoo! & Microsoft Search Alliance eventually received approval from regulators in the US and Europe in February 2010.^[8]

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001^[9] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

SEM methods and metrics[link]

There are four categories of methods and metrics used to optimize websites through search engine marketing.^{[10][11][12][13]}

1. Keyword research and analysis involves three "steps:" ensuring the site can be indexed in the search engines, finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products, and using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
2. Website saturation and popularity, how much presence a website has on search engines, can be analyzed through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on search engines (saturation) and how many backlinks the site has (popularity). It requires your pages containing those keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. The followings are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.^[11]
3. Back end tools, including Web analytic tools and HTML validators, provide data on a website and its visitors and allow the success of a website to be measured. They range from simple traffic counters to tools that work with log files^[10] and to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging (putting JavaScript or an image on a page to track actions). These tools can deliver conversion-related information. There are three major tools used by EBSCO: (a) log file analyzing tool: WebTrends by NetiQ; (b) tag-based analytic programs WebSideStory's Hitbox; (c) transaction-based tool: TeaLeaf RealiTea. Validators check the invisible parts of websites, highlighting potential problems and many usability issues ensure your website meets W3C code standards. Try to use more than one HTML validator or spider simulator because each tests, highlights, and reports on slightly different aspects of your website.
4. Whois tools reveal the owners of various websites, and can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues.^[12]

Paid inclusion[link]

Paid inclusion involves a search engine company charging fees for the inclusion of a website in their results pages. Also known as sponsored listings, paid inclusion products are provided by most search engine companies, the most notable being Google.

The fee structure is both a filter against superfluous submissions and a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be catalogued on a regular basis. However, some companies are experimenting with non-subscription based fee structures where purchased listings are displayed permanently.^[14] A per-click fee may also apply. Each search engine is different. Some sites allow only paid inclusion, although these have had little success. More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo!,^[15] mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling. Others, like Google (and as of 2006, Ask.com^[16][17]), do not let webmasters pay to be in their search engine listing (advertisements are shown separately and labeled as such).

Some detractors of paid inclusion allege that it causes searches to return results based more on the economic standing of the interests of a web site, and less on the relevancy of that site to end-users.

Often the line between pay per click advertising and paid inclusion is debatable. Some have lobbied for any paid listings to be labeled as an advertisement, while defenders insist they are not actually ads since the webmasters do not control the content of the listing, its ranking, or even whether it is shown to any users. Another advantage of paid inclusion is that it allows site owners to specify particular schedules for crawling pages. In the general case, one has no control as to when their page will be crawled or added to a search engine index. Paid inclusion proves to be particularly useful for cases where pages are dynamically generated and frequently modified.

Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing method in itself, but also a tool of search engine optimization, since experts and firms can test out different approaches to improving ranking, and see the results often within a couple of days, instead of waiting weeks or months. Knowledge gained this way can be used to optimize other web pages, without paying the search engine company.

Comparison with SEO[link]

SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search results (Using tools like Google Adwords or Microsoft adCenter) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising with AdWords or Microsoft adCenter , pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.

In some contexts, the term SEM is used exclusively to mean pay per click advertising,^[2] particularly in the commercial advertising and marketing communities which have a vested interest in this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM such as search engine optimization and search retargeting.

Another part of SEM is social media marketing (SMM). SMM is a type of marketing that involves exploiting social media to influence consumers that one company’s products and/or services are valuable.^[18] Some of the latest theoretical advances include search engine marketing management (SEMM). SEMM relates to activities including SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management instead of relevant traffic building (as is the case of mainstream SEO). SEMM also integrates organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means of achieving top in search engines, and pay per click SEO. For example some of the attention is placed on the web page layout design and how content and information is displayed to the website visitor.

Ethical questions[link]

Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports^[19][20][21] by Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter^[22] in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.

Another ethical controversy associated with search marketing has been the issue of trademark infringement. The debate as to whether third parties should have the right to bid on their competitors' brand names has been underway for years. In 2009 Google changed their policy, which formerly prohibited these tactics, allowing 3rd parties to bid on branded terms as long as their landing page in fact provides information on the trademarked term.^[23] Though the policy has been changed this continues to be a source of heated debate.^[24]

At the end of February 2011 many started to see that Google has started to penalize companies that are buying links for the purpose of passing off the rank. SEM has however nothing to do with link buying and focuses on organic SEO and PPC management.

Examples[link]

AdWords is recognised as a web-based advertising utensil since it adopts keywords which can deliver adverts explicitly to web users looking for information in respect to a certain product or service. This project is highly practical for advertisers as the project hinges on cost per click (CPC) pricing, thus the payment of the service only applies if their advert has been clicked on. SEM companies have embarked on AdWords projects as a way to publicize their SEM and SEO services. This promotion has helped their business elaborate, offering added value to consumers who endeavor to employ AdWords for promoting their products and services. One of the most successful approaches to the strategy of this project was to focus on making sure that PPC advertising funds were prudently invested. Moreover, SEM companies have described AdWords as a fine practical tool for increasing a consumer’s investment earnings on Internet advertising. The use of conversion tracking and Google Analytics tools was deemed to be practical for presenting to clients the performance of their canvass from click to conversion. AdWords project has enabled SEM companies to train their clients on the utensil and delivers better performance to the canvass. The assistance of AdWord canvass could contribute to the huge success in the growth of web traffic for a number of its consumer’s website, by as much as 250% in only nine months.^[25]

Another way search engine marketing is managed is by contextual advertising. Here marketers place ads on other sites or portals that carry information relevant to their products so that the ads jump into the circle of vision of browsers who are seeking information from those sites. A successful SEM plan is the approach to capture the relationships amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines. Search engines were not important to some industries in the past but over the past years, the use of search engines for accessing information has become vital to increase business opportunities.^[26] The use of SEM strategic tools for businesses such as tourism can attract potential consumers to view their products but it could also pose various challenges.^[26] These challenges could be the competition that companies face amongst their industry and other sources of information that could draw the attention of online consumers.^[26] To assist the combat of challenges, the main objective for businesses applying SEM is to improve and maintain their ranking as high as possible on SERPs so that they can gain visibility. Therefore search engines are adjusting and developing algorithms and the shifting criteria by which web pages are ranked sequentially to combat against search engine misuse and spamming, and to supply the most relevant information to searchers.^[26] This could enhance the relationship amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines by understanding the strategies of marketing to attract business.

See also[link]

• Digital marketing
• Internet marketing
• Email marketing
• Enterprise search marketing
• List of search engines
• Search advertising
• Search engine image protection
• Search engine reputation management
• Search engine optimization
• Tag cloud
• Web marketing
• Website promotion

Search engines with SEM programs

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Bing
• Ask.com
• Baidu - China
• Seznam.cz - Czech Republic
• Yandex - Russia
• Rambler - Russia
• Timway - Hong Kong
• Onkosh - Arabic search - Middle East
• Aýna - Arabic search - Middle East and North Africa
• Leit.is - Iceland

References[link]

Yahoo! Search

300px Yahoo! Search
URL	search.yahoo.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Search Engine
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Multilingual (40)
Owner	Yahoo!
Created by	Yahoo!
Launched	March 1, 1995
Alexa rank	4 (November 2011[update])[1]
Current status	Active

Yahoo! Search is a web search directory, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009^[update], the 2nd largest search directory on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications.^[2]

Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later was powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.^[3] All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.^[4]

Search technology acquisition[link]

Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired their own search technology.

In 2002, they bought Inktomi, a "behind the scenes" or OEM search engine provider, whose results are shown on other companies' websites and powered Yahoo! in its earlier days. In 2003, they purchased Overture Services, Inc., which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though Yahoo! owned multiple search engines, they didn't use them on the main yahoo.com website, but kept using Google's search engine for its results.

Starting in 2003, Yahoo! Search became its own web crawler-based search engine, with a reinvented crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! Search combined the capabilities of all the search engine companies they had acquired, with its existing research, and put them into a single search engine. The new search engine results were included in all of Yahoo!'s sites that had a web search function. Yahoo! also started to sell the search engine results to other companies, to show on their own web sites. Their relationship with Google was terminated at that time, with the former partners becoming each other's main competitors.

In October 2007, Yahoo! Search was updated with a more modern appearance in line with the redesigned Yahoo! home page. In addition, Search Assist was added; which provides real-time query suggestions and related concepts as they are typed.

In July 2008, Yahoo! Search announced the introduction of a new service called "Build Your Own Search Service," or BOSS. This service opens the doors for developers to use Yahoo!'s system for indexing information and images and create their own custom search engine.^[5]

In July 2009, Yahoo! signed a deal with Microsoft, the result of which was that Yahoo! Search would be powered by Bing. This is now in effect.^[3]

Yahoo! Search blog and announcements[link]

The team at Yahoo! Search frequently blogged about search announcements, features, updates and enhancements. The Yahoo! Search Blog, as stated provided A look inside the world of search from the people at Yahoo!.^[6] This included index updates named Weather Updates and their Yahoo! Search Assist feature.

Yahoo UK homepage

International presence[link]

Yahoo! Search also provided their search interface in at least 38 international markets and a variety of available languages.^[7] Yahoo! has a presence in Europe, Asia and across the Emerging Markets.

Languages[link]

Search results[link]

Yahoo! Search indexed and cached the common HTML page formats, as well as several of the more popular file-types, such as PDF, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint, Word documents, RSS/XML and plain text files. For some of these supported file-types, Yahoo! Search provided cached links on their search results allowing for viewing of these file-types in standard HTML.

Using the Advanced Search interface or Preferences settings, Yahoo! Search allowed the customization of search results and enabling of certain settings such as: SafeSearch, Language Selection, Number of results, Domain restrictions, etc.^[8]

For a Basic and starter guide to Yahoo! Search, they also provided a Search Basics tutorial.^[9]

In 2005, Yahoo! began to provide links to previous versions of pages archived on the Wayback Machine.^[10]

In the first week of May 2008, Yahoo! launched a new search mash up called Yahoo! Glue, which is in beta testing.^{[citation needed]}

Selection-based search[link]

On June 20, 2007, Yahoo! introduced a selection-based search feature called Yahoo! Shortcuts. When activated this selection-based search feature enabled users to invoke search using only their mouse and receive search suggestions in floating windows while remaining on Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo! Mail. This feature was only active on Yahoo web pages or pages within the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Yahoo! Shortcuts required the content-owner to modify the underlying HTML of his or her webpage to call out the specific keywords to be enhanced. The technology for context-aware selection-based search on Yahoo pages was first developed by Reiner Kraft.^[11]

SearchScan[link]

On May 11, 2008, Yahoo! introduced SearchScan. If enabled this add-on/feature enhanced Yahoo! Search by automatically alerting users of viruses, spyware and spam websites.^[12]

Search verticals[link]

Yahoo! Search provided the ability to search across numerous vertical properties outside just the Web at large. These included Images, Videos, Local, Shopping, Yahoo! Answers, Audio, Directory, Jobs, News, Mobile, Travel and various other services as listed on their About Yahoo! Search page.^[13]

See also[link]

• Yahoo! Directory
• Yahoo! Next
• List of search engines
• Yahoo! Search BOSS
• Yahoo! SearchMonkey

References[link]

External links[link]

• Yahoo! Search
• Search Engines: costs vs. benefits

v t e Yahoo! Inc. Acquisitions Criticism Advertising APT from Yahoo! Panama Right Media Search Marketing Development Developer Network Next Query Language UI Library Search BOSS Directory Finance Kelkoo Maps Movies Music Music Radio News omg! Search SearchMonkey Shopping Sports Communication Answers Groups Mail Rivals Upcoming Voice Publishing Associated Content Fire Eagle Flickr GeoCities (Japan only) Meme Pipes Video Software FoxyTunes Messenger releases Toolbar Co-branded ISPs AT&T BT Rogers Others Games Delicious Time Capsule Discontinued 360° Auctions Wallet Babel Fish Briefcase blo.gs Broadcast.com Buzz Dialpad Gallery GeoCities (outside of Japan) Go/Mobile JumpCut Kickstart Live Mash Music Jukebox Music Unlimited MyBlogLog Photos Podcasts Publisher Network RocketMail The All-Seeing Eye WebRing Widgets Annual revenue  US$6.4 Billion (2009) Employees 14,100 (2012) Stock symbol NASDAQ: YHOO Website Yahoo.com