Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Yahoo Search Engine’ Category

Good article about Yahoo settling a clickfraud suit from Search Engine Watch.

A California judge has approved Yahoo’s proposed settlement of a class action click fraud case brought against the company by Checkmate Strategic Group in June 2005.

Yahoo believes the settlement will cover all click fraud claims that have been filed against Yahoo, including a suit filed by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas last year against both Yahoo and Google.

The terms of the settlement include a cash payment of $4.95 million to plaintiffs’ counsel and a provision that will allow advertisers to file a claim for Yahoo to investigate potentially fraudulent clicks back through January 2004. Yahoo will pay refunds to advertisers who file claims if it discovers evidence of fraudulent clicks.

"We’re very pleased with the terms of the settlement," said Reggie Davis, associate general counsel for Yahoo. "We believe it’s a reasonable and fair settlement."

What does it mean for Yahoo advertisers?

The cash payment is far less than the $90 million settlement Google agreed to last March to resolve the Lane’s Gifts class action click fraud case. In that case, up to $60 million was allocated for credit to advertisers, while plaintiffs’ council received $30 million.

The Yahoo settlement differs from the Google settlement in other ways, as well. Google is offering credit to advertisers, rather than cash refunds, with a cap of $60 million. Yahoo, by contrast, is offering cash refunds, and there is no ceiling on the amount it will refund if it finds evidence of click fraud, though the company is optimistic that the refund amounts won’t be onerous due to the safeguards it has had in place.

Yahoo says it believes the favorable terms are due to the strong position it took maintaining that its proprietary system does a good job at protecting advertisers from click fraud. To bolster its position, Yahoo invited the plaintiffs’ attorneys and their experts to meet with Yahoo’s clickthrough protection team, examine its systems, ask questions and attend presentations to better understand the controls the company has in place to filter out questionable or fraudulent clicks.

Yahoo says that its clickthrough protection system has identified and not billed advertisers for billions of clicks during the past eight years, all the way back to the early days before Yahoo purchased Overture and its sponsored listing technologies. Clicks not billed for included obvious click fraud, but also other clicks that the company believed shouldn’t be billed to advertisers (for example, blocked IP addresses, double-clicks, back browser clicks and so on).

Yahoo said that as part of the settlement it is taking five specific steps to combat click fraud:

1. The company is extending the claims period for advertisers suspecting fraudulent activity from sixty days to two and a half years, or back through January 2004. Yahoo will investigate all claims filed under this one-time extension and offer cash refunds to advertisers if it finds questionable activity.

Judge Taylor, a retired federal judge, will be overseeing the extended claims process. His role will be to ensure that Yahoo sticks to the agreed-upon process, and he will also be available to review advertiser appeals if they are not satisfied with the results of Yahoo’s investigation.

2. The company plans to appoint a dedicated traffic quality advocate to act as ombudsman for advertisers.

3. Once a year Yahoo plans to host a panel of individual advertisers to tour the company’s clickthrough protection headquarters, allowing them to ask questions and provide feedback. The company will also seek advice from this panel.

4. Yahoo plans to work with reputable third parties to develop an industry wide definition of click fraud, a list of recognized click bots, and take other measures to garner awareness of the issue and what’s being done to combat the problem.

5. Yahoo plans to build a "traffic quality resource center" for advertisers, providing much more information about traffic quality, including extensive FAQs about the company’s click-through protection methodology.

Full Article: Search Engine Watch

Yahoo’s finally gone public with details about its new "Panama" ad system upgrade, which when launched later this year will bring the system up to matching what Google’s long offered, though both Yahoo and Google will remain behind Microsoft’s third-generation ad platform "adCenter," launched last week. Details have leaked before, but now Yahoo’s doing the talking directly.

You won’t find the new system or features in place today. Instead, all that’s happened today is that Yahoo is giving the many ad management companies and others who programmatically access the Yahoo system through APIs more information on how things will work, so they can start building support.

The system itself won’t start changing until the third quarter of this year, sometime between July and September, Yahoo says. The switch will mean that you’ll be able to build campaigns of multiple ads linked to multiple keywords. But the ranking system won’t change. Those campaigns paying the most money per click will still come up tops first.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Forbes is reporting that Yahoo has released a test version of its new search monetization in Scandinavia and will expand the rollout to the U.K. in July.

Codenamed “Project Panama,” Yahoo’s new model will be similar to that of Google, which ranks search-engine ads by both the amount advertisers pay for keywords and the relevance of the ad. The Google-like algorithm should result in higher click-through rates than its older model that ranked ads only by the amount paid for keywords.

The Yahoo blog reports that they did a index update over this past weekend. As a result, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

Internet News reports that Yahoo is redesigning the front page of the site.

Yahoo is quietly testing a redesigned front page that makes its search features more prominent and puts all its various services front and center for users.

The design, which began appearing to select users today, brings the search function much higher on the page and offers larger icons of the portal’s popular features beyond search, such as mail and messenger, as well as localized features such as weather, movies and search.

I have seen some updates today that look pretty good and it seems a little better organized and I like how they have certain things more front and center.

Search Engine Watch blog has a good post about how Yahoo will no longer be allowing companies to purchase ads linked to the trademarks of their competitors. From what’s being sent to Yahoo search marketing advertisers:

On March 1, 2006, Yahoo! Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owner’s products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertiser’s site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks.

Ive had all kinds of problems with Overture / Yahoo Search Marketing, especially with them over charging my credit card. Then trying to get them to reverse the charges is a herculian effort, the customer service is not very good. It seems like many other people agree with me. Heather posts some rather damning criticism of YSM.

Ive talked with many other people who have basically cut back on Yahoo/Overture and put that money into Google adwords, thats a wise choice in my opinion. Not only does Google adwords produce more focused and qualified traffic, but you have more control, its easier to manage and Ive never had a problem with customer support. 

Yahoo Search Marketing, formely Overture, has eliminated the $20 monthly minimum spending requirement for the pay per click Sponsored Search.

This is a good thing because for some lawyers, they only need to bid on certain geographic specific keyphrases that arent that expensive and dont have much competition. So now lawyers who may have been hesitant because of the minimum requirement can now choose to spend as much or as little as they like, with no minimum to meet.

Yahoo has joined the whirlwind courtship of AOL reports the Street.com. Yahoo is joining Microsoft, Google, and Comcast and making a play for at least a portion of AOL.

Business Week is reporting that Yahoo is going to announce some kind of new blog seach.

Look for Yahoo! to unveil a response to Google’s blog search early next week. This from Bradley Horowitz, director of tech development in the company’s search group. He wouldn’t provide details in advance. And it could be that Yahoo’s announcement will cover only one aspect of blog or RSS search, and not the comprehensive release the search industry’s waiting for.

Yahoo’s announcement comes less than a month after Google’s release of its much antipated blog search. The Google engine, while fast and competent, has drawn few raves.