The Axandra newsletter archive

8 April 2003

This week we're providing you with an almost complete list of Google AdWords partners (a list that Google doesn't disclosure itself). In addition, there are plenty of search engine news.

Google's advertising program AdWords is a quick way to purchase targeted cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. AdWords ads are displayed along with search results on Google.com and on a growing network of partner sites as well.

Unfortunately, Google does not disclosure a list of all partner sites on which the Google AdWords ads appear. For this reason, we've compiled a list of all known Google AdWords search partners ourselves and share it with you.

Here's our list of known Google's AdWords search partners:

• www.alexa.com
• www.amazon.com
• www.aol.com
• www.askjeeves.com
• www.biglobe.ne.jp
• www.bizrate.com
• www.btopenworld.com
• www.comcast.net
• www.cs.com
• www.dealtime.com
• www.dogpile.com
• www.earthlink.com
• www.excite.com
• www.froogle.com
• www.go.com (includes www.disney.com)
• www.infospace.com
• www.libero.it
• www.mamma.com
• www.metacrawler.com
• www.mysearch.com
• www.myway.com
• www.netscape.com
• www.nifty.com
• www.nytimes.com
• www.searchalot.com
• www.searchresult.net
• www.sportsline.com
• www.sympatico.ca
• www.teoma.com
• www.updated.com
• www.washingtonpost.com
• www.webcrawler.com
• www.yahoo.co.jp

These are more than 30 important sites. In addition, the following sites have announced to provide Google search results in the near future:

• www.chip.de
• www.dindel.se
• www.evreka.se
• www.gulasidorna.se
• www.kvasir.dk
• www.kvasir.no
• www.luotain.com
• www.onvista.de
• www.passagen.se
• www.sol.dk
• www.sol.no
• www.suomi24.fi
• www.t-online.de
• www.wlwonline.de

Google also offers content-targeted advertising(tm), an automated system that matches advertising to the information on content and community pages.

As with AdWords, Google hasn't published a complete list of content partners so here's our list of known Google's content-targeted ad partners:

• individual sites like groups.google.com, www.blogger.com, www.howstuffworks.com, www.wunderground.com
  
  
• more than 200 BURST! Media partners, for example www.fantasycars.com, see complete list at " http://www.burstmedia.com/release/gallery/alpha_list.asp"
  
  
• Fastclick advertising network partner sites (www.fastclick.com), for example www.fontguy.com, www.freeze.com, www.smartsmartsmart.com, www.stories.com and www.webtoolcentral.com
  
  
• Knight Ridder Digital network partners, for example www.freep.com, www.miami.com, www.sjmercury.com, list
  
  
• OSDN network sites, for example freashmeat.org, geocrawler.com, linux.com, newsforge.com, slashdot.org, sourceforge.net, thinkgeek.com

* Yahoo unveiled revamped search features

Yahoo has unveiled a new search page, introducing a series of improvements to its search service:

1. Yahoo now reduces graphic advertising on the search result pages, replacing some of its graphic advertising with text ads similar to those on Google.
   
   
2. Yahoo now offers some search features that Google does not, for example a yellow pages search.
   
   
3. Yahoo now offers an images search.
   
   
4. Yahoo is also working on a new product to search the Web for products for sale, similar to Google's "Froogle" service.

CNN reports that "Yahoo plans to incorporate Inktomi's tools in to its search engine by year's end."

* Microsoft says to take aim at Google

"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.

After this announcement, shares of Overture hit a 52-week low. Rumors started to spread that Microsoft and Yahoo wanted to buy Overture. Yahoo announced that it had priced US$750 million in convertible bonds.

A Yahoo spokeswoman acknowledged that the money could be used for "future potential acquisitions," but declined to be more specific about potential targets. Later, Microsoft explained that it did not want to buy Overture.

* Overture signed deals with Gator and MSN Korea

Overture signed a three-year deal with Gator to display its paid search listings on Web pages that pop under those of rival and partner Web sites. This deal has upset many webmasters because Gator is known to open annoying pop up windows and to install spyware programs.

In addition, Overture will provide paid listings through MSN Search Pane and MSN's site in Korea. The Search Pane deal will last until December 2003, the MSN site deal will expire in December 2004. These two deals, combined with a pact with Dreamwiz, would give it a reach of 92 percent in the Korean market, Overture said.

* Google and Amazon.com signed multi-year agreement

Amazon.com and Google announced a multi-year agreement that will make Google's search technology and targeted sponsored links available on Amazon.com.

Both Google's sponsored links and Web search will be available to Amazon.com customers within the next several months; sponsored links are now available on a selection of Amazon.com pages.

* US Office of Fair Trading to investigate PPC price jumps

The US Office of Fair Trading was called on to investigate the search marketing sector after two major players (Overture and Espotting) doubled the minimum price of buying a keyword on their networks.

* Mamma.com will display Teoma results

The search engine Mamma.com announced an agreement to add Ask Jeeves Inc.'s Teoma search results to its meta-search engine.

* NTT-X selects FAST to power multimedia search on Goo

NTT-X, Inc., a Japanese Internet service provider, has selected FAST to power the multimedia searching capabilities on its search engine portal site, Goo.

* German sites to carry Espotting listings

Espotting, one of the biggest European pay per click search engines, has signed deals with two smaller German sites, AllesKlar.de and MeineStadt.de, to provide its sponsored listings.

* Anti-war slogan Googlewashed in 42 days

TheRegister.co.uk reports about how a term ("Second Superpower") coined by the anti-war culture suddenly got radically neutered and altered by a Weblog that a lot of people link to.

Searching for the term on Google now brings up the Web blog and other people talking about the blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused?

* Google News: Official press releases are OK

TheRegister.co.uk has another good story about the content selection on Google News pages. It reports that a Google spokesman said: "We use press releases, but generally we don't lead with them."

* Improve the search engine rankings for your most important keywords with the award-winning software program IBP

IBP uses a new approach to increase your search engine rankings. It compares your Web site with the top 10 ranked Web pages for your keywords. Then it tells you in plain English how you must change your Web site to get top search engine rankings.

A customer told us that "after working with IBP for a few days I have to congratulate Axandra on the improvements. We use IBP for all our promotion efforts now."

Try the freeware Lite edition now

* IBP 2.1 released today

We've released IBP 2.1 today. Among the improvements are:

• creating reports is now much faster
• you can export ranking check results in three additional formats (.csv, .tab, .txt)
• you can export all reports to Microsoft Word documents
• you can customize all reports in greater detail, for example you can now edit headers, footers, the report title, the report description, the background color, the background picture and even the page numbers

As always, IBP 2.1 is a free update for all previous purchasers (the seventh update).

Try the freeware Lite edition now.

• Cookies required?
  
  
• How to check if a single Web page is indexed by Google
  
  
• How to optimize for Google's image search
  
  
• Google's everflux and fresh crawl
  
  
• How to optatin a top 10 ranking for your web site