LBi Netrank: March 2007 News

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Google Pay Per Action Ads launched, YouTube Banned in Turkey, Yahoo PPC Mobile Ads

Google's recently acquired video site YouTube was temporarily banned in Turkey after videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (a criminal offence in Turkey) were posted on the popular website.

Google have won the contract to provide advertising for social networking site Friendster, which was previously provided by Yahoo!
Friendster is one of the larger social networking sites, and generates around 1/6^th of the number of pageviews as market leader MySpace ^{(source: TechCrunch)}.

Google have agreed to provide IP addresses and help arrest Indian users of their Orkut social networking site who post objectionable content. This includes individuals admiring mobsters or posting anti-Indian material.

Media company Viacom are suing Google for hosting their copyrighted videos on their recently acquired YouTube site. They allege that around 160,000 unauthorised video clips have been posted on the site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Google have robustly defended their position, saying that they believe that it is fair use and that the courts will agree with them.

The worlds third biggest PC maker Levono (who bought the PC unit from IBM in 2005) have announced that they will switch the default search engine installed on their computers to Msn Live Search, replacing a similar deal that they had with Google.
Msn are hoping that this will lead to an increase in their search market share, which currently trails in third place in the US after Google and Yahoo!

Google have announced that, unless they are legally obliged otherwise, they will anonymize their server logs after 18-24 months so that the searches of individual users can no longer be indentified.
The AOL search data fiasco shows that some forms of anonymising searches can still lead to some users having their searches indentified, and it's not clear yet whether Google's anonymization will be completely sound.
Nonetheless, this is something that has been called for by privacy advocates for a long time, and the expectation is that other search engines may well follow suit to ensure that they do not lose their privacy-sensitive users.

Google engineer Matt Cutts has posted a notice that Google do not want to have pages which are search results in their own search index. They feel that such pages are not helpful to their users, and would rather have them excluded.
Google's webmaster guidelines have had an addition made to this point, in which they suggest that a robots.txt file be used to exclude such pages from search engines.

Google have announced a new Pay-Per-Action adverts service. The service is, currently in a limited beta, allows advertisers to specify actions that a user visiting the site must complete for a 'conversion' to be made.
Examples given by Google of the sorts of actions that a visitor who arrived via an advert might perform include when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action that they choose.

Both Microsoft and Google are rumoured to be competing to purchase internet advertising company DoubleClick, in a deal estimated at around $2 billion.

Yahoo! have announced the launch of Yahoo! Mobile Publisher Services, a set of services for mobile search which include a Mobile Ad Network, allowing advertisers to reach mobile users via Yahoo! The new services also include the Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine, which aims to make it easy for websites not easily accessible via mobile devices to get their content mobile-friendly.
In related news, Google have launched an updated mobile search engine.