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Slow Down, Important Information Ahead

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Ah, yield vs. relevancy - topics that get batted around in search circles all the time. As part of our ongoing primer in the search space, I felt like today was a good time to tackle the definitions of each of these. Let’s start with relevancy.
We’ve talked a little bit in previous columns […]

How Low Can You Go?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Somewhat lost amidst the noise of the Microsoft/Yahoo! posturing over the last couple of weeks was a rather dramatic announcement by Yahoo! that they were changing how their minimum bid system worked. What struck me about this wasn’t that they had done it, it was that they hadn’t done it sooner, and at the outrage […]

Can Someone Help Me Find Something?

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Once again I was confounded by the complexities of local search today.  And so, I’m wondering if you folks out there might be able to help me?  I was doing a search to try to find some local training for our engineering team (we are evaluating a bunch of new options, and I wanted to […]

Geo-Targeting Primer - Part 3 - Systems

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

As the last post in my Geo-Targeting series I wanted to bring together the user and advertiser perspective and highlight how that impacts the design of ad serving platforms. The short version is - you’ve seen what the advertiser wants and what the user wants - now the trick is translating all of that […]

Geo-Targeting Primer - Part 2 - Advertisers

Monday, March 31st, 2008

When it comes to Geo-Targeting, advertisers can face any number of choices, depending on the systems they are using.  Let’s start from the highest level.  At the end of the day, an advertiser cares about one thing - driving qualified leads.  When done well, Geo-Targetting can greatly increase the number of qualified leads that an […]

Geo-Targeting Primer - Part I - Users

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Over the next few weeks I’m going to focus a little more on helping folks understand some of the key concepts around Local.  I’ll apologize up front to those of you who are already deeply steeped in the technical opportunities and challenges.  For those of you that aren’t, hopefully this will be helpful, as always, […]

Reading A Little Less Into It

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

This is a follow-on to Teri Foley’s excellent article from last week regarding the recent brouhaha around Comscore and Google. As more information has been released, and more analysis has been done, there have been a couple more highly credible theories posted. In particular, Comscore itself has argued that the dropoff in clicks might actually […]

In The Company of Strangers

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

In case you’ve missed it, User Generated Reviews have become one of the defining moments of the Internet in the last year. I know this because they now have an acronym (UGR), and people are starting to talk about how they are becoming commoditized. Now, don’t get me wrong - I completely agree that having […]

Think Local, Act Local

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

As many of my loyal readers know, I’ve resolved to do more locally this year. First off, I’ll report I’m doing OK - definitely doing a good job on shopping locally and driving less. Marchex’s focus on Local is going well, and I’ve already got a good handle on the charitable causes that […]

Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Sorry folks, but I’m going to repeat a couple of themes here, mostly in my everlasting attmept to try to convince you that some of my ideas and assertions make sense.  I spent last weekend in Bend, OR, taking advantage of some beautiful weather and doing some skiing.  As some of you know, my wife […]

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