According to Kevin Lee, Did-it’s CEO, “The paid search matrix search engine relationship chart is as popular as our free best practices white papers.”
“Its incredible not only have fortune 500 marketers downloaded the chart, but also top Wall Street analysts, members of the press and our competition.”
The search engine chart depicts in an artistic but useful manner the back end relationships powering search advertising. Did-it included all the major portals including Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL (including Netscape), Ask Jeeves, About.com Lycos and Infospace. Overture, while not a portal shared Google’s distinction as a major source of the ads we see in search results every day.
“While the secondary Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines don’t generally power the major portals, we included many of the second tier PPC search engines on our chart as well for completeness.” States Lee. These second tier engines include FindWhat, Looksmart, Enhance, Search 123 (a ValueClick company), epilot (an Interchange Corporation company) and Kanoodle. “We know we left out some additional engines, but we had to draw the line somewhere” added Lee. Perhaps future charts will include shopping engines such as shopping.com, pricegrabber, CNET’s MySimon, Nextag, and Bizrate, as well as eBay and Amazon.com who are becoming more like search portals all the time.
“Thousands of marketers have our chart up on the wall so when they see orders flowing in from search listings; they know the source,” explained Lee.
Consumers and markets don’t often understand the incestuous back end plumbing powering the display of search results millions of times a day.
The marketplace is filled with public and private companies waging a search war to get consumer eyeballs. Microsoft’s MSN has big plans according to every indication. Google has a huge war chest as a result of a recent IPO and Yahoo is serious about using a portal strategy to keep users. A recent acquisition of Adverising.com by AOL may indicate some future strategies as well. Infospace acquired Switchboard.com.
Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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