Quigo challenges Google and Yahoo in contextual search market

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Traffic | Leave a Comment

Quigo LogoThe International Herald Tribune reports on how Quigo Technologies is challenging Google and Yahoo in the contextual advertising space as they claim to give publishers more control and provide greater transparency. 

This and the ability to target specific sites is good but the big benefit as far as I can see is that Quigo allows publishers to manage the relationship with the advertiser - it means that they are not handing existing relationships from their own sales teams to Google or Yahoo.  

“Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo, which was founded in Israel in 2001. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them, publishers get a check but little else. They don’t really build any longer-lasting strategic assets.”

I spoke to Quigo last year after they had signed up ESPN but at the time they were not ready to operate in Europe.

More than one million unique, historical newspaper pages online …

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Good Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

Announced on the 15th February via press release, Small Town Papers Inc. have partnered with World Vital Records, Inc., to make over one million newspaper pages from small towns across America available and searchable online.  

The press release states that:

“We selected World Vital Records to distribute our collection of small-town newspapers because of their commitment to the millions of people who want to research their family history,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc. “World Vital Records is delivering on their mission to help people discover their ancestors with an incredible collection of exclusive materials, including SmallTownPapers.”

Current editions are available from over 250 small town newspapers and users can also search the archive.  Users have to register to access added benefits such as the “Scrap Book” and “Notifiers”.  The revenue model appears to be advertising rather than subscription based and the site looks to be reasonably well monetised via display and contextual (Google AdSense) advertising deals.  Geo-targeting of ads also appears to be pretty good - while looking at an edition of the Mifflinburg Telegraph from November 10th 2005 I was getting sky and banner ads from The Sun (UK national) and Talk Talk (UK Broadband service).  

There is a “order a digital reprint” link but it doesn’t work so I guess there are plans to offer this service online eventually.

They are looking to extend the service.  On the ”For Publishers” page it states:

“Would you like your newspaper to be included in the  SmallTownPapers web site? We can convert your paper or film archives to a fully-searchable image archive. Small community  newspapers can participate with little or no cost.” 

As far as I could tell boolean operators are not available in search and pages are not segemented into individual articles for search or display purposes - meaning you can’t search for “apples AND pears” within the same article.  If you search for  ”Edinburgh garden” you get “Edinburgh” from one article and “garden” from another which makes it harder to find things.

Saying that - not bad for a free service.  

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery

Posted on February 21, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Entertainment, Good Things, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery has some great maps, photograhs and posters - this is one of a series on “Air-Raid Precautions and Civil Defense, Illustrated Posters of “Air-Raid Defense”.  

“You can run the keyword or layered search, and view the detailed descriptions and digitized images of the records preserved by the National Archives of Japan. You can, according to your circumstances for the use of the Internet, view the digitized images in the formats of JPEG2000, PDF or JPEG. You can also run the cross-file search linked to various data bases worldwide to share a wide range of information and knowledge.”

Yahoo and Dash hook up to provide mobile local search

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Broadband, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Wi-fi | Leave a Comment

In an interesting development Yahoo and Dash have announced a deal that will allow them to integrate local search technology within in-car SatNav and will connect to the internet via mobile phone or wireless network where available.

“It really is a new implementation of mobile search,” says Peter MacDonald, senior director of business development for Yahoo Local. “People need to find information about local businesses and what’s around them not just when they’re at their PC.”

Scotland’s answer to The Simpsons: they’re horrible, but you’ll like them

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Good Things, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Good news. The Scotsman reports that BBC Scotland has commissioned a one-off radio show called World of the Clan.  The idea comes from Oscar nominated Sylvain Chomet and will feature actress Ashley Jensen, co-star of Ricky Gervais in television’s Extras, who will play a radio DJ.

Edinburgh-based Mr Chomet said he was confident that the characters’ bad behaviour would make them as loveable as The Simpsons.

He said: “It’s taking a cliché about the Scots and making it worse. Clichés are not really based on any reality. It’s like saying all Frenchmen have berets and strings of onions.

“Like The Simpsons, they are horrible, but you like them with all their bad behaviour,” Mr Chomet explained. “These characters are like that.

“It’s like watching your neighbours, because the story just goes on and on.”

Yahoo on “Graded Browser Support”

Posted on February 14, 2006
Filed Under Good Things, Technology, WWW | Leave a Comment

Nate Koechley, Senior Web Developer at Yahoo! Inc. on Graded Browser Support. She concludes the piece with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee:

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

Yahoo also publish a table that shows the level of support each browser receives.

Google and Skype join new wi-fi venture

Posted on February 6, 2006
Filed Under Broadband, Good Things, Wi-fi | Leave a Comment

The FT reports that Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital are investing €18m in funding for Madrid-based Fon to build on its growing global band of “foneros”.

The company allows broadband subscribers to share their internet connection with other users to create local “hot spots”.  They already have 3,000 members.

404 Error Page from the French Ministry of Culture

Posted on October 8, 2003
Filed Under Good Things | Leave a Comment

It is a thing of great beauty - imagine the Scottish version …. (courtesy of Boing Boing Blog).

Blogroll


Categories


Archives