Source: news.searchenginestoday.org

While concerns about a potential economic slowdown continue to intensify, Google, Yahoo and a few other search engines are largely benefiting from the shift of advertising dollars online.

According to new statistics from TNS Media Intelligence, Web advertising spending rose 18.8 percent to $4.7 billion between January and June 2006.

Those numbers are greater than the 5.71 percent increase seen on network television, the 4.39 percent rise at magazines or the 2.59 percent boost seen on cable TV, TNS says.

These figures underscore how the Internet could grow even more important for advertisers in the coming few months if worries about lower corporate profits continue.

All of this is good news for Internet companies, and possibly more bad news for traditional media.

TNS isn’t certain whether its forecast for 4.91 percent total ad growth in 2006 will pan out, even with record levels of political advertising because of mid-term elections in the U.S., says Steven Fredericks, TNS’s CEO, in an interview.

"In the past twelve months, the auto sector has cut spending by $1.41 billion, representing about 1 full percentage point of the full advertising market," Fredericks says.

He added that movie studios are "being besieged from a number of different directions," including the continued growth of Internet downloads.

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Source: news.searchenginestoday.org

Miva, a performance-based marketing network has added a new pay-per-click (PPC) ad offering. It’s an in-line text link that triggers a floating ad unit with site navigation and text ads when it is simply moused over.

Miva’s new service, aptly named Miva InLine, resembles many other so-called inline ad offerings like Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT, which display a contextually targeted text ad triggered by specific keywords within a Web site’s editorial content.

But Miva’s new offering goes a step further by displaying floating ads when a user mouses over a specially underlined link by adding links to related articles on a publisher’s site above the ads.

To be sure, InLine ads will be included in any ad buy across the Miva network, and keyword advertisers won’t be able to opt out of them. However, the company may consider offering them as part of a separate buy if marketers ask for it.

"Miva InLine helps publishers generate more revenue per page, without increasing ad inventory or impressions," said Seb Bishop, Miva’s president.

"Many publishers are experiencing a shortage of available real estate for ads. This will help solve those inventory shortages by better monetizing existing pages."

When a user mouses over an InLine ad, a floating ad appears, showing the top-bidded pay-per-click ad from Miva’s advertisers for that keyword.

Later this year, InLine ads will also include advertiser logos. Ads are clearly labeled, with a link to more detailed descriptions of the source of the ads.

Miva’s contextual targeting technology analyzes each page to determine what the page is all about, so Miva knows what kind of ads to show, Bishop said.

In addition, Miva’s SiteSearch technology regularly crawls the publisher’s site to find related pages, and the publisher can choose to include from two to five text links to those pages within the InLine unit, above an advertiser text link.

This allows publishers to show an additional ad on an existing page, and also to drive traffic to other pages on a site, opening up further opportunities to show ads, Bishop said.

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Source: news.yahoo.com

By Thursday, MSN Search will be no more. Windows Live Search will replace it around the globe.

Microsoft is also taking the “beta” label off Live, Live Search and Live Local tonight. Chris Sherman’s column in SearchDay tomorrow is about Live Search. I’ll be writing a couple of posts about Live Local, here and on the Search Engine Watch blog.

Not to steal Chris’ thunder (Microsoft lifted the embargo early), Live Search offers a nice, clean interface and presentation as well as some nice innovations in image search (i.e., scrolling, scratchpad, slider bar). But I think Miscrosoft has also done a nice job in enabling users to move smoothly through a range of “vertical” tabs (Web, images, news, QnA, local, products, video, etc.). See, for example, how quickly and nicely you can move through a range of information about the US Open by clicking the tabs/buttons on the horizontal nav.

It’s not perfect (Local opens a new app, rather than giving local results relevant to the query). But it’s a very good user experience.

And now to the question everyone asks: “Can it gain market share for Microsoft from Google and Yahoo!?” My answer is, in the short term, probably not. In the medium to long term: maybe. Microsoft is unfortunately tasked with developing an obviouslybetter engine and a better overall user experience in order to get people to change what is now habitual behavior.

This is not to say Live Search isn’t very good. Rather the task at hand is extremely difficult given Google’s (and to a lesser degree Yahoo!’s) entrenchment in the search marketplace.

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