Advertising and marketing

Google plans to update its mechanism for ad quality scoring, a critical measurement that influences whether advertisements are placed next to search results so that judgments of ad quality are made immediately.

Google uses an auction system to determine which advertisers' ads are placed next to search results, but the winners of the auction are determined by more than how much an advertiser is willing to pay. Google also effectively raises minimum bid requirements for ads that don't meet its quality criteria, such as a good click-through rates or, in a newer addition, the speed at which an advertisers' … Read more

Online publishers are increasingly selling ad space on their sites with the help of third-party advertising networks--a trend that's contributing to the rise of newfangled ad technologies.

One advertising network in that boat is Redwood City-based Turn, which on Thursday, raised $15 million in a Series C round of funding to buoy its growth. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Focus Ventures was the lead investor in the deal, and was joined by Turn's previous investors Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures. The company has raised more than $37 million since it was founded in 2005 by Jim … Read more

Yahoo on Wednesday announced an effort to provide the software underpinnings of network-enabled TV, a move that could transform not only what it means to watch TV but also what it means to advertise on it.

Though the TV experience has been spiced up by voting for American Idol contestants, it generally has retained its famously passive character. Yahoo wants to change this by bringing a version of its Yahoo Widget Engine, a software foundation that can run small applications called widgets, to network-enabled TVs.

This new version, called the Widget Channel, will resemble the version that's available for … Read more

Google's quantity searches in the United States during July surged 16 percent over the last year, cementing the company's lead at the top of the market, according to statistics released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.

Google had 60 percent of the 8 billion searches in the month, Nielsen said. Yahoo, whose searches dropped 11 percent, had 17.4 percent of the market, and Microsoft, whose searches dropped 10 percent, had 11.9 percent of the market.

The overall search tally increased 3 percent from July 2007 to July 2008, the company said. Nielsen bases its statistics on the behavior … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Microsoft bought search start-up Powerset with the expectation that its natural-language processing technology would give a better understanding of search queries and the content of Web pages. But wait--there's more.

The company also believes Powerset's technology could help advertisers find placement on Web search results, said Scott Prevost, Powerset's general manager and product director, in a meeting here with reporters in conjunction with the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Today, advertisers bid to have their ads shown on search results pages depending on specific keywords that users type into search engines. That can be … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Microsoft believes it's found a way to gain an edge against Google's dominant search engine: a deeper understanding of what people are searching for and what's on Web pages.

Specifically, the company believes examining a full sequence of user queries can lead to more useful results. Today, the company only keeps track of the immediately prior search, but often users use search engines to explore subject areas broadly, said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search, portal and advertising platform group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference here.

"I believe this … Read more

Google, ever eager to make some money off YouTube, is testing ads for the mobile version of the video service.

"You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube," Christine Tsai, a YouTube product marketing manager, said on Google's mobile blog on Monday.

The test "will give you (YouTube viewers) a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video … Read more

Bits and pieces of Google's acquisition of FeedBurner continue to seep out. Friday marked the quiet "public" launch of AdSense for Feeds, a service that was soft-launched to a small group of AdSense users back in May.

Once integrated into publishers' RSS feeds, it'll serve up contextually-related advertising based around the content, helping publishers make money off the growing number of users accessing their site through RSS readers instead of the site where page and ad views have been factors in revenue.

For users who did not have access to the AdSense for Feeds menu in … Read more

It's a fundamental rule of journalism: let the facts speak for themselves.

An Atlantic Monthly article published online Monday presents the facts of Sen. Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid in the form of dozens of e-mails, memos, and other pieces of correspondence collected from inside the campaign. The magazine also makes a complete index of the documents available.

While the memos largely reinforce earlier reports of internal disputes in the campaign, it is sometimes surprising what one learns (Bill Gates apparently at one point asked Clinton strategist Mark Penn to make him "more human"), and what … Read more