Yahoo teams up with vlingo for voice search

Yahoo today became the first major search engine to let people search the Web by talking to a mobile device.
Marco Boerries, an executive vice president, said technology from vlingo, a start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., would allow people who have BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, using Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch. Yahoo is working to make the service available on other mobile devices and overseas.
"We are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones," Boerries said during a keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas.
Dave Grannon, chief executive of vlingo, said the service can handle any spoken query. It is also built to adapt to a person's voice and to improve over time, he said.
Competitive products, such as the voice search in Microsoft's Live Search for mobile, can only handle queries for specific local information, such as directions to a local pizza parlor.
ChaCha, an Indiana company, lets people search the Internet from any phone by calling 1-800-2-ChaCha (1-800-224-2242). ChaCha sends a text message in response. Unlike vlingo, ChaCha employs people to listen to and answer the queries.
Scott Jones, chief executive of ChaCha, said vlingo's speech recognition is the best he has seen on a cell phone - though still not as good as human recognition.
Cory Pforzheimer, a spokesman for Yahoo, said the Sunnyvale
Pforzheimer said Yahoo's deal restricted vlingo from doing business with Yahoo's competitors, such as Google and Microsoft.
Yahoo led vlingo's new $20 million series B financing round, the companies announced. Other investors included Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners.

New Guidelines for Questionable Products - Yahoo!

Newsletter from Yahoo!

Things to avoid if you don’t like “no” for an answer

As you may already know, we don’t accept ads for certain types of content. Recently, we have added a few categories of unacceptable content to our guidelines. They include:

• Cigarettes—Sure, James Dean looks cool smoking in that “Rebel Without A Cause” movie poster, but in our search listings we will not accept ads that sell, facilitate the sale, or promote the sale of cigarettes.
• Essay-Writing Services—School is hard, writing papers is a drag, but going through life never learning a thing is even more painful. We no longer accept ads that promote academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses and dissertations.
• Fake IDs and Fake Diplomas—These days lots of things can be fake—nails, lips, other body parts…. But we have to draw the line at fake IDs or credentials. For that reason, we will not accept ads that offer fake IDs, diplomas or educational transcripts.
• Firearms, Ammunition and Fireworks—Go blow ‘em up and shoot ‘em up somewhere else, because we will not accept ads that offer or promote the sale of fireworks, firearms or integral parts for these weapons.

Google February search share down globally

News from Reuters

Google Inc's share of the global Web search market dipped in February from January, even as its U.S. share rose, Internet financial analysts said on Wednesday, citing market research data.

The data from comScore showed Google's dominance of the worldwide market for Web search dipping to 62.8 percent in February from 63.1 percent the month before, according to an analyst, who declined to be named.

Analysts view the monthly comScore search market data as an indicator on growth trends in Web search. Several recent monthly reports have sparked debate on Wall Street over whether the market is maturing, even though year-to-year growth rates remain high.

The volume of U.S. searches done through Google dropped to 5.86 billion from 6.14 billion in February, and the worldwide volume of searches also declined, comScore said on Wednesday.

"We are continuing to see deceleration in growth in Web search," said Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali. "Google's month-over-month 5 percent decline is a little surprising, but all of the major Web search names were down."

The drop was partly due to February being two days shorter than January, a comScore spokesman said. However, several analysts said it may also reflect a maturing market. By contrast, searches rose 9 percent in January over December.

Amid a steep decline in the broader market, Google shares closed off $7.16, or 1.6 percent, to $432, while Yahoo Inc fell 59 cents, or 2.1 percent to $27.07. The Nasdaq Composite index slid 2.6 percent.

Microsoft Launches adCenterCommunity.com

Microsoft launched a new adCenter community Monday. The new community replaces the adCenter blog and forums with product specific blogs, categorized user forums, multimedia distribution, and user profiles.

This new SEM resource can be found at adcentercommunity.com.

The community offers advice on adCenter advertising, the adCenter API, and adCenter analytics.

Inside Search with Mr. Google

I always used to wonder how Google used to differentiate between Java – The programming language, Java – The Island in South East Asia, and Java – the coffee bean. It was after a lot of contemplation that I decided to personify Google and all seemed to be clear to me. Google was somebody who understood which ‘Java’ I was talking about, based on the context I was referring to.

Imagine how many such words exist with different meanings, what we call homonyms. Mr. Google knew all homonyms in the English language and not only this, he also understood what ever I said, and even if I misspell something he would come up to me and correct me about what I was asking him. Well how did Mr. Google know ALLLL this? After pondering and reading some stuff that Mr. Google gave me when I asked him, I got my answer.

Mr. Google was a very well read person, he would read, read, read the whole dam day – 24 X 7 and the best part is he never forgets something that he read (I wish I had such a brain). Apart from reading he would go around telling people what they wanted. And I guess he did both simultaneously. I bet Mr. Google had 10 heads like Ravana or might be even more. Who!! Ok! Let us now try and understand how Mr. Google read and how he stored all that data in one of his many heads. For any piece of data that Mr. Google read he would first go about removing all the articles (a, an, the) prepositions (in, on, above), connectors (since, because, while) and other common words. He would only keep the remaining words (those words which were specific to the data). He would then continue to read and whenever he came across similar stuff, he would do some kind of calculations which is a secret and I guess Mr. Google’s son would be the only guy who would get to know of it. These calculations that he performed would give some kind of relevance factor to words. He would do this process for eternity and when ever some body asked him about any thing he would dig into his head and give those pieces of information which have a greater degree of relevance to what the person asked. This degree of relevance is called Latent Semantic Index (LSI).

I got a peep into how Mr. Google went about doing his calculations. However, if you don’t want to get into the math you can jump to the next paragraph. For those who love Math, Let's go on... After removing all the unnecessary words, he developed something called a Term Document Matrix (TDM). Mr. Google generates his TDM by arranging list of all content words along the vertical axis, and a similar list of all documents along the horizontal axis. These need not be in any particular order, as long as he keeps track of which column and row corresponded to which word and document. He would then go about filling the number of times each word occurred in a document. Since any random document would contain only a tiny subset of content word vocabulary, the matrix is very sparse (that is, it consists almost entirely of zero's). This is how he goes about doing it at the lower level, imagine Mr. Google went about doing this for every Web Page!!! Each of his heads would be assigned a specific task and they would do it meticulously. These matrices would run into many more dimensions. He then went about giving weights to words some were local weights and some were global weights. A word that appears more number of times in a page is given a higher local weight. Global weights are given depending on the school of math Mr. Google’s teachers came from. The Global weight could either be directly or inversely proportional to the local weight. There is one more last step to the weighting process – Normalization, this is a scaling step designed to keep large documents with many keywords from overwhelming smaller documents in the result set. It is similar to handicapping in golf - smaller documents are given more importance, and larger documents are penalized, so that every document has equal significance. These three values multiplied together - local weight, global weight, and normalization factor - determine the actual numerical value that appears in each non-zero position of our term/document matrix. This is followed by running a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) algorithm, this procedure is like shining a torch over a ball, what would you see? You would see a circle, in effect, we have reduced a 3D object into a 2D object. This is what SVD is about. The SVD algorithm would reduce the matrix into a set of smaller components. The algorithm alters one of these components (this is where the number of dimensions gets reduced), and then recombines them into a matrix of the same shape as the original, so Mr. Google can again use it as a lookup grid. The matrix is an approximation of the term document matrix, and looks much different from the original. This finished matrix is what Mr. Google would use to actually search. Given one or more terms in a search query, Mr. Google would look up the values for each search term/document combination, calculate a cumulative score for every document, and rank the documents by that score, which is a measure of their similarity to the search query. In practice, Mr. Google will probably assign an empirically-determined threshold value to serve as a cutoff between relevant and irrelevant documents, so that the query does not return every document in Mr. Google’s collection. I guess you would have got a peep into a fraction of second of Google’s life.

Well, in what way is LSI useful to us - PPC professionals? When our ads appear on the content network it is because of the LSI between the cluster of keywords in the ad group and that of the content on the web page that makes your ad appear. LSI also affects your quality score, the greater the degree of relevance between your ad text, your keyword inventory and the content on your landing page would mean a better Quality Score for your keywords. Put on your thinking hats and see what else LSI could affect. So guys! We have one more thing to keep in mind while we create our accounts, make sure you have High LSI's.

Seven Tips To Make Sure Your Ad’s Aim Is True

Got this tips from Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

When it comes to your ad copy, there’s good, there’s bad, and—I know this all too well—there’s sometimes ugly. Like the desperadoes in the old westerns, the latter need to be rounded up and sent away.

To help us clean up this town we call Sponsored Search, we’ve put together our own magnificent seven—tips, that is:

1. Keyword Inclusion – Whenever possible, make sure to use the keyword in your titles and descriptions. It can help make them more relevant and attractive to the people searching on them.
2. Keyword Insertion and Alt Text – Keyword Insertion helps ensure that the keyword always appears in the ad, and Alt Text helps the ad to read correctly and appear the way you want it to.
3. Quality and Clarity – Clear, effective titles and descriptions give searchers a distinct idea of who you are and what you have to offer. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as poorly worded titles and descriptions.
4. Relevance – Make sure that your ads are relevant to the keywords in your ad group. Avoid “catch-all” ad copy that simply doesn’t fit with certain keywords.
5. Keyword/Creative Conflict – Avoid ad copy that appears to clash with your offerings, such as a description that stresses low prices on shoes when in fact you primarily sell shirts. Even when the keyword appears in the creative, searchers may skip the ad if you stress something else.
6. Competitive Advantage – If you got it, flaunt it! If you offer something that may give you an edge such as free shipping or a low price guarantee, be sure to mention it in your copy.Publish Post
7. Ad Testing – By creating multiple ads, you can use ad testing to test the viability of your ads and see which message resonates more with searchers. Routinely checking on the status and performance of your ads will help you stay on top of consumer response.

Now that you’re armed with ideas, you can have your bad ads heading out of town by high noon, if not sooner.

Uploading Pharmacy Related Keywords to AdWords

Hi All, Let me inagurate this blog with your permission. I would like to share a small info, which I got today.

Today when I was trying to upload a few keywords in Editor I got an unusual error message which says "Your keyword appears to contain Pharmacy Related Content, so it violates Google policy in US".

Later I confirmed from Google rep that, this happened because, my keyword was "Pharmacy Updates" which contains the word Pharmacy.

If you come across this kind of error in future what you have to do is, just give a statement in the box (Exception Required) below the error message that your Web Site is not selling and drugs. Then you will be able to upload those type of keywords.

But then I tried to upload same kind of keyword directly to interface, but it got posted without any error.