You might remember that Google agreed to a $90 million settlement last March to clear up litigation in a class action lawsuit led by Arkansas-based Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles. Yahoo’s settlement, at least initially, isn’t nearly as large; the venerable search engine will pay $4.95 million in cash to plaintiff’s counsel. In Google’s case, the plaintiff’s counsel received $30 million, while credits to advertisers for the class action were capped at $60 million. Yahoo’s settlement has no such cap on advertiser claims.

Yes, you read that correctly. Yahoo has said that it will not put a cap on the refunds if it finds evidence of click fraud. The company is even quite optimistic that its claims payments will not be overly onerous, even though it made billions of dollars in revenue from pay-per-click advertising during the period covered by the class action.

Does Yahoo have a good reason for this optimism, or is it just bravado? Well, it’s worth remembering that Yahoo Search Marketing came out of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture, the company that created the pay-per-click search advertising model back in 1998 –- so by definition, Yahoo has more years of experience with this particular business, and its pitfalls, than anyone. It notes on its web site that “one of the very first challenges we identified was the potential for people with bad intentions to click on listings with the sole purpose of generating a charge to the advertiser. To address this challenge, we quickly established a system of proprietary technologies and people dedicated to protecting our advertisers from click fraud and other traffic quality related issues.”

Indeed, during the litigation process between Yahoo and Checkmate Strategic Group, Yahoo invited the plaintiff’s counsel and their experts to take a look at the search engine’s proprietary click through protection system in action. Yahoo even gave the plaintiff’s counsel access to team members and filtering data. After this review, Yahoo proudly states that “the Plaintiff’s Counsel and their experts determined that Yahoo! has in the past and continues to operate a click protection system that goes above and beyond what is necessary to address recent industry estimates about click fraud.” With some estimates of click fraud quoted as high as 20 percent, that is no mean feat.

The Verdict

One of the most maligned search engines is the British based http://www.ask.com/; it have been accused of sins ranging from not taking paid search listings (pay per click) seriously, to making search uncomfortable for browsers. Also, in contradiction to some of this, it has been accused of having too many paid listings on top of its site's listings.

Why would I now ask if a search engine that took literally forever to get into the paid listing market, and whose branding is confused in the mind of the audience (is it askjeeves.com, ask.com, teoma.com or askgive.com), will be the next big search engine? I mean, in terms of market share, Ask is at best fourth, behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is losing its top staff to the competition (Steve Berkowitz to Microsoft, for example). Ask is, to put it simply, not that important right now. But it has several things going for it that could turn it into a top contender for a large market share of the search engine industry.

What we forget, however, is that one-way links have to work, well, both ways, so to speak.  In order to get the one-way links, someone has to be willing to give them out, right?  But in the pursuit of achieving the precious one-way links, have we become stingy with our own gift of links to others?  You bet we have.

The word "Internet" is interesting in and of itself in the aspect of linking.  Ultimately, the entire purpose of the "Inter-Net" is creating a huge web of all of the sites on it, connected to one another.  Search engine spiders rely upon this web of networked sites to be able to index them, and Google in fact does NOT penalize sites for linking to like sites. Contrary to current and popular belief, most search engines in fact have favorable views of a website that links to similar sites. I believe that, in a way, being greedy with links is like missing the forest for the trees; the whole purpose of links is to connect the sites together, and not just to boost your PageRank.  Profound, I know, but I think that we all have forgotten this concept.

In theory, what you get is a whole lot of mobile web surfers performing Internet searches. To all indications, practice is finally catching up with theory, for a variety of reasons. This has implications for anyone who engages in search-related advertising, because, as it turns out, web surfers don't search in quite the same way, or for the same things, on a mobile device as they do when they're sitting in front of a nice big desktop computer monitor.

This starts with the fact that users interact differently with their mobile devices from the way they interact with their desktop machines. It's not just the difference in the size of the screen and the interface, either. Most users seem to think of PDAs, cell phones, and other mobile devices as more personal than their personal computers. Just think about the variety of different ring tones you hear every day (and the growing ring tone market). Clearly, at least some mobile device users think of them as a way to make a statement or express their individuality.

Behavioral marketing has actually been around for a few years. In its crudest form, pre-Internet, it may have consisted of special mailings to repeat customers. Today, behavioral marketing involves serving up ads to a particular individual based on his or her previous online behavior. It is not to be confused with contextual advertising, which serves up ads that are related to the content of the web page on which they're appearing.

This means that two people seeing the same web page could see completely different ads. For example, let's take two surfers, one an outdoorsman who likes to visit hiking-related websites, another a big theater buff. They're both planning a visit to South Florida. Maybe they both end up on the same site with general information about the area, but the outdoorsman sees ads for the local parks or hiking groups, while the theater enthusiast sees ads for tickets to upcoming theater performances.

You can probably see why many online advertisers are very excited about behavioral marketing's potential. It promises the ability to reach an even tighter audience with more relevant ads than contextual marketing can achieve. In theory, this means advertisers can show (and pay for) fewer impressions of their ads, while enjoying a higher click-through rate - and more importantly, a higher conversion rate.

What we forget, however, is that one-way links have to work, well, both ways, so to speak.  In order to get the one-way links, someone has to be willing to give them out, right?  But in the pursuit of achieving the precious one-way links, have we become stingy with our own gift of links to others?  You bet we have.