Last week Yahoo! launched a new search crawler aka Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo representatives consider that implementation of Slurp search crawler due to its enhanced speed and efficiency at visiting sites will lead to 25% decrease in the bandwidth consumed by crawler as well as number of requests.

Before turning off the old crawler completely Yahoo ran both of the crawlers. But now Slurp is in its full power and works on its own. Yahoo claimed to have seen increase in frequency of crawler requests to the sites and lessening in crawler load.

If you’ll see some shuffling in the rankings and pages indexation with Yahoo – don’t worry, it is about innovations introduced to Yahoo search system.

Yahoo Korea made search not only useful but also fun and enjoyable. Having implemented a new tool called Webzari, Yahoo gave Korean searcher the possibility to view the list of indexed pages of any site and to view its inbound links represented in the form of planets. The planets are of different size which points out link’s weight and of different color, which shows weather the link is Korean or international.

Try Webzari, it’s lots of fun. On mouse over the planet shows more detailed information about the link while clicking the planet returns correspondent text.

Though I can’t translate what is written on the result page, the graphics makes everything clear. Though the tool is rather for pleasure then for work, I liked it greatly and would be glad if they launched the same tool in English.

Online advertising market is already making very good revenues to publishers.

How much does your company spend on advertising? Whatever the sum is it is just a small fraction of the overall advertising spends.

The spends on online ads are reported to reach $25.9 billion in the next five years which is 11 percent more then this year revenues from online advertising.

Search will definitely remain the leader of advertising and even will continue to grow up to 43 percent of all online ad spending ($11.1 billion) by 2011. Display advertising in its turn will make $9.2 billion in five years according to JupiterResearch forecast. As for media spending and video expenditures they are reported to increase at a 21 percent and 27 percent accordingly.

The rise in online advertising expenses is mainly explained by the growth of keyword prices, larger keyword lists and the entrance of new advertisers to the market.

Google is making click fraud count accessible to AdWords users. As Inside Adwords Blog reports yesterday Google launched a new feature to its advertising platform that will enable customers to view the details of invalis clicks activity in their AdWords account.

Check your reports section to have an idea of how invalid clicks will be displayed in the report. You may include both invalid click column and invalid click rate column in your report.

The clicks are claimed to be filtered before advertisers are charged for them.

Google has been paying much attention to the click fraud question and the release of this handy tool confirms once again their not being ignorant.

Announced to be launched in the 3^rd quarter, Yahoo new ad system aka Panama is estimated to be implemented only in the 4^th quarter.

The reason of delay according to Yahoo is complications in testing and quality control. COO Dan Rosenzweig seem to be greatly concerned about the quality of the new product and plans to perform over 20,000 test of different kinds.

We wanted to make sure that we got it right. We’d rather take the extra time to make sure that we do it right rather than rush it for a quarter.

Yahoo has been working on enhancement of it’s new ad platform for several months. Improvements concern geo-targeting enhancements, scheduling capabilities, indirect conversion tracking, quality-based ranking model and expression of business goals (i.e. cost-per-acquisition).

Despite of the delay with the Panama launch Yahoo continues to increase its revenue from search advertising. Company’s revenue from market services for the second quarter made $1.4 billion, which is 27 percent up over $1.1 billion of the same period last year.

Launched about a year ago Windows Live Local (WLL) has been constantly being changed and improved. On a closer look 5 things can be selected that make WLL different from other services of the kind.

1) High-Resolution “Birds Eye” aerial views. New functionality implementation i.e. real-time traffic data and coverage of Europe make WLL maps closer to what the searcher looks for in a map.

2) “Call-for-free” capability. This unique functionality gives user an option to initiate a call with a single click.

3) “Collections” function. With this feature user can create topical collections and whether print them for personal use or share with friends via MNS.

4) “Locate me” capability. Based on a WiFi technology the function lets you easily identify an exact place of your location.

5) Three-layers plot of a map. The feature makes easier to search for different categories, pinning the results of the search on the same map.

Windows Live Local has significantly been improved for the last year. Though it still has some annoying problems, I believe that if it will move forward in the same rhythm, it will convert all the remaining bad features to good ones very soon.

This week Fathom Online has published its research of keyword bids. The list of over 20,000 generic keywords divided into 12 categories shows that keyword prices have decreased 8.6 percent for the second quarter. The average bid dropped form $1.39 on March 31 to $1.27 on June 30.

We should mind that the bid decrease mentioned above is an average value and it may not happen in all categories. On the contrary, depending on competition and specifics of business keywords of some categories have become much more expensive. These categories include career training, pregnancy-related words, student loan consolidation, consumer electronics and some other groups.

Nevertheless, statistics says that in general keywords become cheaper from the first Quarter. What is that influenced by? Some relate it to the season price fluctuations but others, including Matt McMahon, VP Marketing Services at Fathom prefer to suppose that advertisers become to make bids more smartly:

The search advertising market continues to expand in robust fashion, but individual keyword’s bids fluctuate each day. Advertisers are now using marketing analytics tools to make smarter advertising spending decisions.

I yield to agree with Mr. McMahon as IMO advertisers really gradually become more sophisticated and professional.