Recently Google published its new patents. What possibilities and functions will they offer to users when implemented?

First of all it is online and offline shopping assistance. Patent named Generating and/or serving dynamic promotional offers such as coupons and advertisements in fact includes much wider range of activities then offering ads or coupons. It’s rather a whole shopping system that provides information about offline shopping based on real time data. Shopping malls, restaurants, island resorts – all are represented in the system containing information on time to wait in lines, products and services available with their prices listed, shopping lists, walkind directions and much-much more. Even a small shop nearby can serve a part of the system described in the patent.

Second patent published is devoted to Google Map service. To be more exact the patent named Secondary map in digital mapping system describes a feature already been implemented. A second map allows to move a view frame or zoom in on particular areas. To have a better understanding on what the patent tells about you could explore the second map feature of Google Maps yourself.

The patent’s name Method, system and graphical user interface for providing reviews for a product tells for itself. It describes ways to search for and collect product reviews aggregating them to provide to users in searchable form.

Now you know what to expect from GoogleJ

Last week Yahoo publicly announced its intention to start fighting click fraud more actively. In fact Yahoo broke the war to click fraud after the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The suit alleged Yahoo to certain measures to be taken to prevent click fraud for further. So what should we expect from Yahoo in this concern?

• Traffic Quality Advocate – appointed by Yahoo an Advocate will serve client interests and address advertisers concerns about click fraud
• Extended Claims Period – the period to submit click fraud claims will be extended. If an advertiser didn’t submit his claims before or the credit was not given to the advertiser previously, Yahoo will issue a 100% credit for advertiser to use according to his wishes
• Traffic Quality Resource Center – advertiser will be provided by more detailed information on the click fraud issues
• Industry-Wide Click Protection – Yahoo will work on industry-wide protection from click fraud
• Access to CTP System – A panel of advertiser will be given an access to Yahoo Clickthrough Protection system and a possibility to meet with CTP team to pose the questions and give the feedback on fighting click fraud

Well, along with advertising account interface redesign already claimed Yahoo this change may make Yahoo Search Marketing not only more easy to use and manage but also more cost effective. From our end we have no choice but wait till these changes implemented!

Incorporated into Quality Score in December 2005 landing page quality now begins to be paid attention to more and more precisely. AdWords product marketing manager Andrew C. claims that this week “a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids.”

Thus advertisers who’s landing page doesn’t provide a user valuable content will either be made to pay more (stop using AdWords) or improve their landing page.

That measure is taken as another step in fight against made-for-adsense (MFA) sites that both pollute Internet with billions of useless pages and undermine trust of long-term users “in AdWords is of overarching importance.”

To determine whether your AdWords campaign will be effected these days by the change of algorithm reported by Andrew C. you can aquaint yourself with AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines.

We haven’t blogged about Google Checkout until now, its appearance has made such a buzz the Internet - it’s been hard not to mention so far. But it looks like the service didn’t got the expected popularity or ‘buzz’ both among potential users and merchants.

Best evidence to this lack of adoption starts when eBay began to ban sellers from requesting their payment through Google Checkout this week.

Though Google has a long experience in billing and payments with AdWords and AdSense services, eBay considers it not to be reliable enough to conform to its Safe Payments Policy.

Google Checkout is now listed among the online payment methods not permitted on eBay because according to the updated version of eBay Safe Payments policy - a payment service must have a “substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services.”

Do they really consider Google to be that unreliable or is that just the matter of intentions of owning PayPal?

Search engines dislike duplicate content both because it appears useless to show the user 2 equal pages in the same search results and because duplicate content pages overburden their index.

What should be (or shouldn’t be) done to avoid duplicate content penalty? Below the things that may lead to the penalty are listed:

• Mirror pages – though many search engines are able to recognize a mirrored site, the possibility of being removed from the index when the site is mirrored still exists.
• Content copying (duplication) – when somebody copies content of your site the danger of being filtered out by search engine lies not only on the site that duplicated your content but on your site as well
• Article syndication – when you syndicate the articles you’ve wrote and published on your site take care of not being regarded as a duplicate content site by search engine
• “Version for print” pages – the pages that have the same content with the original pages even but formatted for print may also cause problems with search engines
• Reproduction of the same product description by many distributors – when the same description as well as the name and type of the product given by manufacturer are copied by the distributors the major part of the page content becomes all the same.
• Presentation of the same page under different forms of URL (e.g. with www. and without it) – when the same page of the site could be reached in different ways search engine might index the pages as different once and regard this like duplicate content
• Pages that provide session IDs or serve multiple variables through URLs – a search engine indexes different pages with those different URLs though originally the page is the same.

The growing frustrations while using Adcenter of MSN, is making all of us think, can MSN get away this time? The clear differences pointed out:
1. The number of steps for making a change to campaigns (Google takes 3 and MSN 7-9)
2. The time it takes to make any change - Google 2.5 minutes, MSN 78 Minutes
3. Support - google - live, chat enabled - call and get an answer. MSN - i have no clue yet how to do it and get it done.
4. Interface - basic and everything you may have to go somewhere else or click something else and wait forever for it to load
5. Errors - MSN simply we dont know why the errors are popping up and what needs to be done to rectify them.

While tall promises of taking advertising away from TV, killing Google etc sound tempting and threatening, I think time for co-existance has come for MSN and it has to live with being 2nd or 3rd in certain markets. Oh what a time to be in

If you are running a pay-per-click or pay-per advertising campaign you must have thought about click fraud at least once (but probably much more frequently). The problem that arises before every advertiser is how to avoid click fraud. Though search engines claim to filter clicks of uncertain origin and to control cases of click fraud, advertisers still worry about their advertising dollars.

The solution to this problem was offered by Joshua Goodman – a Principal Researcher, a head of the Microsoft Learning for Messaging and Adversarial Problems team. In the paper he released named Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud he suggests the type of advertising that will secure against both click fraud and impression fraud. Pay-Per-Percentage advertising method supposes that the advertiser will pay for a certain number of percents of all impressions the word that is bid on deserves.

So when an advertiser bid on a certain percentage of all impressions the keyword receives the number of fraud impressions would not influence advertising cost.

The system is reported to be adopted and will work along with pay-per-click and pay-per-impression systems rather then replace them. So the advertisers will have even greater variety of choice.