“The perfect search engine,” said Google co-founder Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” How to define ‘want’ in search? It is intent. Simply, Larry is stating that search engines must be capable of predicting intent. How can intent be best anticipated, and discovered through Search? Is it important to improve search services to address user intent better? Is there more than
“one way” to do so?

Intent:
Broder, a highly respected and knowledgeable IBM engineer in the scientific analysis community[1] states that user intent, in regards to Information Retrieval (IR) and specifically web search, classifies under three taxonomies, informational, transactional, navigational. Informational is defined as the intent to acquire some information assumed to be present on one or more web pages. (e.g. search terms “how do i bake
a cake” or “origin of the species”).

Web search terms signify intent, and trigger the results which search engines return, yet there is often a cross over when it comes to search terms and intent. This can be easily illustrated with the search term “cat food”, where one might assume that the search results providing locations and websites to purchase “cat food” may be relevant. Yet, the individual may actually be looking for a song by the title “cat food” or even the
process that “cat food” is made. Maybe the individual is looking for the web site www.friskies.com, or even a blog called www.ieatyourcatfood.com. The “cat food” example shows intent can be elusive as a butterfly.

Intent is not always fully exposed through a user’s choice of search words or phrases. The search engine can, in such a case, only try its best to provide relevance, with oftentimes very little information about the ‘perfect intent’ in the mind of the user. This means, for web search users, there will always be some plain luck often involved in receiving relevant search results, responsive to their intent.

Relevancy:
Is there more than one way search engines convert search terms into relevant results? Absolutely, and some of them are well defined in the book, “Google’s Page Rank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings” (2). This book goes in depth as to how a search engine determines what results to show a user. The methods are far reaching and the effects of each algorithm are even more astounding when we look at the various aesthetic display techniques used by various engines.

Effectively, each of the engines display their results in a variable manner as to respond to the desires of the user, attempting to reach a level of information retrieval that coincides with the original intent of the user. Alas, the reality is this task is impossible to do perfectly, because it is virtually impossible to build intuitive perfection into mathematic algorithms, as people do not always submit the best search terms to signify their intent. That being said, some search engines do predict intent very well, others less so.

Many search engines use arcane methods of predicting relevance. One of the most popular is the “democratic method”, which is a factual, almost second-nature of the web linking model. Tim Berens-Lee designed the hyperlink technology at CERN. Imagining the hypertext to link one document to another. “Democracy” comes in the form of links, in that, other publishers/webmasters who find your content valuable and relevant to a subject will link from their website to your website. Google uses this “democracy” model, and although it can be fooled or cheated to drive the display rank of a page higher in the organic results provided by their search engine, it generally works for the most part.

Although the mechanisms are a bit antiquated, the masses have accepted the democratic method as a standard which they are accustomed to seeing results delivered for informational web searches. Even the “democratic method”, though organic, must still function within the algorithm paradigm, that a users search intent can become more and more fuzzy the more vague their query terms. In theory, the more search terms generated in a search query, the user’s intent should become more clear, and for the most part the results more relevant.

As for adding more terms (what google expects the user to do) will provide fewer organic results from the search engine, thereby narrowing the users targets and options. The dilemma of intent, however, is still not served completely with only organic results, nor even with contextual advertising results on the top and side of the google search results pages.

Google’s, as with many search services, approach towards predicting intent and displaying results is to deliver results that can be monetized by the Google’s investment in indexing content into organic results which feature their respective ads on their websites. Obviously as challenging as it is to predict intent, no one style of search service result deliveries can or should satisfy everyone. Some people are fine with the organic result and contextual ad mix delivered by Google and other traditional search
engines.

However, the antiquated assumptive behavior of the traditional search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo, where they believe that interactive user choice and action is irrelevant, may not satisfy the contextual needs of everyone at any given moment. In effect, what fleeQ has built is a new way of delivering deeper and richer context and relevancy without giving up what most users already expect from their search experience. This is a much better method to use in determining intent than simply organic results as ranked links on a page, served up with ads on the side.

Taxonomies:
Back to Broder’s three search taxonomies: having discussed Informational, let us briefly define Transactional and Navigational. Transactional is the intent of the web user to perform some web-mediated activity. (e.g. search terms “buy running shoes seattle” or “download metallica album”), Navigational is an immediate intent is to reach a particular site. (e.g. search terms “msn.com” or “cnn website” or “Oregon State University”)How can we appease these unknown needs of the user?

To improve web user satisfaction with a search experience, the burden to satisfy web users is upon search service providers to contemplate that these three search taxonomies must be pro-actively available and receptive to meet intent, as intent of a web user may variably shift between any of the three at any moment. A search service should effectively deliver a blend of the informational and transactional taxonomy results in manner that encapsulates user intention via an easy to digest search result display model. To do this, requires a search engine display format to offer the best results possible to a user.

A search service should utilize the best boat to take the user on a fishing trip. Allow the search engine to fish their intent, through behavior, and then predict what type of fish they want to pick from the net. To provide this opportunity, our fleeQ search technology sought to improve how results are displayed by utilizing intelligent taxonomy synonyms, selecting the most appropriate search engine to request from, thereby better addressing the taxonomy dilemma to provide the most relevant results to a web user.

Selectively omitting search engines that are geared towards non taxonomy relevance, our fleeQ technology effectively pattern matches the results based upon consumer desire, past history if available, and allows the consumer choice to define the scope and relevancy of results through their actions. Thus allowing us to reflect the isolation of their intent through behavior analysis.

We have discussed informational and transactional taxonomy, but there is a third leg of Broder’s stool, the navigational aspect of how users interact with search. Albeit, many search engines provide navigational matches in the organic search results, it is not possible to truly deliver a navigational intent with out disrupting the users expected outcome. The navigational aspect of search has hereto been addressed by Google
through the “I’m feeling lucky” button found on the Google home page. Although it delivers a relevant and contextually appropriate destination URL based upon the Google search results algorithm, it is is lacks providing other results from the other taxonomies. It operates on only one Broder taxonomy leg as it navigates the browser to a URL page result only. You won’t see the Google search results page at all. FleeQ search, however displays the whole Broder stool, with results of three taxonomies simultaneously, a relevant navigational result, transactional and informational results and advertisements.

DISPLAY OF RESULTS:

FleeQ search delivers a taxonomy trifecta of results into a single action which integrates a non-pretentious “tabbed” and super imposed display approach to search result delivery. A user can interact with the various search tabs, based on their intent of wanting informational or transactional results, or with the page result displayed behind the search results, if they possibly they are looking for relevant navigational results. Furthermore, users can interact with contextual advertisement results incorporated into our display model, for possibly more transactional and informational results. Search engine services can never truly capture the illusive butterfly of user intent. fleeQ was designed to deliver, in a single action, a vehicle by which a search engine can deliver their true search intent.

What’s more, is that although the “democratic” method for displaying organic website link results is seemingly fair to publishers, and therefore assumed to be thereby most relevant by application of results to users, this process can be spoofed or cheated easily. This means that search results that could be available to users, from web publishers who lack either sophistication in the use of deceptive link-farm technology or
exposure and links from other websites necessary to rank higher in the organic results, will likely never appear as an “I’m feeling lucky” target URLs result for a Google web user.

It should not be seen as so radical a thought that both web users and web publishers should interface on the net in an egalitarian manner. A paradigm of the net should not forever remain vested in “Who is more important in web search, user or publisher? ” Why not both be held important? There is no actual justification for not empowering web
publishers (of varying scales) an opportunity for more egalitarian participation in search result display opportunities to web users. Status quo search delivery means that many perfectly relevant navigational or organic link results (for users) are not frequently delivered due to the lack of a level playing field for web publishers, inherent in the continuing operation of major search engine/s.

The fleeQ / adUup system is the first solution that comes close to truly actualizing and delivering a broader search result display solution in effort to raise the status quo of the display innovation stagnant search engines. The status quo is unsatisfactory for both user and web publisher, in that efforts of many publishers to produce and deliver quality content, products, and services goes unnoticed by the user who must rely on results being delivered to them by the status quo limitations of so-called “democratic” search engines.

adUup/fleeQ technology levels the search driven playing field, it is more egalitarian for both web user and publisher, in that it allows web-masters and publishers who have already traffic to participate in an opportunity for visibility before a greater potential of relevant web users. This is finally offered without the need publishers to purchase sponsored links so as to increase likelihood of exposure to relevant users. This is exposure issue is a critical concept to understand, publishers, who do not have much traffic, need it desperately, and having a mechanism by which they can get relevant contextual targeted traffic at no cost until now has been almost impossible.

Greater exposure opportunities to traffic is effectively what we deliver through our proprietary Ancillary Ad System. Like other search services, advertisements are a financially reality to operate adUup and fleeQ and therefore necessary, but not necessarily an evil. It is not inexpensive to deliver the search service, as the the cost of servers, and bandwidth is a market commodity, and not inexpensive. One of the unseen activities and costs of search services, is the creative minds behind the code. The best engineers needed to design search algorithms, for better and better targeting, is an extremely expensive payroll cost.

As an example of the value of algorithms, take a look at the value of a company, PowerSet. Launched in the first quarter of 2007, Powerset’s inventory is simply a set of algorithms and code on top of the wiki data, wiki data that is available freely to the entire world. Anyone can download the wiki data, because its open domain information. What the engineers at Powerset did do was to create some cool associate, contextual algorithm inventories, that sort and predict intent of the web user.

They did it pretty good, and recently, Microsoft bought them for over $100 million dollars. The “Power-soft” purchase most certainly exemplifies the enormous value of code, in and of itself, in “predicting intent” for search service providers. Powerset didn’t have any revenue, they didn’t have any traffic of any significance, the only thing they had was their algorithms. Access to the minds, the engineers that create algorithms is not inexpensive, as is continually proved in acquisitions, such as this one by Microsoft.

The industry gossip that Powerset code would be the Google Killer, ended up as a false hood. I do have to say that what they did do, albeit a small piece, they did well. They showed a new way of displaying results, and a different way of displaying them, that for me seemed pretty cool. But, in the end, PowerSet was a letdown for the fleeQ engineering team, who were looking and dreaming of the day a massive index farm (complete with spider and bots collecting the webpages of the world) would one day surface to put greater contextually and intelligence to the plethora of data that exists on the web.

As for how our advertising (which financially supports or search services) is managed for the best user experience, our search engine does one of two things: We locate a contextual advertiser who desires to advertise against that term, in which case we redirect the browser to that advertiser and display the xyz.com results atop the advertisers website inside of a SRW; OR In the case we do not locate an advertiser against the term, we send the advertiser back to the xyz.com website search page. Allowing the website to display results as if we were never even present.

Our Ancillary ad technology invention empowers adUup/fleeQ’s egalitarian search paradigm. Ancillary ad technology, (as defined in the patent written by myself, Dylan Rosario) is entitled, “Alternative method of retrieving and displaying requested URIs”. The new paradigm provides cohesive satisfaction of user search intent and addresses publisher desire for traffic/revenue via a unified search result delivery model. A model that can accommodate for the Broder’s search intent taxonomies in a single action.

A publisher who integrates our technology into their website enhances their opportunity for exposure to those web users who would have never otherwise found them in the democratic organic results at a mega search engine, nor via the “I’m feeling lucky” method of search engines, such as Google.

The way we deliver navigational traffic to a website is based upon our custom algorithm, it makes the event of searching by a user a traffic generating event. The process then delivers via the “I’m feeling lucky” model traffic to any arbitrary website that our search and targeting algorithms find contextual or relevant. In essence driving traffic to the publisher.

For instance, a participating publisher site at www.GYM.com earns an opportunity for his site to be delivered as the “I’m feeling lucky” Ancillary Ad, once his site generates three fleeQ user searches. In return, adUup locates a search event from one of our many other participating network publishers, and directs the delivery of an Ancillary ad on behalf of publisher www.GYM.com, as a viewable background page to a user searching with fleeQ in another site.

Search boxes featured on publisher sites create an opportunity to capture inbound related traffic and exposure to web users who otherwise would not have viewed their great message, product or service. Opportunity for this traffic is generated not only from other websites, but also the fleeQ.com search portal, and the fleeQ browser embedded toolbar and search boxes.

Publisher revenue opportunity (often siphoned away by status quo search engines) can now be captured through an egalitarian search delivery model that restores value opportunities to traffic otherwise lost. Although, web user search intent is illusive to capture some extents, fleeQ inherently provides traffic satisfaction for both the publisher, and navigational relevance delivery to a web user at the same time. The user gets great results from their query, and the publisher benefits further from his/her visitors.

If the publisher desires to not receive free traffic, and rather cash, we can direct that search to another publisher site and give the originating publisher in this case xyz.com credit towards receiving an Ancillary Ad from our network. Essentially, adUup utilizes the power of search as a force to drive revenues for publishers via a new paradigm. The ancillary ad. When you are at a site (e.g. xyz.com) and you search for either local (in-site) xyz.com results, or you desire web results (e.g. non-local as for example what you get from google) the publisher directs the search to our search redirector. We receive the search term directly from the xyz.com search form located throughout the website.

In the final analysis, adUup offers publishers options in regards to earning guaranteed revenue or traffic by offering web search from their website(s), has been enhanced via the fleeQ adUup technology. Furthermore by giving this new option to the publisher they do not interfere with the users search experience, because intention is taken into account more completely than that of any search engine today. This is something that no other ad network or search engine offers today. We are excited to be delivering a solution that truly “levels the playing field”.

Thanks for reading.

Dylan Rosario
adUup President

What is search intent? What are the taxonomies of search?

http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2002/broder.pdf

Read what this guy this is the primary purpose of a search engine ….
LOL…. way wrong! This is what a marketer thinks.

http://www.build-a-home-business-website.com/purpose-of-search-engines.html

A bit more along these lines…

http://jimjansen.blogspot.com/2008/06/user-intent-in-web-searching.html

What’s next? Search 2.0 and beyond….

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_what_is_next.php

1)[Broder, A. 2002. A Taxonomy of Web Search. SIGIR Forum 36, 2, 3-10.]
2)Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search
Engine Rankings (2) (Hardcover)

http://www.amazon.com/Googles-PageRank-Beyond-Science-Rankings/dp/0691122024

INTENT AND SEARCH : HOW FLEEQ ADDRESSES THE CONSUMER / USER SEARCH EXPERIENCE

A question in my mind in 2006 was, how do I assist smaller companies in marketing and branding online in the face of the dynamics of the internet? Looking around me I saw problems left and right. It was increasingly difficult (if not impossible) for a smaller company to achieve any level of recognition online, and even more difficult if you don’t have a creative angle, or some edgy message. The fact that most of those smaller companies were likely to be forever adrift in vast seas of online information seemed untenable.

Companies who cannot achieve some level of Internet /famedom/ must compete at a level often tilted unfairly in an opponent’s direction. You might wonder why I say ‘opponent’. It is because; online a company is in competition with every other company website out there. There are always a finite number of individuals (browsers) to go around on the web any given time, any given day and plenty of savvy, deep-pocketed competition for their attention.

Not every company can have a blockbuster website. For the hundreds of millions of websites, there are a select few who have ever achieved a phenomenal degree of marketing and/or branding success online. _Not all companies have the innovative or creative power to be able to capture a current wave of marketing ingenuity deployed by some smalltime producers and designers, regardless of excellent viral campaign techniques._

If we presume the average company (who does not have some kind of cool viral message or product) must use standard advertising, then we are facing a predicament in regards to marketing options. I realized that a significant condensation of the distribution channels for advertising was already in motion. Advertising options were and are becoming more and more consolidated by the day, as the major search portals and software publishers are snatching up the channels of distribution and merging. The reality is, powerful distribution channels are now operating more like a /digital cartel/, controlling huge portions of internet-user traffic through mega-search engines.

So, back to the 2006 question, how do I assist my customers (many smaller companies) in marketing and branding online, considering the stacked deck against their unique digital splash being heard at all?

Supporters of cartel economics like to claim that cartels protect weaker participating companies, and to an extent do away with limitations on trade resulting from high cost of entry across borders, distribute risks and profits fairly equitably, stabilize markets, reduce costs, and thereby protect consumers from wild marketplace fluctuations and chaos.

In the digital realm, cartel economies are actually a benefit to very few players across the board, and most especially an economic conundrum for the web-publishers/companies who have few choices of channels through which to market themselves broadly.

One could consider the current state of affairs on the Internet as a near monopolization of online advertising by very few organizations, who effectively function like many cartels. I have been working on the Internet for many years now and I have experienced in many variations and iterations of the technology. I’ve seen companies come and go, and watched online empires built. However, the ‘playing field’ on the Internet is no longer a level field at all.

The big search engines somehow have convinced the small web-publisher that they need them, that in order for the consumer to find them, the search engine must index a publisher’s site. I had to ask, is there another way?

The reality that search engines are capitalizing upon the hard work of everyone else is excused as a necessary evil of a new information medium. Mega-search engines take everyone’s content. They also take the web-publishers products, and they manipulate the web-publishers and their ‘wee-folk’ visitors. Essentially, web-publishers and the wee-folk serve unpaid, feeding the several-headed online-beast of the search engine & consolidated ad channel cartel, which keeps just getting fatter and fatter, and harder to move out of the way.

On one hand, this great beast operates like a kindly innkeeper, by endearing itself to everyone. It points the wee-folk towards village specialty-shops. But on the other hand (for the small publisher, webmaster, and/or business owner) the beast always entices the wee-folk already in the village, to leave, and points them onto other villages, with other small shops. The beast degrades the value of a small publisher/company brand by never promising to send the wee-folk back to the little village again. The beast in fact, supplies a map of a maze of little villages to the wee-folk, with so many road signs and detours along the way the wee-folk may be forever unable to find that lovely village again they once visited.

A magic sword that could smite the mighty beast as it lay in its lair seemed like a fairy tale for publishers and smaller companies. Would anyone ever be able to pull the sword from the stone and help the little village shopkeepers and the wee-folk both? I kept thinking, “Is it possible to slay the several-headed search-engine beast?”

In actuality, the search engines are nothing without the publishers who they index. It is not the search engine, but the publisher who the consumer is looking to reach. The search engines truly have no content, many of them have begun to collect information, but you will notice that not a single thing they offer is their original work. No video, notebooks, no articles, none of the things that search engines index are actually created by them.

Unfortunately, the consumer has rarely caught on to this. The mysticism and magic of the Internet, like slight of hand, has confounded many people. Think of the Great Wizard of Oz and how enamored the wee-folk of Oz were of his powers until Toto pulled back the curtain.

Some think that the whole web is some kind of big shopping mall and you can float from place to place with a simple click of the mouse, like Dorothy did with a click of her shoes. Don’t laugh, but some people even believe that the ‘online shopping mall’ goes by the name of the search engine. Without search engines, many individuals believe they would never find the information they are looking for. Lack of sophistication on the side consumers has made a few mega-search engines extremely wealthy.

I remember the time when there was nothing but a hyperlink. Search engines were programs that looked for pattern matches in files. The concept of indexing those files birthed the modern search engine. The advent of digital plagiarism, easy, passive and highly profitable for search engines, was accepted by publishers willing to take it, as long as somehow consumers might locate publishers and view their information content or buy their products and services. This seemed a small price to pay for traffic and for customers, and there was no viable alternative, no promise a visitor would ever return, or that new visitors would be guaranteed by the search engine, to be returned to Kansas, and back to publisher’s website. Dorothy had her ruby slippers as a promise, Merlin had the secret of the sword in the stone as a promise, and web-publishers have had nothing as a promise.

The wee-folk no longer need to know a brand but only the effect or outcome of what they desire; the search engine does the rest of the work. It pushes the individual far away from a branded source. The wee folk become sheep following a search engine shepherd. What it all comes down to, who gets the profit? Who deserves the profit? In the Internet world or real world, where information should be free, or should it?

Obviously there’s a cost of producing a newspaper, writing articles and creating content. In this case we see the conundrum of content publishers, how they value themselves, and how willing they are to pay for placement. A premium search engine placement is a calculated advertising risk; in hope that when the consumer searches on terms that the ad or link placement will be noticed. No guarantee, no promise.

The interesting thing is that most people don’t understand how a search engine really works, and if they did they would understand that it’s only a matter of time until the search engines no longer exist but for the time being it’s a necessary evil. A search engine is a tool not a destination, and should be thought of as such.

Any group of smart individuals with enough computers and a fat fiber optic pipe to the Web can create a search engine. Now imagine having a fiber-optic connection to your home and a desktop computer, with the equivalent processing power and storage space of all the search engines data farms. You essentially could do away with the search engine, given enough processing, disk space, and connectivity to the Web.

If we were to look at Moore’s Law, and correlate that to the processing power of a search engine data farm, we would realize that in less than 20 years everyone would have a computer just as powerful. Of course storage follows a similar trend, and now with dense wave division multiplexing the bandwidth is increasing. It is only a matter of time until the personal computer can index the entire web.

Some people may call this heresy, especially those that work for the big search engines. They want you to believe that being the consumer and publisher that we need them, but we must tithe the gods of search for without them we are nothing. Unfortunately, there are other ways of dating access to data and finding information. The anomaly of viral marketing, the power of brand recognition, and ingenuity of the traditional marketer cannot be overshadowed by any search engine forever.

So back to the question, how do I assist smaller companies in marketing and branding online in face of the cartels who promise them absolutely nothing? I decided to try to pull the sword from the stone and take aim at the beast cartel. I dreamed about it, breathed it, imagined it and then envisioned it. Based on my vision, I have built a technology known as fleeQ.

With the invention and application of this technology, I have pulled the sword from the stone. It is time to slay the beast. However, innovation can take its toll. Even with the most creative team, and greatest resources, many large organizations do fail. We have a plan. Getting beyond the simple and the mundane to develop and build an entirely new way of delivering advertisements online, we have found that publishers and advertisers both seek a new and or alternative method. We fulfill needs that have been waiting for solutions.

It is our task at adUup to deliver such solutions. The first embodiment of this has manifested in the form of fleeQ. An entirely new search advertising network based upon the principles of my patent “an alternative method for displaying requested URIs”. Many people who have heard, and watched this technology in application, have said this new methodology turns the Internet advertising system inside out and backwards.
Who says internet fairy tales can’t happen?

Here’s a question for you. What is really going on with the online marketing space? How did we get here? Where is it going?

• How does a marketer today compete against the growing cost of SEM marketing?
• What are the other options available to them today?
• Is there anything else out there other than Google and Yahoo?
• Why does television seem to think that they are the only ones capable of reaching millions of people in a single market?
• How does our company address these problems?

To begin with must understand the needs of the publisher and the desires of the advertiser. Each and every single client of our ad network is an integral part of what we call a search exchange. Many unique websites and publishers all working towards the same goal.

Essentially, each of these organizations can maximize their exposure by sharing their traffic with each other. It’s amazing how the Internet forgot why it was called the World Wide Web in the first place. The term World Wide Web is rooted in the concept that sites linked to each other in some context or another. If we were to link these websites together every website to every website there would be billions of hyperlinks on every single webpage. Of course that’s not possible so the search engine was born.

Now obviously somebody who’s in the arcane business of creating lithographic technology for microchips would not link to a website discussing the hypocrisy of Aristotle.

In reality a search engine is designed as a jumping point onto the World Wide Web were then you could link from site to site via embedded URLs on the page and find content that is pertinent to the subject matter in which you are researching. Many times the subject matter they be entertainment but in the end hyper linking was the critical component of the Web.

A hyperlink has all but disappeared on the Internet, still you may find some websites with a link or resource section where they list out websites of commonality or common interest but in the end people have now turned their eyes to the search engine to sort the mess out for them.

The search engines do a great job and the index everything that exists. With massive server farms in massive resources these monolithic business models bring together a disparate and often misunderstood environment that today we call the Web.

Many of the young people today or only experience with the Web has been when search engines existed. For those of us were around in the early days prior to Yahoo, Inktomi, Google, and a dozen other search engines, we remember the lengthy process of finding relevant information. Often times the information never existed in the first place and we had to revert to libraries.

The philosophy I am speaking of here is one of sharing. The Web was orginally about sharing about the propagation of knowledge. The fact that the Web is the ultimate library starts with the publisher and the creator of content. Content as many say is king, and without the publisher the search engines would have nothing to index or spider.

Now putting commercialism aside, and looking at the pure function of the Web as a tool to collect resources and information we can justify the existence of search engines. They do the functionality of indexing and sorting and searching so that way we don’t have to remember every single link in the world, nor keep billions of bookmarks.

As you may know the cost of entry to build a search engine is immense. Massive server farms thousands of computers, and hundreds of people are necessary to sort and decipher this information into contextual search terms which produce results.

Until the day that we all have the equivalent computing power of a Yahoo or Google in our laptop computer, we will use search engines. But as I said previously without the publishers that they index the search engines are really nothing but a bunch of computers in a server farm.

Our technology takes advantage of the many different search brands that exist. We aggregate across multiple engines bring together the ubiquitous search result, and presented in a way that levels the playing field amongst the search giants.

It true David versus Goliath story, ours is one of the symbiotic existence. Looking at the web as a means to collect information, the user becomes a target for advertisement. Advertisement is a necessity without it we would have none of our favorite television shows, we would not be able to read the news from around the world in printed publications, and favorite professional sports teams would be playing ball on the high school field.

Yes advertising is necessary, the cost of content hasn’t changed, but the cost of delivery has gone down. Television has had the best deal yet, put up a number of radio towers around the nation and you can milk them for decades. In the end the consumer has to buy their own television so the medium in which your television signals delivered cost you almost nothing. Of course the cost of production is expensive, but if you look at the revenue over time it completely negates the costs of setting up a studio and radio equipment. These models are driven by advertising, and in the end the subscriber base is so broad that the television stations can claim they penetrate the entire geographical market in which they broadcast.

Of course this model is harder for cable and satellite, which requires very specific registered pieces of equipment in order to deliver their media. This is easily auditable, and us you will see that the per channel revenues is lower than that of broadcast. Albeit that Comcast makes more money in a local market because they have more channels and charge a monthly subscription fee for access to their media, but unfortunately must charge less for the advertisements placed on their network.

This revenue generated from the 30 second ad spot, which generates millions of dollars a month per station per market for broadcast. It is a huge vast machine, very entrenched in the minds of the American people. The same people who are inundated on a daily basis by billboards, radio, mobile advertising, web advertising, newspaper advertising, magazines, and even ads on bathroom walls. The growth in the advertising market has pushed and pulled the consumer in dozens of directions, now each of them is fighting for the same ad dollar.

This brings me to web advertising; it is the strongest mechanism to deliver a marketing message. The technology allows us to target individuals in a geographic area, based on their behavioral patterns, psychographic profiling, and of course the standard demographic target group. With all of this available to it, the cost of delivering it across the Internet medium is so low, that we must add value by defining extensive target capability, of not only a selection technology which presents the ad, but also the relevance of the publisher’s site in which the ad is presented.

Obviously one would not advertise baby diapers and a yachting magazine, the same as one would not advertise feminine hygiene products on ESPN. So relevance is critical, and the Web can produce that by the boatload.

Search engines today assume that the consumer who is searching for a term will find advertisements relevant to their search. With almost any search term in the world today you can find an advertiser who is banking that you will be interested in some contextual or relevant manner to their product. It’s kind of funny, because big national packaged goods brands such as those coming from Procter & Gamble are not necessarily seeking relevance but brand awareness.

How do we bring brand awareness to the Web in a relevant manner? Does it have to be relevant? If it’s been good for these big national brands to advertise on TV with little or no relevance then why is it not good for them to advertise on the Internet with greater relevance and better targeting?

Technology works against itself here in this case, if technology of the Internet is the best delivery mechanism available for a brand message, then why does it get a smaller price point against television and newspaper? That is an easy one, lower cost of delivery. In order to serve 10,000 people online it may only cost three dollars, versus delivering 10,000 newspapers could cost nearly $2000. Scarcity of the media is becoming a moot point. Television shows are moving to the Internet printed publications are presented on webpages, the consumer has many routes to the same information traditionally delivered over these antiquated medias.

Just some food for thought. Next posting I will be discussing the concepts of why one would build a technology such as adUup and fleeQ. Why is this important to the Web as a whole? And who it benefits them the most. Thanks for reading.