Report Predicts Increased Cost for Advertisers From Google-Yahoo Partnership

A report by search marketing manager SearchIgnite claims that the cost of a click on Yahoo! search will go up 22 percent if Google sells the ad according to post on the New York Times Bits Blog. SearchIgnite compared the of cost of clicks at the same position on Yahoo! and Google for 15,000 keywords in 12 million clicks paid. They found that for popular searches terms Yahoo! cost more for the first three results and Google for the rest. For less popular search terms, the kind that would likely be filled by Google, Google cost 14 percent more for the first result and for the fifth through tenth it cost 52 percent more.

Yahoo Opening Search Technology to Other Companies

Yahoo has announced a program to open its search technology and data centers to start-up companies to create new or customized search engines. The program called Boss, bring your own search service, has already signed up two partners. One partner, Me.dium uses information from the users of its social browsing tool to rearrange and supplement Yahoo’s search results based on what sites currently have “buzz”. Yahoo will sell ads on its partners search engines.

Source: New York Times

Click Fraud Tool Adds Automatic Notification to Yahoo

Click Forensics, a click fraud auditor, will provide automatic notification of detected click-fraud in search advertising to Yahoo under a new partnership according to a CNET News report. Currently, filing a inquiry into suspected click fraud requires a tedious manual process. Steve O’Brien, Click Forensics’ vice president of marketing, told CNET News that Click Forensics’ were in conversation with Google about providing the same service, but that so far “Google has taken a different attitude toward click fraud, assuring advertisers that it has a fail-safe means of tracking rogue clicks and that it doesn’t charge for it.”