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In This Issue:
Yahoo Buys Inktomi
In a deal
announced on December 27th, Yahoo purchased Inktomi for $235 million.
As many of you know, Yahoo is one of the largest portals on the Web,
next to rapidly growing rivals like Google and MSN. That's why I was
surprised to learn a couple of months ago that Yahoo had started
serving Google results at the TOP of their search results rather than
their own paid directory listings as they had in the past. This move
made little sense to me and other industry analysts as it devalued
their own product offering. Not only that, it did so in favor of
giving more exposure to one of their chief rivals, Google.
Based on the
recent Inktomi purchase, Yahoo either "saw the light" or implemented
the Google change last quarter as a temporary stopgap measure. Either
way, there's little doubt now that Yahoo will endeavor to take its
$235 million Inktomi engine and replace Google's results with
its own.
This marks a
significant setback to Google, who has been quickly gaining ground
against its rivals. However, it signals a second chance for Inktomi,
who has been losing market share over the past year to other major
players. While Inktomi has never operated its own public search
engine, it has long provided search results to dozens of minor
portals, along with a few better-known ones such as MSN and HotBot.
What does this
mean to you? If you are a member of our Search
Engine Service, we will start focusing more attention
on your Inktomi rankings. Since MSN
displays LookSmart results for most top rankings,
we will concentrate on improving your rankings with HotBot. If
you can achieve top rankings now on an Inktomi-based engine such as
HotBot, then you'll be positioned well for when Yahoo makes the
change.
There are two
ways to get submitted to Inktomi; Free or paid submission. The
free submission does not guarantee a listing and there is no telling
how long it will take before your listing is available for inclusion.
The paid submission gets
your Web address
listed in major search engines like MSN, HotBot, and others
within 72 hours. If your are a member of
our Search Engine Service, we will submit your site at no additional
cost. If you are not, we are offering to submit your site to
Inktomi for only $35 (regularly $39).
E-mail
, or call us, and let us know if you'd like us to submit
your site to Inktomi. Hopefully Yahoo will not take advantage
of the new Inktomi exposure by raising paid inclusion prices.
Protecting Your In-box
To protect your
in-box, you can use a spam filtering
software program. Although there are several available online,
one of the best ones
is Mail Washer. This program will enable you to view all the e-mail
on your server without actually downloading it into your e-mail
program. Once you've reviewed your messages, you can create filters
and bounce the spam messages back to the
sender. The best part is this program is FREE.
http://www.mailwasher.net
Overture Increases
Minimum Bids by
100%
Overture wrote
in an email message to their advertisers that the minimum bids will be
raised from 5 cents to 10 cents. "Listings from 5 cents to 9 cents
will be grandfathered in for the time being. Historically
grandfathered 1 cent to 4 cent listings will be moved to the new
grandfathered minimum bid of 5 cents effective March 29, 2003. Any
changes in bids for your listings will result in your minimum bid
moving to 10 cents."
Free SleepEatFun Directory
Listing
This bed and
breakfast directory is offering free listings which include: Inn name,
inn address, city, state, ZIP, and phone number. Visit
SleepEatFun for more information.
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