The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Marchex has consolidated its broad range of assets into a single PPC ad platform and network to provide a coherent single point of entry for advertisers seeking to reach the local market at scale.  Say hello to “AdHere,” a network including OpenList, local-vertical domain sites, plus a range of third party sites, including:

– IDG - Publishers of PC World, CIO Magazine, and Macworld
– Ziff Davis Enterprise - Publishers of eWeek, CIO/Insight, and Publish
– Banks.com - Timely advice and first-class tools for building personal wealth - covering banking, loans, investing, insurance, taxes, real estate, and autos
– RealtyTrac - the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, providing all the resources that home seekers, investors, and real estate agents need to locate, evaluate, and buy properties below market value
– AmericanTowns.com - a national network of community-based websites where people can find & share the best local information for every town in America
– YourStreet.com - Indexes and maps thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level
– Lat49 - an online ad network providing local and brand advertisers with delivery of geo-targeted and contextual ads across a network of online maps
– HelloMetro - city level information on local history, attractions, real estate, jobs, Yellow Pages, White Pages, and local resources

Marchex is touting exclusive placements on 200 “premium publisher sites.” The network allows targeting and ad buying by site, category, and/or keyword.

Microsoft threw open the doors to its worldwide research laboratories last week at its seventh annual TechFest event, an information technology expo during which the world’s largest software maker revealed  programs designed to make solitary Internet searches a thing of the past.

The event debuted Search Together, a new plug-in to Internet Explorer that will help students, medical researchers and other prolific Web users collaborate on projects, allowing them to jointly save different searches and avoid redundancy. Another new project, CoSearch, is being designed to let groups of people participate in a Web search on a single computer by using multiple mice or even mobile phones.

Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives — writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.

Whrrl — not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl — is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.

Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends — who may be at a nearby restaurant — or at the very least get a review of the restaurant that a friend wrote a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.

Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile-phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as “a live phone book that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list.” Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.

Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — on about eight to 10 phone models — can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 a month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to pursue more funding early next year, employs 34 people.

<http://www.whrrl.com/

Seattle’s Marchex, which recently acquired VoiceStar, launched 100,000 local search domains and is about to relaunch OpenList as a new, comprehensive local destination site, has issued a local report entitled “Unlocking the Potential of the Local Internet.” The document is a very good overview of the state of the market (with data) and the opportunity. Here’s where you can download the report. Simultaneously, the company has started a local blog called “LocalPoint.”

Domain Roundtable, a domain name conference hosted by Name Intelligence, will hold its 2007 conference August 13-15 in Seattle.

“The focus will be on networking,” says Jay Westerdal, Name Intelligence President & CEO. Additionally, Domain Roundtable will feature Ntag, a networking technology that makes it easy to swap information with other attendees and follow up after the conference.
The event will feature a 450 lot live domain name auction on Wednesday, which is open for free to the public. The auction listings have not been publicly released because the Domain Roundtable staff is “triple checking” the validity and ownership of submissions. Even though the auction will feature twice as many lots as the most recent TRAFFIC auction, Westerdal says he expects the auction to last only 3 hours. Domain Capital will provide domain financing at the auction.

Marchex has removed the ad links from about half of its 200,000 direct navigation domains and replaced them with reviews, local search listings and search functions with the purpose of raising relevance and consumer loyalty.

Users on sites such as SeattleVeterinarian.com, as well as zip code domains that reach 96% of the postal areas in the U.S. will now be able to use local search interfaces specifically organized around business categories related to the domain in question.

Matthew Berk, lead search architect at Marchex and founder of Open List described the changes as a guided process saying, “It’s walking someone thru the decision process, so you can help them ask the questions they didn’t necessarily know to ask up front. The Open List experience has always been about refinement.”

Ads on the relaunched properties are a combination of Marchex and Yahoo ads. Marchex has a relationship with AT&T that sources their ads. The company claims 31 million unique IP addresses spanning over 200,000 domains. Open List’s brand appears on all the sites affiliated with the merger although OpenList.com has not been updated with the company’s enhanced vertical data.

Company domains offer 15 million listings for products, business and services, across 20,000 categories not unlike the yellow pages listings. Search engine visibility and the direct navigation of traffic are the points of interest in generic domains for the firm. They have begun research of user behavior to better target visitors. The only information they will make public of their studies so far, is that the practice of direct navigation has not declined since they’ve begun purchasing domain real estate.

Seattle’s Marchex, Inc. today announced a new relationship with Yahoo! Inc. in which Marchex will convert search ad listings from its pay-per-click engine, Enhance Interactive, into Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings.

Yahoo!’s Panama system now provides advertisers with new capabilities including geo-targeting which Marchex will utilize to provide its Enhance Interactive advertisers with more targeted campaigns based on each advertiser’s target markets.

“It is an ongoing initiative for us to offer additional quality distribution to our direct pay-per-click advertisers, and this is a continued step in that process,” said Scott Greenberg, Marchex senior vice president of advertising services. “This partnership will enable us to expand the reach of our advertisers in the United States and beyond.”

The Google Local Business Center has just added four new features for business owners who want to maintain a Google Local Business listing.

You can now:

* Add photos to your Google Maps listing (within the guidelines)
* Add custom attributes to your business listings
* Correct and adjust your Google map marker location, so if it is slightly off, you can move it to the right spot
* View statistics on how many people viewed and clicked on your local business listings

New custom attribute choices include information on price, specialty, free estimate provided, and areas served by default and you can also add your own, such as In Business Since.  The new photo options allows you present an image alongside your marker location on the map.