Intent Data Focused Ad Exchange Launched Today

BlueKai, which claims to be the first intent data focused ad exchange, launched today. They will act as the middleman in auctions between publishers selling data on consumer’s purchase-driven behaviors and advertisers and ad networks buying the data to target advertising. The data will be based on cookies and participants in the network will be required not to combine the data with personally identifiable information. According to a CNET News article, BlueKai’s CEO Omar Tawakol compared the company to “the idea to the direct mail marketing business. Offline, marketers call up a data company like Axciom to buy the names and addresses of household decision makers in a certain ZIP code, for example. Then they would take that data and create a campaign.” While the company claims to have a number of the top 10 ad networks and publishers, so far only Autobytel and online video advertiser Tremor Media have been mentioned publicly.

The company is also touting what it calls “polite marketing”, providing consumers information and control over what information is collected from their data providers. The company also will give rewards in the form of charitable donations to consumer for maintaining data on the site.

Google Reiterates Lack of Duplicate Content Penalty in Google Search

In a posting on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa reiterated that Google Search does not have duplicate content penalty. The theoretical penalty refers to being penalized in the Google search engine due to a site having multiple pages containing the same content. This can be a common occurrence, among the causes is a dynamic site that uses multiple URL parameters. The issue has been addressed in several previous postings on the Webmaster Central blog, but continues to be concern to webmasters. When Google does find duplicate content, it clusters the duplicate contents properties together, including link popularity, and attempts to choose the “best” URL to represent the content in search results. If Google is unable to detect all the duplicates of a page, the page’s ranking may suffer to due not receiving the link popularity of all the versions. The post suggests using a Sitemap to help Google understand what is the preferred URL.

Justice Department May Be Preparing Challenge to Google-Yahoo Partnership

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. Justice Department has hired a well-known lawyer for a possible antitrust lawsuit against Google. The lawyer, Sanford Litvack, was the Justice Department antitrust chief for President Jimmy Carter as well as a former vice chairman of Disney and partner at law firm Hogan & Hartson. The report says that it is not clear if the possible challenge would be to the Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership alone or if it would encompass Google’s overall online-advertising business. Lawyers familiar with the review told the Journal that “For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal.”

Yahoo Hires New U.S. Advertising Sales Chief

Yahoo has hired a new advertising chief, Joanne Bradford will be in charge of U.S. Sales, taking over for David Karnstedt who has resigned, as well as Market Development for Advertisers, Small Business, and Yahoo! HotJobs. Bradford most recently work for advertising agency Spot Runner, she had previously be in the corporate vice president of Global Sales and Marketing and chief media revenue officer for Microsoft’s digital advertising network.

Source: Yahoo Press Release

Comcast Appeals FCC Net Neutrality Related Sanctions

The New York Times Bits Blog reports that Comcast filed a suit in the United States Court of Appeals in Washington to challenge the FCC’s sanctions over it’s throttling of certain protocols on customers connections. Comcast is challenging the FCC’s ability to sanctions companies without first publishing a rule about the issue at hand. Under the current FCC chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC has published broad principles and has only taken action when it finds practices it objects to. Comcast complains that by bypassing formal rules, their ability to put forth their side of issue is restricted.

NebuAd Suspends Controversial Advertising Technology

The Washington Post reports that NebuAd has suspended it controversial advertising technology. The technology uses deep-packet inspection to monitor all unencrypted traffic through an internet connection to gather information to target adds. Publicity, including an inquiry by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, led to ISP’s participating with NebuAd to suspend their use of the technology. In an email to the Post company spokeswoman Janet McGraw indicated that the company was looking to channels other than ISPs to deploy the technology. Earlier in the week, the company announced the CEO Bob Dykes was stepping down from that post.

Google Releasing Web Browser

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google has announced that they will be releasing their own web browser. The browser, called Google Chrome, is built on the WebKit rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari. The browser uses a V8, a JavaScript engine developed by Google, that Google says is designed to “power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”. A beta version for Windows will be released shortly, with Mac and Linux versions in the works.

Google CEO Says Yahoo Partnership On Track To Start in Early October

In an interview with Bloomberg Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google search advertising partnership with Yahoo! is preceding to start in early October. He also said that regulators have so far “not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” The partnership is currently under review by U.S. state and federal regulators, as well as Canadian regulators.

Target Settles Lawsuit Over Blind Accessibility to Website

Target has settled a lawsuit over the inability of the blind to access their website. CNET News reports that Target will establish a $6 million dollar fund for settlement claims and promised to “make its site fully accessible to blind visitors”. The basis of the suit was that the lack alt-text tags for images on the site made it difficult, if not impossible, for blind customers to use site and that this was a violation of state and federal disability rights laws.

Google Adds Search Suggestion Feature to Google Search

In a post on the Official Google Blog, it was announced that Google Suggest, Google’s search suggestion feature, will be a part of Google’s homepage. The feature provides suggested search terms in drop box below the search box as a search query is being typed into the search box. For example, if baseball were typed into the search box, terms like baseball hall of fame of fame, baseball reference, baseball games, and baseball america would show up. The feature also detects misspellings and typos and suggest correction like “Did you mean?” feature already available on the search results page. This feature has previously been available as opt-in feature as a Google Labs experiment.