Looksmart have been 'aware' for some time of this 'under-utilised' area of search potential, for some time now and are finally ready to capitalise on it ..... IMHO.
Tiomike_ca, of Yahoo LOOK board says ....
< The long tail of search--another way of looking at it. Plays right into LOOKs initiatives, aggregating personal search saves along with vertical search.
February 23, 2005 -- The latest research from Nielsen//NetRatings, the Internet research specialist, shows that when it comes to advertising on search engines, companies need to rely on more information than purely the size of a search engine’s audience when choosing where to spend their budgets for keyword placements.
Tim Roe, Head of Data Analytics at Nielsen//NetRatings says “Published for the first time today, the research shows that when it comes to placing keywords on search engines, a bigger audience is not always better.
Understanding that the smaller search engines can be as successful as some of the larger ones in generating click throughs can help companies to improve their return on investment, and make their promotional spend go further.”
The MegaView Search report uses click throughs as a measure of success for search engines. When a searcher types a keyword or phrase into a search engine, they are served a number of results linking to other websites. This report measures how many of these search results are actually clicked on. For many search engines, these click throughs are used as the currency to charge for keyword placement, and by websites to measure the success of their keyword advertising......"
"As Tim Roe comments “There are many factors that influence the success of a search engine. As with other forms of advertising, companies cannot rely solely on the size of the audience to a particular search engine as a guarantee of attracting the right target audience to their website, product or service. Search marketers need to take a more sophisticated approach to understand how many successful searches a search engine generates and which search engines are most successful in which categories. For the first time, this research from Nielsen//NetRatings allows companies to plan with a more balanced view of search engine performance by click throughs, searchers and successful searches.”"
