From

After months of speculation, Yahoo announced today that it has renewed its relationship to use Google's results as part of its search listings. In addition, Yahoo made a substantial change to end its historic barrier between human-powered and crawler-based search results.

Since its birth, Yahoo has used its own human editors or "surfers" as it calls them to organize web sites into categories. However, recognizing that humans can't index everything, Yahoo also has for years partnered with a third-party "crawler-based" search engine to provide answers for when there are no matches within its own human-powered listings.

(Have you noticed in the past, when you performed a search on Yahoo, the results page didn't really look like Yahoo? Well it wasn't! If you had looked carefully in the URL, you would have noticed that it said "http://google.yahoo.com...." This is where Google had kicked in as Yahoo's secondary search vehicle. Now they are combined.)

Historically, the third-party search providers have been paid by Yahoo for the queries they handled. Since Yahoo has consistently been one of the most popular search sites on the web, the amount of queries it generates translates into serious money. In 2001, Google was paid $7.1 million by Yahoo for the search queries it handled, according to a Yahoo proxy statement filed in March.

Fighting For Yahoo

Competition for the latest Yahoo contract was intense. In addition to Google, both Inktomi and FAST were also seeking the contract. However, Google has made history by being the first provider to win the Yahoo deal twice in a row.

Yahoo has been a fickle about its partners. Open Text was the company's first partner, then AltaVista won the contract in mid-1996. It was then dumped for Inktomi in mid-1998, in particular because AltaVista was seen by Yahoo as competitor in the portal space while Inktomi ran a "behind-the-scenes" business model of powering but never competing with portals.

When Inktomi lost out to Google in 2000, this seemed both due to Google's growing reputation of having high quality search results and also what was widely assumed to be a better business proposition by Google to Yahoo. In fact, it turned out later that as part of the deal, Yahoo gained a small investment stake in privately-held Google.

Two Strikes But One Great Hit

Going into the latest competition, Google had two strikes against it. First, some at Yahoo believe that Google may be capturing their visitors. Google certainly does handle a search volume more than double that of Yahoo's as measured by "search hours," and Google has nearly equal Yahoo's 30 percent reach of the US search audience, according to figures from Nielsen//NetRatings.

In addition, a deal earlier this year between Yahoo and Overture precluded Google from giving Yahoo both its editorial and paid listings. As a result, Yahoo -- which is looking to maximize revenues wherever possible -- was potentially looking at a situation where it either had to pay Google to keep it as its partner or go with another provider and earn money.

This is something that both Inktomi and FAST could offer, because some of their crawler-based results are sold on a "paid inclusion" basis. Unlike with Overture, those purchasing paid inclusion are not guaranteed to receive a particular ranking. This means Yahoo could have gone with one of these partners without violating the exclusive deal Overture has to provide the company's US-based web site with guaranteed placement listings.

Despite these two drawbacks, Google had one major factor strongly in its favor. The company is widely acknowledged as being a leader for search relevancy. Indeed, Google has become a synonym for web search to some people.

Yahoo initially partnered with Google so that Yahoo's own users would feel they were getting both the quality of Google and the unique view that Yahoo's human-powered results bring to the web. Given this, dropping Google could have backlashed against Yahoo and made it seem as if the company was selling out search relevancy to gain cash, regardless of the fact that both Inktomi and FAST has very good relevancy themselves.

Using Google More Than Ever

In a unique twist, Yahoo didn't simply renew the deal for Google to be its "backup" partner, used only when Yahoo itself doesn't have an answer. Instead, the company has embraced Google's results even more tightly. Unveiled to the general public today is a new Yahoo search results page, where there is no longer a separation between Yahoo's own human-powered listings and Google's crawler-based results. Instead, the two are blended together.

All managers want to ensure their Web projects run smoothly, meet corporate needs, finish on schedule, and are ultimately successful. Unfortunately, not every company manages to work well with its chosen design team. Large corporations are especially prone to these kinds of mix-ups—the kind that waste time and money. But there are several techniques that companies can use to foster solid, successful relationships with their design firms.(Think very carefully about whether a large firm or a small firm will give you more personalized service!)

1. Define the Problem
Before design firms and consultants can be successful, you must outline the problem they need to solve. What is the business need, the initiative, or the project? You should be able to articulate your vision. Have an idea of the features or content you'd like to have, or say what Web sites you like and what you like about them. Know what you hate and don't want. The clearer your vision of the project, the better you'll be able to communicate what you'd like your design firm to create for you. Not all design firms will gel with your company's personality and objectives, however. This is why point number two is important. (Rich meets with you and asks MANY questions!)

2. Choose Your Design Firm Carefully
When you know what kind of problem you want to solve, you'll be better equipped to find the consultants who can best meet your needs. But be wary of design firms that promise everything."Some companies will say they can offer the 360-degree customer experience," says Nathan Shedroff, experience strategist. "Most companies can only deliver maybe fifteen or twenty degrees. ... "Sometimes it's best to just hire two smart people," says Allison Yates, a freelance Internet consultant. This way, you hold onto the talent that built your site at the end of the project.

3. Help Designers Evolve Your Vision (Rich calls this FEEDBACK!)
Your design firm should help you elaborate your vision. Involve the designers in the process early enough that they can have an impact on the project. If you bring them in too late, they won't be able to come up with real solutions for your business needs. ... "Be ready to provide a lot of information to your designers when you start a project. You should provide not only tangible information, such as internal documentation, Web tracking reports, business plans, and specifications from previous Web projects, but also access to your users and customers.

4. Do Preliminary User Research (Know what you want and what your customers need!)
When you're hiring designers to do a project, you probably know the business imperatives behind what you want to build. But do you know what your users' needs are? As you begin to shape your strategy, before you bring designers in, get to know your user community. Assume that your users see the world differently than you or your company do, and validate your hypotheses about what's important to them."There's nothing worse than spending all this money designing something and then ending up with a site designed for me and not the people who will actually use it," Hawn says. "It's like that game 'telephone.' Everyone whispers the message to the person next to them, and after it's passed through three or four people, the message is garbled. That's what you get when you design a site without direct user involvement."Good designers will want to get in touch with your users and see firsthand how they think and interact with your site. This ensures that the solutions they build really meet the needs of the people you most want to reach.

5. Set Clear Goals and Success Criteria
Once you've determined what you want to accomplish, work together with your designers to outline project goals. They should be able to help you flesh out the details of your vision, providing you with clear guidelines for launching and implementing your project. It's also important to outline what will make the project a success. You first need to answer this for yourself and your company. Is your project tied to your bonus, for instance? Does it need to win the favor of your vice president of marketing? Sample criteria for project success include:

6. Map Out Project Modules (Rich lets you see the entire process as it evolves. He does not surprise you at the end with what HE thinks your site should look like!)
You may have a grand vision and scale for your project. The best approach, however, is to organize your vision into smaller, modular projects that fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. There are several advantages to this tactic. If you're just starting to work with a design firm, a small project can serve as an audition. This mitigates your risk and helps you determine how to best work with the firm. A modular approach also may help you avoid the budget crunches facing many organizations. When you're trying to get buy-in across your organization, completing small chunks of the project lets you demonstrate progress. By modularizing your project, you have the opportunity to assess how well your efforts advance company strategy as you go along. Chances are good that objectives will shift over the course of the project. Implementing a monolithic strategy makes it hard for you to be nimble and responsive.

7. Demand Clear Documentation (Rich stays on and maintains your site with changes that you want and need!)
When you've finished your project, the designers will eventually go away, leaving you to manage and support what they've created. Some designers and consultants operate on the thunk factor: If the project binder makes a heavy thunk when they drop it on the table (preferably making the table shake), then they've done a good job. However, a vast quantity of unorganized or irrelevant documentation doesn't do you any good. You must be able to work with what your designers have built. ... If your project is more technical in nature, your team may need additional documentation and training to support the site.

8. Express Communication Preferences
When you start a project, tell your designers how you prefer to communicate. Do you want daily, in-person check-ins? When do you respond to email? Would you prefer telephone calls (and if so, do you want to be called on your cell phone)? What is the best way to leave you a message, and how quickly can you respond to it? Not only should you think of the communication medium, but also the ways you absorb information. Do you respond better to lists or pictures? Do you want a document or a PowerPoint presentation? Outlining these details for your designers and consultants greases the wheels for steady communication.

9. Designate A Single Point Of Contact
To keep your project running smoothly, give your designers the name of one go-to person in your company. If it's not you personally, it should be someone with enough authority to make decisions and get the attention of other people within the company."It goes without saying that there will be differences of opinion," says Louisa Heinrich, a digital strategist at Qwest Communications. "Sometimes tough decisions will have to be made." Being able to make those decisions quickly and confidently will help keep your project on track, saving both you and your designers frustration. Designers require management and information, both of which take time. In the early stages of a project—when designers or consultants are working on discovery, planning, and strategy—half your time or more could be spent collaborating with the team you hire.

10. Rally Key Stakeholders
Large companies need to juggle different (and often competing) internal opinions and imperatives when working on Web projects. One way to handle these disparate concerns is to build a small, trusted steering committee of project stakeholders. This team should be no larger than five or six people. These individuals will help you and your designers navigate your company's internal dynamics and concerns. Your internal project leader (the single point of contact mentioned above) should be the conduit between that team and your design firm.Also be aware that good designers are nosy. "Your consultants, if they're good, will have lots of questions in a number of categories," Heinrich says. "It will behoove you to arrange access to the resources who are experts on the content required."You should also know who could trip up your project—and how. When you're at a large company, there are always people who will stymie your efforts. How do you spot them? Some possible suspects: the IT director who waffles from meeting to meeting, the VP of some vital area who never makes herself available for interviews, the manager whose job threatens to be disenfranchised by your initiative. Find these people and actively engage them. Consider putting them on your stakeholder committee. You're also probably acutely aware of whose budget funds your project. Don't be naive about it. Remember the yelling executive I mentioned at the beginning of this article? The CFO reported to him, as did three-quarters of the corporation. The marketing department didn't. It's not surprising that the project got canned. It cost the starry-eyed marketing director credibility, and it cost the design firm a theoretically lucrative engagement. Get Results

Finally, always raise concerns as soon as they appear on your radar. "If you have doubts about the direction your project seems to be headed in, don't wait until your consultants have been through two more weeks of design and documentation before speaking up," says Heinrich.A successful project takes a decent amount of management and relationship building. If you keep these tips in mind, you'll have a much happier relationship with your designers, which means that you'll never become someone's horror story.

For some people, pop-up ads, poorly edited "opt-in" marketing lists and search engine manipulation might just as well be lumped together with the junk e-mail scourge. Add to that aggressive marketing pitches over fax machines, cell phones and personal digital assistants, and the list of offenses that deserve the spam handle is seemingly endless.

"Spam has become a generic term for any intrusion that people don’t like," said Ray Everett-Church, a privacy and government relations consultant with ePrivacy Group and an anti-spam advocate.

Spam may be officially defined as "unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail," but more than semantics is at stake. The volume and breadth of new digital advertising strategies threaten to wipe out the line between legitimate and illegitimate marketing, some experts say, as people begin to view all interruptions on a computing or telecommunications device as out of bounds. The result could be a delay in the long hoped-for recovery in the battered online ad market as consumers dig in their heels. Legislators have handed consumers new tools to fight spammers with laws enacted in states such as Washington and California. But those rules have stuck to a relatively narrow definition of spam, according to legal experts who said they've left plenty of room for annoyances to slip through unchecked.

"The definitions that have been written in state laws cover about 90 percent of what they were intended to catch," said Dave Kramer, a partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini. "The problem is that a lot of junk e-mail is not commercial. Some is political, some religious and some may be sent just to annoy people."

New forms of marketing such as pop-up ads have sharpened the rhetoric of anti-spammers and extended it into new arenas, Kramer said. But he cautioned that each form of advertising should be dealt with on its own terms, rather than lumped together under a broad and perhaps inappropriate label. That sentiment was seconded by Everett-Church, who said anti-spammers have in general sought to underscore the differences rather than the similarities between spam and other forms of marketing that may be equally irritating to consumers.

According to Everett-Church and Kramer, the defining factor of spam is not the annoyance of endless trips to the Delete key, but the economic costs faced by corporations and Internet service providers forced to pick up the tab for bandwidth and other expenses.

"Anti-spammers have long sought to argue against those who would combine banner ads on Web pages and pop-ups into the spam problem," he said. "While most of those other technologies may be intrusive, they often help pay for the service you're using. Spam, by contrast, is deeply parasitic."

Pop-ups and other terrors

Spam's widening definition is already disturbing legitimate marketers seeking to shore up their online status at a tough time for the advertising industry. Louis Mastria, director of public and international affairs at the Direct Marketing Association, said the organization is hard at work to devise member guidelines to prevent a backlash among consumers. Those efforts come as Web companies and advertisers struggle in their attempts to turn new media to their advantage--and profit. Mirroring industrywide trends, Internet advertising revenue in the U.S. totaled just $1.55 billion for the first quarter of 2002, declining 6.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2001, and down 18 percent from the first quarter of 2001, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), an online trade association.

The declines have come as advertisers and publishers pull out the stops with new and invasive advertising formats that include taking over an entire computer screen, buying top placement in search engine results and plying customers with incentives to sign up for e-mail marketing lists, among others. Because people are so overwhelmed by solicitations sent on the Web, by e-mail, direct mail, fax and mobile devices, they are quickly tuning everything out and developing a bitter taste for legitimate marketers, he said.

"We are impacted by the growth of unsolicited e-mail, because in effect, it dilutes the power of people getting marketing messages that are relevant," Mastria said.

Permission to be annoyed, please

Legitimate marketers face a tough credibility problem, according to research from spam filter company Cloudmark, one of dozens of companies that have sprung up in the past year offering desktop tools for managing junk e-mail. Cloudmark's SpamNet filter collects votes from users to classify e-mail as junk to be filtered out or a legitimate message to be passed through to the in-box. A preliminary study of results collected in the months since the product launched shows that recipients on permission-based lists frequently identify such e-mail as spam, Cloudmark CEO Karl Jacob said.

"The last bastion of spam protection is handling mailing lists," he said.

Jacob pointed to a recent promotion on online retail giant Amazon's opt-in mailing lists as an example of the perception gap between companies that run permission-based marketing programs and average consumers who receive e-mail under them. In an opt-in promotion on Sept. 12, seven out of 10 SpamNet participants who rated an e-mail titled "’Barbershop’ opens Sept. 13" voted to expunge the message as spam, according to the company's records. An Amazon representative said the study sample did not appear large enough to be conclusive. The company declined to state the number of customers on its permission-based roles, or disclose its turnover rate.

Cloudmark is conducting a deeper analysis of its results that it intends to publish in the next few weeks, Jacob said.

Cloudmark, which has signed up more than 100,000 SpamNet users, also plans to develop better mailing list management tools for future upgrades that let users set custom white lists and black lists to automatically accept or reject e-mail, respectively. In addition, the company plans to automate the process of having an e-mail address removed from a mailing list. "Unsubscribing," as the process is known, has proven too difficult for many consumers, Jacob said, leaving bad addresses on lists and undermining attempts to build permission-based marketing programs.

Pop-up protests

From the first quarter this year to the second quarter, the number of pop-up ads grew from about 3.9 billion to nearly 5 billion impressions, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which measures Internet traffic patterns. In response, hundreds of thousands of consumers have downloaded some kind of pop-up advertising filtering technology to battle increasing online interruptions. America Online recently responded to customer complaints by promising to slash the number of pop-ups served to its 34 million members. AOL rival EarthLink, meanwhile, began promoting pop-up blocking as a feature of its service.

"Pop-ups are a strong form of spam because they come at you from any angle, any site, and you have to stop what you're doing to close them," said Matina Fresenius, CEO of ad-filtering software maker Panicware.

Pop-ups are proliferating in other ways. All the major Web portals including AOL, Yahoo and MSN have warmed to alerts--pop-up notifications that grab consumers' attention for services such as e-mail or shopping deals even when they're busy in other applications. The features, billed as a useful service for subscribers, give the portals license to disturb at any time a visitor who is online or even reachable via mobile device. For example, Yahoo feeds Messenger subscribers pop-ups whenever a new e-mail arrives in their inbox by default. The notice, which also includes an advertisement, informs the mail subscriber on who has sent them a message--even if it is a spammer.

Companies such as X-10, notorious for its pop-up ad campaigns, can find a new way to get in front of audiences via this alert. In its defense, Yahoo said that people could turn off the feature at any point and the company works vigorously to fight spam through its company-engineered bulk-mail filter.

"We continually employ measures to protect from unsolicited email through our Spamguard technology but (spam) is an industry issue, and one we take seriously," said a Yahoo spokesperson.

Searching for spam

The spam label has long found ready use in application to search engines.

Since the Web commercialized in the mid-1990s and search became its guidepost, marketers have targeted the search indices with tricks that promise top ranking for Web pages, despite their relevance. For example, rogue marketers may stuff or "spam" metatags--the source code of a Web page--with keywords commonly queried by surfers, such as "sex" or "books." Because navigation tools can depend on metatags to determine the appropriateness of a page related to a search term, the tags can artificially land a site in top results.

In another example, search engine optimizers use a tactic called "cloaking," in which they create Web pages expressly to be indexed by the engine. This means that a marketer would deliver up a page to be indexed by Google, unlike the public-facing page, to enhance visibility in its search results. The net effect is a less handy search engine. Someone searching for the "National Football League," for example, could find instead an adult-related Web site in the top three listings if a marketer had its way.

While search engines such as Google and FAST's AlltheWeb are in constant battle with search engine optimizers to rid databases of spam, some industry executives say spammers are winning. Paul Gardi, senior vice president of search for AskJeeves, estimates that at least half of all Web pages crawled have no value and are likely created by spammers. The greater economic effect is that indices must store and crawl pages that are useless, as well as constantly tinker with a system to cut out junk marketers.

Spam may be best defined by its economic consequences, according to Wilson Sonsini's Kramer and ePrivacy Group's Everett-Church. But for Gardi, this kind of deception amply justifies the label.

"These are the same people who invade your e-mail box," he said. "Link spammers are trying to trick someone into going to a site in the hopes of them reading something or responding to it when they otherwise wouldn't go there. At the end of the day they've tricked the user who ends up having a bad experience."