News Summary for November 21st, 2006 by Nadeem Abji 1. "Click on Me Now or Visit Me Later". New York Times, Section C, page 4. Summary: ======== In a study conducted by DoubleClick, about 30% of people claim to click on banner ads at least sometimes. However, 61% of the non-clickers said they visited an advertiser's site later. This suggests that people don't like to navigate away from the page they are viewing even if they were interested in the advertisement. The problem with this is that if a site is being paid by the number of ad clicks, this represents a major portion of lost revenue. Some sites are paid for ad views but most people tend to ignore advertisements completely. Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research: ========================================== Question: Is the current method of paying strictly by views or clicks accurate? Paying by the click or view is not an accurate model of the effectiveness of an advertisement. A new measurement is needed that properly captures the awareness generated by an advertisement. There is a need for the ability to track how many unique views there were along with unique clicks. Furthermore, the new model would need to address the issue of click fraud indicating a need for a user-centric identity mechanism on the Internet. Several projects are currently on-going in this area. 2. "For Those in Paris About to Park, A Service That Tells Them Where". New York Times, Section C, page 12. Summary: ======== A new service is being launched to help drivers in Paris find parking garages with vacant spots through their cellular phones or GPS systems. It was said that 20 to 25% of vehicles at certain times of the day are in search of a parking space. The service thus has the potential to improve traffic flow in the city. Participating parking garages are linked to a central server and update the server with parking information which is then sent to the service providers. A similar project in the United States allows consumers to request or make offers for private parking spaces. Ideas for Net Research: ======================= Wireless Service Providers - With the popularity of GPS and cellular devices, service providers are creating a virtual marketplace where buyers and sellers can come together. One idea would be to create a one-stop virtual marketplace for all types of businesses rather than having an individual service for each type of business. Customers can search based on criteria and make offers and then be connected with businesses providing the good or service close to them in proximity. 3. "176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo". New York Times, Section C, page 1. Summary: ======== 176 daily newspapers in the US represented by seven newspaper chains have declared a partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology. The deal involves the newspapers posting their classified ads on Yahoo which is a lucrative business. The newspapers would have use of Yahoo's search technology on their individual websites. The long term goal, however, is to have the newspaper content available online and have it indexed for fast searching on Yahoo. Newspapers have been losing readers and ad revenue to the Internet and deals like this attempt to counteract the trend. For Yahoo, they attempt to align themselves with as many brands as possible in order to remain the most popular online platform. Ideas for Net Research: ======================= It is quite conceivable that in the near future all local and national newspapers will be online and their articles available for searching. There is, therefore, a need to find an optimal way to tag, index and store these articles in order to allow search engines to efficiently search news archives.