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I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

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Just like Yahoo started sometime back, Google is in co-operation with AVG scanning their search results for malware sites.

And while this is good in concept, I found the scan to take way too long, that I don’t think people will generally wait to see the result. An option to turn that off was not spotted. This could be troublesome for people with slow connection. Luckily, Google is not mad at my blog, but they better be careful. They don’t wanna make Yahoo’s mistake, or some say trick ;).

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Google and Yahoo! have been undergoing a testing period for the efficiency of delivering Google Ads alongside Yahoo search results. This is to measure how the ad click-throughs are compared to Yahoo’s own ads. Yahoo themselves estimate that Google Ads bring 60-70% more revenue than Yahoo. This is because of ad relevancy for one, and two I’m sure from the large collection of advertisers Google has. The more options you have, the more possible it is to deliver better results. Also, the user won’t get bored from the same results all the time. And when it comes to global market, say the Arabic region for example, or any other non-English site, it’s pretty difficult to get any geo-targeted ads. I don’t see any Arabic ads at Yahoo or any other ad network, while Google is getting more and more every day.

The test was to show Google ads at 3% of Yahoo search results inside the US for two weeks only. How did it go? Both parties have spoken general good deal of it so far. The Justice Department have been officially informed about the ongoing tests, and questions are rising right now about whether a deal between the two would give Google a monopoly over the internet ad market. Frankly, I would love for my Google Ads to show on Yahoo results for two reasons. One, Google is the best advertising program I’ve tried from many others, and gives very strong ad control and tracking. Two, I don’t want to split my money and time following multiple ad programs. Still however, for a multi-billion dollar business that large, I believe Google are over looking certain areas and need to improve on them:

• Ad Filtering: Filter unwanted ads on my site. Sex & gambling mainly. Google does a brilliant job catching fraud ads, ads that do not reflect the site content, heck they even ban certain Arabic words if they are about medical terms without valid permit. I’ve had one keyword disabled “عقار” which means both real-estate and medicine. It was banned because it’s a medical term and I can’t promote medical stuff without any proof of permit, even if I really meant real estate. So their filtering is strong when they want to, yet their Google AdSense competitive ad filtering is pretty lousy. I filter a certain site and after 12 hours I can still see the ads showing up on my site. This could be really embarrassing and bad for a business. I also don’t get any chance to disallow gambling and sex sites, which I believe should be a normal easy to implement option. Google already offers to filter offensive content in it’s search, so an option to disallow those sites from advertising on mine should be pretty simple.
• Customer Support: How easy is it to contact Google for support? And how long does it take for them to reply. Not what you hope for from a leading company. Google support has always been disappointing to me.
• Wire-Transfer: For AdSense, most countries are still not supported for money transfer. Many smaller sites are ahead of Google and transfer to any place in the world. Google is only slowly expanding, and yet promoting the green environment thing.
• Money Split: For some reason Google just don’t wish to tell you how much your share is from the click. Many other sites do. The ad is on my site and we are sharing the revenue. Any business would usually include share percentage. Google always gives vague unclear answers about the subject. If it’s bad, then you’re doing EVIL. If it’s good, then say it. One report was published before by New York Times based on announced 2006 Google financial reports estimating 78.5% of the AdSense clicks going to the publishers. Such a big number makes you wonder why wouldn’t Google reveal it. One reason I can think of is maybe they don’t want competitors to know the percentage and start a percentage share war.

All in all, Google remains a very strong source for advertising and revenue that I would like to see expand further. A bit more attention is required hoewever for customer needs.

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This tale of this day could really be told for decades to come. It could be a day that will change the web dramatically, with Yahoo Board of Directors setting today on one table to discuss and decide on the Microsoft $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. Such an acquisition I believe has never happened before in the web. One of top 3 sites acquiring the other. Shall Yahoo decline the offer, Google would be happy to offer all the help their competitors need to get back on their foot, starting with powering their Search (again), and their Search Marketing expectedly.

Google hasn’t been looking at this only however, rumors are spreading about acquisitions of two social-networking sites, namely Bebo and Plaxo. Meanwhile, Ask.com keeps their steady silent enhancement with their Big News release, which is really appealing, and is aided with some video, picture, and Digged news.

UPDATE: Yahoo! says we are worth at least $56.4 billion ($40/share) if Microsoft is interested. While Yahoo! doubts Microsoft would bow to such claim, the door is still open for Microsoft, and this time with a certain target. I don’t think this is the end of it, but I believe meanwhile Google are gonna boast things with their rival in a joint venture, just to show Yahoo! how good it will taste.

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This is literally what Microsoft did after more than a decade of failure to catch up with the quickly evolving web world. They are making the biggest bid in the technical world ever to acquire Google’s rival, Yahoo!. Shall such a deal go on, Microsoft would finally be #1 in the WWW customer base, and Ballmer would finally see his dream come true. Beat Google that is! I think they must have thought of this after their protest on Google acquiring DoubleClick failed. This must have been a strong hit and they wanted to strike back in any way they could. Major acquisitions also have been the latest fashion. BEA and MySQL both acquired last month, so why not Yahoo! this month? After all, they have been lacking for the past few years.

But is it a wise thing to acquire a deteriorating company instead of emerging one? In the technology world, it’s about what smart people you hire, and looking at this story, companies like Google and Facebook seem to be getting all the attention of fresh talents, while Microsoft is not anymore the dream of programmers, and Yahoo is not even close to Google. Merges of falling down companies could go real bad. Look at AMD & ATI merge and how terrible it turned out to be, and they are still suffering from it. Such major acquisitions could be really harmful not only to the end user, but to the acquiring company as well.

Either ways, Google obviously is not happy about the attempted acquisition, and is fighting it from both ends. Publicly, they went with the predicted monopoly protest statements, describing how the take over would seriously hurt the global market fair competition, and without any doubt, they are absolutely right there. Especially when the acquisition is coming from Microsoft. From the shadows however, instead of making their own bids as it would contradict their monopoly protest, news have surfaced about Google’s Eric Schmidt calling Yahoo’s Chief to co-operate in backing off Microsoft offer, probably by reaching partnership agreement, something which could be appealing to Yahoo!. Google have also been making contacts with other companies, like Time Warner, looking for possible Microsoft rival bidders. Alas, none seems interested in a lost battle against a company as large as Microsoft.

I personally have been feeling real bad about competitor acquisitions, such as Oracle and BEA. It really cuts down the choices and give the company control over pricing and portability. Yahoo!’s fall to Microsoft would be even more devastating and harmful to much larger segment. And the thing that worries me the most is Yahoo! logically saying that they will “pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”. That said, you can only imagine how $44.6 billion looks compared to annual $4.13 billion in profits.

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Once upon a time there was a lovely PDF reader called Adobe. It was used every where to read PDF documents. It loaded fast, and was wonderfully doing everything it was supposed to do for years. But then the reader felt there is more he can do to this world than just open,read, and close. He felt as if people are just ignoring him, and he should be credited more for what he does. So then every time a user opened him he would suggest new updates. People trusted him at the beginning, however new updates next time took him more time to start. Still, he kept asking for more and more updates. People were starting to get annoyed, bu they still trusted him. Eventually, it became too much for him that it takes him tens of seconds, sometimes minutes to launch and open one single document. All that time was not needed. All people wanted was to read the document. Nothing more. People lost faith in Adobe reader, and it became a symbol for slow launch time.

People complained and asked for adjustments. But the old Adobe reader’s heart now became polluted with greediness and desire for more and more. The future looks bright in Adobe’s naive brain. He wants now to give people ads aside their documents. Ads related to their document. Every time they open it, new dynamic ads are displayed. Dynamic means more load time, and ofcourse more updates to get these ads running. There was born a need, and there the need was filled. Foxit Reader to the rescue. Out of no where the young hero came. He was light, fast, and more importantly, polite. No unneeded updates, or ads on the page. I took my virtual friend’s advise and used it, and lived happily ever after.

Story Lesson:  Background processes are just the fine when they remain background.

Ofcourse Adobe is not really background, but something supposed to be quick and light. No need for all that fuss.

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Even though I mostly use Gmail embedded Google Talk most often as it’s faster, more transient, and I have more friends on Gmail, Yahoo embedded mail chat is also cool if you are into serious chat and want some friendly interface. Today logging into my Yahoo Mail account I could see several changes coming:

1. Yahoo Chat with Live users: This is both good and bad. Good as a technical milestone, good that I no longer have any reason to open Live messenger. Bad because they keep pushing away from the standard XMPP protocol, and because now more people can catch me online unaware :).

2. Useful information identification: Basically a copy of Google Address verification and a map link to it.

3. New Fresh nicer interface

Still though, no matter how much Yahoo Mail improves, every time I login I just look at this guy and wonder

Who the hell came up with this figure? Couldn’t they find anything more live, more appealing, more non-idiot look. He is just ugly square T-Shirt guy. Company as big and famous as Yahoo should be able to come up with more catchy character, and if they can’t, then don’t come up with one at all! I really miss Microsoft good old clippy now.

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