The AMP will be an open platform available to anyone integrated into a single interface with a suite of tools valuable to marketers allowing geographic, demographic and interest based targeting across publishing networks.

The new system has been previewed by members of it’s newspaper consortium which have showed a delightful and optimistic response.

Search engines are the cornerstones of the internet. Unlike tv channels, newspapers or radio stations which are limited in number, new websites come up daily on the web in massive numbers. People rely heavily on search engines to find websites.

Search engines which are pulling a particular site and showing it to users which are typing in queries into their address bar, will also want to make sure that they are pulling out relevant urls from their index to show to their users. Search engines find themselves competing amongst other search engines and need to maintain quality to prevent its users from switching to another search engine.

This forms a two way relationship between site administrator and search engine. The site administrator spends his time to read and follow the guidelines of his favorite search engine or the one(s) which he thinks will be most beneficial and the search engine(s) show his site to its users on relevant searches.

This shows long term planning from the administrator’s point of view. He intends to keep the site online for a long period and respects the well being of entities around him.

Sites which deliberately violate the guidelines set forth by search engines, may end up losing trust within them. This could result in manual action against a site and could possibly put the owner of the site on watch for other or further sites which he owns.

Most search engines will have similar guidelines. For the ones which contradict others, trying to find a least common denominator could be an option.

Yahoo’s gross profit for the period ending Dec-31-2007 is up almost $1 billion from the period ending Dec-31-2005. However yearly income which can be applied to common shares has dropped from $1.896 billion in 2005 to $660M in 2007.

From Yahoo’s perspective, its spending more on research & development and has higher administrative costs.

A possible interpretation could mean that Yahoo! is stable and expects higher profits in the near future from what it has invested into research and development in the previous years.

One of the hurdles Yahoo! needs to overcome is to convince this to stockholders which may be looking forward to cashing in on the unexpected opportunity Microsoft is trying to provide to them.

Mars is an open source, open innovation planet, a leading economy with $36 trillion worth of dirt. The 100 year plan includes

• Choosing a site
• Low Earth Orbit
• Virgle Base 1
• Flying to Mars
• Virgle City

Here’s a video to enjoy.

For those looking for the adventure of their life, you can learn more and sign up for the project right here http://www.google.com/virgle/pioneer.html

Happy Apr-01-2008

It’s presentation states that display advertising is larger then search and Yahoo! is positioned to extend its leadership in display. They project the display advertising market to reach $42 billion out of a total online advertising market of $78 billion by the year 2010. Factors of anticipated growth for search were the overall growth of search volume itself, while for display, Yahoo! plans to implement a new ad platform.

A breakdown of it’s projected revenue growth is an increase in $1.4 billion in search advertising, $1.9 billion in display / video and $0.4 billion from other avenues to give a final figure of $8.8 billion in yearly revenue by the year 2010.

In it’s conclusion, the presentation mentioned how Microsoft’s proposal undervalued Yahoo! and went on to highlight strategic value and how Microsoft would benefit by acquiring Yahoo!. The following points were mentioned.

• Microsoft if acquired Yahoo!, would move from sub-scale position to a strong position in search and display advertising.
• Yahoo! which has stakes in the Asian market is an important growth source for Microsoft.
• Microsoft which lost $700M online in 2007 would move to significant profitability.
• Some recent internet transactions have exceeded 35x forward (EBITDA) while Microsoft’s proposal is only 9x Yahoo!’s projected operating cash flow of 2009.

Until recently, no official name was made public, it went by it’s code name Gatineau before Microsoft revealed Microsoft Adcenter Analytics to be it’s final end product name.

Microsoft Adcenter is saying that the analytics program will come out of beta very soon. The $5.00 registration fee which they had to sign up for their Adcenter program is also gone.

I guess in 2003 or 2004, something in that era a bunch of webmasters decided to bomb Google with some humorous ammunition. They started linking to George Bush’s bio page on WhiteHouse.gov using the anchor text ‘miserable failure’.

In a matter of time, when you searched for miserable failure, Google started showing George Bush’s bio page which floated to the number #1 result for the term miserable failure.

Google said that it’s not going to hand tamper with results their search engine is showing, but to the best of my knowledge diffused the bomb with software patches.

Moral of the story is that anchor text plays a role in how search engines interpret websites. Links with descriptive anchor texts are more effective then links with just plain click here anchors.

Search engines may also validate anchor text with your actual site data.

This is my first blog which I’m going to be actually writing on and maintain. I was feeling kind of left out cause I never really had a blog where people could read my stuff and ramblings.

Btw, my name is Adnan Faridi from Gaithersburg, Maryland and originally from Karachi, Pakistan. Currently in my hometown for a little while before I return back. I have two little daughters. I’m going to have a formal intro on myself in the ‘About Me’ area, with some pics as well.

We’re going to be discussing topics related to search, search marketing, internet marketing, search engine optimization, that kind of stuff so everybody has sort of a general idea of what to expect.

Ok, I’ve got quite a bit to learn on how this whole blogging routine. Thank god wordpress doesn’t require a rocket scientist.