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The Keys to Success

Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether buying keywords is worthwhile. Within the search realm, advancements in the keyword and meta-tag arenas have allowed Web publishers to beef up content on sites and help users get what they're after.

Sentius Corp.'s RichLink (www.sentius.com) allows Web site publishers to dapple their pages with hyperlinked keywords. Users who click on the annotations get pop-up boxes with whatever information the publisher designates: a definition, a translation, a related article, or ad-sponsored material. The idea is to offer users a one-stop search experience. "Our firm belief about pop-ups is that when the novelty wears off, readers stop clicking on advertising," says Chris Verrill, RichLink's marketing director. "They have to get something worthwhile, with some editorial integrity."

InfoWorld magazine, for example, recently deployed RichLink to allow readers to easily dig deeper into its Web site. The links to words like "Windows" lead to related stories designated by InfoWorld's editors. Advertisers seemed intrigued by the possibility of readers hanging around the site longer; within two months of signing up for RichLink, InfoWorld had collected enough advertising to cover the investment. "It's been hugely successful, not only from the perspective of reader feedback, but also in terms of advertising," says Julie Ekstrom, InfoWorld's advertising director.

RichLink's translation technology has attracted companies like Reuters Health and the Tokyo-based newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The latter publication takes feeds from the New York Times and San Jose Mercury News, and uses RichLink to automatically annotate the copy with Japanese definitions of about half a million words.

As for the pay-for-results crew? Spammers and porn sites, among others, have given keywords and pop-ups a bad name, befuddling and angering users who have innocently tried to get information on, say, breast cancer. But the concept has begun to draw some of the big names in the search world. Ask Jeeves joined forces with 24/7 Website Results (www.websiteresults.com) in early 2002 to launch Index Express, the first pay-for-results product that focuses entirely on phrases instead of keywords. And Atomz (www.atomz.com) recently harnessed the power of its Atomz Search technology in a product called Promote (see our review, November 2002, p.45), which ties online search results to relevant promotions and ads.

Robert Woodhead, owner of SelfPromotion.com, a free guide to Internet marketing and a longtime observer of Web sales schemes, says keywords long ago lost their effectiveness. "There are so many sites that match on a particular word, the competition is too high," he says. Key phrases, Woodhead contends, are the only way to go—and even then, only on a couple of the biggest engines. "More specific phrases are cheaper and convert better into sales, but have much less traffic," he says. "So you have to balance things. People should generally start being very specific in their key phrases and generalize once they have a good handle on what works and what sort of return they can expect. As always, the trick is to spend less than the extra profit generated."

You've Got Integrated Mail

A number of recent products are noteworthy for their ability to spider your email just as a search engine crawls Web pages. One of the most interesting is Zoë (guest.evectors.it/zoe/), produced by Raphael Szwarc, is a collection of services that includes a local Web server, a text indexing engine, and a POP client and server. But it doesn't take over for your email client; instead, it tracks and contextualizes your inbound and outbound email and erects handy search and navigation mechanisms. Say you need to review correspondence with a customer named Joe Smith. Zoë extracts all such email, producing a page of hits that lists Contributors (the message senders), Attachments, and Links (such as the URL strings found in the messages). These context items are all hyperlinks to the individual pieces of mail.

In the end, any company seeking new search technology won't succeed unless it knows what their users are trying to find. "You have to ask: 'Does my content constitute good fuel for this particular engine?'" Forrester's Sonderegger says. "Finding the answer to that is where the real magic is."

Legal Questions On the Web, arguments continue to rage about the ethics of using a meta tag of someone else's business name. But is it legal? Federal courts have remained split on the question. In one case earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that former Playboy Playmate Terri Welles did not violate Playboy's trademark rights by using the terms "playboy" and "playmate" within the meta tags on her Web site. In another case, the court ruled that displaying thumbnail images of pictures found across the Web was fair use—but stated that an engine couldn't link directly to images or show them on their own, but must instead link to the page where they're displayed. Bruce Sunstein, who heads up the IP department for Boston-based Bromberg & Sunstein, says the courts have yet to really sift through the morass of related issues. "What usually happens is technology leads and the law follows," Sunstein says. "There are a series of issues that have been around for a while in cyberspace that are relatively fresh in legal arenas." Much of the confusion has swirled around the question of whether meta tags for one company can be embedded into the page of hits in a search for another company. "What if I type 'law firm Smith & Jones' into a search engine, and up pops an ad that says, 'Looking for a lawyer? Try Abel & Baker'?" Sunstein asks. "From what I can see, there are trends in all sorts of directions. "The spirit of free enterprise says that that was a paid ad that got triggered by a search request. But you can go over the line sometimes. What if I put Smith & Jones into the search engine and Abel & Baker has a bunch of meta tags connected to the other company's name that are not visible to the reader?" That, Sunstein contends, brings the parties into the thorny trademark arena. Trademark holders have the right to prevent others from using other names or trademarks that might confuse readers about which is which, he says. Some will argue that users will be confused if they type in one name and another pops up. "But others will say that it's in the reader's interest, because people using Smith & Jones may be interested in what Abel & Baker have to say," Sunstein says. "It also raises a legal issue called false designation of origin," he says. "In terms of origin, Abel & Baker have nothing to do with Smith & Jones, so you can argue that they don't belong there." —DH

David Howard, a New York City-based writer, has covered technology and the Internet for the past five years for publications including MBA Jungle, Smart Business, and Men's Journal.

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