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February 2003 Archives |
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PRIVA TO INTRODUCE FIRST STAGE OF PRIZMPRIZM is Priva's innovative e-commerce visitation analytics solution. Our software goes beyond visitation statistics, it focuses on tracking visitation to conversion. Conversion can mean purchase or just adding to a shopping cart, signing up for a newsletter subscription, requesting a catalog or downloading a PDF file. First up is PRIZM's PPC version, which focuses on measuring the marketing effectiveness of customer programs with pay-per-click programs like Overture and Google's AdWords. With PRIZM PPC, you can refine the keywords and programs you support, armed with the knowledge of which work best in terms of revenue and ROI. To request an online brochure, CLICK HERE. DANBURY MINT LAUNCHES ONLINE SERVICE CENTERPriva has produced and launched a new website for Danbury Mint. Our relationship with the Mint, a leading diversified producer of collectibles and original memorabilia, extends over five years beginning with the launch of the Danbury Mint Sports site. The Online Service Center will assist Danbury's over one million collectors to order online in response to the company's continuous offline advertising and catalogue programs. YAHOO! BUYS INKTOMI... WHAT! DOES! IT! MEAN!?Many people outside of the search engine optimization business don't know the Inktomi name. Why? Because Inktomi has always been a search engine that powered other search engines, behind the scenes. That, and it seems like every important search engine is dependent on Google now. The strange thing? Yahoo isn't making a big fuss about it either. Google still provides Yahoo with primary search results, and the fact that Yahoo bought Inktomi is barely highlighted on Inktomi's page. Things are going to get hairy this year. Here are three predictions for what will happen, and their fallouts:
Yahoo simply did not pay a quarter-billion dollars just to put Inktomi in the corner of a dusty closet. Fallout — Yahoo might take the #1 spot back. Yahoo envies Google's position right now. Everyone loves Google, everyone uses Google (either directly or through some partner), and Google gets lots of Ad Revenue. With the Inktomi purchase, Yahoo doesn't need Google anymore. Yahoo, with former Inktomi partners MSN and Overture, may take back the majority share of searches, once the Yahoo/Google partnership terminates.
Google has no Paid Inclusion feature. Yahoo has had one, but it's not efficient for submission of multiple URLs to their directory results, and there's still no way to get into search results besides the Google Free Inclusion (or natural indexing). Inktomi has the best — and it's now owned by Yahoo! Fallout — The Paid Inclusion Wars They're already beginning. Inktomi has a neat XML feed, where you can submit literally thousands of URLs in just minutes. Inktomi has a nice bed of resellers that perform value-added Paid Inclusion services. These services are wonderfully useful - Inktomi will tell you exactly what they've indexed on your site. Business will concentrate on this feature. It allows, in some cases, for a 24-hour refresh period of the content in the index. This is a wonderful idea for e-commerce sites. And Google knows it. They've introduced Froogle, which is rumored to be developing this XML-feed feature. Think it'll be free forever? Funny things happen when people have to pay for things. Prediction #3 — Google will become more portal-like. Google is quickly becoming a portal-like system. Right now you can read the news, shop, and use the search engine. The search engine automatically gets stock quotes and addresses, so that's taken care of. Personalization is all that is left, and you can bet it'll be there very soon. Google is drifting down the stream that seduced Yahoo several years ago. From primary search engine, to your primary portal to all that is the Internet. The poor man's AOL. Fallout — Technical users will find a new home. Teoma. First it was Yahoo! Then AltaVista. Then HotBot. Now Google. If Google adds the personalization features, technical users will go. And they'll go to Teoma, IMHO. Teoma combines a nice array of features and has a good relevancy record. And a clean interface, which is important to searchers who just want to search. And Teoma already has Paid Inclusion. :-] JAKE BAILLIE DOES BOSTONJake Baillie, Priva VP of Internetworking, has been invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies Conference 2003. The conference is to be held March 4 - 6 in Boston, Massachusetts. Jake will be one of the featured speakers. He plans to build on the successful presentation he made a couple of months ago in Dallas on the theme of optimizing dynamic websites. To learn more, CLICK HERE. If you attend, and also agree to talk about the NHL, he might even buy you a beer. WORM SACKS INTERNET ON SUPERBOWL WEEKENDSapphire didn't really damage any files, cause any data loss, or cause servers to explode. No one was "hacked". So what happened? Why could you access some sites, but not others on Saturday morning? The answer lies in what really happened: a large-scale denial-of-service (DOS) attack directed towards anything and anyone on the Internet. The worm inventors successfully brought down entire parts of the Internet without really bringing anything down. Nothing stopped working. What the worm did was generate a lot of traffic. There was simply too much Internet traffic generated for the current infrastructure to handle. Want an example? The IBS Network that runs NBC's 13 sites experienced 132,000 page view requests per minute. Every minute for 3 hours. Yikes! Most major providers specify new backbone connections (the Internet's major expressways) at three times their normal PEAK traffic levels. That means, they take the highest amount of traffic they've normally EVER had, and build a connection three times of that. To make an analogy, we know that Chicago can usually fill 12 lanes of traffic on its Dan Ryan expressway. If the city were to build a new expressway following current practices by Internet backbone providers, Chicago would build a 36 lane highway! Certainly enough to handle any amount of traffic. Except if the entire world decided to drive the Dan Ryan one Saturday morning. The worm generated up to twenty times of normal traffic. The Dan Ryan would have to be 240 lanes to handle that sort of traffic. Why did the worm happen? Simple — server administrators didn't patch their servers for a vulnerability that was discovered about a half year ago. Doh! What did it affect? Traffic was disrupted for about 14 hours on Saturday. Some people had no problems accessing some sites. Some sites were slow. Some sites were totally unavailable. Why? Because people get on the information superhighway at different points, and at many points were hugely congested entrance ramps. Security and law enforcement experts agree that it is difficult to catch an attacker like this, because they hide behind "zombie" computers...meaning the attacker takes control of a bank of computers that have high speed Internet access, such as a computer lab at a university. The attacker can then send a command from basically any computer to set the "zombies" into action. Many people ask "why can't we just block worms like this from happening?" It's not that simple. You can't close the Dan Ryan just because you think a car will explode and there will be a traffic jam. You can, however, proactively block a road at dangerous points. And network providers are starting to learn how to do this. Especially the Bank of America, who's 13,000 ATMs failed to dispense any cash Saturday morning. But, it has political consequences. As Alex Yuriev — a respected senior network engineer for a major provider — writes, the consequences of such proactive shutdowns would be something like this: Dear Customer, Road development took almost 70 years to solidify. The Internet still needs more time. In the meantime server administrators, do us all a favor and patch your potholes.
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