Re: Altavista

Isn't it the future of internet advertising? I mean its just like Juno's
and other companies, the only ads shown to customers are those that are
relevant to their needs as submitted. Like do a search for web promotion
and you are gonna get ads of various services etc.

It is highly unlikely that detailed logs are kept since Alta-vista gets overwhelming number of hits. The way I go around all these ads is that I
use Internet Fast Find by symantec and I love it, I purchased it after
evaluating for 3 days. Sorry for commercial ;)

I think it is a good idea, no wonder doubleclick.net is one of the
leaders in advertising. You are shown only the ads that will potentially
interest you, search for shopping and you are gonna get one of those ISN
ads etc. 

I think it is a good idea FWIW.

I wouldn't think that a company such as doubleclick.net will do you any
harm.

One of my job assignments is Internet research and I search for such
variety of topics that those robots have no use on the information
submitted.

On the other hand, if I find my site on Altavista and go to it, in my referer_log I will see the entire search query and that is a valuable
marketing information, you learn about how the customer found you etc.

Well, this list isn't marketing101@anywhere.com so I am afraid I won't
bother with more thorough explation :)

I am sorry if you consider this an OFFtopic message but I am just
answering the question. 

On Wed, 29 Jan 97 01:03:35 EST mjw@VNET.IBM.COM writes:
>From:    Mark Waddington
>Subject: Altavista
>
>> However, the doubleclick.net ads appear to bear no relationship to 
>the
>> keywords being searched...
>
>Interestingly, I've just noticed over the last couple of days that the 
>in-line
>ads are directly relevant to the search words I enter. I did a search 
>yesterday
>on "Quicken" and "security" and all the in-line ads I was shown 
>referred to
>security or penetration detection products.
>

Leonid S Knyshov writes:
 
[about targeted webvertising using stats gathered by tracking browsers]

 
> I think it is a good idea, no wonder doubleclick.net is one of the
> leaders in advertising. You are shown only the ads that will potentially
> interest you, search for shopping and you are gonna get one of those ISN
> ads etc. 
> 
> I think it is a good idea FWIW.
> 
> I wouldn't think that a company such as doubleclick.net will do you any
> harm.

Probably not.  But the practice still bothers me.  _I_ want to control
what information about me others can have.  I do not want the precedent
set that on the Net, what you do is trackable by every organization
who might care.  Sooner or later someone _would_ use that information to
hurt me.

That's why I wrote cookie jar, a program that lets the user have better
control over which 'cookies' if any they release to web servers, and
what other information their browser gives out.  See
http://www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar/ for details and code.


> >Interestingly, I've just noticed over the last couple of days that the 
> >in-line
> >ads are directly relevant to the search words I enter. I did a search 
> >yesterday
> >on "Quicken" and "security" and all the in-line ads I was shown 
> >referred to
> >security or penetration detection products.


This doesn't bother me as much (besides the fucking ads, which I
hate... maybe I'll make cookie jar smart enough to nuke them).
The reason is that the ads are selected based on what you typed in
to the search engine right then- there's no tracking involved like
with Doubleclick.



-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
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