Renegade Search

As of Friday DTC has offically become a Microsoft Advertising Accredited Professional Company. This means that our PPC team has successfully completed the requirements set forth by Microsoft by exhibiting our expertise in the MSN adCenter pay per click advertising platform - a platform that allows advertisers to reach the Bing and Yahoo! audience. While DTC has been effectively managing adCenter account since day one, we thought we should take the extra step to become officially certified.



You can view our adCenter company profile, and of course feel free to contact us if you have any questions about either starting a new adCenter campaign or managing an existing account.

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Yesterday, I was shocked to see a post on Search Engine Watch, a well-known and widely-read industry site, covering a new service called 'Local Paid Inclusion'. According to the article, LPI was some sort of a partnership between Bruce Clay, Inc (a long-running internet marketing and training agency), and multiple search engines and directories -- including Google, Bing and Yahoo. The post explained that the new service would allow companies to pay to show up in the local results section of a search engine results page.

At first glance, that might not sound unreasonable. After all, search engines do make nearly all of their money off of advertising, right. So it seems entirely possible that they might partner with a third-party agency to improve their local advertising solutions. But what really stuck out about this proposal was the suggestion that this wasn't advertising in the usual, search engine sense. Rather than placing their customers' sites in a clearly-marked 'paid advertisement' area on the site--which has been the MO of search engines since the dawn of online advertising--this new service would actually allow people to pay their way into the normal search engine results.

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On February 1st, 2011 Google revealed that they had conducted a sting operation against Microsoft’s Bing that confirmed their ongoing suspicion that the search engine competitor was copying their result listings. To provide a backdrop, here is a time line leading up to Google’s claim:

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Bing has begun to roll out a long list of improvements and new features across the board. Importantly, these features will not only be available on the flagship Bing.com product, but also on Bing Mobile Apps. As of this writing, it looks like some of these new improvements have started rolling out, with the remainder to come later this month.

Below is a short list of the major updates to come:

Facebook "Like" Annotations - You will now see search results that have been "liked" by your Facebook friends.

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