Microsoft: Silicon Valley Team Building Stealth Search Engine

Microsoft has gathered a team of twenty or more “rock star” developers who’ve been tasked at building their next generation search engine, a source has told us. The team, which supposedly came together recently, is based at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Mountain View.

We have few details on their approach to the product, other than hearing that it is definitely a “horizontal” engine (so, it’s not limited to a specific vertical like images), and is "very cool."

Microsoft moved Sanaz Ahari down to Silicon Valley to lead the project. Ahari was previously on the Live.com team, and was reportedly the youngest lead product manager in Microsoft history at 23. She was part of the core team that developed the start.com product, which was later renamed live.com

Your Click Charges to be Based on Quality of Traffic

Yahoo! Search Marketing is rolling out a new feature that we think will help enhance the quality, potentially reduce the cost and increase the value of traffic to you, our advertisers. It’s called quality-based pricing, and it measures the quality of traffic coming from our distribution partners—that is, the web publishers large and small that display your ads.

Previously, you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our distribution network. Now, with quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you otherwise would pay, depending on the overall quality of the traffic provided by our distribution partners. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

“Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability of our partners’ sites to deliver more interested, valuable customers to you.

What do you need to do? Nothing that you aren’t already doing now. With quality-based pricing, the system does all the work. Your click charges may be discounted based on the quality of traffic you receive. Please note that some may experience a noticeable decrease in overall cost-per-click, while others may experience only a small decrease in spend.

For more info, please visit: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/faqs/qbp/qbp_faqs.html