Search Vortal's MySpace Agreement to Pay MySpace Users For Searches
!!!There's no actual agreement between MySpace and Search Vortals, says MySpace!!!

The newly launched "Search Vortals" offering enables site owners to monetize searches from their sites. The term "vortal" is an unfortunate conflation of vertical and portal; despite the name I suspect we will be hearing a great deal about the company in the days to come as they conflate MySpace users (and web publishers at large) with the possibility for earning a little beer money.

I spoke recently with 29 year old Daniel Kay, who heads up the Search Vortal project, which is an offshoot of the online marketing company Mainstream Advertising.

My main takeaway from our conversation was that Search Vortals has an agreement with MySpace has a non-agreement service with which MySpace users could treat their own personal profile pages as "vortals" and enable visitors to those pages to search. If these searchers click on any of the ads (and revenues come to more than $50 in a month) the profile owner gets paid.

MySpace says that Honig's statement is inaccurate: In further statement, Steve Honig, SV's PR guy, said "there is an agreement, but we cannot disclose the terms or details." MySpace says: "MySpace.com has never entered into any agreement with this company."

Here is the MySpace page Kay mentioned during our conversation.

This points towards a spammer army churning mesothelioma profile pages in pursuit of Search Vortal revenue, but clearly, given that there's an agreement of undisclosed terms with MySpace, this wasn't seen as a problem. been no agreement according to MySpace, this potential threat could spam the living hell out of MySpace using Search Vortals.

From a search engine analyst perspective I wasn't impressed with Search Vortals as I understood it from our conversation, or from my brief fiddlings with it on their demo page.

It has a "social search" function by which users can vote on the relevance of a given site within the SERPs which I found disorienting because it caused the page to reload. Also I was not "rewarded" by any indication that there had been a change made.

The results are a mashup of crawled data, the specific site's pages and backfill from Yahoo, AltaVista (isn't that Yahoo too?) and Google. They "auto rake and optimize" so that if I'm on a chocolate site and I search for books then SERPs appear with books about chocolate.

The search vortal algo was built initially by a team of 7 guys (in the early phase of the vortal push).

The motivation behind the Mainstream Advertising decision to develop a search engine lies in this statement by Daniel Kay: "it's easy to manipulate Google, Yahoo and MSN's results..." I can imagine how this brash assertion formed given the power of links in rank and the fact that Mainstream Advertising has more than 4 million domains in their portfolio (I should say 4 million VORTALS in their portfolio).

Clearly Mainstream Advertising saw the value in syndicating their 10,000 advertisers' paid search ads across the web - and as an ad network they serve more than 5 billion paid search results a month.

What I see happening is an early widespread adoption by online entrepreneurs and MySpace users. If it works we'll see companies like Eurekster and Rollyo adding a payout to those who run put their search boxes on their sites (if they can get the ad network behind them). This could possibly be a Google or Yahoo too (and would enable folks to monetize their meta-web portals).

Ultimately I think it will be user interface and relevance issues that will relegate Search Vortals to a second-tier on-site search API position though their high payouts will keep them popular with publishers. In short, the company itself will kick ass monetarily but is not likely to advance search or relevance theory very much (this opinion based tenuously on my single conversation with Kay. I'm open to having my opinion changed).

also see Search Company Introduces Vortals to Publishers
And see too: MySpace: "We Have No Agreement with Search Vortals"
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |