zlert – this search engine could save your life

July 16th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Reviews | No Comments »

Here is an excerpt from my local weekly paper The Hook:

“Boston Deputy Fire Chief Jay Fleming has become a pariah to people who tout, sell, or even give away ionization detectors, the most common type (of smoke detector).  He believes they’re nearly useless, and our test showed why.”

So I searched for them on zlert, the search engine for Amazon product alerts:

There may be nothing at all wrong with this model, but with zlert you can set up an alert just in case.

Check out their video here:

Hotel Search Engine VibeAgent Re-Launches

July 16th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Updates, Verticals | No Comments »

VibeAgent is a hotel search engine.

We help you decide where to stay for your next trip, and where you can book it for the best available price.

When you do a hotel search on VibeAgent, we go out and compare pricing and availability in real time from over 20 different travel sites, including online travel agencies, consolidators, and hotel sites. The rates and availability displayed on VibeAgent.com are exactly what you’d find searching each individual site.

After we search all these sites, we sort the information into a simple, easy to use format so you can quickly find the perfect hotel for your needs. Our price, location and category filters are the best around, and help you instantly narrow down your search results to only display hotels that meet your specific criteria.

When you’ve found the perfect hotel, we show you where you can book your room at the best available rate and then take you directly to that site’s check out page to complete your transaction. Voila! You just saved time and money by searching over 20 travel sites all at once to find the perfect hotel at the best available price!

Note: The company is based in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. (as is AltSearchEngines!)

Behind the Scenes at HP – the Merchant Center

July 16th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in CEO Views, Verticals | No Comments »


by CEO Michael Brown


In this “behind the scenes” post, I thought I would give you a look behind the scenes of HealthPricer’s merchant network. As a quick background, HealthPricer represents trusted merchants offering prescription and OTC drugs, contact lenses, supplements and beauty products. Below are some of the merchants represented:

Selection of merchants represented by HealthPricer

Our network of merchants gain exposure to highly targeted consumers – currently hundreds of thousands every month that visit HealthPricer and our syndicated service, MarketPlace, available at the following leading online health sites:

QualityHealth.com with 3 million unique visitors per month
HealthCentral.com with 7 million unique visitors per month
Healthline.com with 4.8 million unique visitors per month
RightHealth.com with 9.9 million unique visitors per month
everydayHealth.com with 5.6 million unique visitors per month

HealthPricer’s merchant program is based on a Cost Per Action (CPA) transaction model. Basically, HealthPricer is paid a commission for orders generated through HealthPricer and MarketPlace. We prefer this model as it encourages merchants to display their entire inventories of products, rather than just popular products in a Pay Per Click (PPC) model.

As part of this process, we provide an end-to-end tracking process – a short snippet code and a 90-day cookie to capture any visitors that return to buy products at a later time.

Merchants in the HealthPricer merchant network can track the progress of their conversions through a secure web-based interface into HealthPricer’s reporting system.

HealthPricer Merchant Center Homepage

The HealthPricer Merchant Center allows each individual merchant to monitor overall performance, product referrals and HealthPricer top product referrals. In the below screen shots we are using an online pharmacy merchant as an example.

HealthPricer Merchant Center Performance Report

The merchant center provides real-time referral and order tracking. Each merchant has access to their own unique referrals, orders, conversion rates, total order values as well as those of the department leader.

HealthPricer Merchant Center Product Referral Report

The product referral page provides detailed conversions based on individual products the merchant offers.

HealthPricer Merchant Center Top Products

The top product referrals provide merchants an insight to the overall products that sell the best for a specific time period – this gives them insight that can help them adjust offerings to raise their own conversions.

HealthPricer Merchant Center Resource Page

And finally, the HealthPricer Merchant Center provides a resource page of information pertinent to each department partner.

Mobile Search: Is Off-Portal Where the Action Is?

July 16th, 2008 by Peggy Salz
Posted in Guest Authors, News, Verticals | No Comments »


With Peggy Salz
Mobile Search Expert

Mobile Search Panel Recap: Clicks Are Good But Commerce Is Better; Is Off-Portal Where the Action Is?

As I said in the post below, today’s tie-up between MCN and Nokia also provides me a perfect opportunity to summarize the highlights from the mobile search and advertising session (Overcoming The Barriers To Delivering A Successful Mobile Search Advertising Ecosystem) moderated by Oguz Oktay from ARGELA-USA Inc., which brought me together with MCN CEO Marc Bookman and Juhani Kivikangas, TeliaSonera VP Content, New Businesses, Business Area Mobility Services. The panel was part of Mobile Advertising 2008, organized by IIR Ltd. and our own James Cameron.

The discussion centered on the mobile advertising ecosystem and the role of branded search providers in the scheme of things. We started off with the operator perspective from Juhani, who walked us through his strategy and the company’s clever move to encourage mobile search and surfing by offering users improved navigation and streamlined access to Internet sites via a mobile search toolbar. The approach, which takes its inspiration from the PC browser experience, offers users a long list of features and functionality including bookmarks, zooming capability, browsing history and a dedicated search box.

By way of background TeliaSonera booted out Microsoft (MotionBridge) to relaunch its portal with white-label search and advertising provider JumpTap. JumpTap is the exclusive partner for all advertising and paid search ads served on the portal.

In Juhani’s view, mobile operators must create business ecosystems that allow them to deliver users results and content from the Internet as well as content from their own portals and partners.

Since the end-game in mobile search is about delighting the customer with a great search experience, mobile operators should choose their options wisely. “Branded search players are not only [operator] competitors; they can also be partners.” The trick is to negotiate these relationships from a position of strength and maintain control over the search results and the traffic.

The mobile search functionality offered by TeliaSonera’s SurfOpen service – provided and hosted by JumpTap – presents search results organized in a range of categories and gives the operator the final say.

The operator-branded search results page combines results from TeliaSonera mobile content partners (divided into individual content categories such as ringtones, video, etc..); results from the mobile Web index (provided through crawling); global Internet index results (provided through crawling and an third-party API to Ask.com); local results (from the Web and provided through a third-party API, where available); and white pages/yellow pages results (provided through integration with third-parties, where possible).

Read the entire post on Peggy’s blog MSearchGroove HERE.