Slashdot Mirror
An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little
The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.
As a long-time Google customers, I can tell you I'd love to see a viable AdWords competitor. Specifically, the AdWords "affiliate" program sucks: Google won't tell you which sites you are advertised on and certainly doesn't give you the ability to say "I really don't want my product/service advertised on site X, Y or Z". Also, Google's trademark name policies are really bizarre: sometimes you can protect your own name, sometimes you can't. Other times someone will convince Google that a phrase widely used in the industry is a "trademark" and lock out all other industry competitors.
Unfortunately, the ads are going to continue to be sold by the search engines themselves for as far out as I can see, so it's tough to say if these guys will get any of my business.