From: "John Beamish" 

I'm not sure why this qualifies as news but it's on Reuters and the WSJ. I
suppose that, for some, the cross-linking between Hotmail and Live Search
(through a cookie? an IP address?) is new but for many others it's
yesterday's news.  Still, I thought I'd post it.


Here's a comment from one site:

http://searchengineland.com/061226-090229.php
How Microsoft's Behavioral Targeting Works

Microsoft Ad Push Is All About You at the Wall Street Journal has a nice
overview of how Microsoft's behavioral targeting ad software works, nothing
ground breaking, but a nice overview. I'll quote a piece of the article for
you:

Here's how it works: If someone types in "compare car prices" on
Live Search, Microsoft's computers note that the person is probably
considering buying a vehicle. The computers then check with the list of
Hotmail accounts to see if they have any information on the person. If they
do, and an auto maker has paid Microsoft to target this type of person, the
computer will automatically send a car ad when she next looks at a
Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should see more ads that are of
interest to them. "We know what Web sites they have visited and what
key words they used," says Mr. Dobson. "We can deduce what their
interests are." Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral
targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76%.

The rest of the article discusses the competitive landscape.



And here's the piece on Reuters.

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2
006-12-26T110332Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-281442-1.xml

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. is making a global push to sell
targeted online advertisements using data gathered from users of its
Hotmail email service, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on
Tuesday.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, is aiming to grab a bigger
slice of the online advertising market for its msn.com news page and other
Microsoft-owned sites. It currently lags behind Google and Yahoo.

The company has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of
its free Hotmail email service with information gained from monitoring
their searches, the paper said.

For advertisers, combining these two sets of information could allow them
to better target the ads they send to people's computers, and avoid wasting
people's time with irrelevant ads, the paper cited Chris Dobson,
Microsoft's global head of advertising sales, as saying.

Microsoft is using the information to sell ad space on Microsoft Web pages,
including msn.com and Hotmail, the paper said.

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