Welcome to APT, an online platform from Yahoo! that will make buying and selling digital ads easier. APT will make cross-selling easier for businesses, publishers, networks and agencies. APT from Yahoo will give you the ability to find the right audience at the right place, at the right time. According to Yahoo, “APT will be a “transform development for the advertising and publishing worlds” by allowing advertisers to shift its focuses from properties to audiences.” It has been mentioned that the business of selling digital ads exceedingly time severe and complicated. This new platform will aim to make the process of selecting and targeting display ads fast and easy.

Currently newspaper agencies are hurting in the online ad business and will try anything to grow their online revenues. So Yahoo has decided to release APT starting with the first phase of the platform by opening it up to a couple of newspaper agencies like San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst News. This system will allow papers to offer their display ads which will target certain demographics and bundle those ads together with similarity targeted ads from Yahoo. “This system has already started to increase the revenues of MediaNews on remnant inventory while cutting process time by half,” according to Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews. Yahoo plans to roll out APT to other businesses such as cosmetic dentist, personal injury lawyers and plastic surgeons that participate in PPC. APT also will target agencies, publishers, networks and all other interested parties in the upcoming year of 2009.

In my opinion the companies that will profit using APT is users, partners and developers and advertisers and agencies. It will benefit the users by allowing them to be drawn to more relevant online experiences which users will see more targeted and more engaging ads. Partners and developers will benefit in ways that will bring their technologies, solutions and innovations to a wider variety of the marketplace. Advertisers and agencies will benefit also by reaching a large scale of audiences which will harness detailed insights on those users, driving better performance as they simplify media buying.

To find more information on APT you can visit apt.yahoo.com

Google has a feature in it’s Webmaster Tools called Google Enhanced Image Search. When you are logged into Webmaster Central, you can access this feature by clicking Tools, then Enhanced Image Search in the dropdown menu. Once you are there, Google will ask you if you would like to turn this feature on. If you would like your site to participate, then you click the check box and click the “OK” button. This tool is used to help Google label images on the web for their SERPs.

Google Enhanced Image Search Home Page

It is kind of like a game you can play. How it works is that you go to the Google Image Labeler page and click the “Start Labeling” button. You will automatically be paired up with a partner. You and your partner have two minutes to give as many labels as you can to the same set of images. You will earn points once you match your partners label. The amount of points you receive depends on how specific your label is. You will be given another image once you and your partner match labels. You have the option to pass on an image if you cannot come up with a label. Once time has elapsed, you will get to see all the images you and your partner labeled as well as what labels your partner listed. You can also see what websites the images came from and the total number of points you and your partner earned.

Playing this game is easy and sounds like it will help with the image search results. But this feature is not for everyone and there are some negatives. You have no idea who is suggesting labels for your images. These people may not be experts on your products and could completely mislabel your products. Your competition may be labeling and they could corrupt your images. If you are a cosmetic dentist and have after images of your patients’ beautiful smiles, you don’t want to take the chance that someone may label your images as “gross.”

There are no exact locations available unless you know exactly where the image came from. A nice photograph of a beach with palm trees and a gorgeous sunset could be anywhere. Your image will not be labeled with Hawaii, Cocoa Beach in Florida, or the Virgin Islands. It will most likely be labeled with beach, blue, sunset, palm tree, beautiful, etc.

Google Image Search Car Image

There are keywords that are off-limits for some images. You have a column for your labels and then another for the labels that you cannot suggest. My partner and I had an image of a car on a road, but there were several words that we could not use like car, sky, sun, sunset, and VW. I suggested ad, clouds, and white. We ended up matching on white, which doesn’t seem like a very good label.

Google might be wanting to find labels for images that are not obvious. So, they put in the off-limits section, but do you really want to search for white and see a car?

You can misspell words. Who is to say that if you and your partner both misspell the same word, that you won’t match on it. Then your image will be labeled with a useless misspelling.

Ear Piercing Diagram From Google Image Labeler

You may come across images that you have no idea what they are. Images of electronics are all over the web and you may come across one while labeling. You may have no clue what it is. Many times, my matches with my partner were colors. I did the Google Image Labeler game several times and most of those matches were color.

On one image of an ear that had piercings, we couldn’t use the words ear, diagram, or piercing. I didn’t know what else to try other than illustration, metal, and gray. My partner suggested gray too and that was 130 points.

A Lasik surgeon’s site might have diagrams of eyes explaining the process of Lasik and PRK. Someone labeling images might put down eye, eyeball, lens, blue, or light instead of Lasik or PRK. How are we supposed to know what the image is about without seeing it in the context of which it is used?

Your images may not show up better on the SERPs if you enable Google Enhanced Image Search. If you have specific products or images you do not want mislabeled, then don’t enable this feature. Your best bet is to optimize the images the best you can and rely on the robots to do their job. If you have products that are obvious to label, then this tool may be a great option for you. Right now, this is a hit or miss and should be used only on sites that you are confident will not be hurt by it.