Marchex, MDNH, domain names, and CyberBandits

This is an old post that was private that I decided to make public:

I was doing some domain speculating this weekend & kept running across Marchex sites everywhere. Then I read an article over at dnjournal that talks about Marchex and their $164M investment into direct navigation (domains). So I figured I’d get my hands dirty and see what they really had behind all those numbers. It kind of shocked me…

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First off, a big congratulations to Brad & Justin! They are both great representatives for the search industry whom I’ve come to know through various conferences and parties and people over the past few years.

The big news is that LocalLaunch was acquired by RHDonnelley. 

By combining these core capabilities with RHD’s existing print and local online search offerings, including the top-performing DexOnline.com site, the company is well-positioned to generate additional leads and deliver an expanded level of service to advertisers.

Does this mean I have a new competitor in eWhisper? Sure hope not Stick to the businesses Brad, there’s nothing good going on over here in people lookup land.

So here are the list of some sites of the entire relationship I’m trying to visualize:

• LocalLaunch.com : did they want them for the marketing team? the data? the yp platform? d) all of the above?
• Local Matters : tangled up in everything
• DexOnline : is this going to be the brand that comes out of it?
• RHDYP : and the lame duck relationship w/ ATT & yellowpages.com
• EMBARQYP.com and BestRedYP.com : another brand?
• Chicagob2b.com : beta…why…how….who am i again?

So is there soon to be a true IYP out of this group with both platform, data, salesforce, and marketing intellect? And is Dex going to be that brand?

Like most in the search industry I’m a big Danny Sullivan fan & wish him the best in wherever he goes next. But even more exciting than search news (I understand some people don’t find search news exciting) are his posts on Dunkin’ Donuts (I think everyone should find donuts exciting.)

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More people doing fun stuff

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/suggest.php
http://www.dontdelete.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-08-n53.html
http://fakerake.com/tag/AOL

one thing that sticks out is how people keep going back and searching for the same thing. i know people use search as navigation now, but I didn’t realize how many people did this and how frequently. one user kept searching for “bankofamerica” almost daily. Bookmarks & the address bar is your friend, use it. But it’s a good reminder of the level of sophistication you’re dealing with. You can’t expect people to learn to use their browser when they need to figure out “how to make a leprechaun trap” or beat the system and get the “free pregnancy test online to see if you are pregnant or not.” They just don’t have time…well, unless they’re now time travellers after finding out “how to change time of day to pm from am“

While some people at SES are talking govt conspiracy theories with this “release” of data - all signs point to incompetence. I wish I had more time in the first few days to dig around and put up a linkbait site for it, but instead I’ll just watch them as they come out.

There are going to be some insights search marketers can get from this data. Both competitive intelligence as well as searcher behaviors over a 3 month period.

http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/

http://aolsearchlogs.com/

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com

and of course the raw data itself is mirrored and bittorrent at various places. Good times, it’s a little weird that it’s not really making any kind of news at SES though