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Ad and seek

Madhuri Velegar K at Pragati Maidan

Ross Veitch, producer of Yahoo! In Asia, Yahoo Inc spoke about the easy way he collects content for his search engine -- he has partners around the world simply surfing the web to find interesting sites to source from.

"We also outsource from the offline world, but it's far easier and less taxing in terms of the material coming categorised and indexed straight from the web,'' says Veitch.

In the long run Veitch hopes to build a community wherein Yahoo can offer an array of information and services to his customers. He offers them data in turn for more date, like his demographics that can then be used to service Internet-related activity.

Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff on the Net (yup, that's us) also said in his session titled, Advertising on the Net : "Any site which has gone beyond just offering information could well be heading towards becoming a portal.'' Balakrishnan felt a site needn't be the only way to jump onto the Internet bandwagon.

"Web sites work in certain situations, so till you figure out the kind of business you want to do, you may just have to hitch onto another well-visited site." He said hardly 1-2 per cent of the people click on banners, but then television ads translate only 0.0001 per cent of ads into sales. In comparison, 1-2 per cent wasn't so bad, he said.

The issue of infrastructure and the thin bandwidths got short shrift. But the matter was avoided like some embarrassing doggie poo beneath the table at a ball.

Prakash Nelakantan from Elind Computers gave talk on databases and the Web -- very technical, a little repetitive. Attendance was already sparse and those who were present weren't listening anyway.

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