DIGITAL MEDIA

Ansearch is to unveil a new look search site in two weeks, featuring a fully integrated video search engine facility. Ansearch CEO David Burden revealed to Digital Media that the revitalised site will showcase the Blinx search engine, which Ansearch acquired exclusive local representational advertising rights for in June.

Burden, who took the helm of Ansearch in February with a carefully chosen new board team in place, said the re-launch was one of many innovations that the streamlined and re-focused search based marketing company would be introducing over the coming months. The group has also soft launched a retail web development play with its Perth based subsidiary Webfirm opening its first retail presence in Melbourne in mid June. The arm is aggressively targeting the web-challenged SME sector of which Burden estimates has an addressable market of around 734,000 and of which 50% are without websites.

The service offers a fully functional and SEO enabled site from consultation to delivery in 12 weeks with price points from basic packages of $2.5k -$5k and advanced at $5- $25k.

The company has flagged a return to profitability in 2008/9 following a 49% surge in revenue to $12.3 million for its unaudited accounts for 2007/8.

Hitwise co-founder Andrew Barlow, who became chairman of Ansearch in October was instrumental in bringing new blood to the board including Burden, Hitwise co-founder Adrian Giles and dotcom veteran Adrian Vanzyl. Burden has spent the last five months heavily restructuring, slashing 20% of staff and shedding non-core business projects in addition to building his ³dream² board and executive team which he says will future proof the business and its expansive new directions.

Burden said that video properties were emerging as a key plank to the evolving search and advertising market with clients constantly lamenting the shortage of inventory for video advertising.

³Video delivers the audience at the point of peak engagement and makes for highly effective, measurable campaigns,² he said.

According to Hitwise Blinkx has gained momentum from mid-May 2008 with Australian Internet users increasing traffic by 210% in share of visits.

Hitwise analyst Sandra Hanchard said that there was a 16% increase in traffic from search engines to video sharing websites, ³is a very good indicator that online video is gaining momentum and will attract a mainstream audience in Australia.² She added that ³we¹re seeing similar patterns in video search to how social networks emerged into the mainstream 2 to 3 years ago.² Burden claimed that the new look Ansearch would offer a serious independent alternative to the entrenched top 5 search players in the Australian market.

³There is a space for an independent alternative in the market,² he said adding the partners were ³getting over Google² its dominance and its pricing structure. He added that Ansearch was also a far more nimble player than its high ranking portal based competitors. ³The first project I axed at Ansearch was a portal development site. Search does not need a portal, it needs to be exact.² Hitwise¹s latest stats reveal no shift in Google¹s dominance as number one search engine in Australia, with almost nine out of ten searches carried out through it. The results from Hitwise Search Engine Analysis for the four weeks ending 28 June show 87.81% of all searches are done through Google, an increase of 11.79% compared to the same period last year.

MSN Search and Yahoo! Search engines each received 6.72% and 3.93% respectively, while the remaining 42 search engines included by Hitwise, accounted for only 1.54%.

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