Google's latest rival, Megaglobe, goes live in beta

by Stuart Corner

Tuesday, 29 May 2007

A new search engine, Megaglobe, that promises advertisers protection against click fraud has gone live in beta mode, with another novel feature: advertisers get credits every time they use Megaglobe to make a search.

Megaglobe was announced in January 2007 , with few details and a full year after the company announced its intentions with a much fuller press release which said: "Megaglobe will be Google's hottest competition in a long time, protecting its advertisers from fraudulent click-throughs on their sponsored spots."

Megaglobe claimed that "experts have estimated that click fraud accounts for as much as 30 percent of an online advertiser's expense," and that it would offer "a revolutionary zero percent click fraud rate for sponsored ads" enabling advertisers to verify clicks by comparing Megaglobe's online reporting with their own server logs. Megaglobe's sponsored listings will also be cheaper than those available on Google, Overture and Miva," it promised.

The January 2007 announcement offered journalists the opportunity to sign up as a beta tester and "get a sneak preview of the revolution that will overwhelm the Internet." Emails have now been sent to those people with a password enabling them to sign on at beta.megaglobe.com. Also, anyone can access www.megaglobe.com and add their web site to Megaglobe's index.

Beta testers get a very simple search screen which appears to use the standard convention that enclosing two search terms in "..." creates an AND search and simply typing the words does an OR search, but no information is available. And the only other options are to select country and language, but what exactly the country option means is not clear.

The site also provides information on a feature called 'Megaglobe Search Rewards' which gives searchers credits they can use towards the cost of advertising on Megaglobe. "Simply log on to your Megaglobe account and use Megaglobe as your preferred search engine...Sign up now and start earning credits on your account. Just be sure to log in to your account before searching to maximize the number of credits applied to your account."However there is no information on the valued of searches or the cost of advertising.

Megaglobe announced in March that it had "a unique e-commerce partnership with PayPal" enabling advertisers to either pay with credit cards in 50 different currencies, or with a PayPal multicurrency option.

Megaglobe also has a news section, segmented similarly to Google's (US, World, Science & Technology, Business, Entertainment etc) but its lists only one item on each topic, and every link tested by iTWire linked to a CBS news item.{moscomment}

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