In a blog post at DotComicide.Com, the blogger notes that mainstream media (and I would add other bloggers, too) missed the boat on the recent BitTorrent Search Engine story.

As one colleague said to me this morning,
"Who cares about searching torrents? That's not news - the news is that Ask Jeeves has partnered with BitTorrent to syndicate their Adwords feed next to pirate content."

According to the SEW Blog (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050523-113437):
Sponsored links will come from Ask Jeeves (apparently the Premier Listings that Ask sells directly, rather than the paid listing that it carries from Google).

But that's not the case. The source code in the advertising is from Google. There are less ads showing today, than yesterday so I'm not sure what that means. But a search for software (http://search.bittorrent.com/search.jsp?query=software) turned up some Google AdWords ads syndicated through Jeeves.

(1) I think its important to link directly to where you initially started this topic of discuss, and that will be at WebmasterWorld under the title of AskJeeves in Ad Distribution Partnership with BitTorrent (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum2/494.htm). Excellent thread, so much so, I actually blogged on it (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002000.html) myself.

(2) My personal feelings about Ask Jeeves serving up ads for pirated related search results...Does it say "Ads powered by Ask Jeeves"? Will it? If not, does it ruin them? Can they start a new brand just for ad serving for sites that are questionable? Hosting companies do it all the time.

But as a big fan of Ask Jeeves, I dislike it.

(3) It might be a question I ask at Cre8asite Forum's Live Q&A Session with Jim Lanzone (http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=24824).

Jim knows better then you or I if this will hurt or help Ask Jeeves.

Yeah, I noticed this when I looked at the search.bittorrent.com site go up on May 26 and Gary blogged that day that these were just Google ads being resold:

Meanwhile, the mystery of what type of ads Ask was going to provide is cleared up. BitTorrent Search is carrying ads from Google, from what we can tell. In other words, Ask gets most of its keyword-targeted ads through a partnership with Google. With BitTorrent, it's simply resyndicating these ads.Until the site went live, we couldn't really know if it was going to be a Google resell or not. But as soon as it was up, looking at the URL strings gave the game up.

I think there are still come cases where Ask might provide its own ads first, similar to how Lycos will do this but still carry Google as backfill. However, it is extremely odd that Ask is effectively a Google ad reseller.

Why wouldn't Bittorrent just go directly to Google? Maybe they tried and Google said no, worried about any legal issues. This way, Google would still get cash through Ask but have things at arms-length.

Why wouldn't Bittorrent just go directly to Google? Maybe they tried and Google said no, worried about any legal issues. This way, Google would still get cash through Ask but have things at arms-length.


If Google isnt in the bittorrent game, than Im a jackass. Probably so, but they better start seeing the writing on the wall. Bittorrent is a protocol that has been exploited by many pirate sites. Many Universities , Linux sites offer their cd's or large downloads through bittorrent. This is the way to offset network loads by offloading it to the clients.

Time Warner is talking to some large bittorrent sites, you know the game is a rolling. Why would a "corporation" want to get involved in bittorrent? Well the answer is "offloading network costs". Think about the movie Gladiator -- 800 MB Video file. There is no network in the world that could serve the movie to say 100 million concurrent users... We arent there yet. However, with bittorrent this is possible.

IMHO, the corporations are looking at this the way they always look at things... the bottom line (2 dumb to see the future). Imagine, if the corporations decided to enact a way that piraters, although less profitable, they could be used for distributing their legal media ... offsetting the network and server loads, while increasing their speed and accuracy.

To look at it in the perspective of money making.... 100 legal users want gladiator and have purchased the video, 1000 illegal users want the video but dont want to pay the price. The combined total is 1100 user served videos. The 1000 illegal downloads actually helped the 100 legal downloads by serving them bits of the content. Realize that bittorrent is a "chunk" by "chunk" kind of technology, where you recieve bits and pieces from different clients, eventually you get the whole file but probably from hundreds of clients.

This technology is logical and pragmatic in todays network. At the speed of internet users, I am afraid the world is not keeping up with the network requirements... perhaps the USA is the exception to the rule (my brother has a 10 MB line while I in europe only have a 1MB).

my 2 cents