A Washington DC television station is reporting an apparent meteorite fall in Lorton, Va. The space rock, which has been taken to the Smithsonian Institution, crashed through the roof of a doctor's office at around 5:45 p.m. on Monday, narrowly missing patients and staff.

NOTE: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to the office as a dental office. Although there is a dental office in the building, the doctors who found the meteorite are in a family medical practice. The Weatherblog regrets the error.

The reported time of the fall matches closely the time that scores of people from New Jersey to southern Virginia reported they saw a bright meteor fall, leaving a writhing smoke trail in the twilight sky. The Baltimore Sun's WeatherBlog has received more than 100 reports of the fall from observers.

The story on the Web site of WUSA9 in Washington says the mango-sized meteorite crashed through the roof and acoustical tiles of the Williamsburg Square Family Practice office in Lorton. Dr. Frank Ciampi told the station the crash was so loud he thought bookshelves had toppled.

Experts at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, interviewed by the station, confirmed the fractured meteorite was a stony "chondrite" meteorite, with a dark fusion crust formed by the heat of its passage through the atmosphere.

Professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold says he is on his way to Virginia. "I hope to find some other pieces," he said in email to the WeatherBlog. Arnold, TV's "Meteorite Man," also took part in the apparently unsuccessful hunt for fragments of the meteor that fell somewhere along the Mason-Dixon line north of Baltimore last July 6.  That fall was accompanied by a sonic boom that startled residents in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

The Smithsonian museum's Linda Welzenbach said the Lorton meteorite is believed to be only the fourth confirmed meteorite fall in Virginia's history.

(PHOTO WUSA9)

http://www.meteorite.fr/en/basics/history.htm

Meteorites in History and Religion

Throughout the ages, meteorites were venerated as sacred objects by different cultures and ancient civilizations. The spectacular fall of a meteorite, accompanied by light and sound phenomena, such as falling stars, smoke, thunder, and sonic booms, has always kindled the human imagination, evoking fear and awe in everyone who witnesses such an event. For obvious reasons, the remnants of these incidents, the actual meteorites, were often kept as sacred stones or objects of power. They were worshiped, and used in their respective religious ceremonies.

From Prehistoric Times to Ancient Egypt

Actually, several Native American tribes venerated pieces and fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a giant iron meteorite that excavated Arizona's famous Meteor Crater upon its impact about 50,000 years ago. Archaeological finds throughout the United States and Mexico, proved that Canyon Diablo fragments had been traded briskly centuries before Columbus reached the shores of the New World. The Winona meteorite was found in a stone cist in the prehistoric Elden pueblo, Arizona, in 1928. The circumstances of the find suggest that the builders of the pueblo had kept the meteorite as a sacred object after actually witnessing its fall. The tribes of the Clackamas in Oregon claim that they once worshiped the Willamette meteorite, one of the largest irons known, weighing about 15 tons. Prior to their hunting trips, the Clackamas dipped the heads of their arrows and lances into the water that had gathered in the large cavities of the iron – they were convinced that this ritual would harden their weapons and grant them success in their hunt.

Native tribes throughout the world venerated meteorites, and similar stories have been told from Greenland, Tibet, India, Mongolia, and Australia. Pure iron has always been rare and so there is little wonder that iron meteorites were especially coveted by ancient civilizations as raw material for cultic knives and weapons in times prior to the Iron Age. Such knives and daggers have been recovered from the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs, from Mesopotamian sanctuaries, and from the graves of the leaders of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca, in both Americas. >> top…

From Ancient Greece to Mecca

The ancient civilizations of the occident are no exception, and there are several examples of the worship of meteorites in Greco-Roman tradition. Mircea Eliade, an expert in religious history, claims that the Palladion of Troy, the Artemis of Ephesos, as well as the Cone of Elagabalus in Emesa, were actually meteorites – stones that had fallen from the sky, objects from heaven, believed to contain supernatural powers. Richard Norton mentions the sacred stone in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, a rock that was said to have been thrown to Earth by the Supreme Being, Kronos, marking the "omphalos", the navel of the world. The Roman historian, Titus Livius, tells the story of the meteorite of Pessinunt, Phrygia, a conical object known as the Needle of Cybele, the goddess of fertility. After the Romans had conquered Phrygia, the meteorite was conveyed in a gigantic procession to Rome, where it was worshiped for another 500 years.

Even in the monotheistic religions of Judaeo-Christian tradition we find traces of an ancient meteorite cult. In the Hebrew language, meteorites were called "betyls", an equivalent to the Greek "baitylia", meaning "the residence of God". In the Bible, we find a story where Jacob, the ancestor of the Israelites, beds his head on such a betyl-stone in the desert. In his sleep, he has an impressive vision of a stairway to heaven leading directly to the throne of God. The story says that Jacob was full of awe when he awoke, and that he built a temple around that stone. However, nothing of this temple has been preserved up to this day.

There is another famous example from the Middle East, but there is some dispute about whether the object of veneration is actually a meteorite or not. We are referring to the "Hadschar al Aswad", the sacred "black stone", to which all Moslems pay homage on their "Hadsch", their pilgrimage to Mecca and the most important sanctuary of the Islam, the Kaaba. Each Moslem has the duty to make this pilgrimage once in his lifetime, to visit Mecca, and to walk around the Kaaba – a cubic building – seven times. Then, he has to pause at the southeast corner of the Kaaba to complete the ritual, touching or kissing the Hadschar, also known as "Yamin Allah", meaning "the right hand of God".

Tradition says that this stone is a betyl, a meteorite that was given to Abraham by the archangel Gabriel. That stone also played a most important role in the life of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, who immured it into the wall at the southeast corner of the Kaaba.

The Hadsch is a rather strange ritual since Islam prohibits the worship and veneration of objects, but it seems that this tradition is much older than Islam itself. The Hadschar might be a true betyl, a real meteorite, since it is said to have a black crust and a light-gray interior. However, it might also represent a rather large Wabar pearl, a meteorite related impact glass that is found in central Saudi Arabia, not that far from Mecca. It's a pity that scientists haven't solved the mystery surrounding this sacred stone, but for normal religious reasons it has not been allowed. Wouldn't it be great to know that there is at least one ancient betyl left, and that it is still venerated after more than perhaps 2,000 years?

Almost-close encounter: Meteorite hits Lorton doctor's office

By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 21, 2010; B03

Much later, after the hole in the roof had been fixed and the debris cleaned up, after the cause of the damage finally had become clear, Frank Ciampi wondered: What are the odds?

He is a doctor. He has worked for 18 years in the two-story building in Lorton that houses the Williamsburg Square Family Practice, in the 9500 block of Richmond Highway. He spends his days walking in and out of examining rooms, seeing patients.

What are the chances, as he goes about his routine, that he'll get hit by a meteorite?

Not impossible.

It almost happened.

“I was in my office doing charts,” Ciampi recalled. It was Monday, a little after 5:30 p.m. He was on the building's second floor. “And I heard a loud boom, almost like a small explosion.”

At first, he said, he thought a bookcase had toppled nextdoor. “So I ran toward the office. And then I saw all the debris in the hallway,” he said.

The floor just outside examination room No. 2 — about 10 feet from where Ciampi had been doing paperwork — was littered with small pieces of wood, plaster and insulation. Upon inspection, more debris lay inside the room. He saw three chunks of stone on the floor that together formed a rock about the size of a tennis ball, with a glassy-smooth surface. Then he saw a hole about the size of the rock in the tile ceiling, and a tear in the maroon carpet where the rock had landed.

“The first thing we thought was maybe something had fallen from a plane,” Ciampi said.

For most of the day, the 10 examination rooms used by Ciampi and two other medical professionals in the practice had been occupied by patients. Had the falling object crashed through the ceiling a little earlier, it might have killed someone.

“I thank God,” Ciampi said.

Later, he said, “I was up all night, wondering what it was.” No one else in the practice could figure it out, either. Then on Tuesday, the office manager, Rhonda Lawrence, offered a suggestion from her husband Jeffrey, who has a background in geology.

“Jeff said that maybe it was a meteorite,” Ciampi said. “We didn't think of that. You know, a meteorite — that's not the first thing you think of.”

Cari Corrigan, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, confirmed it.

“It's beautiful,” she gushed on Wednesday, after examining the rock.

“The first thing we look at is what's called the fusion crust on the outside,” she said. “It's kind of a black, shiny coating, because when it passes through the atmosphere, it's melting a little at a time. So it's like an outer layer of glass, of melted rock.”

That, plus flecks of metal in the rock, confirmed it had come from space, she said.

Corrigan said small meteorites hit Earth “fairly often.” “We're bombarded by stuff like that all the time,” she said. Since most of the planet's surface is uninhabited, most meteorites land a long, long way from people. And most of those that do hit inhabited areas go unnoticed, she said.

Every now and then, though, there's a landing like the one in Lorton. She said the meteorite weighs just over a half pound and probably was traveling about 220 mphwhen it hit the building.

If the folks at the medical practice want her to, Corrigan said, she will submit the stone to the Meteorite Nomenclature Committee.

“They'll give it an official name and an official description and it'll go on the books as being an official meteorite,” she said. “I would imagine it would be called the Lorton, Va., Meteorite, or something like that.”

Technology trends and news by Dan Spelzmann
September 16, 2009 | Comments (0)
Short URL: http://vator.tv/n/aa8

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, the company known by most users as a provider of those (slightly annoying) tests where you have to type out the squiggly, morphed words displayed to sign in to a site. The idea is to prevent bots from buying all the tickets for a show in the first 10 seconds of the sale or signing up for every available email address.

Google says reCAPTCHA currently guards over 100,000 Web sites from such spam attacks.

The service has much broader applications, though.

reCAPTCHA is aiding the massive task of digitizing books, newspapers and old time radio shows. For physical books, it’s a two-step process: scan a page, then transform into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR).

Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated OCR program cannot easily transcribe just any scanned image of a page of text, for example, because in some older books, either time has taken its toll on the paper and ink or the font is just plain weird. But humans can probably figure out what it means.

According to reCAPTCHA’s Web site:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

reCAPTCHA gives users two words. The first is a word reCAPTCHA knows. The second is the word from that ancient or damaged text that the computer is trying to transcribe. If a user gets the first word right, then reCAPTCHA assumes it’s dealing with a human, and accepts the user’s input for the second word. After many run-throughs with many different users, reCAPTCHA pools all the inputs for the second word and assumes the majority answer is probably what the word actually is.

In this way, reCAPTCHA can continually utilize the crowd to correct and improve its OCR.

Google’s acquisition of the company makes a lot of sense, considering that they are currently invested in two large-scale digitization projects: Google Books and the Google News Archive.

By Sophie Freeman
Last updated at 11:19 AM on 08th December 2009

Pimps sold a young woman as a sex slave in broad daylight on Britain’s busiest shopping street.

A brothel owner paid just £3,000 for the Lithuanian victim, a woman in her 20s, in the transaction on London’s Oxford Street.

Police surveillance footage shows an Albanian man handing over the cash to two of his countrymen outside Selfridges department store as shoppers pass by, unaware of what is happening.

Caught in the act: Gazmet Turku hands over £3,000 to Izzet Fejzullahu (second from right) and Agran Demarku (right) in Oxford Street. He is 'buying' the Lithuanian woman pictured on the left to work in his brothel. All three Albanian men have been jailed and the girl returned to Lithuania

The helpless woman – guarded by a thug – is forced to watch as the men discuss the deal.

She would have been expected to earn her new ‘owner’ £100,000 a year by having sex up to 25 times a day in a brothel.

On this occasion, the woman was lucky. Police swooped to free her and her traffickers were jailed for a total of 63 years.

The Home Office estimated that in 2003, the most recent figures available, 4,000 women were trafficked into the UK for prostitution.

Police warn that the numbers of Eastern Europeans being trafficked into the UK will grow significantly in the run up to the London 2012 Olympic Games.

A rise in so-called ‘vice activity’ has already been detected in the five Olympic boroughs of Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Greenwich, to cater for demand from 25,000 construction workers.

A special police squad has been set up to tackle the trafficking. Officers cite the example of a 16-year-old Albanian girl who thought she was coming to London for a romantic weekend with her boyfriend. When they arrived, he handed her over to pimps.

Police released the photo of the woman being trafficked on Oxford Street in a bid to raise awareness of the problem.

Seller number one, Izzet Fejzullahu – an Albanian vice gang member – is pictured selling the girl for £3,000. He was jailed for 14 years at London's Southwark Crown Court for controlling prostitution.

Seller number two, Albanian Agran Demarku, is seen discussing the deal with the brothel owner. He was sentenced to 18 years, as was his brother, Flamur, who stood guard over the girl.

The buyer, brothel owner Gazmet Turku, was also jailed.

Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Martin, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs and Vice Unit, said: 'The man to the left in the picture has £3,000 in cash in his hand, with which he is buying a human being.

'She is just a commodity to them. She is an item for selling sex.

'The man is buying the girl for his own brothel from the men to his right, who ran a network of nine brothels. He is simply replenishing his stock, as a shopkeeper would.

'These women are put into slavery and exploited in the vilest way.'

Detective Superintendent Martin said 25 trafficked women had been rescued by his unit this year.

'We have had people kidnapped and smuggled into the UK,' he said. 'Others came in thinking they were working in bars but were put to work in brothels.

'Their passports were taken, they were threatened – and some were systematically raped and beaten up.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233780/Human-traffickers-sell-sex-slave-Britains-busiest-street.html#ixzz0Z8sg9uLZ

Yunnan (Women's Feature Service) – Zhao Xianming, a narcotics control liaison officer for Mengla county in southwest China's Yunnan Province, clearly remembers the circumstances of that Saturday. Around midday on July 25, 2009, Zhao received a call from a senior police officer from Phongsaly Province, northern Laos, urging him to stop an international bus coming from Laos into Mengla. “I was told that a Laotian woman suspected of trafficking two girls was trying to bypass border check points,” recalls Zhao, who can speak fluent Laotian.

Two cousins, aged 14 and 15, who had no identity certificates with them, were excited about the prospect of working at a restaurant in a neighbouring county in Laos. The job was promised by the Laotian woman, who was married to a Chinese man. It never even occurred to them that they were actually crossing into China.

“Thanks to the timely communication from the Laos side, the two girls were rescued and handed to the Laos police the same day,” says Zhao, who believes that intelligence and information is the most cost-effective way for the efficient rescue of trafficked girls.

Mengla is China's southern most border county in Yunnan. It shares a 677.8-kilometre border with Laos to the south and east, and is separated in the west from Myanmar only by a river. With 46 land crossings, 14 market places for border residents, as well as five motorways to the Laos and Myanmar borders, the county is regarded as a major passageway to Southeast Asian countries.

Communities living in the Laos-Chinese border area usually share the same origin, customs and are, therefore, able to speak the same language. The stark difference in economic levels on either side of the border encourages cross-border migration and also leads to the menace of trafficking.

During his decade-long service in the narcotics control task force under the Mengla county public security bureau, Zhao has been involved in rescuing and transferring over ten trafficking victims from Laos. “Most victims were teenage girls from the mountainous areas of northern Laos, who were lured by the prospect of jobs or marriage opportunities at the other side of the border,” says the officer.

Although the search for better living conditions is the driving factor for cross-border migration, Zhao also cited the difference in gender ratio at the source and destination areas as another important factor for human trafficking.

With more and more Chinese labour engaged in helping locals grow rubber trees and other cash crops to weed out poppy production in Laos – which is part of the notorious Golden Triangle for drug manufacturing and smuggling – clandestine cross-border match-making services have sprung, some of which even sell brides.

Since 2000, according to Wang Wei, a senior police official in Mengla, the police has received reports of 31 trafficked victims from Laos, of which 19 were rescued from Chinese provinces like Hunan, Shanxi, Henan and Shandong, the latter being one of the most densely populated provinces in the country. Some women were even trafficked as far as Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, to the east of the country.

“Perhaps Laos is only a starting point or point of transit for human trafficking. Nonetheless, human trafficking has directly affected social security. It requires bilateral or multi-lateral efforts to address the issue,” observes Kiengkham Inphengthavong, head of the secretariat of Laos' National Steering Committee on Human Trafficking, under the Ministry of Public Security, during the Laos-China anti-trafficking meet held recently in Mengla.

A highlight of the joint meeting was the inauguration of a border anti-trafficking liaison office for China-Laos at the Mohan land port, about 100 metres from the border.

Compared to human trafficking along the China-Myanmar and China-Vietnam borders, trafficking along China-Laos border is smaller in scale. However, ever since the Kunming-Bangkok highway which goes through Mengla was opened to traffic last year, the authorities have had to brace ourselves to deal with more cases, according to Hang Lintao, deputy director at the criminal investigation section, Yunnan Public Security Bureau.

A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons released earlier this years by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that almost 20 per cent of all trafficked victims are children. In some parts of the Mekong region, it noted, children are the majority. What's more, sexual exploitation and forced labour are the most common forms of human trafficking.

According to the latest report released by the United Nations Children's Fund, 'Child Trafficking in East and Southeast Asia: Reversing the Trend', “Poverty does not cause trafficking. The demand for cheap or exploitable labour, sex with children, adoption outside the legal channels, women or girls for marriage, all contribute to the trafficking phenomenon.”

The liaison office in Mengla is one of a series of offices being set up along China's southwest border to fight cross-border trafficking through better information sharing and investigation, as well as repatriation and victim transfer.

Over the years, child trafficking within China has penetrated most provinces. During a six-month special anti-trafficking operation this year ending in mid-October, Chinese police cracked 1,717 cases and rescued 2,008 trafficked children.

Meanwhile, trafficking on both sides of the border is on the rise. Since 2002, Chinese girls from Yunnan, looking for jobs or visiting relatives across the border, have been increasingly trafficked to Malaysia or Thailand and have ended up being sexually exploited, while girls from Laos and Vietnam have been trafficked into China and sold as brides.

“Trafficking in human beings has no borders,” says Kirsten di Martino, chief of Child Protection Section with UNICEF-China. Although media figures of cross-border cases appear quite low, she notes, “it is in fact only the tip of the iceberg,” as there isn't a good mechanism in place to report and follow any trafficking incidences.

But there have been concerted efforts to curb the menace. In 2004, six countries sharing the Mekong River – China, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand – signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Cooperation Against Trafficking in Persons in the Greater Mekong Sub-region. In late 2007, China unveiled a four-year National Plan of Action on Combating Trafficking in Women and Children, mobilising over 30 government departments. The Ministry of Public Security has even set up an anti-trafficking office. In May 2009, the ministry launched a DNA database for trafficked or missing children, designating 43 DNA laboratories affiliated to public security bureaus at provincial and city (county) levels to share and compare DNA information and recover children who had been trafficked when they were too young to remember any details.

Zhao feels information sharing is crucial to build a national database for trafficked victims. He has also called for a simple marriage registration service to tackle trafficking through marriages. As he put it, “This is necessary, otherwise rescue efforts would be pointless and unappreciated, since the victims may choose to reunite with their 'buyer husbands'.”

Womens Feature Service covers developmental, political, social and economic issues in India and around the globe. To get these articles for your publication, contact WFS at the www.wfsnews.org website.

As former lead diplomat and interagency coordinator in the federal government to fight human trafficking, I had the privilege to learn a ton about an often ignored, discounted, or misunderstood crime and abuse. From a woman I met in Romania who got TB as a sex trafficking victim in the UK, to the young woman I met in Bangkok who was subject to beating in a secluded Thai seafood processing factory after fleeing repressive Burma, human trafficking is about gross exploitation.

Sometimes it’s about moving across borders, but often it is not. Never having crossed any borders, the U.S.-citizen teenagers who are prostituted throughout America and the people of disadvantaged castes trapped in bonded labor in rice mills and brick kilns in India are human trafficking victims by dint of domestic law and U.N. protocols. “Trafficking” refers to the human trade – treating people as pure commodities robbed of freedom and equal dignity.

Eschewing jargon, human trafficking is best seen as slavery — typically without chains, but slavery nonetheless.

While the public sector has much to do to help victims and punish their traffickers, so much is to be done by other actors.

I’m now the Executive Director and CEO of Polaris Project, named after the North Star which, with the help of ordinary citizens, guided slaves to freedom in the Underground Railroad. Polaris Project is devoted to breaking the backbone of traffickers in America by reducing the profit and raising the risk. The U.S. government has turned to us as a nimble NGO capable of running the primary national human trafficking hotline (1-888-3737-888) (http://nhtrc.polarisproject.org/ ) We serve as a catalyst in the anti-trafficking movement, from the essential micro level of victim services to the macro level of reforming laws and their implementation.

Not just nonprofits, but funders and investors outside of government are essential to the ultimate goal in fighting slavery today: abolition rather than mere mitigation and regulation.

Some philanthropic funders have entered this space. Humanity United funds anti-trafficking nonprofits and the leading coalition Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (aptly named ATEST, summoning the image of faithful witness to crimes against human dignity). Additionally, the NoVo Foundation, led by Jennifer and Peter Buffett, has committed to supporting work to empower women and girls against the dehumanization of sex trafficking. (Full disclosure: both fund Polaris Project.) Within a two-week period this autumn, Polaris Project was featured at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting where President Clinton highlighted human trafficking as a problem deserving action. Polaris Project was recognized for its anti-trafficking work in the U.S. and Japan and for the commitment it made to be an exemplar for the world. I also had the opportunity to speak at the annual meeting during the more politically conservative Philanthropy Roundtable. Yet there’s still a largely untapped opportunity for philanthropy to help the goal of abolition.

Businesses have a part to play too. First, they need to implement in deeds a kind of Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. They mustn’t wittingly or unwittingly spur on human trafficking. In the area of labor, businesses should make supply chains more accountable. The Department of Labor has given them a tool by promulgating a report on countries in which various sectors are tainted by forced labor and onerous child labor. Moreover, there need to be more businesses like Manpower Inc. who admirably seeks to eliminate shark-like labor recruiters who help enslave people through lies, seized passports, and usurious debt.

Businesses should also avert enabling human trafficking for sex—whether airlines and hotels work to not facilitate sex tourism; landlords rebuff brothels; or internet advertisers refuse to allow commercial sex (and with it, sex trafficking) to be promoted by their businesses.

Businesses can contribute to philanthropy against trafficking, and often have comparative advantages to bring to the fight. Just take three partners of Polaris Project:

The direct financial support, legal and technical advice, and research services of LexisNexis – is part of the company’s significant commitment to advancing the Rule of Law around the world. LexisNexis Risk & Information Analytics Group worked with Polaris Project to develop and implement a new web-based system that allows all employees of our national human trafficking hotline to access the same information in real time. It allows employees to service those in need by being able to field and respond to hotline calls more quickly and provide up-to-date, accurate information about local resources and service providers.

In late 2008, Wyndham Hotel Group generously donated one million Rewards points to Polaris Project. We utilize these points to provide emergency hotel stays to victims of human trafficking. Wyndham Hotel Group provides the first step in the recovery process for these victims who have nowhere else to turn. The support of Wyndham Hotel Group is so vital to victims of human trafficking that the Wyndham Hotel Group and Polaris Project relationship was listed in the 2009 Trafficking in Person (TIP) report released by the Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton last June.

And the aforementioned Manpower recently signed a partnership MOU with Polaris Project. Polaris Project will help Manpower employees gain more expertise on human trafficking in the labor market, and in turn Manpower will help Polaris Project by offering job training and job placement for victims we serve in places like Washington, DC; Newark, NJ; and Tokyo, Japan.
Philanthropists and businesses have slowly entered the fight to end human trafficking. But only when their role matches that in fields like development, international education, HIV/AIDS, and domestic violence will we have the hope of realizing the goal of a world without slavery.

By Ambassador Mark P. Lagon
Mark P. Lagon, PhD. is Executive Director and CEO of Polaris Project, a leading anti-human trafficking nonprofit, running the 1-888-3737-888 national hotline. He was formerly Ambassador-at-Large to Combat Trafficking in Persons at the Department of State.

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Posted on 07 December 2009

New data from WebVisible indicate that small businesses are diversifying their paid search campaigns to include sites not named Google. The local interactive advertising firm's report found that 60.4 percent of search spending went to Google last quarter, while Yahoo reaped 26.2 percent, Bing garnered 10.5 percent, and Ask.com pulled in 2.4 percent.

Google lost 5 percent share compared to Q3 last year, according to the study that surveyed around 25,000 companies with less than 200 employees during the last four fiscal quarters. Kevin Ryan, CMO for the Irvine, CA-based WebVisible, said the most-interesting finding was how Microsoft's aggressive promotions for its new kid on the block, Bing, have paid off, gaining market share from Google.

“No one expected this to happen when they came into the game just six months ago,” he explained. “I'm sure people are wondering if Bing's success will last beyond its huge media buy. Once Bing stops spending that kind of money to get in front of local advertisers, [small businesses] may forget about [the search site]. That is, unless it is as effective as it claims to be.”

While click-through rates were up year-over-year for all the engines, Yahoo charted the biggest improvement with a 123 percent CTR increase. Bing's CTRs lifted by 76 percent, while Google experienced a 52 percent hike. Google's cost-per-click average was 14 percent higher compared to Q3 last year and was 30 percent more expensive than Yahoo and Bing for the most-recent quarter.

Small Businesses Increase Spend by 91 Percent

Generally, small businesses are buying more keywords and dramatically increasing their paid search budgets when compared to last year, according to WebVisible. First off, the average small business purchased 55 keyword phrases in Q3, which is up 30 percent from Q3 2008's median number of 43. That statistic represents the high-water mark for the four quarters that WebVisible has been tracking small businesses keyword buys.

Meanwhile, businesses dedicated an average of $1,658 to search ads, 91 percent more than Q3 2008. And business-to-consumer professional services appear to be the busiest in terms of collecting local sales leads via SEM. Attorneys and dentists made up the top two advertiser categories, with 7.7 percent and 5 percent of total small advertisers, respectively. Each of the two categories invested far more than average, spending $2,560 and $2,005 respectively in Q3.

Air conditioning services and physicians/surgeons were the only other categories that accounted for more than 2 percent of search advertisers. Overall, the research suggests that the small business search advertisers are a varied bunch. The top 20 categories accounted for only 36 percent of total dollars spent.

Thirty-two percent of search clicks resulted in a “lead conversion,” meaning the viewer either clicked through to a landing page on the advertiser's Web site, printed a landing page, watched a video, printed out directions, entered an e-mail address, inquired via e-mail, or completed an online form. Clicks to the Web site were far and away the biggest lead conversion type, coming in almost twice as high as the next three categories: printed landing pages, submitted e-mail inquiries, and printed driving directions.

For small businesses utilizing a call tracking number, 4.5 percent of the clicks resulted in a call, a 3.6 percent lift from 2008. No material differences occurred among advertisers in terms of CTR or proportion of lead conversions. However, WebVisible said that cost-per-clicks and keyword counts tended to increase with rising spend levels.