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Microsoft and Yahoo have announced the merge of their search engines (Yahoo! and Bing) to take on the world’s leading search engine Google.

Microsoft will be powering the Yahoo search capability with their more sophisticated Bing engine, and Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies’ paid search advertisers. The partnership is a 10 year deal, where Yahoo will use Bing’s search technology on its sites, and Microsoft will give Yahoo a percentage of the revenues generated from the paid search results.

Currently Bing is only powering the Yahoo search results in the U.S and Canada, however plans are in the works for other countries.

In June this year, comScare Inc reported the current percentage share of each of the 3 main search engines as follows:
- 64% Google
- 18% Yahoo!
- 12% Bing

With the merge of Yahoo! and Bing, they still will only have less than a third of the search market, so there will be a lot of work and time involved before they stand a chance of toppling Google.

Google is one of the dominant forces online, dwarfing all other search engines.  Even with the creation of Bing, Google remains supreme, and it would take much more than a single entity to topple the giant.  But is Google’s market share slipping?

According to ComScore, Google’s US search percentage slipped from 65.1 in March to 64.4 in April, while Yahoo’s share rose to 17.7% up 0.8% and Bing’s 11.8% up 0.1%.  Although these statistics are rather small, this doesn’t mean they are irrelevant.  If Bing and Yahoo! (more commonly known as “BingHoo”) rolled out their blended engine it would command 29.5%. A big slice of the online search pie.

Even though the battle of the titans has been waging for years, it shows no sign of slowing down or stopping.  NineMSN has release a streamlined search homepage for mobile users.  There has been a noticeable move to make Bing dominant in this new site, being only 1 click away.

These moves haven’t gone unnoticed by Google, which is still leading in new ideas and innovative technologies. Google Goggles, for example, are very cool.

Google has also recently released a new interface design for its homepage, though this has been greeted with mixed responses from netizens.  I even expressed the normal “huh – what the…” when I got to work in the morning.  After watching a good ol’ Google video I now understand that Google is trying to make it easier to find more relevant and recent information.

The list of differences between the search engines could be debated forever – if only they released the search algorithms! One of the more interesting facts is in the difference in short tail keywords.  Bing will give the most relevant search results as well as categories.  Google will tally millions of searches, and give the best results from other users data.

Although the battle is long and fierce, there is little information to show that Google is significantly slipping.  The benefits from a user’s perspective are advantageous that the battle wages on.  The biggest and best weapons and innovations are created at the time of need.  I am looking forward to seeing the changes from both engines, and I am sure you are too.

The latest comScore figures show that in the first quarter of 2010, Facebook became one of the largest display advertisers on the web. It served about 176.3 billion ads compared to Yahoo who could only serve 131.6 billion banner ads. These figures were only measured on display ads within the company website and not through external networks.

According to The Wall Street Journal,

By revenue, Facebook has a long way to go to catch up to its more established rivals. The social-networking site earned more than $500 million in revenue in 2009 and is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billion in 2010, according to people familiar with the matter. Yahoo earned $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009, mostly from advertising.
Still, Facebook served more ads as people spent more time on the site and loaded more pages. The growth also reflects increased demand from both small and large advertisers, says comScore Chief Marketing Officer Linda Abraham.

Although this is still early stages for Facebook in terms of being a proven advertiser that converts, there are a growing number of small businesses that have invested into it for promotional purposes, and affiliate marketers have also invested a budget into it as the site’s audience continues to increase. Similar to the early stages of Google Adsense, the cost of advertising is still cheap so the opportunity to run a successful campaign is cost effective.

For more information on how E-web Marketing can help you create a successful online campaign that will help a cost effective return on investment, contact us now.

Yahoo has just announced that it will no longer be offering its popular and controversial paid inclusion service as of the end of this year. The decision for yahoo to do this was mostly unexplained and has I am sure surprised the many customers utilising its benefits.

Also commonly referred to as “search submit pro” the paid inclusion service in a nutshell enabled yahoo marketers to submit a sites pages and information directly to the search engine index, this was a popular alternative to awaiting the natural search engine spiders to do so naturally.

The ability to submit pages manually enabled Yahoo marketers the benefit of having newly listed products and information added to the organic search index almost immediately, in turn giving instant organic listings and traffic.

What does this mean for Yahoo marketers?

If you are not currently using the ‘paid inclusion’ service this will not mean much. Though now that site previously utilising the service do not have the option to submit products and information directly to the search engine they will now need to find alternate means of doing so. Included in this would be more readily index able site structures and more search engine optimised sites. This will increase the level of competition for yahoo organic listings.

If you are utilising the service then this change will greatly impact the way in which you get organic traffic from the yahoo engine. From less control over the listing titles and descriptions, as these will now be automatically generated from the product and information pages to lagging product indexing speeds and less traffic. Switching to XML site map feeds currently used on other search engines is the best alternative, though not offering anywhere near as much control over your listing as with paid inclusion this will lessen the impact of the transition.

Until the finalisation of the Bing - Yahoo merger, Yahoo will be relying solely on their SLERP algorithm to control their organic search listings. This is a great oportunity for sites owners to apply SLERP specific search engine optimisation techniques to generate additional Yahoo traffic.

Yahoo (for the sake of the article, I’m going to drop the “!”… it’s too frustrating to keep that up) has announced today that their latest version of Yahoo Search has been launched today, with much fanfare. This fanfare has been accompanied by a $100 million ad campaign.

Rather than try and rehash their marketing copy, here are the key highlights directly from Yahoo:

•    Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.
•    Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.
•    Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

After using search engine for a few quick searches, we’re still not impressed. There seems to be too great a reliance on keywords in the URL, and not enough of an examination of on-page content. Search engines are constantly evolving, so we don’t expect it to remain like this forever, however if this is their big launch, colour us unimpressed. On top of the average results, if you look at the search results, they appear in the exact same style as Google’s. So, Yahoo wants us to switch to another search engine that looks the same, but delivers worse results? Hmm, that would take an amazing advertising campaign.

In an attempt to convince us of switching over, Yahoo is dropping over $100 million on an ad campaign. This campaign will work around the rebranding of their new slogan: “It’s Y!ou”

Pause for a second to take in how painful a slogan that is to use. I’m sure someone with a massive marketing budget, powered by some awesome think tank came up with this. Regardless of personal thoughts about the slogan, Yahoo is not taking the beating on its back. They are doing everything they can to compete with Google.

The biggest issue with Yahoo vs Google is that they seem to be attempting to take Google head on, trying to be better than Google, at what Google does best. Bing on the other hand has tried a different tact, and is wooing potential customers by offering different results to Google, in a hope to help them in a different way. Unless Yahoo does something different soon, we question their ability to penetrate the market, and wonder whether Bing may not come in second in the quest for market share. As we have examined in the past, market share in online industries is a big money winner, and has the potential to make or break a brand in the future.

This time last Friday I was at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney; getting ready to see what Yahoo! Search Marketing and ninemsn had for us in their “Get better Bing for your buck” event. I didn’t have any big expectations because we all know the uphill battle for Yahoo & MSN to compete against the search engine giant Google.

We heard from presenters:

* Alex Parsons, Director of MSN products, ninemsn
* Willie Pang, Managing Director, Yahoo! Search Marketing Australia & New Zealand
* Claire Seldon, Sales Director, Yahoo! Search Marketing Australia & New Zealand

They presented their goals for the next 2 to 3 years along with what made Bing different from anything else we’ve seen. Some of the interesting things noted were:

* Bing aims to be more than just a search engine, where it actually helps you make decisions
* 2-3 years goal is to have 20% market share, where they are currently at 14%
* 90% of users engaged with Bing ads
* Bing receives more attention to its PPC ads than Google does (42% vs 28% respectively)
* They expect in the next 12 months, that there will be an increase of 1% in searches, which equates to 20% more queries for your existing PPC campaigns

The latest stats from the US this week shows that Bing is growing, but not enough. “Bing lost market share in June even as it handled more search queries, according to Hitwise, showing the size of the hill Microsoft has to climb.

Google remained the overwhelming favorite among search engines with 74.04 percent of the market in June — that’s up about four-tenths percent since May and nearly 5 percent from a year ago. Still, the number of search queries handled by Bing grew steadily in June, nearly doubling by the end of the month to 6.63 percent. Bing’s average weekly growth rate was 25 percent, according to Hitwise — faster than the growth rate of Microsoft search services (Bing, Live.com and MSN Search) combined.”

Only time will tell if Bing can maintain this performance for the months to come. For more info, click here.

Why do you use search engines? I know myself I use them for many things, but for the vast majority they are great for research. If I was looking for a review of a movie or latest news or information, I already have a bank of my favourite websites that I monitor via RSS feeds. But when I need something new or have to research a topic, there is nothing like search.

Today Techcrunch reported that Yahoo is launching SearchPad - it’s version of Google’s Notebook. Now I myself have never used either product before, but Yahoo has given me some reasons why.

How it works is by determining the refinement of your repeated search queries. From that it can recognise that you are researching and prompt you to leave notes in your SearchPad. The usual features you expect are there such as reordering, cutting and pasting snippets and email sharing.

Whilst those basic features are both useful and simple to use, they are very basic. I would have been expecting something a little bit more Web 2.0 (*shuddering whilst typing that term). I guess it would be nice to see some delicious integration for my favourite links to share on my network there. Or how about team researching with other uses adding as they find relevant articles - think of a group of you and your friends planning a holiday. Heck, why not throw Twitter in there as well like everyone else is.

I really applaud Yahoo for what they have done and are doing in search, but I think with the upcoming Google Wave, this will soon be forgotten.

In another attempt to claw back market share (have they thought about updating their algorithm to deliver decent search results for a change? I digress…) Yahoo! is trialing a new feature to make research easier.

Their new service (currently dubbed Search Pad) is best described as a automated bookmarking tool. Their vision for its usage is that  if someone performs a search, and then further refines the search, Search Pad will realise that it’s a research project, and start taking notes from each of the sites visited.

An example of this would be if you started searching for “hip hop”, then further refined to “southern style hip hop” and then refined to “southern crunk hip hop with lean”, Search Pad would start taking notes, so you would be able to come back and find the information on previous sites you had visited, even if you didn’t bookmark them. This has potential because if you visit a site, and are unaware of its value, you can always find the information later as you become more experienced in your research.

Tom Chi , Yahoo!’s senior director of product management says Search Pad was developed from:

…spending a lot of time studying volunteer users in their homes and offices. [Yahoo!] was able to catch specific stuff about user habits and search behavior it normally wouldn’t have caught in a lab.

Yahoo has posted a demo video of Search Pad working in the wild.

Although interesting in theory, the question remains whether users will change the way they search, or whether they will be frustrated by the pop up box.

For more information, check out this link

One week into her new job as CEO of Yahoo!, Carol Bartz has put a freeze on all salries at the company, Computerworld Reports.

“Based on the current economic environment and our focus on keeping costs in line with revenues, we have decided that providing annual salary increases would not be in the best interests of the company or our shareholders,” said Kim Rubey, a Yahoo spokesman in an email to Computerworld . “This decision is consistent with our broader focus on strategically reducing Yahoo’s costs, an effort that has been underway for some time now.”

This is just one of many challenging decisions Bartz is going to have to make to bring Yahoo! back on track.

TechCrunch has reported on yet another attempt on Yahoo is in the works - this time by a group of Silicon Valley executives that would be funded largely by Microsoft’s money anyhow.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, the investment group would make a takeover bid for Yahoo at a relatively low premium of around 20% to its current price of around $13 per share, valuing the company at just over $20 billion.

A complicated financial structure would be put in place to finance the deal, but the bulk of the cash for the transaction would come from Microsoft as debt.

Some more info on the complexities of the deal can be found on the TechCrunch article.