Not too long ago, Google introduced search plus your world, in an attempt to make their organic search results more social, on the back of Google+. Bing’s new design uses a three-column format to give their users a more social search experience.

Bing redesigned for social search

On the extreme left is the improved web results column, which provides regular organic search results. The second column is a ‘Snapshots’ column. As the name suggests, this column offers the most relevant information related to the user’s search. It also provides integration with services like OpenTable to allow users to actually take the required actions. The third column is a social sidebar, which includes recommendations by friends and experts related to the user’s search.

Bing director Stefan Weitz spoke to Fast Company recently and said that the change was in response to their need to “reinvent search.”

Bing hopes to be able to use the data available on the net to create apps that will provide instant answers to users so that they won’t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they require.

The idea of incorporating the social column on the results page is that users would generally rely on the opinion of their friends far more than they would rely on the opinion of unknown people or on abstract search results.

Ultimately the target that Microsoft has in mind for the new redesign is obviously to increase their search market share by making a dent in Google’s monopoly. As of now, Microsoft has accumulated losses of about $6 billion since the launch of Bing about three years ago.

The Facebook Factor

Incidentally, it is the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who can be credited with helping to create the new Bing design, as he told the developers working on this project “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience.”

Bing’s close ties with Facebook will work strongly in their favour in this case. Unlike Google+, which is still a fledgling, relatively unimportant social network in spite of its claimed high volume of users, Facebook is a truly social network and using the social aspects of Facebook to power Bing gives the new social search engine a lot more credibility than Google plus your world.

Users in the United States were invited to try the new Bing interface yesterday. Let us know what you think of it – will this new feature make you leave Google and start using Bing?

www.bing.com/new

Discussions about this possibility originated after a report on CNBC mentioned the possibility of Microsoft swapping Bing in exchange for shares of Facebook, following the announcement of the Facebook IPO.

Rick Sherlund, who is an analyst with Nomura is in favour of such a deal as he feels it would be a win-win situation for both parties concerned. He further explains that while Facebook is looking to improve their search capabilities, Microsoft is losing money on Bing. The amount of loss is estimated to be $2.5 billion a year.

Facebook, which is already using Bing to power their search results, could improve their search feature further if they had full control over Bing.

On the other hand, Microsoft could continue to make money through search and display ads in the form of TAC [traffic acquisition costs]. Also if Facebook is able to improve their search results, they would give more competition to Google , which itself is good news for Microsoft.

Facebook’s huge user base makes it more capable of improving their search facilities and is thus better equipped to compete with Google, especially where it comes to social search.

As far as the valuation of Bing goes, it is estimated that Microsoft would probably be able to get between 1% to 2% of the Facebook IPO valuation, which is estimated to be between $75 billion to $100 billion.

IgnitionOne, a leading digital marketing solutions firm has just released these figures.

According to these results the Yahoo! Bing alliance has shown an increase of 46.4% increase in US search advertising spend in the first quarter of the year. This growth is more than double the growth that had been seen by both Yahoo! and Bing during the first quarters of 2010 as well as of 2011.

In comparison Google has shown a growth of only 26.6% growth YoY.

It is an established fact that search spend during the first quarter of a year sees a dip after the spike during the holiday season. In spite of this Yahoo! Bing managed a growth of 14.3% increase in spend while Google posted a drop of 5.4% during the same period.

This growth seen by the Yahoo! Bing combine is the best since they started their alliance and could well be attributed to their recent push for increased utilization of broad match keywords. This system of utilization leads to increased competition between marketers, which is of course good for the search engine.

The U.K. markets are following a similar trend, with the Yahoo! Bing alliance posting a growth of 6% during the period.

In the U.S. the Yahoo! Bing alliance has a share of 21.2%, while in the U.K. it holds only 4% of the market share.

During the same period, mobile search activity has also seen a growth, resulting in 12.3% of total search advertising spend, during the first three months of the year.

Tablet devices accounted for 67.4% of total mobile search advertising budgets for the quarter, thus proving that tablets are being adopted at a phenomenal rate.

According to the latest reports on this issue, it is believed that Facebook is trying to improve their search functionality in the hope that this will lure away more users from Google towards Facebook.

This report has of course come through unnamed sources, and one of these sources is a former employee of Google according to ‘Business Week’. 

The said employee of Google is Lars Rasmussen and he is believed to be leading a team of 24 people who are set to revamp the way in which Facebook search operates.

While Google is way ahead of all others including Facebook as far as their search market share is concerned, Facebook hopes to be able to make use of the various apps at their disposal to chip away at Google’s market share slowly but steadily.

Google on their part are trying to integrate their social feature Google+ with their search engine.

The main problem that Facebook is currently facing in this endeavour, is the fact that the privacy settings of users allow them to integrate only those results that a user has set for public viewing.

On the other hand the problem Google has to deal with is the fact that their social site, Google Plus is certainly not as popular as Facebook is.

Only time will tell which of the two sites will eventually reign supreme in this game of one upmanship.

This assumption has been confirmed by studies in the USA that show that in January 2011 mobile devices accounted for only 5.3% of all clicks on Google. In contrast, just 12 months later in December 2011 mobile devices accounted for 12% of all clicks on Google. This increase of 132% is substantial to say the least.

Comparing the share of clicks on device by region. Source: Marin Software

The good news is that ad spend on mobiles has kept pace with this increase and has gone up from 3.4% to 8.7% during the same period. This is an increase of 156%.

It is being predicted that mobile devices will account for 25% of all paid-search clicks on Google by December 2012, and at the same time ad spend on mobiles will account for 23% of Google’s paid-search spend.

Comparing the share of ad spend on device by region. Source: Marin Software

This sudden rise in mobile paid search as well as mobile ad-spend can be attributed to the unprecedented increase in adoption of smartphones and other devices such as tablets.

It is being estimated based on current figures that the number of smartphones in use globally will touch 1 billion between December 2012 and June 2013.

When increasing the ad-spend on mobile devices, advertisers will have to keep in mind the fact that while the cost per click on mobile devices and on tablet devices is less than on desktop computers, the conversion rates are considerably lower on mobiles than on desktops and tablets.

Though tablets are not yet as common as desktops and Internet-connected mobile devices they are growing in popularity and are providing the best overall return on ad spend. Advertisers should keep this fact in mind while planning their ad budgets in future.

The scientific team at Yahoo! has been working on providing a new technology to the search engine. They are aiming to be able to provide answers to queries on their search engine, rather than just providing links.

This new technology will allow the search engine to anticipate the requirements of the user, who is conducting a search operation. The new algorithm will help the engine to find out what it is the user is really interested in. This will be done by continuously monitoring how that user engages with the search results provided.

The system will keep updating itself to provide the most relevant search results. Results that were at the top of the page in the morning may be pushed lower down later in the day, and results that held a lower position may be shifted upwards, depending on user behaviour and what content is most relevant.

For now, these changes have been introduced only for queries related to news and movies. They intend to introduce similar innovations for other categories such as shopping, local, travel and mobile searches in future.

Yahoo! search for ‘Whitney Houstons coroner’ includes News results

While this is indeed a good move, it has come very late in the day. Search giant Google introduced similar features on their search engine almost three years ago. In March 2009, Ori Allon from Google had said, “We’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search,”

At that time itself, Google had changed from traditional keyword searches to ‘semantic search’, which goes beyond just matching keywords, to actually understanding the meaning of a sentence or a combination of words. Later that very year, in December, they started integrating News search results into the organic Web search results pages.

Considering this fact, one wonders how much the new innovations at Yahoo! will be able to help the beleaguered company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is likely to make some changes in the way their search engine processes and answers queries over the next few months.

These changes are expected to affect the websites that depend largely on the Google search engine. The changes will also help them to serve more advertisements thus increasing their revenue.

While the ‘keyword’ search system will continue, Google is planning to introduce a “Semantic Search” feature. This means that the search engine will actually try to understand the meaning of the keyword being used, and thus offer more relevant answers.

Amit Singhal, a top search executive at Google has said that Google has amassed a very large database over the last two years. The engine will now try to coordinate and associate different words with each other. For example, the word Google could be associated with its owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Singhal says that the search engine will now function more like “how humans understand the world.” He also says that while the changes will start in the next few months the entire process will be long drawn out, and will enter the “next generation of search.”

It is hoped that this new search system will provide more value based answers than it has done in the past. In this respect they hope to be able to keep up with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Some experts believe that this move will help Google to keep up with the fast-evolving social networking scene where the prominent players already have a huge database. Others are a bit more sceptical, saying that Google already does this to quite a large extent so not much will change.

It is not yet known how these changes will affect the advertisements being served on the search engine. However, it may be assumed that once the engine better understand s what a user is looking for, they will be able to serve more relevant ads.

Google has often updated their search algorithms in the past. Recently, they have begun to provide answers to users based on their activity on Google Plus.

This new update will be based on their acquisition of Metaweb Technologies, which has a database of 12 million entities including books, movies, celebrities and other data.

It remains to be seen how effective these changes really are. After all, Bing has been using similar semantic technology but has failed to really make a dent in Google’s market share.

Now, when a user searches for a symptom or a group of symptoms, Google’s organic search results will show a list of possible causes for those symptoms.

In other words, Google will offer a differential diagnosis for a given set of symptoms.

To explain how the system will function, Google has given the example of a search being conducted for right sided abdominal pain, in a blog post.

While this is being done with a view to help users, one needs to make sure that the search does not end up causing more confusion.

It is very likely that a user conducting a search for some symptoms, may consider the symptom to arise from a relatively minor problem, which may have been placed higher on the search results page. The user may thus neglect taking prompt expert advice, and delay taking treatment and further aggravating a potentially serious illness.

On the other hand, some users may consider themselves to be suffering from a major and dangerous illness, and unnecessarily stress themselves over what may eventually turn out to be a minor matter.

Google has clarified that the results will be algorithmically presented. The results have not been provided by a medical doctor, who is qualified to make a judgement about the actual diagnosis taking into account several points such as clinical findings and the results of various investigations.

While the effort being made by Google is noteworthy, users must remember to use this only as a broad guideline and not as a replacement for an expert opinion. After all ‘little knowledge is dangerous’.

While Google continues to hold the number one spot in this market, with a share of 66.2%, Bing now holds the second position with a 15.2% market share, and is followed by Yahoo! with a 14.1% market share.

Google and Bing have shown a marginal growth over the previous month by 0.3 and 0.1% respectively. Yahoo! has seen a fall of 0.4% in market share. These figures are valid for the Explicit Core Search.

Numbers for Total Core Search are slightly different. In this category, Google continues to hold the first slot with a 66.2% market share, but Yahoo! is second with a 16.0% market share and is followed by Bing with a 13.8% market share.

In both categories, Ask Network and AOL Inc. hold the fourth and fifth places respectively.

Lopez narrowly beat another comeback queen, Mariah Carey, into second place and Take That into third to be named the “World’s Greatest Musical Comeback Act” in a study of online searches since 2004.

The first global ranking of the world’s “Greatest Musical Comeback Act” comes from analysing over one billion online searches via Google by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency.

The study also shows that, above all, the death of a musical star is by far the biggest driver of online music searches. Searches for Amy Winehouse after her death equalled those for Jennifer Lopez’s comeback and searches for Michael Jackson almost quadrupled those for Lopez.

So what constitutes a big comeback? According to Farhad Divecha, AccuraCast’s Managing Director, “It is when a previously well-known act registers a low starting search index which subsequently goes through the roof for a sustained period of time. We have been careful to include acts that have had true comebacks not just more or less successful periods in their careers. Using figures from Google we have been able to analyse rises and falls in popularity and produce a unique league table”.

The Jennifer Lopez comeback began in early 2011 when she released the single “On the Floor” which achieved worldwide success and gave Lopez her first top ten on the Billboard chart since 2003. Combined with her stint as a judge on TV hit “American Idol”, Jennifer’s comeback is still happening.

Mariah Carey’s singing career was believed to be over in 2002 after poor reviews for her last two albums. She came back with the critically acclaimed album, “The Emancipation of Mimi” and has rarely looked back since.

Take That had split up in 1996 and after almost ten years apart re-formed as a foursome to release, “Beautiful World”, which would sell over 3 million copies. Their musical comeback continued when Robbie Williams completed the original line-up and another album and a record breaking tour followed.

In the U.S, Lopez and Carey saw off comeback competition from Ricky Martin, New Kids On The Block and ex-Beach Boy now soloist Brian Wilson.

The U.K. top five after Take That featured Blur, The Spice Girls, Rage Against The Machine and Take That ‘leader’, Gary Barlow.

“The UK results feature more bands than the U.S”, adds Divecha, “They also show the importance of sustaining a comeback. The Spice Girls reunion was just that and Rage Against The Machine saw incredible interest around a Christmas record before immediately falling back to previous low levels.

“Gary Barlow is interesting. His comeback is via Take That but also due in part to his X Factor appearances. His score is increasing but unlikely to ever get close to the Take That total.

USA’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

UK’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

Back in 2004, when Google and online shopping started growing, the trend started becoming visible. Since then, the volume of searches for ‘costumes’ around the Halloween period have spiked higher and higher, year upon year.

Comparative volume of searches for ‘Costume’ in 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011

A walk down the English High Street today reflects the growing popularity of what was once considered to be a solely American “festival”. Similarly, the number of children and adults dressing up on Halloween day is also growing steadily.

If the numbers to date are anything to go by, 2011 seems on its way to become the biggest ever day for online fancy dress retailers in the UK. Considering the corresponding search volume in October 2010, this means that over11 million searches for ‘costumes’ will be carried out in the UK during the month of October 2011 alone.

Spikes in search volumes around this period aren’t limited to regular Web search. Image searches spike even more sharply in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of October and product searches also get bumped up a good bit from the last week of September till the 3rd week of October.

As more retailers rush to capitalise on the opportunity, costs per click also spike during the same time. Recognised brands, retailers with guaranteed delivery and those with popular costumes in stock are the most likely winners in such a situation.

Action buttons will allow people to complete a task related to a search query. The Bing algorithm will help the search engine to predict the possible tasks that the user could be undertaking and then the action buttons will simplify the process.

Action buttons for Hertz car rental on Bing

Bing director Stefan Weitz says that Bing will try to provide more than just simple blue links in their search results.

To start with, these action buttons will be available only on seven major search categories of popular search sites. These categories are airlines, couriers, restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels.

Based on the internal data of searches collected by them, Bing will then decide which are the most popular actions conducted by users on those sites. Those action buttons will then show up in the SERP.

Action buttons for Delta Airlines on Bing

Bing hopes to be able to provide more than just links to other pages, through these action buttons. The action buttons will aim to take the user deeper into the content. In some cases, the action buttons will be the same as the site links, while in other cases they will connect to a new page on the site. For example, booking a flight and viewing the status of a flight are both site links and action buttons in the screenshot above, whereas ‘Check In’ is an action button that does not exist in the extended site links for Delta Airlines.

The overlap between site links and action buttons may seem confusing and might make users wonder why Bing bothered with the buttons when the links were already there. Could it possibly be that Bing has run out of ideas and is now resorting to trivial changes in search results just to be able to make headlines?

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and most other online advertising platforms have very strict editorial policies that prohibit the advertising of narcotics. AdWords’ editorial policy prohibits the promotion of drugs, drug paraphernalia and aids to pass drug tests. This includes drug accessories, drugs, and herbal drugs.

The medical marijuana industry is a multi-billion dollar industry in itself, and now, the Medical Cannabis Network, (MCN) is launching an online advertising opportunity in the form of a site called Cheeba.com.

“MCN was created to fill the gaps in the marijuana industry, and what we’ve been seeing over the years is that cannabis-based businesses are continually denied services from online ad networks,” said Jason Draizin, Chairman and CEO of MCN.

Cheeba.com will be the first search engine to allow users to search the entire database of medical marijuana related products. It will function as an advertising platform for all legal marijuana-based products and companies. It will also introduce a keyword-based advertising platform similar to Google AdWords.

Medical marijuana is legal in California and several other states in the USA. The new search engine will provide an opportunity for dispensaries and marijuana doctors as well as ancillary businesses such as law firms, consumer goods providers and educational institutions that want to target Americans who favour the legalisation of marijuana.

Instant Pages will be available by default in the latest stable version of Google Chrome. This feature will help users to save precious time by loading the pages they are searching for faster than before. In fact, as the name of the service suggests, the page will open almost instantly.

When a person conducting a search clicks on the topmost result, if that result has been determined to be the most likely one to be clicked by the searcher, Google will ensure that the page will open almost immediately when clicked.

This will be possible through pre-rendering technology available in the latest version of Chrome.

Only when it is almost certain that a user will click on the first search result, will Instant Pages start to load that result even before the user clicks on it. In cases where the first result on the Google search results page is not an obvious choice, Google will conserve computing power and let the page load in its natural time as and when the user clicks on it.

Navigational queries and brand-related searches are likely to benefit from this speed improvement most of all, as they are the sort of queries where searchers tend to click on the topmost organic result.

This should give Chrome an edge over other browsers, as users are always impatient for their pages to open, and when they’re performing a navigational query, reducing the time to reach their destination could have a significant net positive impact as it would make the act of searching akin to or even faster than typing the website address directly into the URL / search bar on Chrome.

It was found that during the second quarter of the year, total retail search volume has gone up by 27% compared to the figures during the same period last year.

The major part of this growth has come from the increase in mobile searches, which grew by 216% compared to the same period last year.

The search volume for online retailers has gone up by 21% compared to the 14% increase in search volumes for multi-channel retailers, who use the internet as well as stores.

International mobile searches are also on the rise. U.K. retailers being searched by consumers based overseas. There was an increase of 34% in this sector of search. On the other hand the number of U.K. based consumers making overseas searches grew by 76% during the second quarter of 2011.

London remains the core of online shopping in the U.K. registering 36% of all retail searches.

Wedding dresses, garden furniture and other DIY articles are high on the list of retail searches being carried out. Among electronic goods, the iPad 2 that was launched last March, and the iPhone 5 which is due to be released in September are reportedly the most searched items.

According to Peter Fitzgerald, retail director for Google, even though volumes dipped in April due tot eh warm weather as well as bank holidays, and then picked up again in May, the volumes of mobile search remained constant through out, due to the ‘always on’ nature of mobile users.

A blog post on the RKGBlog contained a screenshot of ads being displayed within the organic search results.

The ads have been placed along with the organic (unpaid) listing results. The word “Ad” is placed on the right hand side of the sponsored result. However, it is not very prominent and can easily be missed.

Image courtesy RKG: Bing displaying ads within organic search engine results

In the past, Yahoo! and a handful of second-tier search engines had tried a service called “paid inclusion”, whereby ads were included in the search results, but there were no ranking factors. Yahoo! withdrew the service in 2009, due to its controversial nature.

Popular blogger Danny Sullivan had also voiced disapproval of Google using paid inclusion in their search results.

Currently, Google does include ads within their organic search results, but they are highlighted in a different colour above the organic results, differentiating them from the organic results and making the fact that they’re ads more obvious than the marking that Bing is using.

This format is currently in the testing stage and is shown only to a few users. A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

If Microsoft does choose to go forward and roll this format out worldwide, it could have serious ramifications. For one, click-through rates on Bing ads are likely to rise. If Google feels the pressure and chooses to do something similar, AdWords advertisers could benefit greatly while the value of SEO could fall.

The Harry Potter series has been a huge success both in print as well as on screen for the last ten years or so.

The last of these movies has just been released last week. This has fueled the interest in the subject, leading to a huge number of searches being conducted across various search engines.

The searches being conducted ranged from a search for the order in which the movies were released to searches on the various characters and actors in the movie.

According to Yahoo! Trends the most popular characters being searched are

1. Harry Potter
2. Hermione Granger
3. Luna Lovegood
4. Draco Malfoy
5. Ginny Weasley
6. Lord Voldemort
7. Hagrid’s Dragon
8. Ron Weasley
9. Bellatrix Lestrange
10. Professor Severus Snape

Among the actors being searched, Emma Watson leads the pack followed by Daniel Radcliffe and Robert Pattinson. Emma Watson is being searched for her ‘hair cut’ and ‘style’ apart from the fact that her turning 21 is also being searched.

Again, according to Yahoo! the most popular Harry Potter titles are

1. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” (2007/2010 and 2011)
2. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (2005/2009)
3. “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone” (1997/2001)
4. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (2000, M 2005)
5. “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (1998/2002)
6. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (2003/2007)
7. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (1999/2004)

Sites like Google Trends and Twitter also reported a surge of interest in the Harry Potter series.

While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.

In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.

However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.

This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.

A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.

In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.

Bing will now provide English language search results on Baidu in China.

This deal quite obviously implies that Baidu is desirous of spreading their reach beyond the traditional Chinese speaking market.

As of now, Baidu controls about 80% of the market share in China, followed by Google which holds about 19% share in the Chinese search engine market.

Following a dispute over censorship issues, with the Chinese government last year, Google had put a halt to their operations in China. Users who now enter search terms in the search bar are directed to Google’s Hong Kong search site.

In the worldwide market, Google controls about 91.07% of the search market, while Bing controls only about 3.21%. The tie up with Baidu, will give Bing access to China’s internet user base, which has been estimated to be around 480 million, thus improving their over all market share a little.

It is most likely that Bing will have to follow the censorship guidelines, Google had earlier objected to.

Financial details of the Bing Baidu partnership are not yet available.

Yahoo! search trends reported that there was a spike of 100,000% on the topic of Osama Bin Laden, making him the most searched person of the day. Notably, about 20% of the searches were conducted by teenagers and a total of 25% of searches were by those below 24 years of age.

The commonly asked questions were about confirmation of his death as well as how he died and who killed him. Additionally, people also asked about his age, height, wife, children and his biography. People were also curious to know whether his name was spelled ‘Osama’ or ‘Usama’.

1 in 3 searches asking “how did Osama Bin Laden die” were from users aged between 13 – 17 years while 40% of searches asking “who killed Osama” were queried by users between 13 and 20 years of age.

This interest by youngsters is quite understandable, as most of them may have been too young to remember the events of 9/11 that took place almost 10 years ago. Even those who do remember would have lost track, unless they had been personally affected by it.

Twin Towers dominated the New York skyline before the Al Qaeda attack

Other common searches on the day were about Pakistan – maps, news, Islamabad, Abbottabad and the house in which Osama Bin Laden lived. People also carried out searches about the events of 9/11, Ground Zero, the Twin Towers and World Trade Centre in New York, all of which were iconic of the act of terrorism initiated by Bin Laden.

Google also reported a 1 million percent rise in searches for Osama BinLaden between 7.30 and 8.30 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday.

A report from the banking firm Macquaire Group, using data from Efficient Frontier, has found that at present, mobile paid search spend accounts for 5% of paid search spend in the U.S.

It has also been estimated that this could further increase to 10% by the end of 2011. In actual terms, mobile paid spend could then be worth $1.1 billion.

Quite expectedly, it has been found that Google is the major stakeholder in this market with about 97% of the market share, while Yahoo! and Bing jointly hold about 3.2% of the market share.

95% of searches on the iPhone come through Google. Of these, 50% are from the tool bar, 42% from Google’s home page and less than 10% from Google Apps. On Android devices, the number of searches through Google is likely to be even closer to 100%.

If Bing manages to tie up with Apple to become their default search engine, a large share of the mobile search volume could automatically go to Bing. Or, iPhones could lose favour with some users for providing a poorer search experience.

CPC for mobile search is currently higher than that for PC searches in some markets, while click through rates for mobile search are lower than for PC searches.

A Growing Monopoly

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that mobile search is growing very fast. It now accounts for about 15% of search across all categories.

This underscores the importance of mobile search. The fact that Google’s starting off in this growing market with such a strong position can only mean one thing – its position will get stronger, at the expense of all competition, and as a result, CPC rates will go up.

Advertisers stand to lose in such a situation, as the lack of a viable alternative will leave businesses with no choice but to advertise on Google AdWords if they wish to build a mobile search presence.

Users too will suffer in the long run, as the lack of competition will stunt development in mobile search, as the incumbent, Google, will have little reason to continue to innovate in that space.

When users click on ‘Deals’ they are shown a list of the special offers that are currently available in their locality.

Microsoft has started this feature in association with DealMap, which features deals from sites like Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com. The feature will offer about 200,000 deals across 14,000 cities.

Since the feature has only just been launched, the service is going through some teething troubles. For instance, a few of the deals being offered have already expired or the deal information may not yet have been optimised for mobile access. Given a little time, it is quite certain that these problems will be ironed out.

While the new service is compatible with both iPhone and Android based handsets, it is, quite surprisingly, not compatible with Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system. This incompatibility arises because the service is is built on HTML5, which is not compatible with Windows Phone 7. It is expected that Microsoft will soon add an update that will allow users to access this feature through the Windows Phone 7 and Internet Explorer 9.

Irrespective of the minor shortcomings of this feature, Microsoft is undoubtedly one up on their rival Google as Google has not yet got a similar feature. It has been rumoured, though, that Google plans to launch a similar service called “Google Offers” very soon, which might explain why Bing rushed to get Deals out in the market before it was fully developed to support Microsoft’s own devices.

Microsoft also plans to start a similar service in association with eBay.

According to Google, Microsoft has been keeping track of what people are searching for on Google, and then simply copying the top search results of these queries on Google to improve their own search results.

Google claims that they first noticed that something was amiss, last summer, when a search for a misspelt query (torsorophy) returned the same results on Bing as it did on Google. Only, in the case of Google, the spelling was corrected (tarsorrhaphy), but not on Bing.

To cross check this, Google later set up a “sting operation” where they ran some synthetic queries on unusual search terms that wouldn’t normally be queried by any human, and the top position for these queries, was given as a web page which actually had no connection to the search query whatsoever.

A few days later it was found that Bing also showed the same web page as the top result for that query.

Bing copies Google results for the query ‘hiybbprqag’

This seems to indicate, that Bing is not only keeping tabs on what people are searching for on Google, but are also using Google search results to improve their own.

Google engineers speculate that that this is done either through the Bing Toolbar or the Suggested Sites feature of IE 8. Both of these features collect data from users and return it to Microsoft to improve the user’s search experience.

The Google Toolbar and Chrome browser also collect similar information from Google’s users, but Google claims that this information is not used to improve their search results, which is most probably a lie – search suggestions and clicks from the Google toolbar are almost certainly counted and used to improve organic results.

Microsoft on their part have categorically stated that they “do not copy Google results”. They further explain that Microsoft uses over a 1,000 different signals to create their search algorithm. While features such as the Bing Toolbar and Suggested Sites, do help them to decide their search rankings, it is possible that in the case of rare and unusual queries, as those used in Google’s “sting operation” there may be an overlap of results.

Where Microsoft’s explanation fails, though is in the fact that no human user would have been likely to search for those special search queries before Google set them up. How then did Bing derive the Google results without any historical clicks that were tracked to “improve” their user experience?

As far fetched as this may sound, it is indeed their next major project for the coming year.

Google’s V.P. of Geographic and Local Services Marissa Mayer, explained that this new feature would have to make use of a user’s browsing history as well as his location which is now easily available based on GPS. Based on this information, Google will try and predict what sort of information a user is likely to require shortly, and they will provide it accordingly.

Marissa Mayer says that “We’re started to play around with some new concepts in how to find information,”

She said at the LeWeb’10 conference in Paris that this is called ‘Contextual Discovery’.

The idea is to push information to people. For instance, in a restaurant, they could provide not only the restaurant menu to the user, but also a ‘social menu’ which could tell what other clients have ordered and whether or not, that dish has been appreciated.

On a PC this information could be provided in a pop-up panel on the browser. On a mobile this information would be based on the location.

While providing such ‘unasked for’ search results Google will have to be careful to make sure they do not push too hard, and end up putting off their clients by disturbing them.

Another possible problem which Google may eventually have to face is regarding user privacy, especially if they provide details like the ‘social menu’ in the above cited example.

When users look up data on words like ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ they do not receive any results. There is no data available for these search terms. However, they do show data for the word ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’.

Yahoo! Search Clues for “Gay” and “Lesbian”

It is, of course, possible that users may assume that these terms have been avoided deliberately with a view to maintaining a family atmosphere, where people need not be embarrassed by the availability of certain search words that have a sexual connotation.

While this attitude itself is quite surprising in this day and age, what is even more surprising is the fact that words such as ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ are very much present.

It is not known whether this act on the part of Yahoo! was accidental or intentional. However, once this fact becomes known to certain sections of users, it may lead to some protests regarding discrimination.

Not The Only Prude

Yahoo! Clues is certainly not the first to avoid the use of certain words that may suggest adult content. In the past, Google Instant, Google Trends and Apple have also disallowed the use of words indicating sexual context without an express confirmation from the user that they wish to view non-family-safe content.

When a correspondent from ZDNet contacted Yahoo! about these omissions, they received a reply to the effect that Yahoo! Clues was still in the beta testing stage and their data is not yet comprehensive. New search terms and data are likely to be added in due course. Yahoo! officials refused to confirm or deny whether terms such as ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ would eventually be included.

When Ask.com was first founded in 1996 it was called Ask Jeeves and they were the first search engine to offer a Q & A format. However, after seeing the success that Google enjoyed with their algorithmic search service, Ask Jeeves chose to follow suit and soon rebranded to Ask.com.

After years of trying to compete with Google, Yahoo! and more recently with Microsoft, in late July 2010, Ask.com decided to restart the Q & A service, alongside their algorithmic search engine. They have now decided to focus their resources exclusively on the Q & A service. Google or Bing will now be used to power searches on Ask.com.

Rumours of a possible acquisition by Microsoft had circulated online last year. However, nothing came of that, and neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft formed any alliance with Ask Jeeves. Google continues to supply sponsored link advertising in addition to Ask.com’s own advertising programme.

Ask.com’s President Doug Leeds says, “This is the best use of our scarce resources.” In the past, Ask.com used to serve close to 2 million users a day. But in spite of their advanced features that provided a seamless search experience, they could not continue to compete with Google, which holds about 65% of the market share in the USA and over 90% in Europe.

In effect, they will be shutting down their offices in Edison, NJ and Hang Zhou China. Some of the staff from those offices will be asked to relocate to the Bay Area headquarters. About 130 employees are expected to lose their jobs.

Microsoft adCenter provides paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing, and their premium partners in the U.S. and Canada. Bing supplies the organic search results for Yahoo! Search.

The combined offering allows advertisers to reach a far greater audience with a single ad buy than they could before the alliance took place.

Since this arrangement has been successful – as successful as it could get in the presence of Google – in the U.S. and Canada, Microsoft and Yahoo! are now contemplating a similar formula in other regions. They intend to start this facility early next year in certain markets within Europe, such as the U.K., France and Ireland. They hope to be able to extend this service to all of Europe by the end of 2012.

Advertisers have been advised to continue to manage their Microsoft adCenter accounts with their existing support contacts as the holiday season approaches.

Once Microsoft and Yahoo! are ready to roll out their new facility in Europe next year, they will inform advertisers about the changes 3 months before the transition actually takes place.

While the combined market share of Yahoo! and Bing in the USA is more than 25%, the two search engines account for almost nothing in most of Europe. Most advertisers do not even consider advertising on either platform, and even when they do, impressions and click volumes are found to be dismal. The search alliance might get some interest, mostly out of curiosity and the hope for a serious Google replacement, but it is unlikely to make any significant impact.

Nevertheless, advertisers who do use the service have been advised to keep their contact preferences in ‘My Settings’ up to date, in order to receive regular updates and avoid inconvenience of any kind.

These new Place Search results will be shown automatically when Google is able to gauge that a local search is being carried out. If that does not happen the user can use the ‘Places’ link in the left hand panel of the search results page.

Place Search groups together search results around a given location. The results are marked with red pins on a map in the right-hand column, where traditionally the 4th-6th sponsored links were placed. The listings are also accompanied by a snippet that can include a 2-line description, the business logo, address, phone number, ratings stars and links to reviews and the official Place Page.

Google Web search with Place listings

Certain search queries deliver a results page that contains a number of Place listings followed by just three organic search results. Others follow the older format of a map with up to 10 local listings followed by the usual 10 organic search results.

The update will show users between 30 to 40 links on a single page, saving time for the user but making the search results page busier and perhaps full of too many options and too many different logos and colours fighting for attention. This is quite a stark contrast to the early days of Google when simplicity was key to success.

Google also rolled out an ad service that will help small and medium sized businesses in particular. The new ad service, called ‘Boost’, allows businesses to place local business ads and show up when users conduct local searches in their specific business category. Place Search and Boost work well in conjunction with each other to help users as well as advertisers.

It has been estimated that over 20% of searches on Google are related to location. It makes sense for Google to pay attention to this corner of its market and to improve services there. What is surprising, though, is that rather than introducing business logos, images and videos in the sponsored links, they’ve chosen to draw attention back to organic search results and even pushed sponsored links below the fold on the right-hand side of the page.

Jeff Kelisky, General Manager of Mapping and Local for Microsoft began by stating the main focus of the future for Bing maps. He stated that in place already was a framework on which developers can produce apps that use location information to produce and develop exciting and innovative applications that are grounded in maps. Before showing some examples of these applications he outlined a number of substantial changes to Bing Maps.

Changes

• A more fluid experience –  The whole user experience of Bing Maps is now a  smoother operation. For example, when zooming in on an area Bing Maps now turns into the bird’s eye view of the area upon reaching a set zoom in response to users comments and demands.
• Drag and drop directions – It is now possible to drop one pin in one area, and a second pin on another area of the map and ask for either walking or driving directions from pin 1 to pin2.
• New StreetSide experience (even Jeff Kelisky referred to it as “Street View” a few times!) – Currently only working in some parts of the US, but data is being collected in major cities.
• Map Apps – applications that run alongside Bing Maps. This is where the rest of the presentation focused.

Map Apps

Various applications can now be created with Bing Maps as a grounding. For example, the Twitter app displays locational tweets on the map itself. It is possible within the app to search tweets containing certain words. Bing Maps then displays these tweets with a flag icon.

Another application enables users to calculate the cost of a taxi journey from one place to another such as from Heathrow Airport to Victoria Station. It gave a pretty accurate estimate.

Windows Phone 7

A demo of Windows Phone 7 followed, with emphasis on how it uses Bing Maps. Window Phone 7 triangulates user location with GPS as well as using SIM information, giving a more accurate location of the user.

A hard “search” button is built into all Windows Phone 7 devices. While in Bing Maps, users can press this and instantly start searching their query.

For example, if you were out and searched for Pizza in Bing Maps, a map pops up with local pizza houses labelled. With these labels, Bing Maps also pulls the phone number, email address, reviews and what else is close to said location from Bing’s local database.

Three software developers then talked about how they used Bing Maps.

Earthware

Brian Norman – Technical Director, Earthware, spoke about how they use Bing Maps to create theworldcupmap.com

He stated that the aim of the project was to provide a “ground breaking mapping experience”, one in which all areas of news and video was pulled in and displayed on a map. He used the term “mapumentary”, the idea of information gathered from other sources and displayed on a map. For examples users could click on a stadium, while on the maps and see information about the games played as well as numerous information videos associated with that area.

Shoothill

Rod Plummer, Managing Director at Shoothill, started out by stating that there is a wealth of data out on the Internet, but that it is all over the place and hard to locate. A use of Bing Maps is to display some of this information on a map. He gave the example of displaying a heat map of MP’s expenses. He they gave a more detailed account of his work with MSN to produce maps about the Battle of Britain

http://news.uk.msn.com/in-depth/world-war-two/battle-of-britain/default.aspx

The Battle of Britian Map contains a current-day aerial view. On top of that, is a box in which users can select different maps or flight plans by dragging the box over the map and selecting which map or flight plan they want to see. The user can accurately see historical maps in relation to their present day grounding.

Fortune Cookie

Ben Morris, Head of technology at Fortune Cookie spoke about their use of Bing Maps to create a Journey Planner for their client, Europcar. The Journey Planner needed to be mobile as well as social so that users could upload their own photos, comments or recommendations.

The software allows a user to plan a drive while on holiday, showing accurate road maps, comments and recommendations as well as views along the way. He stated that users enjoyed a deep level of engagement and the average user time with the product was between 5 and 10 minutes.

Questions and Answers

A member of the audience asked whether  Bing itself would archive maps and produce a historical map archive. Jeff Kelisky said that this would be up to developers themselves to produce, but that the data would be available if a developer wanted to do this.

Another question was regarding user generated content. It was said that in the future it could be possible for members of the public to alert companies or councils to issues in their area via Bing Maps. For example, alerting a council of some dumped rubbish.

When Bing made their announcement, Satya Nadella, the Senior VP of Online Services, informed users that their search results would be enhanced by the ‘Like’ feature on Facebook.

In other words, when users conduct a search on Bing, they will be able to see which of their Facebook friends has ‘Liked’ the product or service being searched. Results that were ‘Liked’ by these friends will also be placed at the top of the search results page as they are likely to have more value for that user.

“Liked” results on Bing let friends help users decide which movie to watch

Thus, certain search results on Bing will now be personalised for individual users. This Facebook ‘Likes’ feature will be active only when the user has signed in to a Facebook account.

Another feature which Bing has also introduced, in conjunction with Facebook, is the ability to search more easily for people. Bing will now make it possible for users to search people by name and will bring up results from Facebook that are more likely to be the searcher’s friends. Users will then be able to add that person as a friend, or send the person a message directly from the Bing search results page.

Bing social profile search

Google’s newly integrated social search feature shows users conducting a search on Google for certain trending topics an indication of the pages popularity by including the number of times the page has been shared next to the page’s title in the search results. This social shares link, however, appears only on the main search results page and not in Google News.

Google social search results indicating number of times the article was shared

When users clicks on the ‘shared by’ link they are taken to the Google real time search results page for that link, which will show the real-time sharing activity for that particular page.

Unlike the Bing feature, this is a general sharing feature and it does not specify who has shared the article. It also does not give the user any specific information from friends whose opinion the user is more likely to rely on.

Bing is gradually rolling out the social search feature, and will currently limit the roll out to users in the USA only. Google’s feature is already live in the USA and UK.

Why Google’s latest social search feature doesn’t tie-in better with their social graph and show shares from contacts within a user’s social circle is not clear. Even with social graph integration, Google’s offering would rate second-class, at best, as Microsoft has a very big advantage here owing to their relationship with Facebook.

Users typically find it much easier to enter the site address directly into their search toolbar, and find the site at the first shot, rather than go about the task in a round and about manner, where they would have to make several attempts and receive many directions before they reach their target site.

Navigational searches are defined as search queries containing a website address. 15% of the total number of searches on the top 5 search engines in the United States were found to be navigational queries.

While it is certainly true, that queries (and hence websites) with the suffix .com are the most popular, other suffixes are also steadily gaining in popularity. In fact, of the approximately 1.9 billion navigational searches conducted across the 5 major search engines in the month of July, 83% of the addresses had the suffix .com. But, this figure is actually down from 85% in July 2009. Other suffixes are growing at a good rate. For instance, the domain extension .edu has gone up by over 80%, .org has increased by 12% and .tv has gone up by almost 85%.

These findings indicate that brands that are interested in reaching a large number of users, and want to corner a larger share of the market for themselves should invest in advertising on keywords containing website addresses, as this investment will certainly prove to be worthwhile in the long run.

With the number of Twitter accounts reaching 145 million, and continuing to grow, it would be difficult for users to decide which accounts they would like to follow and also to know whether or not the account they are following is genuine or not.

Bing recommending “influential” and “popular” Twitter users

Bing social will help these users by now recommending people who they think the user would be interested in following, based on the search he conducts.

When a user types a particular query, Bing will recommend three people related to the query, who would be most influential or popular with regard to that query.

Representatives of Bing have said that this facility has been “developed, to help consumers identify the most influential people to watch on Twitter based on their interests.”

The list of these recommended people is available on in the right hand panel of the Bing Social page.

The service also lets users know, whether or not the account they are following is genuine, by means of a blue and white check mark next to the name.

A similar suggestion feature has already been available on Twitter for a while now.

The service, known as ConnectedDrive, has allowed BMW car owners to conduct local searches while they are on the move in their cars.

Google services inside a BMW car

The new services will initially be available in Germany, France Italy, Austria and the U.K. and will be included in every new BMW car which is equipped with a professional navigation system from September 2010.

One of the new features being added is search suggestions. This facility is similar to what is available on desktop computers. When a person types the first few characters of his search query in the search box, he will be provided with suggestions. Only, in this case the suggestions will be based on the current location of the car. This feature will definitely speed up the search, as the user will not be required to spell out lengthy names while he is driving the car. Also a user can conduct the search even if he is not sure of the exact name or spelling of the place he is looking for.

Another interesting feature which is being introduced in the ConnectedDrive service is ‘Pictures at your destination’. As the name suggests, this service provides the user with detailed photographs of the location he is searching for, including satellite images from Street View when available. These pictures will make it easy for the user to identify the place when he actually reaches it even though he may never have been there before.

The search results also provide useful information such as the postal address, telephone number, ratings and reviews, facilities available etc about the place.

Google also continues to try and make new innovations, to add more services to their local search feature, which would prove to be more useful to their users and car drivers.

These added features should benefit BMW, as new car buyers would certainly give some consideration to these features while deciding which brand of car they wish to buy.

In effect this means that Bing now occupies the number 2 slot, which had so far been held by Yahoo! In the search engine market.

The Nielsen report shows that in the month of August 2010, Bing held 13.9% of the market share, which is ahead of Yahoo! which had only 13.1% of the market share.

In the month of July however, Yahoo! had still been ahead of Bing with 14.3% of the market share.

Over the last year, Yahoo! has lost a considerable part of its market share, which was 16% last August, but is only 13.1% this August.

Bing on the other hand has been growing steadily from 10.7% last August to 13.9% this August.

The Microsoft Yahoo! search deal which was announced in July last year, has now become operational in the U.S. and Canada, due to which Yahoo! searches are powered by Bing. This could have further contributed to the loss of market share which Yahoo! has suffered.

In fact the combined market share of Bing and Bing powered Yahoo! search results now stands at 26%.

While the Nielsen report is based only on search queries generated by users, the comScore reports include contextual search also. The comScore figures thus vary considerably from Nielsen, and these figures indicate that Yahoo! still held the number two slot in the month of July with a considerable margin.

Needless to say, Google continues to hold the number 1 slot with about 65% of the market share.

Yahoo! started transitioning some of the back-end functions of Yahoo! Search to Microsoft last week and the transition is now complete. As a result of this, all English Web, image and video searches conducted on Yahoo! in the U.S.A. and Canada will now be powered by Microsoft Bing.

The search transition will take place in other countries in due course.

In the U.S. and Canada, searches conducted on Yahoo! now have a “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of the search results page.

“Powered by Bing” written at the bottom of Yahoo! search results

However, Yahoo! features such as Search Assist and site filters will continue to be available. Yahoo! will also continue to support SearchMonkey, Site Explorer – the counter part of which has long been disabled by Microsoft since the days of Live Search – and the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Yahoo! is still working towards finalising the revenue model for Yahoo! Search BOSS and they will continue to offer new tools in future.

The transition between Yahoo! And Microsoft has gone very smoothly and it is hoped that the joint service could compete significantly with Google.

The deal was cleared, with regard to the Anti-trust laws, by the concerned authorities in February 2010. The two firms have now started testing both organic as well paid search results from Microsoft and Yahoo! Search.

The basic change which will now occur is that the search results from Microsoft’s search engine Bing will be displayed on the Yahoo! Search results page. The page will however continue to retain the features of Yahoo! Search along with its rich content and the various tools available on Yahoo! Search.

The tests are being conducted only in the U.S. and Canada and will reach up to 25% of users of Yahoo! Search.

Users will also find some difference in the search results display as Yahoo! is simultaneously testing some new configurations.

Users will be able to differentiate between the results received from Yahoo! And Microsoft as the results originating from Microsoft will be placed in boxes, while the other results will be from the Yahoo! Search Engine.

Yahoo1 will also be extending this combined search experience to users of Yahoo! Search Mobile in the near future.

It is hoped that the testing of organic search results in the U.S. and Canada will be completed by August or latest by September and for paid search results by October 2010.

When the site was first launched in 1996, it featured a unique question-and-answer format for providing information, and was called Ask Jeeves. Users could ask questions using natural language queries, and, as the name suggests, the site would provide appropriate answers.

In 2005, the site was re-branded Ask.com. Users could still ask general questions and the site would try to provide satisfactory answers.

Over the years, several changes occurred until it finally became a general search engine. However, the market share they have managed to corner is extremely small and thus they have decided to go back to the original Q&A format.

The new Ask Jeeves site

The answers provided to the questions asked will be collected from the Ask.com search engine and also from answered obtained from other Q&A sites, as well as from answers provided by users of Ask.com.

Ask.com’s senior Vice President for product management Tony Gentile said that “search didn’t work out so well” for the company and given that search isn’t what Ask.com is known for, it only makes sense for the company to get back to its roots.” Hence they have gone back to the Q&A format.

They have started working on this feature since last year itself and they currently have authoritative answers to 60% of the queries on the site. They also claim to have the largest Q&A data base with over 500 million Q&A’s having been indexed.

To answer the remaining 40% of queries, Ask.com has asked users to create their profiles and select subjects on which they are qualified to answer questions. Questions will be forwarded to these users as per their field of expertise. The questions will reach the appropriate user through email and also through prominent messages on Ask.com.

The question will also be put up on the general site for other users to answer. Users will also be able to vote the answers up or down, thus giving the site a social networking tweak.

While the service will definitely face competition from sites like Quora and Aardvark, they may have a head start because of their huge user base of 87 million monthly users.

The service is currently in the beta testing stage, and people can join it by invitation only. Ask.com also plans to make the service available through mobile apps in the future.

During a developer conference last April, the figure had been estimated at 600 million search queries per day.

A few days ago, at the Aspen Ideas festival, Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter announced that the number of search queries had gone up to 800 million per day.

That is a growth of 33% in a very short span of time, making it the fastest growing search engine at present.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Bing was the fastest growing search engine, with a growth rate of 22%. Twitter’s figures obviously appear to be much bigger than those of Bing.

However there is a catch here: Search queries on Twitter are counted quite differently from those on other search engines such as Google and Bing.

On the traditional search engines, a user actually goes to the search bar and then types in a query.

On the other hand, on Twitter, the ‘search’ mostly takes place on apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic, where users create columns, on a topic which they need information about.

As the Twitter API receives more and more tweets containing the search query under consideration, the column gets automatically updated, every few seconds and each update is counted as a search query at Twitter. Thus the actual number of search queries is grossly over-inflated.

While CEO Evan Williams has clarified that the search queries on Twitter do vary from those on other search engines, the figures being mentioned can by themselves be quite misleading to those who do not know of the way the search queries at Twitter are counted.

Users can share shopping search results in order to ask for a friend’s opinion while shopping online. The sharing options are visible only on the product reviews page, which can be reached by clicking on the “User Reviews” link on the Shopping search results.

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

Sharing is enabled through Facebook and Twitter. Users can share the shopping search results by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter or email link and then typing any questions about the product.

Some question the utility of such a feature. Twitter users might not want all their followers to see their shopping-related queries. They might also not appreciate receiving advice and opinions from several of those followers or other advertisers with automated tweets set to respond to such shopping tweets.

Proponents of social search have always used the argument that the ability to get a friend or trusted person’s opinion before buying something would be invaluable. This new feature by Bing makes that argument a reality.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently offer users the option to share shopping search results. Microsoft might have yet another winner on their hands… if only more people would actually use Bing’s shopping search!

Data from the Yahoo! Toolbar across 50 million page views generated in March 2009 was analysed. Rsearchers, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins found that users now spend only 21.4% of their online time on search activities.

The total time spent searching included 6.2% time spent on Web searches, 1.4% on multimedia searches, 1.4% on databases of items such as those found on eBay and Amazon.

In contrast to this, users spent 50% of their online time browsing and one-third of the time on communication.

5.3% of all pageviews were found to have a referral from Web searches, 1.4% from multimedia searches, 0.6% from database item searches, and 1.5% from other search query types. Thus, each category of search pageviews tends to result in around one follow-on click on average.

Experts at Yahoo! surmise that in the future, search needs to focus on gathering and understanding, and when appropriate, serving structured information.

It was observed that users are now much more dependent on social networks, location-aware smartphone applications and voice or images to find the content that they are interested in.

Last month, Facebook had more site visits than Google in the U.S.A. Search ads, which are the main source of revenue for the search engines, could potentially lose user attention to an extent.

More importantly, search and display advertisers now have a greater choice and must decide on the best way to reach their target audience and the best channel to maximise the return on the money they spend advertising.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! already recognise this change in online user behaviour and have been forging partnerships with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for over a year now, in addition to building social networks around their own products.

Click the link below to read the full white paper:

A characterisation of online search behavior (144kB PDF)

This means that Twitter’s 106 million users carry out on average 6 searches each day, which amounts to about 18 billion searches per month.

If these figures are to be believed, it means that Twitter is way ahead of Bing and Yahoo! who have 9.4 billion and 4.1 billion searches per month respectively. In fact, if these figures were true, Twitter would be second only to Google, which is of course far ahead at 88 billion searches per month.

The search volumes for Google, Yahoo! and Bing are reported by comScore and other respectable rating services. Twitter’s figures, on the other hand, have been reported by Twitter alone.

comScore has never included Twitter in its ranking of the top search properties. Danny Sullivan suggests that one reason for this could be that the actual number of searches happening through Twitter’s own website is much lower than the total search queries they process, as the majority are conducted through APIs, where third parties direct the search query to Twitter and are given the relevant information back.

According to Evan Williams, many Twitter queries are also generated through widgets which are inserted on web pages.

comScore and other ratings services do not take third party queries into account. The argument could also be made that comScore does not take into account queries conducted on third-party websites that use the Google Custom Search or the Yahoo! Search Box. While the former would make a significant differeence, the latter probably makes a negligible difference.

Searches generated through Twitter, on Google and Bing are not part of Twitter’s total search tally, as both Google and Bing pull in the Tweets and index them themselves and also store them in their own databases.

Google has now introduced another feature, to access whatever data is needed from all the Twitter archives.

Since blogs, tweets and online conversations are constantly adding to the search content, it is difficult for users to access information of some time ago.

With this new feature, it will be possible for people to ‘replay’ whatever was being said on Twitter about a particular topic, at a given point of time in the past.

To do so, users should first click on ‘Show Options’ on the search results page. They must then select ‘Updates’. They will first be shown the latest and greatest short-form updates but they will also see a new chart at the top, from which they can select the date, month and year, and they will see all the Tweets on the given topic from that day onwards.

The chart will also show all the spikes and dips of Twitter activity on that subject.

This new feature will allow users to go back in time to study the opinions on the subject at that time.

The feature is just being rolled out in English initially, and will allow people to go back to the Tweets up to February 11 2010. Later of course, it will be possible to go back to the starting of Twitter, way back on March 21 2006.

The study carried out in the first half of January 2010 found that keywords related to homosexuality had been filtered out in both the Arabic and English versions. When Arabic keywords like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘porn’ or ‘homosexuality’ were queried, a pop-up message appeared saying, “Your country or region requires a strict Bing Safe Search setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

In the English version, use of these keywords is censored for Image searches, but Web searches for gay and lesbian sites are allowed.

Bing searches for ‘gay’ censored in Middle East

Unfortunately, this censorship also blocks out searches related to sex education and gay equality rights.

Bing does not offer users the option to turn off the Safe Search setting in the Middle East.

It was, however, found that if users who are physically present in an Arabic country change their country setting to a version of Bing that is offered in another region, such as North America or Europe, then the censorship does not occur, and users can thus gain access to all the searches that are banned on the Arabic version.

Another way users could initially bypass the censorship was by using another non-filtered keyword along with the filtered keyword. For example, the keyword ‘lesbian’ is filtered but ‘lesbian rights’ was not filtered. This, however, seems to be fixed, and both queries are now being censored.

Surprisingly, OpenNet did not find any censorship relating to other sensitive topics such as politics, terrorism, religious rights or minority issues and gender equality.

As of now, it is unclear whether Microsoft has imposed this censorship upon itself, or is working under instructions from the local authorities.

According to Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal, the new search service will run on set-top boxes and will allow users to search for TV shows and Web content, including YouTube videos.

Dish Network, which is currently the second largest satellite TV provider in the U.S., will allow Google to offer TV searches of a very high quality to its viewers. In return, Google will be able to drive more advertising revenues as subscribers are bound to see its display ads while conducting searches.

The service will make use of some features from Google’s Android Operating System. New set-top boxes will have to be loaded with Google software and Dish Network subscribers will be able to search content and even create their own show line up or playlist using a keyboard.

The service is already being tested by families of Google employees.

Studies have shown that more and more users are interested in viewing online content on their large-screen TV sets. Some companies like Apple, Yahoo! and Microsoft already offer similar services.

One hurdle that Google will have to overcome is that users will need new set-top boxes, and they may not want to spend money on them. Google will have to devise some enticing offers to encourage users to get a new set-top boxes.

www.searchalliance.com

According to the official press release from Yahoo! and Microsoft, this alliance will enable their business users to connect with a larger audience of potential customers, thus saving them valuable time and money.

Users will now be able to search ad inventory from both the sites simultaneously, by using the Microsoft search engine, Bing, which presently has a combined audience of about 577 million users worldwide.

Advertisers will be able to use Microsoft adCenter to advertise to the combined client base of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The alliance will obviously help both the companies concerned to improve monetisation for their partners, eventually helping the companies to generate more revenue for themselves.

Though both companies will continue to have different consumer search experiences, Microsoft will manage the technology for both of them through Bing. Yahoo! will support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies and resellers and their clients. Microsoft on the other hand will support self service advertisers. All ads will go through the Microsoft ad-Center.

This alliance will be implemented across the U.S. Canada, U.K. and France. Elsewhere in Europe, Latin America and Asia, Microsoft is already a partner of Yahoo!

At present, ads will continue to show up on Bing search results, just as before, and advertisers will be informed about the alliance once it actually begins. They aim to be able to implement the new setup before the 2010 holiday season, but may delay it to early 2011 if needed.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be providing Facebook users with a more detailed search experience. Facebook users will now have full access to several features that are available on Bing, instead of just a few links as they previously had.

This means that Facebook users will get better search results, with the use of the new tools now available to them.

Microsoft has a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which they had bought for $240 million about two years ago allowing search integration between Bing and Facebook in the U.S. This search integration will now be available to Facebook users all over the world.

So far, Bing has been providing display ads on Facebook, but it has been mutually decided that from now on, Facebook will provide their own display ads. They can better decide what ads will be best suited tot heir website. Microsoft will, however, continue to provide search ads to Facebook and Facebook search results will of course continue to be powered exclusively by Bing.

This has been a good time for Facebook, as they will not only earn more revenue through the display ads, but they are also completing six years of social networking. They now have about 400 million users, which is a landmark in itself, and the figure has almost doubled over the last year.

It is also expected that Facebook will set up its own full-fledged webmail product, and with more and more people spending so much time on Facebook, they could soon become the top news source on the Internet.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

Google is sticking far too many fingers into the mobile pie to leave any mobile provider comfortable. They’ve stomped over other mobile search engines, mobile operators, mobile application platforms, even mobile operating systems and are developing their own Operating System which will compete with the Apple Mac OS.

These facts do not seem to have gone down well with Apple, and undisclosed sources revealed to BusinessWeek that for the past few weeks, Apple has been in talks with their one-time arch rival, Microsoft, which is also a rival of Google.

The talks have been centered around the possibility of making Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, the default search provider on the iPhone.

If the deal between Apple and Microsoft is finalised, users will have to actively change the settings on their iPhone, if they then wish to use Google as their search engine.

At present, Google’s position as the default search engine earns them a considerable amount of money from mobile search advertising on the iPhone. This revenue is then shared with Apple. Needless to say, Google would lose out on this revenue if it is replaced by Bing.

If Bing does become the default search engine on the iPhone, Microsoft will not only get a higher market share in mobile search but will also earn significant revenues from mobile search advertising on iPhones.

Realistically, though, even if Apple and Microsoft could put aside years of rivalry, which is still going strong (look at the I’m not a PC, I’m a Mac ads!) and strike the deal, one wonders how long it will last, especially since Microsoft is also believed to be working towards making its own smartphone.

Add to that, speculation that Apple might try to develop its own search engine definitely precludes any relationship with Microsoft, as the last thing Ballmer and company need is more competition in search from yet another major rival.

During the week ending on 26th December 2009 social networks and forums took a lead over the search engines, in terms of number of visit, for the first time ever.

This peak over the Christmas holidays was followed by a dip in social networking, but the sector has already recovered and social networks and forums are once again showing a definite upward trend.

During the week ending on 16th January 2010, visits to social networks in Australia were only 0.4% behind search engines.

Another trend, which has been visible over the last three months, is that social networking shows a significant rise during the weekends, especially on Sundays. This was first seen by Hitwise on Sunday the 15th of November 2009 and then again on Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd of November 2009.

One remarkable finding pointed out by Hitwise was that while social networking reached its highest point for 2009 on Christmas day at 14.8% share of Internet visits, search engines reached their annual peak on 10th January 2009 at 14.5% share of Internet visits.

Facebook and YouTube both had their highest number of visits on Christmas day with 8.0% and 2.2% of the market respectively.

Search engines still dominate the market in the U.K. and U.S.A. However, if the trend in Australia is an indicator of the future, social media marketing might be set to increase in importance a whole lot more.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

Yahoo! now incorporates information from tweets, photos and videos posted on Twitter. They have revamped the Yahoo! News Shortcut result, that shows at the top of the organic results for queries on breaking news topics, into a horizontal tabbed form, which links to three or four news categories.

The first tab in the new Yahoo! News Shortcut result shows news sites with snippets from articles. The next tabs link to photos and / or to videos and the last one to Twitter.

Searches on certain popular news stories currently bring up the Twitter tab, which then takes users to the Twitter search results page for that query. Screenshots provided by Yahoo!, though, show the Twitter tab loading with a couple of selected tweets and associated videos.

According to Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf on Yahoo! Search blog, “Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Although both Google and Bing have already started incorporating Twitter feeds into their search results, Yahoo! claims that they are the first to integrate Twitter with news, which actually makes a lot of sense since Twitter is growing into a rather popular source of breaking news round the world.

They are hopeful that this will make Yahoo! News the first choice of users looking for current information on any breaking news stories. Yahoo! will also run a separate algorithm to filter out any irrelevant information that is present on Twitter.

Yahoo!’s Larry Cornett said that they were very pleased with user reactions they saw during initial user testing of this feature.