Yahoo! Site Explorer had been launched on 29 September 2005 and had become a popular tool for SEO’s.

Hemant Minocha, Product Manager, Yahoo Site Explorer has recently confirmed that the Site Explorer will be shut down in due course of time. While no date has been finalized as yet, it is likely to occur before the end of the year.

It has been recommended by Yahoo! that Webmasters should join Bing Webmaster Tools and use that in place of the Site Explorer in future.

As of now, the Bing Webmaster Center team has been busy adding new features to their product in order to provide the kind of detailed support that Site Explorer has been providing so far.

A statement from Yahoo! says, “We are working with Microsoft to transition organic results in all markets to the Microsoft Search platform. Site Explorer will shut down once all markets are transitioned. This is expected later this year.

Other existing third party tools such as Majestic SEO, SEOmoz and Ontolo. may very likely benefit from the shutting down of Site Explorer as it is possible that some users of Site Explorer may eventually start using these tools.

The first such report provides an analysis of the use of plugins for social networks.

The report shows that Facebook is easily the most popular as far as the number of links to various sites is concerned.

The report compared the data between the month of June 2011 and July2011.

It was found that Facebook is the leader of the pack with links to 47.4 percent of the top 10,000 websites. This includes a direct link to the Facebook homepage. In comparison Twitter has 41.8 percent, YouTube has 16.75 percent, and LinkedIn has 3.7 percent.

The change experienced by these sites in the two consecutive months has been almost negligible. YouTube is the only site which experienced a slight drop in usage from 16.77% to 16.75%.
As far as adoption of social plugins is concerned, the rate is much lower than expected.

Facebook is the number one here too, with four plugin services. They are Facebook Like button (10.8 percent), Facebook Like box (6.1 percent), Facebook Connect (1.9 percent), and Facebook Recommendations (1.2 percent).

The Google +1 button has been doing well for itself, and is currently placed at number two. At 4.5% it is ahead of Twitter which has two services. The Twitter Tweet button (2.1 percent) and the Twitter Follow button (1.3 percent).

Jim Yu CEO of BrightEdge says “Fewer than half the largest sites on the Web offer any kind of social link at all on their front page and these sites represent a massive slice of Internet traffic on any given day. We would expect to see a land grab effort this year as plugins vie for placement on this very valuable Web real estate.”

schema.org

This initiative will make it possible for publishers to put in structured markup on their web pages in order to help the search engines index their sites better and hence deliver better search results to users.

Schemas are essentially common sets of tags used to denote detailed data to be used to describe the publisher’s product.

Since Bing, Google and Yahoo! have initiated this protocol jointly, it will make it easier for the publisher to provide this data to the main search engines. In other words, Schema.org works as a one stop shop for webmasters to add in the most search engine friendly markup for data contained on their web pages.

Google had already introduced a similar service, called rich snippets, a couple of years ago. This service allowed users to receive non-textual information such as reviews, personal profiles, local business information or details about the product they were searching, in addition to the regular plain text snippet that accompanies each organic search listing.

Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo! have made a combined effort to improve their users’ search experience, it should pay rich dividends to all concerned – the user, the publisher and the search engine as well.

In the past, the major search engines had come together in 2006 to provide a common standard to webmasters for sitemaps.

The Panda update, has affected several sites in the U.S. and now a number of sites have been affected in the U.K. as well. The resulting loss of search ranking has meant lower traffic referrals to those sites.

Data from German SEO tools developer, Sistrix, has revealed that article sites, price comparison sites and business directories, in general, have suffered a setback.

Searchmetrics has released some initial data on the matter. This data is based on the Organic Performance Index, which is calculated according to a keyword’s search volume, position and the statistical value of traffic distribution.

According to Searchmetrics’ report, the 10 biggest losers are:

1. pricedash.com (-99.7%)
2. discountshoppinguk.co.uk (-99.3%)
3. webdevelopersnotes.com (-98.9%)
4. netvouchercodes.co.uk (-98.7%)
5. pocket-lint.com (-98.7%)
6. killerstartups.com (-98.3%)
7. wakoopa.com (-98.1%)
8. aceshowbiz.com (-98.0%)
9. everydaysale.co.uk (-97.8%)
10. electricpig.co.uk (-97.2%)

Ehow.co.uk and ehow.com, which had done well in the U.S. following the Panda update, have suffered a setback in the U.K.

Update: Sistrix have released a follow-up report, which found that ehow was actually quite badly affected in the U.S. too.

Some of the common reasons why these sites have lost ranking are too many links taking you away from the main page, too many broken links, expired vouchers or deals, too many ads and lack of original content.

Among the top sites to have gained in ranking due to the Panda update are:

1. ebay.co.uk (+42.1%)
2. techcrunch.com (+40.7%)
3. national-lottery.co.uk (+39.5%)
4. econsultancy.com (+37.1%)
5. thisismoney.co.uk (30.1%)
6. siteslike.com (+25.4%)
7. mirror.co.uk (24.9%)
8. blogspot.com (22.8%)
9. mashable.com (22.6%)
10. itv.com (22.4%)

Sites that have lost their ranking from the first two pages of Google’s search results could be badly affected by this update. We have seen historically that most users do not click beyond the first page of Google search results. Therefore the casualties of this update could suffer a serious loss of traffic.

These terms are not queries in themselves, but are modifiers to the queries. They are, ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’.

Researchers at comScore found that the use of these modifiers has grown significantly between January 2010 and January 2011.

Number of searches on most popular modifiers in Jan 2010 v Jan 2011

Who – This question is generally asked with an ‘is’ ‘are’, ‘was’, or ‘were’ attached to it. In January 2011, 57 million searches by 21 million searchers in the U.S. searched questions with ‘who’. The most common question with ‘Who’ are, ‘Who is searching for me’, ‘Who is looking for me’, ‘Who is looking at my Facebook profile’ and ‘Who am I’.

What – This question is usually attached with an ‘is’, ‘does’, ‘are’, ‘was’ or ‘were’. 253 million searches by 52 million people were conducted with this modifier in the U.S. in January 2011.

Where – The most common questions here are, ‘Where is’, ‘Where are’, ‘Wheres’, ‘Where’s’ and ‘Where was’. The term ‘where’ had 52 million searches from 29 million searchers in the U.S. in January 2011.

When – This question is asked with an ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘did’ and ‘does’. It is almost as common as ‘where’ with 54.8 million searches by 21 million searchers in the U.S. in January 2011. The most common ‘When’ questions are about upcoming events, holidays and festivals. If publishers can keep track of when these question are likely to be asked, they can reach their target audience easily.

Why – The most common questions here are ‘Why do’, ‘Why is’, ‘Why are’, ‘Why did’ and ‘why does’. This question has 33 million searches from 13 million searchers in January 2011.

How – This is the most common search term modifier by far, with 431 million searches by 71 million searchers. It is attached with a ‘to’, ‘do’, ‘much’, ‘many’ and ‘does’. Of this, ‘How to’ had over 253 million questions in January 2011, up by 35% in 1 year.

Since it has been found that these searches continue to increase, at a rapid pace, publishers and marketers can make good use of these modifiers to find their target audiences and to improve engagement with them.

The tool, called the Personal Blocklist extension, can be downloaded directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Once users download the extension for their Chrome browser, they can decide which sites they want to block from the search results pages they view and can communicate these decisions to Google.

Thus, if a user finds that that the results obtained from a particular site are not up to the mark in terms of quality, or they have just been copied from another site, the user can click on a link added by the extension to block that site from appearing in future search engine results pages.

Blocking sites from SERPs using the Chrome Personal Blocklist extension

When a site is blocked, a signal will automatically be sent to Google regarding this. Google will then study the feedback received in this manner. If they find that certain sites are being blocked repeatedly by individuals, they could eventually decide to block the site from their search results entirely.

A user who blocks some sites will be able to check the list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension icon on the top right hand of the Chrome window. The user can also unblock a blocked site if he wishes to.

This extension is an effort by Google to help reduce spam in their search results. It is specifically aimed at content farms, which are sites that host lots of content that is merely duplicated from other sites or is not of much value in and of itself.

The extension is still in the testing stage and is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Doomed For SEO / Spam Misuse

In the past, Google has tried to enable users to indicate which websites were good and which ones were bad in the search results. They did this through Google SideWiki and search results customisations. However, the endeavour was mostly used by SEO specialists and spammers. This new tool is more than likely to meet the same fate.

So, unless Google has figured out a really good way to crowd-source policing of the SERPs without opening themselves up to competitive malpractice, the new extension is likely to fail too.

The study, conducted by Mari-Carmen Marcos a professor and Cristina González-Caro a PhD student at the university, classifies search queries into 4 categories:

1. Informational – where the user looks for information such as an address or definition of a term
2. Navigational – where the user searches for a website or brand instead of typing its URL in the browser
3. Transactional – when the user wants to conduct a transaction such as booking a ticket
4. Multimedia – where the user searches for a photo or video

58 participants were studied. The subjects were between 18 to 55 years of age. 25 were male and 33 were female.

Heat maps showing user fixations on Google results for Informational v Transactional queries

When searching for information, the users spent 53% of the time on a page looking at snippets, 34% of the time looking at the title and 13% of the time on the URL. These users were found not to be distracted by the presence of images on the search results page.

For navigational search queries, the fixation times were similar to informational queries, with 48% of the time on the page devoted to snippets, 33% to titles and a slightly higher, 15% to the URLs. About 5% of the time was spent on images in these search results.

Most of the attention was centred on the image itself on search results for a multimedia query. 71% of the time on an image search results page was spent looking at the images themselves.

Participants of the study were found to spend much more time looking at sponsored links when the query was of a transactional nature. Nevertheless, the number of looks or fixations on sponsored links was still found to be just 17% versus 82% on the organic results.

Percentage fixations (number and time) on organic v sponsored results

56% of the time on the transactional query’s search results page on the whole was spent looking at snippets, 28% on titles and a surprisingly high 20% on the URL. However, when considering just the sponsored links, the amount of time spent on the title was disproportionately much higher, commanding 43% of the time as against 28% for the snippet and 29% for the URL.

For search marketing professionals this means that a lot more attention should be paid to their ad headlines and display URLs.

Interestingly, that the number of actual fixations was found to be much higher for transactional queries (9.8%) than for informational (2.8% ) or navigational (5%) queries.

Sponsored results placed above the organic search results got a lot more attention (79%) than those in the right hand column (21%), which is not surprising.

Read the full eye-tracking study (Spanish PDF 2.28 MB)

According to this study, 3-word queries are currently the most successful drivers of traffic from organic search results.

The study was conducted during the one-week period between 13 and 19 June 2010 across a sample of 41 million impressions of search traffic. They found that approximately 10 million or 26% of these impressions were for three-word queries.

The next most popular query length was with two words at 19% followed by four-word queries at 17% and one-word queries at 14%.

Queries with  five words or more had a much lower percentage of traffic.

In the past, one-word queries accounted for a much higher percentage. In 2007, one-word search queries accounted for 24.5% and in 2009 they accounted for 20.4%. Two-word queries accounted for 23.6% in 2009.

The study also considered the effect of word count on ad click rate for paid search results. Quite contrary to the findings for organic search results, they found that the highest click rates were associated with queries of five, six and four words respectively, with five-word queries getting 1.4% of the click share. This means, unsurprisingly, that complex searches are more likely to convert into revenue, rather than searches with one, two or three words.

Register local listings on Bing For Business

Bing might not be anywhere near the top choice for UK searchers, but it is believed to have the potential to reach 30 million users in the U.K. through the search boxes available on various Microsoft properties such as Internet Explorer, MSN and Windows Live.

Businesses that register with Bing for Business in order to establish a local presence on Bing Maps could be more visible to consumers.

While Microsoft promotes Bing’s local service as a simple 3-step process for businesses wishing to increase their visibility on the search engine, the reality is not quite as simple.

First, business owners or representative must add their business details to Bing’s local listings. Rather than handling the process in-house, Bing U.K. has outsourced it to a company called 118information. The process breaks down here itself for many businesses.

Once the user has verified that the business is not alreay listed on 118information, a new listing can be submited via a form that requires the business details as well as details about a “Senior Decision Maker”.

What’s worse, the form does not even mention a privacy policy, link to one or give users the option to opt out of being spammed by Microsoft’s selected partner and their partners!

Anyone with experience dealing with telemarketers will know that when someone asks for a “senior decision maker”, they are asking for permission to spam, online, offline and over the telephone!

Once a business has been verified, its information will be displayed on various Microsoft services including Instant Answers, Local Search and Maps.

The second and third steps that Microsoft recommend are registering the business website with Bing investing in pay per click advertising to highlight their products and service.

If Microsoft hopes to catch up with Google Maps or even local search services such as Yelp and FourSquare, they will definitely need to improve they way they go about collecting data to being with, in order to have a comprehensive set of listings, which users can then trust to deliver the results they need.

Captions will be automatically generated through the voice recognition algorithm that is used on Google Voice. The technology is known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and can be pretty accurate for some cases.

In many cases, though, the automatic captions result in some rather funny output, even for videos by Google’s own employees. This could lead to some very confused users if they relied solely on automated captions!

Funny Automated Captions On YouTube

In order to use automated captions, a user has must click on the upward arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the video control bar and click on ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the captions (CC) menu.

It is also be possible to translate the captions into several languages.

While this will greatly improve YouTube’s accessibility and benefit people who have difficulties hearing, the translation facility will also help people who do not understand the original language used in the video.

Another feature that is being simultaneously introduced is auto-timing for subtitles. If all the words used in the video are provided in a text file, Google will automatically associate the timing of each caption alongside the video timeline.

In other words, the text of the video will be transcribed. This transcript can obviously be indexed and crawled, thus helping users with search engine optimisation of video content.

The new captioning features will therefore eventually allow users to search for a video based on keywords used in the video script.

The automatic caption feature is already available on most educational and Google-owned channels. Automatic timing is now available on all newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

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.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

The message prompts webmasters to give Google AdWords a try, as an alternative means for sending traffic to their website and even offers 100 € free AdWords credit to get them started.

Like all Google promotions, this one is cleverly interwoven into a helpful email. They start by pointing users to the Webmaster Support / Help page and their search engine optimisation starter guide. Only after that do they add that the AdWords programme is just another effective way to drive traffic to a site.

The message ends with a quick run-down of the advantages of advertising via AdWords.

Google has not remained unaffected by the economic downturn. This promotion is just one more example of the various new means they are trying to drive advertisers expenditure. The search giant is continuously testing ways to broaden its advertising platform’s reach, prompt more users to click on ads and convincing more advertisers to spend a greater portion of their media budget on AdWords.

Screenshot of message promoting AdWords to Webmaster Tools users

Adobe SEO Technology Center

Sites built with Adobe Flash technology have remained largely invisible on search engine results until mid-2008, when Google and Yahoo! announced the ability to crawl and index text within Flash files after Adobe agreed to cooperate with the search engines.

The technology centre will help developers to build Flash applications that will be more search friendly in the future. The site describes difficulties that SEOs face and explains simple ways to deal with them.

So far, the SEO Technology Center has five articles: search optimization techniques for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), an SEO checklist, information about enhanced search indexing of SWF content, and guides to the Adobe Flash Player version checking protocol, detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files.

Adobe has also informed that at present it would be more practical to offer HTML representation of content while the work on improving Flash technology is still in progress. Webmasters can use additional text, build static (HTML) version of their site or include content in a <noscript> tag.

It is hoped that the creation of this SEO Technology Center for Flash will help small and medium businesses in particular, as they often do not have highly specialised personnel to deal with these problems. However, the damage may already have been done, and Flash technology, as we know it, will probably never recover to be considered an equally viable alternative to HTML for website SEO.

Microsoft adCenter Analytics was designed with the intention of providing website owners with detailed reports of the activity of their users and also to let them track the performance of their advertisements.

While the service has been closed with immediate effect to new customers, it will continue to be available to existing users till the 31st of December 2009. On that date, all hosted services, data collection and technical support will cease. Those who wish to save any historical data have been advised to download reports through the export feature before that date.

The Microsoft adCenter Analytics team claims that the aim of undertaking this project was to fulfil the needs of small and medium size self-service customers, and to evolve a strategy for web analytics. They claim to have achieved this objective. Their blog states, “It enabled us to most confidently determine that we can be of most value to advertisers and publishers by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.”

The adCenter Analytics blog will now be called ‘Insights and Analysis’ and it will focus on research and best practices helping online marketers navigate better and improve market optimisation.

Strangely, Microsoft has suggested some alternative analytics services that their clients can now turn to, and the list includes Google and Yahoo!

It is a well known fact that Facebook is the biggest social networking site in the world at present It already has 180 million registered users and that number is still growing. Given this fact, it is not very surprising that the site refers a lot of traffic to certain sites.

Even though Facebook has only about 50 million users in the U.S., which is only slightly more than one third the number of Google’s 149 million users in the U.S. – according to comScore – Facebook has referred more traffic to certain sites such as PerezHilton.com, Dlisted, CaféMom, Evite, Tagged.com and Twitter since the beginning of this year.

The number of people being referred to CafeMom and twitter can perhaps be explained by the fact that CafeMom has a Facebook page and Facebook and Twitter users can synchronize updates with each other.

Gossip sites like PerezHilton.com receiving so much traffic from Facebook is a little more difficult to explain. Maybe it is the simple fact that users just spend a lot of time on both social network sites like Facebook as well as on gossip sites like PerezHilton.com

This year PerezHilton has received 8.7% of its traffic from Facebook as opposed to only 7.6% from Google. On the other hand another gossip site TMZ received only 3.8% traffic from Facebook and 12.2% traffic from Google. The difference could very well be due to better optimisation, a bias in the user base or a more significant presence on Facebook.

Traffic being referred to video sites from Facebook has also gone up according to NewTeeVee. According to figures released by Hitwise, 3.3% of traffic to video sites came from Facebook last month, compared to less than 2% in the same month last year.

This just goes to prove that social networks and content sharing are becoming big business at a very fast pace.

It is possible that companies that are currently spending a lot of money to get traffic from Google may now allocate a substantial portion of their marketing budgets to social sites in the future.

Last year $12.2 billion were spent on search optimiation by various companies to get traffic directed towards themselves from Google, according to eMarketer.

Speaking to AdvertisingAge, Peter Yared CEO of marketing firm iWidgets says “Soon the spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to Social Media.

However, as one commenter points out, “Hitwise does not measure how much traffic has been referred from one site to another, it simply shows which site a user was on prior to visiting another.” The statistics could therefore merely indicate that most visitors to facebook also check out the gossip sites as part of their brwosing / socialising routine online.

Enhanced data from Facebook will now be available on Yahoo!’s search engine results pages by default. This will enable users to add friends, send them messages, or pokes and view their friends in just one click from Yahoo!’s SERPs.

Facebook, however, is not the first provider of enhanced data on Yahoo! SERPs. Other apps available on the results pages by default via SearchMonkey are LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Citysearch, Zagat and Wikipedia. Users can also integrate other SearchMonkey apps into the page if they wish to do so. For instance they can add StumbleUpon, Delicious and Flickr.

Of course, this move is expected to upset the advocates of user privacy. In order to put their minds to rest, Yahoo! has ensured that users will be able to see the profiles of only those users who have allowed their profiles to be viewed and searched publicly.

Thanks to this integration between the two sites, when a user types in the name of a person, the search result will show the public profile picture of that person along with other associated basic Facebook commands. Facebook too has added semantic mark-up to their public profile page.

If the search query includes “on Facebook” along with the name of the person, the profile will show at the top of the search results rather than lower down.

Rich Ads on Yahoo! Search results pages are being tested by a handful of advertisers since the end of 2008, and so far the results are encouraging. In fact, Yahoo! claims their advertisers have reported a rise of 25% in the click through rates for these ads. Not only that, the brand exposure and conversion rates have also reportedly increased significantly.

This new service allows the advertiser to add video, images, custom links and custom search boxes within their ads. These ads are placed in a separate box than the regular “Sponsored Results” and are labeled as “Promotional Results“, as shown below:

Click on the image to see a live Rich Media ad on Yahoo! search

Advertisers will also now be able to customise the ad to suit their needs. It will also be possible for them to decide the day, time and other demographics, for when the ad should appear, as is seen with TV and radio ads.

Google tested video ads in search results last year, but they have not gone mainstream with the feature. Yahoo! seems to be following in Google’s footsteps, but seems determined to beat them to the punch in delivering a rich media ad solution first.

Ads with the video and images embedded within the search results would certainly increase the impact that the ad has on the user. Yahoo!’s Rich Ads also allow the creation of deep links to the relevant pages and they can also contain boxes to enter data or select from lists of products, allowing customers to search for the product without having to navigate away from the page. Brand logos can also be incorporated into the ads.

While these features help advertisers and agencies to increase brand recognition and advertiser conversion rates, making them attractive to advertisers, it is not doubtful that they will make Yahoo! any dearer to end users. The company is desperately trying to lure advertisers, and could be shooting itself in the foot by alienating end users in the process.

Michael Walrath, Yahoo!’s senior vice president advertising marketplaces group says, “As the economy continues to put pressure on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend. Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience providing increased efficiency and accountability.”

Don’t they ever learn? Google had it right to start with – forget advertisers – concentrate on getting users and the advertisers will automatically follow.

Americans carried out 13.5 billion searches in the month of January 2009. This figure is 7% higher than the corresponding figure just one month ago, in December 2008.

Expectedly, Google sites were the leaders in the number of searches conducted with 59% share of the market, followed by Yahoo! sites having 15% market share and Microsoft sites having 6% share of the market. AOL and the Ask Network had 3.9% and 3.7% respectively.

Of the 11.7 billion (up 5% from December 2008) searches conducted across all Google sites in January 2009, Google Search accounted for 75% while YouTube and other Google sites contributed to 25% of the volume.

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search metrics are much more heavily skewed towards their main search properties, with both contributing to 99% of their individual total volumes.

AOL and the Ask Network, on the other hand, had a much more even distribution. 58% of AOL searches coming from the search network while 42% came from MapQuest and other AOL properties. Less than half (49%) of the Ask Network’s searches came from Ask.com while 51% came from MyWebSearch and other properties.

A comparison with the same period a year ago shows that Google’s market share grew 6% points between January 2008 and January 2009, while that of Yahoo! fell 2% points and Microsoft fell 1% point.

Yahoo!, though, has actually gained market share for the fifth consecutive month now, at the expense of Microsoft and Ask.com mostly, but also at the expense of Google last month.

Yahoo! is the current search leader in Japan. Google Japan started featuring “Hot Keywords” on their homepage last month. This was done with the intention of guiding users to other related sites such as Google Maps, Google News, Gmail and YouTube, which they hoped would improve the user experience and get more users to access the site.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog reported last week that Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a company that specialises in online marketing to sponsor blog posts through a pay-per-post service to inform users about these new features and associated Google products.

Paying bloggers for links is against the policies of Google. Since Google Japan had to pay the online marketing company for the blog posts, they have broken one of their own company’s rules.

Google Japan has not only discontinued the services of Cyberbuzz, but has also issued an apology on the Google Japan blog, The translated post says:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologise to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

The “Hot New Keywords” feature has also been removed since then and Matt Cutts confirmed that Google dropped the page rank of Google Japan from 9 to 5 and it will likely stay that way for a while!

This move comes as something of a surprise to users familiar with Google’s advertising ethics, because during an interview in 2004, Google co-founders Sergey Brin had said, “One thing that’s important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There’s a clear large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence.”

Of course, in order to make sure that users can still differentiate between the ads and the organic search results, Google Mobile Search is using a different coloured background for the ads.

To be fair, the ads are not interspersed within the regular organic results. They are, instead, placed at the end of the plain text results on a universal search results page.

Mobile search advertising has still not found its groove. Google continues to test various ad placements to find the right solution. Google started by placing ads at the top or one at the top and one at the bottom of the mobile search results page. Recently, this changed and ads were placed only at the bottom of the Google Mobile Search results page.

Given the fact that the mobile screen is very small and there is really no place available to demarcate the page into a separate column at the side or at the top for displaying the ads, the only choices really are to place ads atop, below or in between organic results. Google already tested the first two options. They are now taking tentative steps towards the third option.

A really bold move, though, would be to intermingle sponsored links within the organic text-based results on the mobile search page. Will Google go back on its own word and implement such a system in order to get more money from mobile search?

Google has launched a feature called SearchWiki that is available to all users who have signed in with a Google Account and searched on the regular Google search service.

Once signed in, users automatically have the option to rearrange the search results provided by Google to suit their needs. To do this they can make use of ‘promote’, ‘remove’ and ‘comment’ buttons provided by Google alongside each result.

Changes thus made will be stored in the user’s account and will be displayed every time the user repeats the same search. Users can also alter the changes again whenever they feel the need to do so.

Single user changes will not be reflected in any other user’s search results. However, a user can see all the changes made by other users to a given search result by clicking on a link saying, “See all notes for this SearchWiki”, which is provided below each search page.

It is very likely, though, in time, that Google will start using the collective wisdom of the masses to eliminate irrelevant results and promote results that are consistently voted up by users.

This is the first time Google will allow its users to alter the search results, but Microsoft has already introduced a similar service on an experimental basis called U Rank, while Mahalo also provides results which have been created by users.

A web analytics expert from Seattle, Dustin Woodard, conducted a study of the 10,000 most commonly used search terms recorded by Hitwise. The resulting graph turned out to be quite incomprehensible, with long stretches of information recorded almost invisibly across both the axes.

In order to get more comprehensible results, he further narrowed down his sample to include only the top 100 search terms, out of an estimated 14 million. The results received showed that these top 100 keywords accounted for only 5.7% of all search traffic. When the experiment was expanded to cover the top 500, 1,000, and 10,000 keywords respectively, it was found that only 8.9%, 10.65% and 18.5% of the total search traffic was covered.

Based on this, Woodard says, “This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines, (which is impossible) you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.”

In other words, there is still lots and lots of room available for the search engines to expand their reach. Woodard further says, “If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Another reason for search engine optimisers to rejoice is that this experiment was conducted across a sample of only 10 million users based in the U.S., thus leaving out a much bigger field to be captured. Also, the search terms studied were selected with filters to screen out adult terms and the study was carried out considering the top 100 terms across 3 months that are known to be slow for business.

Among the most common search terms found were words like MySpace, Google, Bank of America, and Yahoo mail.

This bit of information should surely be heartening and reassuring to small businesses and SEO professionals among others, as they can be sure that there is till as lot of traffic for them to capture without having to spend absurd amounts of money on a few popular keywords.

Users will now be able to add, delete and rearrange the order of the search results they receive through Microsoft as per their requirements, through a Windows Live ID, which they will first have to sign up for if they don’t already have one. Users can also add photos, videos and new pages to the results.

All this will be possible through a new experimental search engine, being introduced by Microsoft, which has been named U Rank.

As users will be quick to point out, this is not a new idea. Both Google and Yahoo! already offer similar facilities. What is new here is the ability to share these changes, with ones friends and contacts if these changes are made while sharing is on. The friends in turn can make further changes if they desire to do so.

However if a user does not wish to publicise the changes he has made, he can go to his history page and make the required edits there. Thus the privacy concerns of clients have been taken care of.

At present this facility has been made available only to a limited extent, but if it is successful, Microsoft may expand it, to be a part of Live Search. It is also possible that the results which have been reordered on U Rank may be visible to other interested users, who are not on the friends list, at a later stage.

This process is of course not as quick or easy as it may sound, as Search results take a while to get loaded, and Microsoft still has to sort out some basic user interface problems they are facing. For instance, it is presently not possible to change the ranking of search results from one page to another. Even the drag and drop method is not very effective.

All said and done however, at the end of the day, this effort by Microsoft will allow customers to offer constructive criticism to their search results, and as such the attempt should be appreciated.

Since the prices invariably vary from service station to station even in the same city – for instance, in the city of Chicago, the rates of petrol range from $3.54 to $4.33 per gallon – users can save by searching for nearby petrol pumps on Yahoo! and identifying the place with the cheapest prices.

Users searching for petrol prices or service stations in a specific city or zip code will find a list of prices and addresses of 5 nearby providers alongside a map showing their exact locations.

Even if the city name or zip code is not entered, Yahoo! will try to provide details about petrol pumps nearest to the user, based on the IP address.

Prices seem to be obtained through some sort of collaboration with oil price comparison site, gasbuddy.com, though Yahoo! has not clarified whether any relationship exists at present. The service works only in the US and Canada.
Yahoo!’s main competitor, Google, also provides a list of local gas stations in map searches, but so far they have not added any feature that compares prices.

People may of course argue that it does not make sense to travel too far to save a few pennies per gallon of petrol, as you will end up using more petrol to reach there, thus wasting more money, or at least negating the effects of the money saved. However, it is the availability of information, which gives one the power of choice, that is important here. Also, if drivers are aware of the stations that are cheaper, they can always plan in advance and fill up at that station when passing by.

With the current financial scenario, the prices of oil have fallen in the last few weeks, but it still does not hurt to be able to save a few pennies. In fact, the stock market and banking sector crash are all the more reason for people to save money as and when they can, and Yahoo! might win some favour in this respect.

They have already started making use of the Semantic technology available in Powerset for various projects, to improve the user experience.

To begin with they have started off with simple projects, which they could complete within one month, so as to get a proper feel of the way the technology works. At present these new projects are being tested on only a handful of clients, in order to get feedback and data from which to make further improvements, before releasing the finished product in the market.

The first project they have undertaken is to increase the number of queries that Live Search will instantly answer. As of now, Live Search can answer some queries including those like Microsoft, San Francisco weather etc. Several celebrities and bloggers are also covered in this facility, but they still have a long way to go, before Live Search will answer more general queries like Films, music etc. Some of these general category queries have been chosen on an experimental basis to present a topical summary with links, just like the Freebase Answers in Powerset.

The second experiment undertaken is to improve the captions of Wikipedia articles, making use of the Semantic technology based in Powerset. The idea is to have eye-catching captions for the Wikipedia articles, as they show up frequently in Live Search queries. These changes will be visible to users, and it will be possible to judge whether the new or older captions perform better.

The third project undertaken, for now, is to use Factz extraction from Powerset to generate a list of queries that are related to a given query.

Live Search technology is also being used on Powerset to get related articles on Wikipedia, which have been enhanced by Powerset.

These are early days for the collaboration and much more can be expected to come from it, in the future.

Insights For Search adds to the bunch of new tools and features that Google has released in the past month. It is supposed to enable AdWords advertisers to understand search better. However, closer inspection makes it seem more like a repackaging of already available data with some pretty graphs.

An advertiser interested in selling a product or service, say SEO, could type in the search term “seo” to study search volume patterns across a given time period. The data can be compared for various geographical markets, as shown below:

The advertiser can also see the top and rising related searches and to compare search volumes across multiple local markets within each of the geographical locations being compared.

For the statistics and trivia buffs, Google Insights For Search also includes the ability to compare trends for multiple search terms…

… and the ability to compare trends for a search term over multiple periods of time.

Users can download the results from this service and view the numbers on the graph by signing into their Google account. The numbers on the graphs, though, are rather useless for most real purposes. In Google’s own words, “The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalised and presented on a scale from 0-100″.

The same information, minus the pretty graphs and maps with hotspots, can be found from the Google keyword tool, with the added benefit of now including real search volumes. It seems rather unlikely that this tool will be used to a great extent by savvy search marketers.

Graphical representation of data, easy correlation of geographical distribution (in spite of rather dubious results in the UK) and comparison to other related terms might appeal to Internet marketing novices and traditional media executives who have begun dabbling in search, which seem to be Google’s new target market.

The updates to the Webmaster Center enable discovery of issues affecting a website including errors the Live Search spider faces when crawling the site, such as file not found, files blocked by robots exclusion, long, dynamic URLs and unsupported content types. The Live Search console will now return the URL, along with the date when it had last been found.

Webmasters will now also be able to get a lot more information regarding links pointing to their sites.

New features have been added to old as well as new reports, to enable advance filtering so that webmasters can zoom into the appropriate data, without having to scan all the results and downloading data to enable analysis of large volumes of data. However, only the first 1,000 results can be viewed in a .csv file.

All of these features have already been provided by Google Webmaster Tools for a while now. If Microsoft wishes to be considered remotely significant in the search industry, the least they could do is provide all the tools and information that Google does, soon after, if not before Google releases them.

Playing catch-up months or years after Google acts on an issue, and then trying to make it out to be a big deal, will not win Microsoft any favour with the search marketing industry.

In the near future, more customers will start seeing a message on the upper right hand corner of the search results page specifying that the search results have been customised for a particular city or locality. There will also be a link saying ‘More details’, which the user can click on to find out more.

Search results are personalised based on the following criteria:

• Location – based on the IP address of the computer being used, Google automatically knows the approximate location of the user. This information is used to provide search results that are most relevant to that location.
• Recent Searches – Whenever possible, Google will take into consideration the previous queries entered by the user, in order to better understand the context of the current search. This information will help customise results irrespective of whether the user has signed in or not. Google will also retain the last query entered on the browser for some time, in order to customise future results. However, if the user closes the browser, then, that information will be deleted instantly.
• Web History – If a user has signed in, and has Web History enabled, then Google will customise search results based on past records of what the user has searched. If a user does not wish to have a particular search customised, he/she can temporarily sign out from the Google Account.

The addition of this latest feature on Google Search will not alter the web results in any way. It will only allow users to better understand how their search data is used to personalise results.

A video demonstrating this new search results page feature can be see on TechCrunch. A screenshot has been provided below, also courtesy of TechCrunch:

Users of the new search results test page are able to express their opinions of the search results by moving them up or down at will – by using the thumbs up or down icon. If the user votes a result down, it disappears and turns into an inconspicuous link at the bottom of the page, while if they vote it up, it will move up the search results.

Comments posted alongside individual search results listings are also being tested simultaneously by Google. Individual comments can also be upgraded or downgraded by other users. Clicking on the username of the person who posted the comment will show their Google account profile.

The new interface incorporates a lot of Digg’s most popular features. This has sparked off rumours that Google might be looking to acquire Digg, though this seems odd given that Google can already replicate Digg‘s functionality on their search results, as can be clearly seen in this test.

Google has been working on this project for a long time now, but it is only in the last few days, that users have been given an experience of what the new interface will look like. It will still be quite some time before the finished product is released, if ever, but it does give search marketers and some users a hint of things to come.

The new feature provides two sets of data:

1. Approximate search volume for the previous month, which gives the number of times that keyword has been queried in the previous month
2. Average search volume, which gives the average number of times that keyword has been used, each month, over the last 12 months.

The search volume of any keyword will keep fluctuating from time to time, as net traffic is greatly affected by factors such as seasonality and current events. The volumes that are shown could also change depending on where the tool is accessed from:

• If the keyword tool is accessed from within an ad group, the statistics available will include details regarding the ad campaign in that particular country and language. If a specific region or city are targeted, then only that region’s statistics are reflected.
• If the external keywords tool or any third party application built using the Google adWords API is used, then the statistics will vary according to the country and language selected.
• The statistics provided will also vary depending on whether advertiser selects broad, phrase or exact match when using the tool.

Data about search volumes is especially useful to search advertisers who wish to create new ads around a particular keyword. Knowing the amount of traffic generated by a keyword will help advertisers plan budgets appropriately. It will also allow advertisers to select the most effective keywords, so that the ad can reach a wider audience.

Google’s External Keyword Tool

Google has traditionally been extremely tight-lipped about specific search volumes, click through rates and so on. The past few weeks, though, have seen them opening up and revealing more than they have ever done. first they launched Google Trends for Websites, then the Google Ad Planner and now the search volumes feature on their Keyword Tool. These steps have most likely been taken to help traditional media agencies perceive them as a regular advertising channel rather than a digital oddity.

Google will now be able to index all the text that is present in Flash files. The search engine will also use the text indexed from Flash files to generate snippets, and words in the Flash files will be searchable as query terms by users searching on Google.

Over and above this, Google will also be able to identify URLs embedded within Flash files and crawl these links. However, so far, they have been unable to index non-textual content such as images and videos on FLV files. Even if the Flash files contain only images, it will not be possible for the Google spider to recognise them, and hence they will not be indexed.

Anchor text in Flash buttons will also not get indexed, which poses quite a major problem from a search engine optimisation point of view.

The algorithm developed for this purpose will work by clicking buttons, entering input, then ‘remembering’ all the text that it comes across and finally indexing it. This algorithm has been built in using Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

All textual Flash content will automatically be indexed by Google. If webmasters do not wish to get some content indexed, they can just replace the text with an image, thereby ensuring that the file remains invisible to the algorithm, for now.

This indexing facility still has some technical limitations, which Google is working on; For instance:

• Google will be unable to index Flash files that use embedded JavaScript
• If a file is loaded from an external source, such as HTML, XML etc. Google will index it separately but will not be able to attach it as part of the Flash file
• Flash indexing is available in most languages on the net, but so far, Google is unable to index bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

As was the case with the comScore search ratings discussed yesterday, the Hitwise ratings show that Google continues to rule the roost with a wide margin. According to Hitwise, Google holds 87.3 percent market share in the U.K., which is only marginally lower than their share in April 2008, and the main competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft are far behind.

Similarly in the U.S.A, Google Search accounted for 68.3% of the market share, while Yahoo! received 20% and Microsoft had only 5.9% of total search traffic.

comScore, who have only released results for the month of April 2008 so far, show that Google holds a 74.4% share of the UK search market, while Yahoo! has 4.3% and Microsoft has 3.4% respectively.

While the variation in numbers between the results of different sites is understandable, as each group has different parameters to follow, what is common among all the results, is the obvious sway that Google continues to hold over the market.

Media planners, website owners and advertisers will not be particularly pleased with this discrepancy, though, as a difference of 13 percent in market share reported for Google search traffic to a site that receives 1 million visitors per month can mean a difference of 130,000 visits / ad impressions / clicks from Google. Such large discrepancies can make planning media campaigns for new sites quite difficult.

On the whole, though Google continues to make major gains in the online video, sports, business, finance, entertainment, social network and travel sectors.

Of course this is hardly news as they have always been way ahead of the competition.

As of April 2008, Google had the largest market share, accounting for about 74 percecnt of all searches conducted in the UK. The second site in line, eBay, lags far behind, with only 6 percent of total searches, followed by Yahoo! with 4.3percent and Microsoft in fourth place with just about 3.4 percent.

A detailed analysis of the subject reveals that there has been very little change in the market position of the various search engines between the months of March and April 2008. For instance, Google had a market share of 74.4 percent in March, and 74.2 percent in April.

The only new entrant in the U.K. top 10 list this year is the social media site, Facebook, at 6th place with 1.8 percent of searches conducted in April.

Among other interesting findings, is the fact that the U.K. beats all other European nations, in terms of the volume of searches carried out. 4.1 billion searches were conducted in the UK during the month. 31.2 million Britishers carried out at least one search in April, but on an average 130 searches were conducted by per person, during the month.

As is the case with all numbers released from research corporations such as comScore, these findings have also been questioned. Most agencies and webmasters in the UK report seeing more than 80 percent referrals from Google. Moreover, the inclusion of eBay, Facebook and RightMove in the same category stretches the definition of the “search” market too far for some.

The graph below charts the market share of the leading search engines based on percentage of all searches carried out:

Microsoft is now introducing an even better scheme for their Search and Give project, which will be easy to use even for novices, and will allow users a greater choice in terms of the charity they would like to donate to. Interested persons just have to sign up on the Search and Give site:

www.searchandgive.com/

For every search a user conducts after signing up for the programme, one cent will be donated to the charity of their choice. The list of charitable institutions included now covers over 100,000 schools and 900,000 non-profit organizations worldwide. More charitable persons can also elect to convert the tickets they may have earned while playing games on Microsoft’s Live Search Club into donations.

Thus every time a person searches for something on Microsoft Search, he/she would be indirectly performing a good deed. It has been estimated that a person often conducts about 500 searches online per month, which could amount to $5.00 given to charity per Microsoft Search user.

Users can keep track of their donations and also of the total donations and other donors to that organization. This Search and Give incentive will help people to donate to causes that they care about. Users can also send emails to their friends and family to let them know about the scheme and further increase the donations generated.

While this seems to be a noble venture on the part of Microsoft, it cannot be denied that the ultimate aim behind this gesture would be to have more and more consumers using their search engine instead of Google, thereby improving their own position in the search market.

In order to improve their position, Microsoft had also launched a cash for search incentive just a couple of weeks ago, wherein users would receive a certain percentage refund on any item they purchase through Microsoft. While one program rewards the user directly with money, the other rewards the user with a good feeling for having done some charity. However, both the programmes ultimately benefit Microsoft as they both lure more customers to their Search engine.

The series of graphs below explain these findings one by one:

More searchers limit themselves to the 1st page

The percentage of searchers viewing only a few of the results has gone up quite dramatically, emphasizing the need for websites to rank within the top 3 results, or above the fold, rather than just anywhere on the first page.

A much higher percentage of searchers limited themselves to just the 1st page of the search engine results in 2008 than they did in 2002. This could be due to shorter attention spans, but is more likely to be due to the reduction in spam on organic search results and the improved quality of search results through the introduction of features such as universal search.

In all likelihood, the contributing factors are a mix of both. While search results have improved in quality, users have become much more impatient, and move from one page to another very quickly. This is backed up by the second finding in the study – 26% of searchers try a new search query after viewing just the first page of results, up from 14% in 2002.

Fewer searchers look at the 2nd or further pages

Correspondingly, the percentage of searchers looking at the first two pages has fallen:

As has the percentage of searchers looking at the first three pages:

Search marketing professionals need to take note of this finding. There are two important factors to keep in mind:

1. Differentiation has become even more important now
2. Using all means available has also become extremely important.

Marketing professionals can use a variety of assets available to them in the digital library, such as video, audio and images, and put them up on the web site where appropriate. Having multimedia on site would in itself give websites an edge over the competition, in addition to the possibility of showing up in the ‘blended results’ on universal search.

Apart from competing with other organic search results, advertisers will also need to consider using new paid search strategies that are now available, such as video ads in Google search, to improve the users awareness of their brand.

The amount of money being offered will vary from 2% to 30%, on different items being sold through various etail outlets. This move is an obvious attempt by Microsoft to convince its advertisers that Live Search can beat Google in the search engine advertising game.

Chairman Bill Gates believes that online search has just begun to get competitive, and has promised big announcements in the industry every six months.

Online shoppers who buy anything from Microsoft’s 700+ partners via the Live Search Cashback site will be eligible for a certain percentage refund on the purchase. The percentage cashback is clearly indicated alongside each of the 700+ million items. Cash back payments will be made through PayPal, by cheque or directly into the customer’s bank account.

http://search.live.com/cashback

Retail brands that have signed up for this programme include Barnes and Noble, Home Depot and Sears. The cashback percentage offered on the same item varies across different suppliers, as can be seen in the example below:

Google currently holds 60% share of the search market in the USA, while Microsoft is a distant third with only about 10% market share. Expectedly, this campaign has generated both positive and negative reviews from various quarters. Some believe that even a cashback policy will not improve Microsoft’s position, because the services of Google are far superior. Others believe that this is an interesting idea and may be able to lure away at least some of Google’s users who may be susceptible to bribes or rebates, especially during a recession.

Cash is the one thing Microsoft has plenty of. Perhaps using this cash to lure searchers away from Google might serve Live Search better than trying to buy other struggling companies like Yahoo! or even just the Yahoo! Search and marketing platform.
Microsoft is also enticing advertisers and retailers to its own platform by changing the working pattern commonly followed: Advertisers usually pay on a cost per click basis, but now Microsoft is offering a cost per acquisition model – that is, advertisers will pay only for actual sales made through Microsoft’s search services.

This is not the first time Microsoft have used monetary rewards to lure searchers. The first time reeked of desperation. But it must have worked, since they are at it again. Even if Microsoft does succeed in luring some users away from Google with this cash back rewards, will they be able to hold on to these customers after the scheme is withdrawn?

Yahoo! has chosen India to beta test this new search feature as India is a very fast growing market. If user reaction to the feature is positive, they will offer this feature in other countries as well. To start with, Glue pages will cover the travel, sports, health, technology, finance and entertainment verticals – topics that will have a large amount of information and several sources.

Glue pages are expected to improve the over all user experience. Mr. Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience at Yahoo! India says, “this concept integrates the best of info in a visually appealing manner.”

The new search results page format is very similar to the search results found on Ask 3D. However, they differ substantially from the Google universal search results page, in that, here the information is be put up in the form of separate columns. The layout of the columns varies from topic to topic. Even the placement of sponsored links seems to be varied across searches.

….
Comparison of Yahoo! Glue pages and Ask 3D results

Search results will now be inclusive of news, videos, music, images, Wikipedia articles and information from other sources. Users can browse through videos, articles and images on a given topic within the same page without needing to click through to visit multiple pages. The time wasted in the actual search process will now be considerably reduced.

Glue pages seem to be indiscriminately “open” in their choice of sources. Content is drawn from sites such as Last.FM, Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks.com and even YouTube, which is owned by their main competitor, Google!

Users who are not satisfied with the Glue pages can switch to the old format by simply clicking on the “classical search” tab. Yahoo! Has obviously put in some time and effort to offer a lot of good information in user friendly manner on their search results page. It is a shame though, that Ask beat them to the punch by a long time, and the improved layout did nothing to help improve Ask’s marketshare. History is not on Yahoo!’s side in this case, even if they are pinning their hopes on attracting and retaining more searchers through this improved search format.

In a bid to retaliate, some Chinese citizens demonstrated against and decided to boycott the French hypermarket chain Carrefour in China from May 8 to 24, the time during which the Olympics will be held in Beijing. Soon after that, it was found that searches carried out on Google.cn for the word “Carrefour” did not show any results even though Google.com has over 6 million results on the subject and they are available in Hong Kong, which is outside China’s national network.

Searches for Carrefour on Google China bring up a message that informs us that ‘this information cannot be accessed and one should return to google.cn for other information’. News and video searches for Carrefour have also been blanked out.

Censorship of domains is quite a common practice in China, but censorship of keywords is something relatively new. It is believed, that if this censorship has been carried out by Google under instructions from the Chinese government, it is more likely to have been ordered with a view to appease the agitating public rather than to hurt Carrefour per se.

While the Chinese government encourages a show of patriotism, it is not in their best interests to encourage huge hordes of angry protesters, as this may eventually harm their own set up – they intend to use the Olympics to project an image of tolerance and non-dictatorialism to the world.

In the past Google has often cooperated with the Chinese government and agreed to impose a degree of self-censorship. For example, some satellite imagery is not available on Google Maps, and a number of domains relating to human rights organizations are missing from the search index. Anti-government sources have also been removed from Google News.

It is not absolutely certain, though, whether this ban is from Google or the Chinese government. It is quite possible that the Chinese have developed some system to block specific search queries, perhaps based on the specific URL returned for individual queries. At present, neither part has commented on the ban.

At present search engines rank images based on the presence of keywords in text associated with the image, rather than the image itself. Results are often unsatisfactory and inappropriate. Image analysis results remain poor in spite of decades of research in the field.

The New York Times reports that search geniuses intend to introduce a system for image searches that is similar to PageRank, which is used for Web search. The new PageRank for product image search, or ‘Visual Rank’ as it is called, will actually try to understand the picture or analyze the visual link structure.

Image recognition, which is expensive and time consuming, usually breaks down with any images other than faces, alphanumeric characters and very specific objects. The new technology will instead try to identify more objects and also perform a link analysis with image processing. In this system, a numerical weight will be allotted to all images, thus weighing its relative importance vis-à-vis other images.

Classical image recognition methods can only compare images with a known image. However, with VisualRank, Google will use “visual themes”, to rank each image from a given set of images, based on how well it matches the theme. For example, when the word McDonald’s is used, the algorithm would identify the famous golden arches from their logo as the theme. A picture where the arches are prominently displayed would then be ranked higher than one in which the arches are in the background.

During a recent study Baluja, Jing and 150 panelists surveyed 2,000 of the most popular products search on Google. It was found that the VisualRank algorithm reduced irrelevant results by 83%. As of now all this has been done only on an experimental level and it remains to be seen whther Google can scale the technology and apply it to their entire database of images.

The once popular search site, whose market share has dwindled to just 3%, has finally given up its pursuit of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Instead the company will return to square one and focus on doing what it started off with – answering questions.

Ask Jeeves, as it was called at the start, began as a question-and-answer type of resource. Users were prompted to “Just type a question and click ‘Ask!’” They were also shown example questions that others were asking. Naturally, most queries on the search engine were in question form, starting with ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’ or ‘how’.

That initial habit fostered among users has stuck with the brand. A larger than normal portion of their user base still formulate queries containing questions rather than just searching for keywords. Even though the site changed and the butler Jeeves got fired, the user mindset never completely adjusted to thinking of Ask.com as just another search engine, in spite of the quality of their results being comparable to Google. Now they are simply returning to their roots.

Women from the Midwest and Southern United States form the majority of Ask.com’s user base. Catering to their needs is therefore an obvious choice. Ask.com will now help married women looking to manage their lives by answering questions about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework.

Now that Ask.com is out of the picture, and Microsoft looks likely to acquire Yahoo!, the search engine market is turning into a duopoly with an extremely dominant front-runner, Google.

Update:

Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham has stated that the rumours in the mainstream media are not true. “The idea that we’re going to become a women’s site is just plain wrong. We know that a sizeable group of our core user base is women, and we know they come to us for a certain kind of search: to get answers, often in areas of reference, health and entertainment,” he said, “We recognize that we can’t be all things to all people, so we’re focusing on our core group of users. We want to build up the kinds of answers those users are looking for, while at the same time remain a strong search site.”

The graph alongside holds few surprises. Google has consistently held its pole position in the ranking of search engines. In January 2008 alone the search giant received 7.7 billion search requests on its combined properties, which include Google Search (6.2 billion searches) and YouTube (1.5 billion).

Google’s market share in the US crossed 50% in September 2007, and it hasn’t fallen below the half way mark since then. Yahoo! continues to trail far behind with 2.5 billion searches, followed not as far behind by Microsoft with 1 billion searches. If the 2nd and 3rd ranking players in the market were to join forces, their combined search volumes would be 3.5 billion, accounting for 24% market share.

Over the past 6 months Google has continued to grow at the expense of its competitors. The graph below compares the growth in number of search queries received on each of the Top 5 ranked search engines.

Google grew 14% in terms of the number of queries received over the past six months. Even though all the providers grew in Jan 2008 compared to December 2007, the six-month numbers are not as good for anyone other than Google. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have fallen, the latter by as much as 7% compared to August 2007 numbers.

Yahoo! Open Search will allow third party website owners to present more useful information about their site on the search results page. Webmasters will be able to substitute the regular title link and description snippet with all sorts of additional information including images, deeper site links, reviews, ratings, prices, contact details and more.

If the Open Search platform is implemented well, and abuse kept under control, it could take the concept of universal search to an all new level. Webmasters will have more control over their site listings and users will now be able to control what they see in their search results by turning off anything they dislike in Open Search.

As shown in the sample Open Search result above, which was provided by Yahoo!, a publisher like the New York Times, Yelp, or even a small local website can supply Yahoo! with additional data. The Yahoo! Search algorithm will then present that data to users at the right time.

TechCrunch reports that while the Open Search program will provide third parties the incentive to add images and more links with the aim of driving more traffic to their site, it will not allow them to affect the search rankings in any way.

Yahoo! Open Search Site

Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Search says “We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved – site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users.”

Yahoo! Open Search is the best piece of news and the most groundbreaking innovation to come out of the beleaguered Internet giant in recent times.

Over the last weekend Colin found that the robots.txt file on Yahoo!’s social bookmarking property del.icio.us blocked search engine spiders including Googlebot from crawling certain directories. The extract from the robots.txt file on del.icio.us pasted below shows the “offending” code:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Disallow: /inbox
Disallow: /subscriptions
Disallow: /network
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /post
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /rss

Colin then spoofed the Googlebot to see what was being delivered to the spider when it tried to access one of those pages, and found that he was being delivered a 404 error.

Colin’s erroneous post

Yahoo! has recently tested featuring information about del.icio.us bookmarks on its search results pages. Colin, along with a bunch of other SEO enthusiasts immediately jumped to the conclusion that Yahoo! is making use of its right to prevent competitors from benefiting from del.icio.us.

What Colin and the others are overlooking is three extremely important facts:

1. The directories being blocked by the robots.txt contain general administrative pages such as the “Add a URL” page, which do not need to be indexed by the search engines.
2. The 404 result is delivered because the user is spoofing a search engien spider, and the del.icio.us site is most likely smart enough to detect this and therefore does not allow access to its pages in order to prevent content scraping.
3. Del.icio.us, like most other websites relies on Google for traffic, and blocking the spider from accessing its content would amount to del.icio.us shooting itself in the foot!

The fastest way to check the validity of Colin’s claims is by checking if Google has been able to spider and cache any pages from del.icio.us after Colin’s original discovery…

Pages spidered by Google from del.icio.us in the past 24 hours

Clicking on the link above will immediately show that the Googlebot continues to access del.icio.us.

The Problem With SEOs

While the topic of del.icio.us blocking or allowing Googlebot is relatively minor, the buzz surrounding this post highlights a much bigger problem in the industry: the fact that a self-proclaimed pundit can cry “wolf”, and in no time a whole bunch of clueless “sheep” will run scared, turning what should have otherwise been someone’s minor error into SEO gospel.

The data Kaushik had gathered on Google queries provides the following information:

1. The average number of words per query to Google has gone up from 3 words to 4 in the last quarter of 2007
2. Paid searches account for about 14% of Google clicks, while 86% of clicks are organic
3. 25% of queries made in a month on Google are unique for that month.

The implications of these three points of data are very important for all search marketers.

Search Matures

An increase in the number of words per query indicates a maturity in the market, from the point of view of searchers as well as publishers. Searchers are more focused and aware of what they are searching for. 1-word queries tend to be typically navigational queries. Longer query strings typically indicate that the person searching has a specific objective in mind and is using more keywords in the query to filter out irrelevant sites and hone in on the correct types of sites.

Market maturity on the whole would be the primary driving force for such query refinement. If the amount of content were limited, searchers would not need to type in long queries to find exactly what they wanted. However, as more and more information becomes available online, more targeted searching becomes a necessity when looking for particular information, products and services.

Optimisation Is More Important

According to Kaushik‘s data, 6 times as many clicks are counted on organic search results as on sponsored links. While sponsored links provide accountability and fully controllable marketing, the bulk of traffic comes from natural search listings, which irrefutably implies a need for organizations to focus on SEO.

Long Tail Keywords Matter

The long tail theory of search marketing postulates that a large number of queries are made for terms that might not have high volumes, but put together, all of these queries often amount to much more searches than the total searches carried out on a handful of high-traffic keywords. If 25% of queries within a month have only 1 search associated with them, that means 25% of searches come from long tail keywords, which further extols the importance of these keywords.

Official Press Release

In a letter to the board of directors at Yahoo!, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, “Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.”

The first thing that springs to mind when reading this is that the rumours were true – in 2007 and even back in 2006 the two companies were considering ways to partner or join forces!

Another post on TechCrunch UK discusses the regulatory implications of such a merger. Microsoft is no stranger to regulatory scrutiny. The new merger will just add to the heap of inquiries already underway in the EU. The dynamics of this merger will be quite interesting, though…

Yahoo! Search Marketing is the most desirable asset that Microsoft will obtain as a result of this merger. The combined popularity of Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! Search in the UK and Europe will still amount to less than 20% (even less than 10% in many countries) of the total search market. So by no means could this be considered anti-competitive.

Email and instant messaging, however, are a different story. The combined popularity of Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger as well as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail would dwarf all the competition. While the services are free, they do represent significant ad inventory, which could irk Google greatly.

Kelkoo and MSN Shopping are both extremely popular shopping portals that were once competitors, but will now join forces. This could create minor issues from a regulatory stand point, but the greater likelihood is the eventual absorption of the Kelkoo brand in the larger MSN portal.

Microsoft’s offer could not have been better timed. Yahoo! recently announced poor results and a bleak outlook, causing their stocks to fall (NSDQ: YHOO). The news has been received well by Wall Street, with shares of both Yahoo! and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) rising in early hours trading and the overall market receiving a much-needed boost of enthusiasm.

If the two Internet giants do merge, it is not clear what will happen to the workforce. Yahoo! will most likely go ahead with the layoffs announced earlier this week. And as the two companies align departments, more downsizing is likely to occur in order to minimize overlap in job functions.

An interesting question stemming from this latest piece of news is ‘what will this merger mean for the search and search marketing industry’?

Update:

An official press release from Yahoo! states that the board have confirmed receipt of the offer from Microsoft and are considering the offer.

Responding to a post on the Google Webmaster Help forum, John Mueller stated, “In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get additional credibility from Google.”

SEO professionals starting paying more attention to links from .edu and .gov domains after Google’s update nicknamed Jagger, where reciprocal links were devalued and more importance was paid to links from sites having greater authority. Educational institutions are usually very choosy about whom they agree to link with. Websites of well known colleges and universities also typically have higher PageRank. The conclusion that such a link would be more valuable is therefore not really far-fetched.

A link from a .edu or .gov site is neither easily available free of cost nor through payment. These websites link only to extremely relevant and trustworthy sites or other equally popular sites. Immaterial of whether the domain extension of such a site is .edu or .com, it fits the bill for a good quality, desirable site to get a link from.

Back in April 2006, a post on High Rankings Forum asked whether there was any evidence that having inbound .edu and .gov links was “better” and counted more than other links, to which forum moderator Jill Whalen answered with a simple “no”. It would seem though that Jill may have been in a minority here as many SEOs voiced their belief in the SEO goodness of .edu and .gov links on a post at SEO Roundtable.

There is no absolute proof that search engines do or do not consider .edu links to be more valuable. Even Google’s, John Mueller does not categorically deny the value of a .edu domain. All he says is that they “generally” do not get more credibility from Google. This does not mean that link from respectable universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale will not count for more. Though, the fact rests that there are a lot more good attributes associated with all of those university websites than just their .edu extension.

Yahoo! reported a net loss of $24.1 million or 4 cents per share for the third quarter. Although these figures are in sync with Wall Street estimates, they represent a sharp fall from the $8.1 million or 13 cents per share profit for the same period last year, which was also the time when Yahoo! had made big promises about their new advertising platform (code-named Panama). Needless to say, Panama did not live up to any of the hype and Yahoo! is now suffering the consequences.

This glaring downhill slide has forced those at the top to consider layoffs for about a thousand out of their estimated 14,300 employees in the immediate future. However according to CEO Jerry Yang, the company will continue investing heavily in some strategic departments like paid services, and advertising and search technology. Some of the laid off employees could reapply for jobs in the growth sectors.

Analysts at Wall Street expected advertising revenue to slide down, as it did. However, they did not expect the outlook to be as bleak as was painted by Yang. Revised projections for the fourth quarter place expected revenues at only $160 – 180 million against Wall streets estimated $190.8 million. Year end estimates have also been cut from $700 – 775 million to $688 – 708 million. Investors have taken these results negatively and Yahoo! share prices fell by over 10% in after-hours trading.

Egos at Yahoo! have taken a severe beating over the past few weeks, as they should. Their demise will be of their own making. During an interview with Fox Business News yesterday, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said, “At some point Yahoo! might have to make a decision – to either lose the ad platform or partner with Google, or lose their company and get sold off to Microsoft or to a hedge fund in pieces.” This would surely be the most bitter pill for Yahoo! to swallow.

Arrington And Fox Business News Discuss Yahoo!

Social bookmarking pioneer del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! in December 2005. The site enables users to store their bookmarks and tag them online so that they can retrieve them or add some more at any time, from any computer that they may be using at that point in time, instead of the earlier practice of being able to access ones bookmarks only from one’s own PC.

Del.icio.us incorporates a social element by allowing users to share bookmarks with friends and check bookmarks used by others. In effect the system allows people to be better organized and share information with colleagues and friends.

Google has long considered bookmarking to be an important indication of site authority, and incorporated the number of bookmarks, social as well as browser-based, as one of the factors in its algorithm to rank sites. Yahoo! has probably weighed in the number of del.icio.us bookmarks to a page when calculating the page’s rank for some time too.

However, for the first time Yahoo! is now listing the number of bookmarks alongside the search results pages, as shown in the screen grab below, found courtesy of Marketing Pilgrim. Even if Yahoo! does not use del.iciou.us bookmark popularity as a ranking factor, the presence of the number of bookmarks pointing to the site will probably influence users to click on the more popular results.

Integration of del.icio.us tags and bookmark popularity in the search results is currently being tested and has not been implemented widely. If they find that the information helps users, we will likely start seeing the del.icio.us icon more frequently alongside search results on Yahoo!

The presence of the del.icio.us popularity number could turn into a bit of a vicious circle in some ways, as more users click on the more popular results and accordingly more users will end up bookmarking those results, further increasing their exposure. While this isn’t bad news for some webmasters, for others whose sites are new or not as popular, this could mean they start the SEO game on the wrong foot and are never given the opportunity to prove their worthiness of a place in the SERPs.

Fast Search and Transfer has made minor headlines in the past year with its mobile search product and deals forged with Virgin Mobile and Infospace. The company offers a range of services including enterprise search, eCommerce solutions, information management, mobile and online media to about 3500 companies, some of which fall in the Fortune 500.

As per the public declaration, Microsoft has offered Fast Search and Transfer US $3.56 per share, which is a 42 percent premium on its share price of Jan 4 2008. The total value of the deal is estimated to be US $1.2 billion or £600 million. The board of directors at Fast Search obviously consider this an excellent offer as they have unanimously recommended that its shareholders should accept it. Over 35% of the shareholders have already agreed to accept the offer.

As in all business deals there are observers and analysts who approve of the deal and those who do not. There are many who feel that $1.2 billion is too much money for a company like Fast, and that Microsoft should have waited a while and acquired the company at a lower price, once the recession, which the U.S. economy seems to be heading towards, had struck. Others believe that this is a smart move by Microsoft, and will help them further consolidate their position in the long run.

In all likelihood, the deal will have little impact on the overall search market, but will provide Microsoft access to a more robust mobile search offering and a new distribution network.