The report, released by online marketing company, Efficient Frontier, states that during Q4 of 2011 search spend continued to increase in both the U.S. and U.K.

Increase in search spend in the UK by quarter. Source: Efficient Frontier

Retail spend in the U.S. grew by 18% year-on-year and 40% quarter-on-quarter, indicating that the spend increases substantially during the last quarter of the year. Retail growth in the UK was not as good, and this was reflected in the search spend too, which grew by just 10% year-on-year in the country.

Although Google accounted for 80% share of spend in Q4, Yahoo! and Bing clicks were found to be 14% more valuable and showed 9% higher return on investment than Google. The click-share of Google has, however, gone up by 2.5%.

Search CPCs dropped by 5% overall, mainly due to an increase in mobile advertising and better ad delivery.

Mobile ad spend now accounts for 7-8% of all ad spend compared to just 2% a year ago. Of this, tablets account for 50% of the share. Google drives 96% of mobile search ads while Yahoo! and Bing have just 4% share of the market.

In 2012, mobile search spend is expected to account for 16-22% of all paid clicks as users gradually shift from desktops to mobiles. For the same reason, search CPCs are also expected to fall by 4%.

Projected mobile search spend forecast by the end of 2012. Source: Efficient Frontier

Facebook accounted for 2.7% of biddable online spend in Q4, as marketers now spend a larger amount on social networks. Yahoo! and Bing are set to increase their ad inventory, while Facebook is expected to reach 5% of all online ad spend in 2012. Other social networks, such as Google+ and LinkedIn are also set to grow further and deliver more ad impressions.

There are over 300 websites providing daily deals to consumers. The total number of deals being offered is over 200,000, which is a really huge and a daunting task to sift through.  It could put off even the most ardent shoppers, if they had to search through such a huge number of deals, in order to find the deal that is of interest to them.

The new Bing Deals service was launched with a view to simplify the process and help users to find daily deals that would be of interest to them.

Bing Deals is not a new programme. It is now just a place where deals from several of the most popular sites are presented together. Bing Deals will function as a one-stop shop where over 200,000 deals from the U.S. will be presented to users at one go, without having to browse several websites.

Some of the sites featured are Groupon, LivingSocial, Target and Nordstrom. Deals are organised by retailer, location, keywords and category such as restaurants, spas, entertainment, etc.

Deal search results are visually organised to help users select deals of interest. The top daily deals in any given locality are displayed on the homepage. These deals generally offer savings of between 30%-50%. More features are likely to be added to this service in due course.

bing.com/deals

Bing Deals homepage grouping deals by store and category

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

Action buttons for Hertz car rental on Bing

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

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

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

Action buttons for Delta Airlines on Bing

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

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

This app helps users to organise a get together or events with their friends. When a user wants to know where his friends are, this new app makes it very easy for him to do so.

Users just have to invite their friends through this app, and when they agree to join, both sides will be able to see each others’ locations.

In order to use this app, the user has to sign up using his phone number. Then he can invite all his friends through his contact list and also tell them the reason for the invite.

At this time he can also specify the amount of time for which this invite will hold good. Once that time limit is up, the invite expires automatically and the location sharing stops automatically.

The friends receive a text message with all the details on their Windows Phone. Those who decide to join in will be visible along with their location on the map. The map can be extended or narrowed down to include a larger or smaller area as required.

All those who accept the invite will be able to see each others location. The participants can also update their status through messages. To see a particular person status update, one must click on the user tile of that person. To see the status of all participants, one must click on the People tab.

A person who wants to stop sharing his location has to tap ‘leave’ on the People tab. He can also send his friends a status message to indicate that he is leaving the group.

At present this app is available only on the Windows Phone in the U.S. but is likely to be added to other devices in the future.

This activity is likely to become very popular as it has been found that 73% of users engage in mobile social networking on a daily basis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nokia, the handset manufacturing giant, has been going through a deepening crisis since the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007. The company has decided to sideline their Symbian OS in favour of the Windows Phone OS for their smartphones.

Microsoft Windows Phone on a Nokia handset

Nokia will also use other Microsoft services such as the Bing search engine for their mobile phones. This could turn into a serious blow for Google Mobile and help Bing to gain a larger share in the mobile search market.

The move is expected to help Nokia fight the growing popularity of the Apple iPhone as well as the Google Android platform. Nokia’s new Chief Executive, Stephen Elop, worked with Microsoft until last September, when he took charge of Nokia. The relationship comes as no surprise, not only due to Elop’s historical associations with Microsoft, but also because of the fact that Google is seen as a competitor.

According to Elop, “Nokia is at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward. Today, we are accelerating that change through a new path, aimed at regaining our smartphone leadership.” He also indicated that there would be a management reshuffle, and some people may also lose their jobs.

Though Nokia is still the largest handset manufacturer in the world, its market share has fallen from 36.4% to 28.9% in the last year.

Reactions to the announcement have been quite negative, and the price of Nokia shares has fallen 9.8% since the announcement. Even though this could be Microsoft’s biggest stroke of luck, with respect to mobile search, their shares didn’t rise much either.

Could this be both Microsoft and Nokia’s chance to strike the smartphone and mobile Web markets and make a serious change in both their fortunes?

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

Changes

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

Map Apps

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

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

Windows Phone 7

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

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

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

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

Earthware

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

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

Shoothill

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

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

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

Fortune Cookie

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

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

Questions and Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bing social profile search

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bing recommending “influential” and “popular” Twitter users

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Microsoft has now gained the number 2 position in desktop search according to reports from Nielsen, their performance in mobile search has not improved significantly.

In the beginning of 2009, Microsoft had signed a five year deal with Verizon, to make Bing the default search engine on Verizon mobile phones, with a view to improving their mobile search rankings.

In spite of this deal however, Verizon continued to have the right to use Google as the default search engine on their phones which were powered by Google’s Android software. As a result of this, Verizon is using the Google search engine on 7 of their 8 Android phones, thus leaving Microsoft ‘out in the cold’ in a manner of speaking.

Reports from comScore show that Microsoft’s share in the mobile search market has grown from 1.2% to 1.7% between July 2009 and July 2010. However Google has grown from 9.3% to 14.4% in the same time period.

Microsoft however has said that the deal with Verizon has been made keeping a long term view in mind.

They say that 7 new Android phones are due to be released by Verizon this fall, and they will use Bing as the default search engine.

It is certainly crucial for Microsoft to improve their mobile search market share if they hope to be able to corner a part of the ever growing mobile advertising market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using the local section on m.bing.com users can now find a lot of information that they might need when they are on the go.

Bing provides users a list of suggestions for their local area. The suggestions are based on popularity and also vary according to the time of day. For instance, if a user is conducting a search in the morning hours, the suggestions will give priority to restaurants that offer breakfast and coffee shops. On the other hand, in the evening hours, places such as pubs and nightclubs will be ranked higher.

These results are based on either GPS-determined location of the handset or via mobile phone location triangulation. Users can also the select the radius within which they want to conduct the local search. In areas that are crowded or heavily congested, users can use a smaller radius and in open areas they can use a larger radius.

The listings offered on Bing mobile can also be displayed on a single map for convenience.

To make use of the local suggestion facility, users must click the ‘Local’ link on the Bing Mobile homepage. They will then be presented with a list of nearby places grouped under various categories such as restaurants, schools, shopping malls and theatres.

After selecting the appropriate options the user can save them in the Favourites column. Thereafter the user can just clicks “What’s nearby” and find a list of places of interest in a given radius.

These listings can then be seen on a map, and they can even be forwarded to friends via email, so that users can easily discuss their options and decide where they wish to go.

Google is reported to have said that during the second quarter of the year, marketers were more likely to agree to pay a higher charge for their ads to appear online. This was probably a result of the fact that users were more likely to click on the ads.

The largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. Gannett Co. has also reported a positive trend in the print media after a gap of 31/2 years. The decline of print ads has dropped to 6% during this period.

General Electric Co. has also reported a recovery in the local ad market and the percentage of growth is quite substantial.

The first two months of the quarter were good for Yahoo!, but in the month of June they noticed a sudden drop in the ad spend of several of their advertisers. Though the total search advertising revenue fell by 8%, the display advertising sector has shown a growth of 19% compared to the same period last year.

The Omnicom Group Inc. has shown a 4.2% growth of quarterly net income. There overall revenue grew by 5.9% and in the U.S. alone, it grew by 7.4%.

The New York Times has reported a quarterly growth in revenue after a gap of 3 years. Digital ad sales grew by 21% but the print media saw a drop of 6% in advertising generated revenue.

Online ad revenue on Bing has increased Microsoft’s revenue by 19%. Fox Cable Network reported a growth in their advertising revenue. Time Warner Inc. also saw a surge in growth due in part to increased ad revenue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

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

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

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

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

The community page is essentially a new version of the Facebook Page. They were created to stop people from building Fan Pages on topics that are neither brands nor famous personalities.

In the past, users have created Fan Pages on trivial topics such as “I bet I can find 1,000,000 who HATE Miley Cyrus”, which should have perhaps been a rant for a celebrity forum or a Facebook group, but should never really have been a Facebook Page.

Now, people who are interested in a topic can network with each other on Community Pages.

These pages are connected with the Bing Maps Platform, so if a particular community page is associated with a geographical location, the place will also be pinpointed on a Bing Map that will be visible on the page.

Community Pages are still in the beta phase. Facebook and Bing aim to turn the new service into a site much like Wikipedia, Squidoo or Mahalo, where shared knowledge is available on any topic. To start with, the page will show information from Wikipedia, but Facebook looks forward to contributions from users on the subject.

In order to drive users to these pages, Facebook will suggest specific pages to users based on their interests, place of residence and other details mentioned on the users’ profiles. Users will always have the option to accept pages suggested or to ignore page suggestions.

Community Pages will be public, so users must keep in mind that any comments they make or pictures they post will be visible to all users.

Facebook Community Page for Johannesburg, Gauteng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bing searches for ‘gay’ censored in Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.searchalliance.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has confirmed the deal, and she says that the feature is likely to be launched within the next two months. She has however reassured Facebook users that their privacy will be respected and therefore, Facebook will only stream data from those users who have their privacy settings mentioned as ‘everyone on web’. In fact sorting out this public data from the more private one is the reason, it will take about 2 months to launch this new feature.

Ms. Sandberg has also confirmed that Facebook will not be receiving any monetary compensation for allowing Bing to access their data. In due course of course, it is reasonable to expect that the increased access of Facebook data will lure more marketers and advertisers to Facebook. Thus indirectly this deal between Facebook and Bing is sure to help Facebook to earn more money.

The deal should also help Bing to boost its market share in the search market as they have managed to get these deals through before Google. Bing search results are now likely to be more real-time based than those on Google thus attracting more customers to Bing.

At the same time, Bing must make sure that they do not just clutter up their search results by adding data from Twitter and Facebook. That would only serve to confuse users, instead of providing better quality search results, which is the aim of these partnerships.

Qi Lu said that Microsoft was in talks with Twitter to introduce real time search on Bing.

The new features due to be Launched have been labeled ‘Bing Wave 2’.

He also provided a demo of what the new search results would look like. Apparently the new service will incorporate the best features of both Bing and Twitter.

Microsoft will now have access to all of Twitter’s public feeds, and so, when a user conducts a Twitter search on Bing, they will not only see the most recent tweets and top links, but they will also have the various search features of Bing. The most recent tweets of Twitter will be constantly updated in real-time on Bing. The results will also have a retweet button, so it will be very easy for users to forward the tweets if they wish to.

Although the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, Qi Lu did admit that this would be a non-exclusive deal, thus fuelling the rumors that Twitter is in talks with Google for a similar deal.

Bing will be able to use Twitter content and will keep track of the number of followers to each tweet, in order to determine the quality and ranking of each tweet. Spam will of course be filtered. Tags will be used to identify the trending topics and Bing will also provide the shortened URL as well as the final URL of the topic.

There has been speculation about similar deals between Bing and Facebook but nothing
has been confirmed on that score as yet.

In order to enable social sharing of Bing search queries, Microsoft introduced a feature called ‘Bing and Ping’ last month. The service has now been launched in limited beta, with  a handful of users who signed up for the test on Facebook.

Henceforth, whenever one of the beta testers is signed in and searches for something on Bing (U.S. only) and feels that this information would be of interest to their friends, all they need to do is click one of the links to share it with their friends.

Microsoft Bing and Ping

Users can share via Facebook or Twitter or they can email the search result and a link to the SERP. Surprisingly, they have not included the Windows Live service for this sharing.

The service can be used to share things like news reports, recommendations, local movie times and flight status at present. Microsoft has only just started Beta testing this service, and is looking for feedback from users in order to fine tune and expand the service.

Interestingly, Microsoft made quite a blunder while sending out their invites to users for this service. They listed all the email addresses of people who had signed up for the service in the ‘To:’ field, thereby disclosing everyone’s addresses to all the recipients. They tried to set things right soon after, though, by sending an apology letter admitting the error.

The study shows that the search industry has grown by 41% in July 2009, compared to what it was in July 2008.

Expectedly, Google cornered the lion’s share of the searches conducted. It had 76.7 billion searches which is 67.5% of the total number of searches carried out in July 2009.

Google’s competitors were left far behind. Yahoo! received 8.9 billion searches or 7.8% of the market share. Yahoo! was closely followed by the popular Chinese search engine, Baidu, which received 8 billion searches which is 7% of the market share.

Microsoft’s Bing, which was launched only in June 2009, registered 3.32 billion searches which is a 41% growth compared to July 2008′s volume of searches on Live Search.

Generally speaking, all the well known search engines showed a significant growth in the search volumes they received compared to the same time period last year. Most notably, the Russian search engine Yandex grew by 94%.

comScore has further revealed that the behaviour of search engine users varies markedly from region to region.

They found that Europe accounts for the maximum number of searches with 32.1%, while the Asia-Pacific region follows with 30.8% and North America has 22.1%.

On the other hand, Latin America had the largest number of searches per person. They had an average of 13 search usage days per person in a month, and each searcher conducted 130 searches on an average.

They were followed by Europe which had 117 searches per user and North America which had 12.5 usage days in the month.

The Middle East and Africa lagged behind with only 5.8% of searches conducted worldwide, 10.5 search usage days per person and 97.3 searches per person.

According to sources, Microsoft has declined to make any upfront payment or revenue guarantee, which Yahoo! had initially asked for.

Microsoft search technology will now be used on all Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will also be able to sell search ads on its own sites as well as on Bing through the Microsoft adCenter technology.

The deal, though not quite as all encompassing as expected, gives Yahoo! the control it wanted over its advertisers and consumer data.

According to details available, the partnership for online search and advertising will be for a period of 10 years.

In a joint statement issued by the companies, the deal was forecasted to increase Yahoo’s! annual operating income by about $500 million, while also reducing their capital expenditure by$200 million.

The deal is likely to give Microsoft a larger share of the search market, thus helping it to fight rival Google. According to the latest reports from comScore, Google has about 65% of the U.S. search market, while Microsoft Bing has 8.4% and Yahoo! has 19.6%. Jointly the two companies will account for about 30% of the market share.

Microsoft Live Search had been losing market share in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, but Bing seems to be changing that situation now.

Reports from Efficient Frontier show that ROI received by advertisers has gone up by 43% for Google, and by 24% for Microsoft Bing, but has dropped by 8% for Yahoo!

This is in spite of the fact that the over all expenditure by advertisers on search marketing has gone down by 21% compared to the same time last year.

The amount that advertisers spent on Bing has gone up by only0.1 percentage points compared to last year, but has gone up by 0.7 percentage points when compared to the first quarter of 2009.

In the second quarter of 2009, Bing received 4.5% of ad spend of the clients of Efficient Frontier, while Yahoo! received 20.5% and Google received 75%. At the same time, Bing had 4.1% of the total clicks while Yahoo! had 24.3% and Google had 71.6%

Bing has been doing especially well in the travel and financial services sectors.

The report by Efficient Frontiers also shows that the amount which its medium spenders (between $50,000 to $2,00,000 per month) are spending on SEM has gone up by 5% in Q2 of 2009, compared to the amount spent at the same time last year, but small advertisers (below $50,000 per month) spent only 59% of what they spent last year, and large advertisers (above $2,00,000 per month) spent 78% of what they spent last year. Over all, the budgets have gone down by 21%.

On the other hand, another SEM company reported that large spenders (over $1 million per year) spent 18.77% more than they did last year, while small spenders (below $1 million per year) spent 25.33% less than they did last year.

comScore reports that Microsoft had 8.4% of market share soon after the launch of Bing in June 2009, compared to 8.02% in May 2009. but that figure is still less than the 9.2% which they had in June 2008. This may be the effect of the recession though.

Twitter users often look up the latest or trending topics at a particular time, as indicated in the right-hand column when logged in on Twitter. Then, in order to find out more about the topic, users have to query a search engine to get the latest news, presumably from more reliable sources.

BingTweets eliminates the need for users to go to another site for the search process.

Rather than adding the functionality to Bing.com, Microsoft has chosen to launch a new site, BingTweets.com, which automatically provides search results for topics currently trending on Twitter.

Users can now go directly to BingTweets.com and check out what the trending topics are at that point of time and get search results for those topics on the same page.

When a user on BingTweets clicks on one of the trending topics, its search results are provided alongside without having to click further or load a new page. In fact, even the website that is linked to within the search results loads within the same frame, allowing users to stay within BingTweets, without needing to leave it to get details on any interesting topics.

Another interesting feature of BingTweets is a ‘Share This’ option, which allows users to tweet or email the search results to their contacts. In fact, users can even post them on various other social networking sites via the Share This tool.

If such innovations continue, it looks as though Microsoft may really be able to make some in-roads in the search market, which has so far been dominated by Google.

Update:

The screenshot below shows BingTweets in action.

Bing will now be used to power the new Quick Add feature on Hotmail. This essentially means that users can now search Bing from within Hotmail and add information from the search results directly into their email body.

Details about movie listings, images, videos, maps, restaurant reviews and many more info bytes can be searched and added directly into outgoing email messages, as can be seen in the example below:

The procedure to do this is actually quite simple.

The user first has to open up a new message page, by clicking on ‘New’. Then selects a category from the ‘Quick Add’ column, which can be found on the right hand side of the page. After that, users can select what sort of results they are looking for (image, video) and then search in the Bing search box. Bing returns the top 10 results within the same page. More results can be viewed in a new window. Lastly, clicking ‘Insert’ on the relevant result will add it in the message body where the cursor was placed.

One shortcoming of this facility is that it lists only a few search results. Those looking for more detailed search results, have to go over to Bing, and then it is not so easy to add the required result into the Hotmail message.

At present the Quick Add feature is available only in select locations like Australia, Canada, China, India and of course in the U.S. and U.K.

Data pulled from the 4 billion page views collected across more than 3 million websites that use the StatCounter analytics solution showed that Google monopolises the mobile search market. The search giant, whose brand is now a neologism for searching, delivered 96.23% of mobile searches worldwide in the first half of 2009.

Yahoo! follows second, worldwide, with 3.24% mobile search market share and Yandex.ru is third with 0.14%.  Ask Jeeves (0.11%) and AltaVista (0.07%) round off the top 5 mobile search providers. The rest, including Microsoft, account for no more than 0.21% of the worldwide mobile search volume.

In the UK, the situation is similar, with Google commanding 98.8%, followed by Yahoo! (0.86%) and, surprisingly, Ask Jeeves (0.14%).

Before screaming “anti-trust” or falling into depression caused by the world turning into a Googleopoly, let’s take a moment to examine the data…

While the size of StatCounter’s data set is nothing to laugh at, most of its volume comes from fixed internet websites rather than mobile sites. In fact, the page views and number of sites using StatCounter to track visitor data on the mobile Internet is bound to be much, much lower.

That’s not all. StatCounter data itself is not wholly credible due to the fact that they use cookies and JavaScript to track visitors, both of which often don’t work when websites are viewed 0n a mobile device. Therefore, any data delivered by StatCounter is only valid for a small subset of all the different mobile phones consumers use to search the Internet.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Google’s mobile search market share in the USA was an estimated 61%, while Yahoo! and Microsoft got 18% and 5% respectively. Not a lot has changed in the mobile search market since June 2008, which makes it safe to assume that Nielsen’s numbers would not be drastically different today.

This still leaves us back at square one, asking “has Google already won the race for mobile search supremacy before it even really began”?

The latest reports received from users seem to be very favorable for Bing.

The reports sent in last week, generally gave the impression that this new effort by Microsoft, was nothing great, and Microsoft would not be able to hold its own, against Google in the search engine market, no matter how hard they tried.

In fact one enterprising blogger even coined an acronym for Bing. ‘But It’s Not Google.

The more recently received comments and reviews are a complete turn around, when compared to these earlier reports.

Now people are not only appreciating Bing, and saying that it is good, some of them are even saying that it is better than good old Google and they may now switch loyalties to Bing. A few others who are not quite so effusive in their praise, still grant that Bing is as good as Google, and the only reason they will continue to stick to Google is habit.

It is not to be expected of course that Google will or should take these comments lightly, and continue to rest on past laurels. Maybe this is the wake up call they need to innovate and further improve their own search engine.

The new platform will be called Bing. It is expected to help users obtain knowledge about their query and thus make smart decisions.

Steve Ballmer first introduced Bing at the D7 Conference held in San Diego recently.

According to the Bing team, four and a half new websites are being created on the net every second, but a large portion of searches conducted still do not produce the results that users are looking for. That is to say, the results obtained do not help users in the process of decision making.

Bing will be endowed with a new set of intuitive tools, along with an excellent search service, which will combine to provide users with results which are far better organized, thus helping them to make better decisions.

Bing will also have features like cash back and Price Predictor, to help users save some money.

Bing will focus on four key areas, viz. making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

The brand name Bing will also be incorporated into some of Microsoft’s other services. For instance Virtual Maps and Farecast will henceforth be known as Bing Maps and Bing Travel respectively.

To help users learn more about Bing, Microsoft has started a new website DiscoveringBing.com. Its new Twitter account is @bing.

Whether Bing will help Microsoft to displace Google in the search market only time will tell.