With this, Yahoo! has achieved the reputation of having had four full time CEO’s in less than five years.

Ross Levinsohn has been appointed as the interim CEO. He was earlier overseeing Yahoo’s media and advertising services.

Yahoo! has been having financial problems since 2008 when they refused a takeover bid by Microsoft. The company had appointed Scott Thompson to take care of their troubles. However, a disgruntled stock holder and activist hedge fund manager, Daniel Loeb, recently found that Thompson never received a computer science degree from Stonehill College as was listed in his biodata. He exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo!’s board.

After initially trying to protect the CEO, by claiming the whole issue was “an inadvertent error”, Yahoo! set up a special committee to investigate the facts. Thompson tried to pass-off the error as having been made by Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.

Heidrick & Struggles have denied any wrong doing on their part. “This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect”, CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees.

Five Yahoo! board members, including chairperson Roy Bostock and four other directors who were to step down after the company’s annual meeting, will also be resigning immediately.

Loeb, who has a 5.8% stake in Yahoo! will now occupy three of Yahoo’s vacated board seats along with his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.

Thompson told Loeb in late March, he wasn’t qualified to be on Yahoo!’s board. This had upset Loeb who then found out about the inconsistencies in Thompson’s résumé.

Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who has been on the board for just three months will now chair the board. The newly reconstituted board hopes to be able to tide over the crisis that Yahoo! has been going through.

If the beleaguered tech giant wasn’t having enough trouble, the new issues have reduced the company to a joke in certain circles. Many tend to forget that in spite of all the public issues faced by Yahoo! the company still drives a tremendous amount of traffic and revenue. However, they’ve fallen foul of the investors and seem to be digging themselves a grave they’re unlikely to ever crawl out of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Club Bing is a group of online word games that had been launched by Microsoft in April 2007. It was called Live Search Club previously. When players completed games on Club Bing, they would earn tickets that could later be exchanged for products from Microsoft.

The games had initially helped Bing to increase its market share from 8.4% in May 2007 to 13.2% in June that year. However, it now seems like the Club has either served its purpose to launch the Bing search engine or is not continuing to drive visitors to the service and hence the decision to shut it down.

The Club will be shut down on the 31^st of May this year. The games will continue to be played until the 15^th of May, and users will be allowed to redeem their prizes until the 31^st of the month. Thereafter, the club will shut down, and any left over coupons will obviously lapse.

Club Bing is to be replaced by a service called msnNOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searches for news of Jackson’s departure were double those of Osama bin Laden who was narrowly ahead of Amy Winehouse (both of whom died last year) in a study of online searches since 2004.

The first global ranking of the world’s “Deaths That Shocked the Net” comes from analysing one billion online searches via Google by AccuraCast, a leading U.K. digital search agency.

Deaths that Shocked the Internet – infographic

2011 had 5 big deaths in terms of search with Osama bin Laden, Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Taylor and Muammar Gaddafi all featuring in the top ten of most searched for deaths of all time. Only 4 other years made it in the study – 2010 for Alexander McQueen, 2009 with Michael Jackson and Brittany Murphy, 2008 for Heath Ledger and 2006 with Saddam Hussein.

The study shows that the average age of the top ten most searched for deaths is 50 years and 4 months. Amy Winehouse was the youngest on the list at 27 years of age with Elizabeth Taylor the oldest at seventy nine years of age.

The top ten contains 5 entertainers (3 film stars, 2 singers), 2 political leaders, 1 fashion designer, 1 terrorist and 1 technology pioneer – Steve Jobs.

Violent death is the most common cause of death in the top ten search list with 4 in this category – Bin Laden (shot), Saddam Hussein (hanged), Muammar Gaddafi (shot) and Alexander McQueen (suicide).

Homicide was found to have killed Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs died due to illness while drugs and alcohol accounted for Heath Ledger and Amy Winehouse respectively.

Brittany Murphy’s death was judged as accidental while Elizabeth Taylor was the one person who died a natural death.

According to Farhad Divecha, AccuraCast Managing Director, “Our study shows that, above all, death is the biggest driver of all Internet search activity especially just after it has occurred. Using figures from Google we have been able to analyse rises and falls in search to produce a unique league table”.

Ranking of the 10 most shocking deaths

Google has stated that they are doing this because they wish to create a “beautiful, simple and intuitive experience” for their users.

In effect, the new policy will make it possible to share information provided by a user on one Google product across all other Google products and features. This includes Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, Google Plus and others.

A major stumbling block of this new policy is the fact that users will not have the option to disagree with the policy if they wish to continue using any of these Google services.

Consumer Objections

Users have voiced their discontent via comments and votes on the YouTube video introducing the new, unified privacy policy. The major bone of contention for users seems to be that information from any one Google service will now be accessible to a host of other services.

Regular consumers are not blind to the fact that Google makes its money from advertising. They also accept that in order to advertise on all of its services, Google does need to be able to pull information from one service and use it elsewhere. What they dislike is the idea that Google is mixing the concept of privacy in a closed system such as GMail with that on an open network such as Google+ or YouTube.

Official Investigations Triggered

Not surprisingly, the announcement has not gone down too well with certain groups. Gary Davis, the Data Protection Commissioner in Dublin, where Google’s European headquarters are based, has said that their office would be “further assessing the implications of the changes now that they are launched to users”. He also said that “Google has a responsibility to ensure that any such changes are made abundantly clear to users”.

Greg Jones from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office said, “Failure to inform users about changes may not only lead to a loss of trust in the company, but could also mean that they are failing to comply” with U.K. law.

Exceptions to this new policy will be Google Books, Google Chrome and Google Wallet. These sites will continue to retain their own privacy policy.This exception is due to legal reasons.

The new policy will come into effect from the 1st of March 2012.

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.

A study recently conducted by ecommerce firm Baynote, has found that only 90 people out of the 1,032 individuals surveyed in the United States were in any way influenced by retailers’ pages on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Of this, 59% said that they bought products directly from the retailer’s own website.

In fact, 80% of those surveyed said that the social networks had no influence whatsoever on their buying habits. They claimed that recommendations made by social networks had no bearing on their purchase decisions.

Search and email were the dominant drivers of promotions and recommendations. While 93% of those surveyed used the Internet to research products, 91% rated recommendations from search engines as relevant and 63% found search engine promotions useful.

It was also found that tablets were becoming increasingly popular for browsing through the goods available online, as the relatively larger screen of the tablet as compared to the mobile makes browsing more convenient.

93% of these people also confirmed that they use tablets only as a means to browse the availability of products and then they buy the product directly from a store.

2011 U.S. online holiday shopping experience. Source: Baynote

While this study might alarm some readers, the core findings are not that surprising. Social media remains a great branding channel and should not be perceived as a venue to hard-sell products.

To begin with, Microsoft adCenter will start providing paid search results to Yahoo! sites in France, Ireland and the U.K.

Ranked second and third most popular search providers in the UK, Yahoo! and Microsoft hope to be able to achieve this in the first trimester of 2012. Advertisers and marketers will accordingly be informed about actions they can take with regards to their adCenter accounts and budgets.

Testing of the paid search results is expected to begin by mid January itself, but will be limited to a small percentage of Yahoo! traffic. Marketers have been advised to closely monitor their campaigns and prepare to increase their budgets, especially if the budget is currently depleted more than 80% daily.

Location targeting capabilities of adCenter are also being improved in order to help advertisers reach a more relevant audience, with new language and location targeting options. This will help European advertisers to reach users in various locations where the same language is spoken. They will also be able to decide which location they wish to target via choices ranging from a bundle of countries to individual cities. They will also be able to apply bid-boosting to focus their spending more effectively.

Testing and adjustments will continue until the second quarter of the year, by which time, Microsoft and Yahoo! are likely to be ready for a full-scale roll out of these services.

According to this report, the list is similar to the one they had released last year. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of unique visitors to most of the top sites.

It is no surprise that search, social networking and video remain at the top of the reasons for mobile browsing with Google, Facebook and YouTube scoring the top three rankings respectively.

The world’s 10 most popular mobile websites are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vkontakte.ru
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com
10. twitter.com

The report has compared the findings between November 2011 and November 2010. Apart from seeing rapid growth in Asia, Opera Mini has also found a substantial increase in mobile Web usage in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USA’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

UK’S 5 GREATEST MUSICAL COMEBACKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action buttons for Hertz car rental on Bing

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

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

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

Action buttons for Delta Airlines on Bing

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

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

www.google.com/flights/

This new service has been launched in conjunction with ITA Software, which was acquired by Google in April 2011. It took Google nine months to finalise the deal with ITA, because of in-depth legal scrutiny of the deal as a result of objections from numerous other websites.

Flight Search by Google is a lot faster than similar services provided by any other website so far. The results appear almost instantaneously compared to the typical 5-10 second wait experienced by users on most other travel sites that scour a large database of partner deals.

Instant results on Google Flight Search

Users can browse costs to fly to different destinations without having to perform a dozen searches. Prices and travel times in this flight search facility can be viewed on a graph for easy comparison, and a slider allows users to filter down the search results by price and flight duration.

Flight search results filtered on a graph

Google believes that most flights are chosen based on cost as well as travel time. Thus, they said, “We automatically set the filters to focus on options which are reasonable in both price and duration, and you can always adjust the filters to show even more flights.”

This service is not based on any paid relationships so far. Since it is the airlines that decide how their flights are to be marketed, the booking links will point to the airline websites only.

As of now, this feature is available only for selected destinations within the U.S. There are plans to expand the service in the near future.

It was certainly a surprise to Ms. Bartz, when she was informed about the decision over the phone on the 6th of September!

Bartz had been heading the company for nearly three years. When she had taken over, Yahoo! was bad shape and she had to face many challenges. Although she managed to overcome some of the problems, the general consensus was that her style of functioning was not good enough and she had not been able to achieve as much as was expected of her. It was also felt that she was not taking the competition from Facebook seriously enough.

During her tenure at Yahoo! Bartz did not succeed in bringing the company’s stock back up anywhere near the price it was trading at when Microsoft tried to buy it out.

YHOO share price between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

After the news of her termination was publicised, Yahoo! stocks went up 6% in after-hours trading. The share price had been more or less flat during her regime in spite of a 60% rise in the overall Nasdaq Composite Index. Yahoo!’s performance was also poor compared to fellow search provider, Google.

Comparing YHOO and GOOG share prices between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

That said, Yahoo! did post a profit of over a million dollars last year even though comScore reported that visitors were spending 33% less minutes on Yahoo! sites since Ms. Bartz took over.

Yahoo!’s Chief Financial Officer, Tim Morse, has been asked to take over her duties until a suitable replacement is found. In a memo to employees, Carol Bartz expressed her sadness at having to leave the company and wished all her colleagues all the best.

As of now, Yahoo!’s future is once again up for speculation. It is believed by some that they may even be willing to be bought over for the right price.

The most notable change to have occurred is the fact that people now start conducting movie searches much earlier than in the past. It has been found that on an average, people now start movie searches about five weeks prior to its release. Only a couple of years ago, these searches were conducted just prior to the release of the movie.

Google search results for the last Harry Potter film

Another major change that has been found is the fact that people now search for movies much more than they used to do in the past.

Selina Rennie, who works with the team at Google that carried out this study team says, “Movie-goers searched 1.75 times more per film in 2010 than in 2008. Additionally, searches for film trailers were up by more than 50% in 2010 versus the previous year.”

The increased availability of digital content as well as the growing availability of Internet-connected devices has led to these changes in the way movie searches are conducted.

Big box office hits (grossing more than $100 million) seem to draw disproportionately more searches than mid-tier films (grossing $50 – $100 million). Queries per moviegoer are higher for mid-tier films, indicating a lot of consumer interest but low engagement from the industry, which implies a lot of potential for growth.

YouTube searches and related video referrals are a very important source of video views. Yet, the surprisingly low number of studios advertising on YouTube search as against those advertising on Google search shows yet another opportunity for growth.

It would be highly expedient of studios to be ready with an interesting trailer the moment the audience shows an inclination to see the movie or gather any information about it.

Home entertainment is also an evolving branch of this industry and studios are now contemplating the creation of a new “premium VOD” that would allow users to rent movies within 30 to 60 days of the release of the film.

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

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

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

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

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

As the name suggests, this new feature will show users additional content ‘related’ to the topic they are reading about, even as they read about it.

With the help of Google Related users will be able to view other content relative to that topic — like videos, product reviews, or other mentions of the product across the web.

Users will be able to see the related content n a thin bar at the bottom of the screen. Hovering the mouse over the bar will cause it to expand, enabling the user to view the content directly in the browser window without having to open a new tab or window. If users come across some information of interest to them they can use the built in +1 button.
This feature will make it very easy for users to find contextual content. Google Related is a step in the right direction for optimising websites and hence will be of use to marketers.

Microsoft Advertising recently recently posted the results of research analysing how Indians spend their time online. The study, titled “Living with the Internet” was carried out by Microsoft Advertising, MEC and Mindshare, and it provides interesting results.

Indians were found to spend:

• 49% of their time communicating
• 35% of the time seeking information
• 22% of their time on entertainment activities
• 14% of the time creating content on digital spaces (status updates etc)
• 12% of their time making online transactions.

In addition, it was also found that 81% of time spent reading the news or looking for information, is planned. Similarly, 81% of activities such as communicating, online chatting and networking are also planned. Even downloading or streaming videos, playing games or listening to music are planned 60% of the time.

In contrast, activities such as updating blogs, uploading photos and online transactions are unplanned nearly 50% of the time.

Another issue being studied is the popularity of laptops versus smart phones. While it was found that both gadgets are equally popular for searches on the go, laptops are more popular for other activities.

Laptops were used for communication 51% of the time compared to smart phones 46% of the time. Laptops were used for entertainment 23% of the time versus 17% for smart phones and laptops were used for transactions 13% of the time compared to 8% for smart phones.

This information is especially important to marketers and brands planning to target the Indian subcontinent as the data shows a definite maturing of the online market, thereby enabling advertisers to connect better with their target audience online rather than having no option other than to advertise on television, billboards and newspapers.

Google Hotel Finder

Hotels in Chicago via Google Hotel Finder

Google’s new service allows users to find hotel rooms available in a given area, along with the price and amenities of each hotel in that area.

Hotel Finder selects the most visited areas of major cities by default and shows hotels within these tourist hotspots. Users can also draw a shape on an interactive map around the area they wish to stay in.

The Hotel Finder service provides a comparative study of the price range of hotels in an area.

Details of each hotel in the area are provided when a user clicks on the listing, along with a collage of images and reviews from Google Places. Users can then shortlist the hotels they are interested in or book a room in the hotel they like via Travelocity, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com or the hotel itself.

Hotel Finder is currently in the pre-beta experimental stage and is available only for hotels in various American cities. The interface is very similar to other sites and uses sliding scales and quick option selectors to allow users to narrow their choice. The most popular feature of the service is likely to end up being the seamless integration with Google Maps, which makes selecting hotels in a particular region extremely simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Alongside this is the growing popularity of the Internet, which is becoming more and more an integral part of all aspects of lives in all parts of the world. Hence, it was only be a matter of time before the Internet would be widely used as a means to facilitate the process of adoption or surrogacy.

The Internet already provides detailed information about how to go about the process and who are the people who can apply for adoption or surrogacy.

Google ads for online adoption agencies

A large amount of adoption and surrogacy research is started online.Over 4.5 million searches are carried out on Google each month on topics related to adoption and about 0.5 million searches are carried out on topics related to surrogacy.

The growing popularity of these search terms has led to searches for adoption or surrogacy-related topics even displaying rather inappropriate-looking ads, such as the one pictured here, which includes a Google Checkout button among search results for ‘International adoption agencies’.

However, indiscriminate use of the Internet for these purposes could come with its own set of problems that are much more serious than a few awkwardly placed searched ads.

A Double-Edged Sword

A while ago, a woman came across a couple online, who were on the lookout for a woman agreeable to be a surrogate mother to their child. The parties concerned then made an informal agreement for surrogacy using the ovum of the surrogate mother and the sperm of the intended father.

Usually people who undertake such arrangements in the U.K. receive a lot of counseling and advice from non-profit organizations. Since the parties mentioned above met through the Internet, they did not have the advantage of such support.

At a later stage, they had some disputes and the surrogate mother refused to hand over the child to the intended parents. The courts also sided with her, keeping the welfare of the child in mind, as the intended parents had not had much interaction with the child.

Similar and various other problems can also occur in cases of adoptions being arranged over the Internet if the parents and child do not receive appropriate counseling.

Need For Offline Control

It may be advisable and indeed necessary, that the authorities concerned lay down certain laws for people who wish to go in for adoption or surrogacy via the Internet, in order to avoid misunderstandings and disputes in future. This would certainly be best for the children concerned.

The largest spending was seen in November ($14.5 billion) and December ($18.1 billion). Cyber Monday – the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday – broke all records with $1.028 billion being spent in a single day.

Among electronic items, flat panel TVs and mobile devices were the fastest selling, followed by computer hardware.

Online Consumers

Group buying through sites such as Groupon and Living Social gained tremendous popularity during the year. Social networks also continued to grow. Facebook became the number 1 site in August 2010, for time spent online, beating sites like Google and Yahoo! It now accounts for 12.3% of the total time spent online in The U.S.

The amount of time spent on leisure activities online also grew in 2010. Portals represented 20.2% of the share of time spent online, while social networks accounted for 14.4% and entertainment sites for 12.6%.

Social Networks

The growth of social media caused web-based email usage to reduce from 12.5% to 11.0%, especially among the younger generation. Social networking accounts for 14.4% of all time spent online, but its share much higher for youngsters. Women also tend to spend more time on social networks than men.

Facebook also now accounts for 10% of the U.S. page views and has gained millions of new users. MySpace, on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline, losing 27% of its users. LinkedIn, Twitter and several new social sites continue to grow gradually. While it has lost some users in the 35-54 years demographic, the number of users below 18 years and above 55 years have grown significantly. On the other hand, Twitter saw maximum gain in the 18-34 years demographic.

Search Marketing

The search market has also seen innovation with the introduction of instant search by Google. Google continues to be the market leader in the States, with over 60% of the market share, while Yahoo! had 16% and Microsoft had 12% in December 2010. ‘Facebook’ was the most searched term, with 1.9 billion queries in 2010, followed by ‘YouTube’ with 790.7 million searches.

Online advertising has grown by 23% between December 2009 and 2010. Leading brands have now started reallocating a larger share of their ad spend to online advertising. Over 1 trillion display ads were shown on Facebook and 529.4 billion ads on Yahoo! The strategies being used for display as have also improved resulting in better user response especially through retargeting. The online video and TV market are also growing, which is a fact that advertisers should take note of.

The accusations have come from a researcher, Ben Edelman, who is an associate professor with the Harvard Business School. He carried out a study titled ‘Measuring Bias In Organic Web Search’. The study was conducted last August along with another Harvard professor, Benjamin Lockwood. A report on the study can be viewed at:

www.benedelman.org/searchbias/

Edelman claims that Google gives much more weight to its own sites and products than is deserved. He also found that Bing search results were more fair and reliable.

For instance, when the term ‘email’ was searched, the results gave Gmail as the top-ranked email site, and similarly, YouTube was the highest ranked site for the search term ‘video’.

Google is already facing enquiries by the European Commission and the Attorney General of Texas, regarding claims of manipulation of search results.

Google has strongly refuted the claims made by Edelman, and said, “Mr. Edelman is a longtime paid consultant for Microsoft, so it’s no surprise that he would construct a highly biased test that his sponsor would pass and that Google would fail,”

A spokesperson for the search engine has added, “Google never artificially favours our own services in our organic web search results, and we perform extensive user testing to ensure that search results are ranked in a way that provides users with the most useful answer.”

A number of other websites and bloggers have also spoken in favour of the authenticity of Google results.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has said, “Statistics can easily be turned to whatever you want them to be. I feel like Edelman is turning his study into the most negative view possible.”

The Huffington Post has also defended Google saying that the study size (32 search terms) is too small a sample. They also add that while favouritism should remain a concern, Google runs on an algorithm, which favours relevant results over irrelevant ones.

One needs to keep in mind the fact that since Google is the market leader with a huge majority, its own sites and products are bound to be more popular than most others and hence deemed more relevant and ranked higher.

While promoting one’s own product is not necessarily a crime, anti-trust commissions in Europe and the U.S.A.  might consider this fair grounds for an investigation if someone complain that Google was abusing its dominant position in search to push its own products.

Microsoft had to separate Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player sufficiently from the Windows operating system, as a result of a similar anti-trust investigation. Could Google face a similar fate?

Once a user decides to use the service, Google will record voice searches by the individual and link them to that particular user’s Google account. The data thus collected will be used to build a speech model for that user.

Google is still in the process of incorporating more features to improve the accuracy of the service. When voice search was first introduced over 2 years ago, it did not take into account factors like age, sex, accent or speed. These factors have now been incorporated.

To access this new facility, users will have to download the latest version of the Voice Search app from the Android market.

Users will have the option to select this service or to ignore it. Users who do not wish to use this facility can switch off the ‘Personalised Voice Recognition’ through the ‘Speech’ section of the Google Dashboard.

At present this service is only available in English, but plans are afoot to extend the service to other languages as well.

TrueView ads will allow viewers to not only choose whether or not they want to watch an ad, but also when they want to watch it.

The best part of this format, for advertisers is that they will be charged only when the viewer chooses to actually see the ad, and not when the ad impression is served. This cost-per-video-view ad model is good for advertisers as they will reach their target audience and only pay when their ad is watched.

Users will also benefit from the new format as it allows them to skip through ads that don’t interest them.

Just Like TV, But Better

Traditional television advertising works in the same way – users view ads before and during the content they’re interested in. However, unlike traditional TV ads, which must be endured by all viewers or can be walked (or channel surfed) away from,  TrueView ads will be skippable and will be priced per actual view only.

With the TrueView Video Ads – In Stream, which play as a pre roll or post roll ad along with a video, the viewer can select or skip a video ad after watching it for 5 seconds, and the advertiser is charged only if the ad has been watched fully or for 30 seconds whichever is shorter.

YouTube has already been experimenting with this ad format in their Promoted Videos advertising service too. They have found that users choose to see those ads that are relevant and interesting to them.

TrueView ad playing on YouTube

Advertisers will be able to collect data about the type of audience that shows interest in their ads. This will help them not only target future ad campaigns better, but also to align products to their target audience.

Google has also tested this system over a large audience and the results indicate a view-through rate between 20-70%. This means that between 20-70% of users have chosen to view the ad during the trial stages, which is an adequate response. This ad format was also tried during the recent U.S. mid term elections and the campaigns were fairly successful.

Hulu also offers viewers a similar choice – to watch or skip an ad. Hulu.com offers it in an InSlate format where users can watch one ad out of several or take a regular commercial break.

At present this ad format is available only in the U.S. and Canada and for limited testing in the U.K.

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

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

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

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

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

Not The Only Prude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Web search with Place listings

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

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

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

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

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.

When the company recently announced their earnings for the third quarter of 2010, they disclosed earnings from the display advertising, YouTube and mobile sectors of their business. CFO, Patrick Pichette, clarified that this may very well be a one-time disclosure that they are making, and they do not intend to do this on a regular basis.

The breakdown of earnings was not provided for any altruistic reasons. In fact, it was meant to prove to their detractors that search is not the only revenue-generating section of their business and that other sectors are making money as well.

Display advertising has had an annualised run rate of almost $2.5 billion. Google had earlier referred to display advertising as their next billion-dollar business, and it looks like they have already achieved that. Of course, a large part of the display ad business has come from DoubleClick, which Google acquired fora hefty price tag of $3.1 billion.

As far as YouTube is concerned, specific revenue numbers were not made available, but it was clarified that YouTube is now monetising 2 billion page views per week, which is an increase of 50% compared to the previous year. Based on some recent reports, Ben Parr at Mashable concludes that YouTube should now be generating approximately $1 billion per year in revenue.

Google’s mobile business has had an annualised run rate of $1 billion this year, which is a very positive sign, and it is the mobile ad business which has been responsible for this growth, rather than the Android system which is available for free to companies.

In what can also be interpreted as yet another sign of growth, Google has also employed about 1,200 additional staff members, including about 300 through acquisitions and executives. They also intend to continue hiring more staff.

All of this extremely positive news has give the company’s stock a good boost of over 10% on the day following the earnings announcement. Share prices for GOOG went past the $600 mark today, reaching their highest point in the past 6 months.

GOOG stock value 12 – 18 Oct 2010

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

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

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

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

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

Bing recommending “influential” and “popular” Twitter users

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google has recently decided to hire a number of new employees in China. They are on the lookout for candidates to work on a variety of roles ranging from technical to marketing departments, with designations ranging from software designer to national marketing manager.

Six months ago, Google had to shut down their search service in mainland China following differences with the Chinese government. Since then, users have been referred to the Hong Kong site. The site, however, is not always available, thus causing Google to lose more market share.

The reported loss suffered varies according to various sources. According to Shanghaidaily.com Google’s market share fell from 23.6% to 12.3% and the search engine’s ranking also fell from the second position to the third. According to Analysys International, Google has retained the second position in the market, but their market share has fallen from 30.9% to 24.2%

In spite of this loss in market share, Google has continued to maintain offices for research and development and for advertising. A spokesperson for the company says, “Our engineering teams in Beijing and Shanghai continue to focus on bringing a steady stream of innovation to our services in China,”

This information, coupled with the fact that Google actually renewed their license to operate Google.cn in July, has given hope that they may be in talks with the Chinese government and may eventually restart their operations in the mainland.

In the meantime, Baidu, the official search engine for China, is way ahead of Google in terms of market share. Advertisers are still keen to do business with Google as it has been found that users who opt for Google are more educated and also richer than most others, and are thus more likely to spend money on the products and services being advertised.

Considering that China already has over 420 million internet users and continues to grow, even 20-30% of the Chinese Internet audience could bring substantial revenues to Google. It is in their best interests to restart their search service in mainland China.

Last year, in the month of June, Google had a market share of 23.6% in China, for mobile search, making them the second most popular search engine in that region after the local Baidu.

However, things have changed quite drastically in the last few months.

Google had a major disagreement with the Chinese authorities this year in January, following a spate of cyber-attacks on their properties. After this they decided that they did not want to bow down to the Chinese rules and regulations regarding censorship, and that eventually led to them pulling out of the Chinese search market.

Their users from the mainland were referred to the Hong Kong search site which remains uncensored.

This move probably did not go down too well with users, who may have felt some discomfort or unhappiness with the situation. A large number of users then switched loyalties to other search engines.

Handset makers such as Nokia and Motorola, who normally use Google as the default search engine have also made the necessary changes and are now using Baidu as the built-in search engine on their handsets in China.

As a result of this Google has now dropped to third place in the Chinese search market, with a market share of only 12.3% in the end of June 2010.

The Shenzhen based search engine Easou now comes in at second place with 16.9% of the market share, while Baidu retains the top slot with 34.3% of the market share.

When a user types a search query, the new interface starts predicting the query even as it is being typed, and accordingly starts showing search results instantly.

This new interface was developed based on the fact that people type much slower than they read. It has been found that it takes 10 times longer to type than it does to read, so even as a person is typing a query, he can easily look at the page and see the search results as they appear, thus saving the user’s time as he conducts his search.

Based on the search results and suggestions displayed as the query is being typed, users can modify their search queries to get even better results.

Not only are organic search results updated on the fly, but ads that appear alongside the search results also get updated accordingly. As the user continues to type a new letter into the query, the organic results and related ads get instantly modified accordingly.

As a result, users will see unrelated and related ads as they are typing in a query.

Problems for advertisers

Google has clarified that an impression will now be counted when a user stops typing for more than 3 seconds or when the user performs an action such as pressing the Enter key or Search button or clicking on one of the results.

Even so, the number of impressions recorded for Google AdWords ads will change drastically as a result of this new search interface. A user could simply pause while typing a search query or look away from their PC for a bit, and that incompletely entered query would count for ad impressions on campaigns from advertisers who might not even be relevant to the final query the user intends to search for.

Moreover, as impression counts increase and click through rates drop, Google will need to adjust the AdWords algorithms to ensure that Quality Scores don’t drop and drive up costs per click for ads that got inadvertently displayed due to such incomplete query entry.

Google Instant is being made available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia, to users who have a Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac, or Internet Explorer v8 browser. Users on other domains can also access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google account.

Read more about Google Instant

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new Ask Jeeves site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Users who wished to conduct searches for the search term ‘Holy See’ were directed to a site with the domain name ‘www.pedofilo.com’ much to their consternation.

The term ‘pedofilo’ is Italian for Paedophile, as seems to be quite obvious. However reports from Italy have claimed that the actual IP address of the site is not in Italy as may be expected but in Mexico. It is also believed that the site is actually a religious site contrary to expectations.

This action of Google Bombing has taken place soon after news reports alleging several incidents of child abuse by certain people who work for the Church were made public. The Vatican has also prescribed a new set of rules with which these offenders will be taken to task.

The Google Bombing incident was first noticed by at the Vatican itself and they contacted Google about it.

A spokesperson for Google Italy however said, “I cannot confirm if it is an attack because I have not had any more precise information from the US engineers to understand the nature of the problem.”

It would be quite embarrassing for Google to have to admit to this being a case of Google Bombing as they had claimed to have solved that particular problem, quite a while ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the entire Asia pacific region, social media has started affecting the buying decisions of users in a significant manner.

Online product reviews have become very popular and are next in line only to recommendations by family and friends. Products such as consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars are frequently reviewed here.

Interestingly however, different countries vary greatly in the way they share reviews. While the Koreans are most likely to post positive reviews the Chinese are most likely to post negative reviews of any product.

The report also shows that blogging is most popular in Japan, with over 1 million blogs being posted there every month. Twitter which had only about 200,000 users in Japan last year now has over 10 million users, which is 16% of the Japanese Internet population.

In China more than 80% of social media content is through bulletin boards, and new comers indulge in social gaming while the more experienced tend to share content. Virtual product placement in social gaming is very popular and social media celebrities like Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan are more popular than real celebrities.

Though Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Facebook is fast gaining in popularity. Twitter is also growing very fast and over 57% OF Twitter users in India, have joined in during the last year. Online product reviews are also very popular here.

In Korea, 95% of the Internet population accesses their social site Naver every month. The elections in June also saw the growth of mobile social media.

Australia has the highest global average for time spent on social media with users spending over 7 hours per month. Activities relating to sports and parenting are frequently discussed here. LinkedIn has also grown in popularity by 99% in the last year.