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.

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.

The last CEO, Carol Bartz, had been asked to go by chairman Roy Bostock quite unceremoniously last September, and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the beleaguered company.

Yahoo! has now announced that they have found a suitable candidate in Scott Thompson, to lead the company. He has been the president of online payments firm, Paypal, which is a subsidiary of eBay.

Mr. Thompson has a tough task ahead of him, to say the least. He will not only have to focus on rebuilding the core business of Yahoo! but he will also have to carry out a strategic review of what new investments to make and existing business lines to dispose off.

According to Stuart Miles of technology blogsite Pocket-lint, Thompson will have to decide on whether they should concentrate on product innovation or content creation.

Yahoo! was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and was incorporated in March 1995. The company had a great run for the first decade or so. It was around 2005, with the rapid growth of Google that their troubles started. In 2008 they had to lay-off several employees, but when Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to take over the company at $33 per share, they refused the offer, saying that they were being under-valued.

However, the company has never fully recovered from that set back, and the share price continues to hover around $15 ever since. Will Scott Thomson change Yahoo!’s fortunes?

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.

Delicious was part of the Yahoo! network and used to be one of the most popular sites in its category. In December last year, there was news that Yahoo! intended to shut down the website.

Following this, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who had earlier developed and then sold YouTube, decided to buy it over from Yahoo! Delicious was taken over as part of their new company called Avos, which they had formed in April 2011.

Both Hurley and Chen had been thinking about the fact that there is always a flood of information on the Internet, and it is very difficult for users to go through all of it and reach the information that they are really looking for. With the revamp of Delicious, they hope to be able to simplify this process for users.

The new Delicious is supposedly a place where users can see the most recent links shared around topical events. On the homepage, users will now see browseable “stacks”, which are collections of images, videos or links to a particular topic.

Stack on Delicious about the TV programme, Merlin

Speaking about the newly launched site, Chad Hurley sa, “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing.” If this idea catches on, Delicious could soon become far more popular than it ever was in the past.

However, the first mover advantage that Delicious once had is no longer the case. Sites like Facebook and Google+ already have far more viewers and are extremely popular for social sharing. StumbleUpon has steadily grown in popularity as a social discovery tool.

Since the demise of Delicious a number of bookmarking sites have stepped in, but none have become quite as popular. While the organisation of information that the new service offers is great, conceptually, the new owners of Delicious might find that their absence from the market has cost them dearly and that they’ve missed the boat to become a social media powerhouse.

Obviously, Google must think they can get more out of Hulu than the other companies – they wouldn’t want to buy yet another video hosting site and then struggle to monetise it, would they?

It has been reported by the Financial Times that Amazon, Yahoo! and Dish Network have offered between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to Hulu in exchange for ownership of the free video site, its subscription service and the rights to exclusive content for at least two years.

The details of what Google is willing to offer Hulu are not yet available. It is also not known whether or not Google has already made an offer to Hulu.

It is quite possible that Google is looking for access to more content and video scene search technology from Hulu, and the deal would then have to be for a longer period of time. It’s equally possible that Google just doesn’t want anyone else to compete with YouTube’s newly formed movie and TV show streaming business.

An executive of Hulu, involved with the deal-making process has said, “Normally we would have thrown people out if they’d said that.” In spite of such strong statements, Hulu is still talking to Google, so it is quite obvious that the offer being made by Google is probably too good to let go.

While the money involved seems to be big, there is still the possibility that Google and YouTube could eventually swallow Hulu, and that may deter Hulu from agreeing to a deal with Google.

It is also quite possible that Hulu’s parent companies, News Corp and Disney, may decide not to sell the company to anybody at all.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fact is that Yahoo! is not only big, but several of its properties are number one in their respective fields, while many others are at the number two position. Alex Linde, Yahoo! Director of Mobile Advertising, said during the OMMA Tablet Revolution Showcase at Internet Week New York 2011that “Yahoo! is the premier digital media company”.

Linde explained that Yahoo! reaches about 680 million users every month, which is about 50% of the online global population. They also reach about 187 million users in the U.S., which is almost 90% of PC users in the U.S.A.

Similarly, Yahoo! has a large clientele on sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and several other sites such as Flickr. Linde says, “We are the most trusted brand on the Web.”

According to the April 2011 comScore Media Metrix report, Yahoo! is the number one overall Web property and twelve of their properties are number one in their respective vertical sectors.

Yahoo! News Network, with 88 million users is far ahead of popular sites like CNN and MSNBC. Similarly, Yahoo! Finance is far ahead of Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and others. Yahoo! Sports is also far ahead of ESPN. Moreover, these Yahoo! properties have retained the number one position for the last several months.

In spite of this, Yahoo! seems to have lost the favoured position which it held, in the 1990’s.

Yahoo!’s Executive Vice President of the America’s region, Ross Levinsohn claims that this is just an evolution phase that the company is passing through. He describes it as “a generational thing. Not a Yahoo! thing.”

However, the company’s historical mis-steps have cost it in the long run, and even though it might continue to get visitors, it is unlikely to return to glory unless the management team at Yahoo! take some serious steps to bring the brand back into the limelight.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

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.

While the percentage of users using their desktop PC to access their email has remained more or less constant, the percentage of those using their mobile phones to do so has increased substantially.

This conclusion was formed based on a study conducted by Return Path an email marketing and monitoring firm. According to their research, about 48% of users access their email through Web browsers such as GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail. On the other hand, those using desktop-based email programmes such as Microsoft Office Outlook account for about 36% of users.

In contrast, the fraction using a mobile device to access their email is about 16%. While this figure is much lower than the numbers for webmail and desktop mail, it has grown by nearly 81% during the 6-month period of the study. This growth has, quite obviously, occurred at the expense of the other options.

The iPad and other tablets have contributed largely to the growth of “mobile mail”, which allows users to check their email at any time and at any place. The study by Return Path shows that the use of tablets has surged by about 15% between October 2010 and March 2011. This surge is expected to continue, as newer devices hit the market.

The use of mobile mail is becoming important as it allows users to access their emails and learn of the latest developments at any time without missing out on some important communication.

On the traditional email side, desktop usage was high during the week, peaking on Wednesday and then tapering off over the weekend. Webmail use, on the other hand, is high on Monday, lowest on Wednesday and then rises gradually again to peak over the weekend. Neither of these statistics are surprising.

In contrast, mobile use remains fairly steady during the week, starts to rise on Thursday, peaks on Friday and Saturday and then drops again on Sunday, although it remains higher than on weekdays. Marketers need to keep these facts in mind when planning their campaigns so that they do not miss out on an opportunity to connect with their target audience.

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 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.

During a recent presentation held in New York, she has stated that she considers Facebook to be an even bigger competitor of Yahoo! than Google.

During the presentation she said, “Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google. They’re a hot site, but there’s room for more than one of anything.”

So far there has been no comment on the subject from Google or Facebook.

Bartz had been brought in as CEO of Yahoo! to help salvage the company, which had been going through a particularly bad phase. Since then she has made several changes and undertaken cost cutting measures such as cutting out of non-performing products, to help cut costs.

Yahoo! has also recently started a search deal with Microsoft which allows Microsoft to handle the search results, while Yahoo! focuses on advertising, thus bringing in more revenue.

She has also laid stress on sectors like news and sports which always attract a lot of users. She has also focused on acquiring companies which can bring along users, content and engineering technology to help Yahoo! compete with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

In fact Bartz has also said that Yahoo! had considered buying over Facebook for a sum of $1 billion. While no such take over took place, the tables seem to have turned now.

While Yahoo! currently has a market capitalization of $22.1 billion, Facebook, which now has over 500 million users, is valued at $40 billion according to SharePost Inc. a private share-trading company. Bartz has said that as of now, Yahoo! has no plans of going private.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the reasons for the irritation is the fact that more often than not, the ad is of absolutely no relevance or interest to the user, and the user then feels that being forced to watch it is a waste of time.

A few companies have now decided to try and rectify the situation by offering users a choice. Users on certain websites will now be able to select the ad they would prefer to watch from a choice of 3 or more ads, thus letting them see the ad that they have decided would be most interesting to them at that point in time.

While helping users, this option also has the added advantage of being beneficial to advertisers. Agencies and brands will improve their consumer targeting, thus increasing the possibility of making a sale, which is the ultimate bottom-line for a marketer.

The new tool that facilitates such ad delivery is called ASq. It will be functional by next month.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hulu, CBS and AOL have already decided to use ASq, while others such as YouTube are still weighing the pros and cons.

ASq’s new concept in video advertising is appreciated by most. However, there are those who disagree with the concept. Richard Wheaton of Ogilvy & Mather believes that unless users get to know about certain products and services, they would never be able to make use of them. ASq will restrict the exposure of such products from users, thus defeating the very purpose of advertising.

On the other hand, Uyenco Shatto, global research director at Microsoft Advertising says, “We’re getting smarter about what makes more impactful advertising. The big ‘aha’ here is understanding what makes a viewer choose a particular ad.”

ASq is expected to further improve the market value of the global video ad market, which is already $3.1 billion. The global video ad spend which was $2.2 billion in 2009 is expected to go up to $11.3 billion by 2014.

facebook.com/questions

Facebook Questions will allow users to ask questions on any topic, to the entire Facebook community, as the question will not only be received by friends and friends of friends, but also by those who are known to have knowledge of the concerned subject.

Users will receive answers not only from their friends and friends of friends but also from a much wider and authoritative source, thus making this feature resemble a new aspect of their search service.

This feature will make Facebook compete not only with traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo! but also with other Q&A formats like Aardvark, Quora and Ask.com.

An “Ask Question” button will be available at the top of the homepage. The user will simply need to click on the button and then write a question. Users will also be able to attach a photo or a poll to the question.

In order to get the best results, users can also add an appropriate tag to the question, so that it is shown to specialists in that field. Users can also click ‘Follow’ under any question to get notified every time a new answer is received.

An answer page on Facebook Questions

While questions asked through this service will be public, those who wish to ask a question only to specific friends, can put up the question as a status update on their profile marked to those friends.

Facebook may have to face a backlash once again regarding user privacy, as this feature will be public.
At present only about 1% of Facebook’s 500 million users will have access to this facility, and it will gradually be made available to all.

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.

Apparently, the deciding factor in this deal was the fact that Google’s services in the Japanese language were better than those of Microsoft.

The partnership is likely to come into effect next year.

While Yahoo! has a strategic partnership for search with Microsoft in the U.S. and other places, they are under no obligation to do so in Japan. This is because Yahoo! Controls only a 30% stake in Yahoo! Japan, while Softbank controls 40%. Since Softbank is the dominant partner, they are at liberty to select the partner.

At present Yahoo! Japan controls about 57% of the search market in Japan, while Google controls about 385. When these two ‘super powers’ join hands, they would effectively control about 95% of the market, potentially killing all competition.

Microsoft had to fight a similar situation between Google and Yahoo!, in the U.S. in 2008.

They had won that round thanks to the Anti-trust laws. They intend to do the same thing in Japan.

A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google’s deal with Yahoo! in 2008 that the U.S. Dept. of Justice found to be illegal,”

However, it is believed that it may not be very easy for Microsoft to win this battle in Japan, and the deal is eventually likely to go through.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

In an interview with Forbes magazine, Yahoo!’s senior Vice President, David Ko said that according to him, the best way to increase the mobile business is through mobile ads, apps and partnerships.

Ko says that Yahoo! is now focusing on building their mobile business by developing new Apps for users. They already have Apps such as Yahoo! Finance and Fantasy Sports on the iPhone and BlackBerry. They are now also working on Apps for Android and they want to add some really different and special features rather than just copying the features of other websites as they want to deliver high quality content and services.

Yahoo! is better off collaborating with mobile phone manufacturing companies like Nokia and Samsung rather than to compete with them. He feels that through such collaboration they can directly get access to the huge customer base which these mobile phone giants already have, rather than make your own handset and start building your customer base from scratch, after having invested large sums of money to design and manufacture the phone.

The decision to stay away from manufacturing of mobile phones seems to be a good one considering the fact that both their competitors Google and Microsoft have only recently announced that they would discontinue the manufacture and sale of their own handsets, Nexus and Kin respectively. Analysts say this decision is based on the fact that the sales have not been as good as expected.

According to this deal, Yahoo! and Nokia will work together to improve their mobile internet services, in an attempt to win back some of their market share from competitors like Google and Apple.

The agreement will become functional in the second half of this year, and more services may follow later. Yahoo! will host Ovi email on Nokia phones exclusively, while Nokia will provide maps and navigational services to Yahoo!

During a conference held in New York last week, Nokia and Yahoo! stressed on the need to improve and expand mobile services in new markets, as the mobile phone is fast replacing the PC.

Nokia’s Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo believes that this deal with Yahoo! will help Nokia to do better in the U.S. where it is still not doing well in spite of being the market leader in the newer markets.

He says, “Location, maps and navigation will get more mind-share, will get more attention in the U.S. and many more users in the North American market,”

While Nokia has spent over $10 billion in the last few years to offer services like music downloads email etc. they are still unable to compete with Apple and Google.

On the other hand it is a well known fact that Yahoo! has been struggling for a while now, to keep up with its rival Google which has the far more popular Android operating system.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz feels that this deal could eventually help Yahoo! to get more local advertising business.

Financial details of this deal are not yet available. There have been mixed responses from various analysts as to whether this deal is likely to be successful or not.

Facebook has, for the first time, overtaken Yahoo! and Microsoft in delivering display ads in the U.S. They served 176.3 billion display ads on their website in the first quarter of this year, which accounts for 16.2% of the total display ad impressions delivered to U.S. home, work and university locations.

The world’s largest social network, Facebook, has grown by 52% between the last quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. During the last quarter of 2009 they showed 115 billion ads, compared to the current 176.3 billion.

Yahoo! on the other hand, has actually dropped from serving 140 billion ad impressions to 132 billion during the same period. Microsoft served 60.2 billion impressions in Q1 2010.

While the numbers indicate that Facebook is now far ahead of Yahoo! and Microsoft in serving display ads, the figures do not take into consideration the number of ads that Yahoo! and Microsoft display on other websites, which accounts for a large portion of the revenue they generate through advertising.

Also, display ads counted here only include static and rich media ads. The numbers exclude video ads, house ads and very small ads less than 2,500 square pixels in dimension.

Moreover, while Facebook may have the volumes, the actual revenues earned by Yahoo! and Microsoft through advertising on their Web properties are much higher.

Last year, Facebook generated $ 500 million from advertising and expects to earn $1 billion this year. In contrast, Yahoo! earned $6.5 billion last year and Microsoft earned $3 billion.

In spite of being far behind in terms of revenue generated, Facebook’s growth is worth noting, as the number of people on Facebook continues to grow and users continue to spend more and more time on the social network. It will most likely be just a matter of time before they establish a more effective way to monetise all this traffic.

Brands such as Verizon, Toyota and Ford were among the top advertisers on Facebook this year, but were nowhere on the list of top 25 advertisers on Facebook last year. This indicates that Facebook is becoming an important platform for advertising, and marketers are probably diverting their ad spend from other sites towards Facebook.

Reports from Nielsen corroborate Facebook’s growth in display advertising – they found that Facebook’s share in the U.S. display advertising market grew from 2% in April 2009 to 20% in April 2010. However, according to Nielsen, Yahoo! is still the U.S. display market leader with 34% share of the market in April 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click the link below to read the full white paper:

A characterisation of online search behavior (144kB PDF)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, most of the technology giants such as Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook rely on companies that generate their power from coal. The use of coal to generate power adds to the carbon foot print.

It has been estimated that by 2020 data centres will consume 1,963 kilowatts of electricity, which is more than the power that France, Germany, Canada and Brazil jointly consume at present.

Tom Dowdall of Greenpeace said to the BBC that the availability of smartphones and netbooks is increasing the demand for cloud computing, which requires companies to invest even more in huge data centres.

However, instead of trying to use greener sources of energy, most of the companies are only concerned with efficiency.

Facebook, which is developing its first custom-built data centre in Oregon, will use an evaporative cooling system to cool their servers. Pacific Power, the company that supplies Facebook power, uses more coal than the U.S. average.

Over 380,000 people have joined English and Spanish language groups on Facebook set up by Greenpeace to pressurise Facebook to use 100% renewable energy. Facebook, however, claims to be helpless as they have to rely on the local power grid.

Microsoft uses a similar air cooling system but claims to use 100% hydropower in their data centre in Dublin. Yahoo! also uses hydropower for their data centre in Buffalo, New York.

Dowdall says, “We would like to see more examples of companies using purchasing power to drive an increase in renewable capacity.”

Google is the only tech giant that has truly pulled its weight and has invested in a number of environment protection and green energy related initiatives.

Interestingly, only the accounts of foreign journalists and analysts based in China and Taiwan were affected.

The journalists whose accounts were blocked received messages saying “We’ve detected an issue with your account”. They were asked to contact Yahoo! While one such account has been restored by the technicians at Yahoo! details about the other accounts are not yet available.

Yahoo!, of course, has said that they condemn the attacks and will do whatever they can to protect user privacy.

However, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) is not quite satisfied with this statement alone. In fact, they have blamed Yahoo! for not informing all their users about the situation.

As if these allegations were not enough to add to the growing international contempt for the Chinese government, Google, who recently shifted bases to Hong Kong, has also blamed the Chinese government’s censorship tools, commonly known as “The Great Firewall of China”, for blocking Google’s search services earlier in the week.

The services were later restored, so Google has admitted that they do not really know whether the drop in services was due to a technical fault on their end or an intentional move on the part of the Chinese government.

Google’s mobile Web services were also partially blocked later, but no reason has been provided for that.

Picnik allows users to edit and share their photos like several other sites, but what is especially significant about them is the fact that unlike the other sites, users of Picnik do not need to download any special software to edit the photos. They can do so directly in the cloud.

At present, Google will not make any changes to Picnik. The entire team of 20 employees will continue to work for Picnik. They will introduce some new features and integrate the service with Google’s existing products in future. Google may incorporate Picnik’s technology into Picasa Albums, which they also own. Google will also continue to support all existing partners of Picnik.

Details regarding the terms of the deal between Google and Picnik are not available at present.  Picnik is currently among the fastest growing photo editing sites and is already integrated with Flickr, SmugMug and some other sites.

Flickr, which is owned by Google’s competitor Yahoo! will most likely discontinue using Picnik as its default photo editor. Why Yahoo! hadn’t acquired Picnik in the first place is not quite known.

Jonathan Sposato, CEO of Picnik has already worked with Google in the past, when he sold PhatBits to them in 2005. He will now be back with Google.

In the recent past, Google has bought over reMail, the email app for iPhone, and a social search startup, Aardvark, in addition to some smaller companies. Maybe, they have decided that the global recession is over and have started spending again.

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.

187 million users are the equivalent of 91% of the total U.S. Internet audience. AOL’s reach reportedly grew by 8% compared to the same month in 2008.

Yahoo! Network, which reaches 180.9 million U.S. users, was ranked second place and grew by 9% in the same period. The Google Ad Network occupied the third place with a reach of 178.1 million U.S. Internet users, and grew by 13% in that period.

Microsoft Media Network has turned out to be the fastest growing ad network, with a growth of 31% compared to the same month one year ago. Collective Network, which grew by 22%, was the second fastest grower and Audience Science, which grew by 16%, was placed third in that category.

According to comScore senior Vice President, Jeff Hackett, “Ad networks continue to be a powerful mechanism for delivering a large audience online with eight different networks reaching 75% of the entire U.S. online population.” Hackett believes that in 2010 ad-networks will continue to innovate and perform well.

Top 10 US ad networks ranked by total unique visitors in December 2009

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has made it clear during an interview with CNBC & Bloomberg that Microsoft plans to continue working in China, and they will toe the line as is expected of them.

Following a meeting with President Obama at the White House, he told Bloomberg, “There are cyber attacks on all companies, of any size, from all parts of the world, not just China, at all times, so it’s hard for me to understand how that got tied into the whole notion of doing business in China.” He further said, “China’s the second largest market in the world … [Pulling out of China] is not something we’re thinking about. That’s not part of the way for us to grow.”

Google’s announcement stated that the company had been the direct victim of highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks that had originated in China. The attack not only resulted in the loss of corporate infrastructure and intellectual property, but also targeted various human rights activists.

Microsoft, on the other hand, said that they had not been affected by any such attacks and their email system has not been breached. The ethics of bowing to the Chinese government’s cesnorship requirements don’t seem to bother Microsoft.

Microsoft’s market share in China, which is currently estimated at just 0.25%, may grow if Google quits the Chinese search market.

U.S. Government officials have clearly stated that they support Google’s decision to pull out of China. White House spokesperson, Robert Gibbs said, “Our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.” While the White House has not yet taken any action against China, Philip Crowley of the State Department said that they will issue a formal message to Beijing and ask for an explanation.

If Google is to be believed, freedom of expression on the Internet is at stake here, as is the future of several companies who wish to do business in China, which is the world’s largest Internet market. Though, that is little more than grand-standing on Google’s part.

Human rights organisations in China have asked other companies to follow Google’s lead and withdraw from China if censorship continues.

So far, however, there is no indication that other companies will withdraw, and China seems adamant on maintaining their policies, since they know that the Western world will not be able to withdraw from their country very easily.

Yahoo! users will be able to view the activities of their Facebook friends on Yahoo! and at the same time Yahoo! content will be accessible on Facebook.

This integration will make it possible for Yahoo! users (500 million across the globe) to keep in touch with all their friends and access their social activities from a single site.

Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Finance and Flickr will all be accessible directly through Facebook Connect and users will have the choice of updating their status messages either from Facebook itself or through any of the Yahoo! sites.

Due to this integration users will be able to add comments, share news with each other or access their friend’s news feeds by accessing Facebook through Yahoo!, thus giving a much larger audience to Yahoo!

For a while now, Yahoo! had been discussing the possibility of integrating their social features such as email, address book and messenger with each other, but as of now they have decided to simply outsource these services to Facebook. They have thus lost the opportunity to monetise their own social network.

Twitter Tab on Yahoo! Search for Hot News items

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A total of 3.920 billion hours were spent by users on Microsoft sites in September 2009, which is approximately 14.5% of the total online time by all users in that month. Of this, nearly 70% was on Windows Live Messenger.

In contrast only 2.512 billion hours were spent on Google sites, which is about 9.3% of the market share.

Google can take consolation in the fact that the usage of their sites has grown by 48% when compared with the usage in September 2008. Microsoft has grown by 44% in the same period.

Yahoo! sites, which accounted for 1.699 billion hours of online use have actually lost 14% in the same time frame.

The greatest (but not really surprising) growth was shown by Facebook. They clocked 1.387 billion hours in September 2009 compared to 474 billion hours in September 2008, which is a growth of 193%.

Graph showing change in user hours clocked on Top 4 Internet sites

A total of 27 billion hours were spent on the internet by 1.2 billion users over 15 years of age. The total population accessing the internet has grown by 20% in the last 1 year and is growing further.

Analysis of time spent online on a regional basis shows that Microsoft sites are largely preferred in Europe (16.8%), Latin America (35.9%), Middle East and Africa (33.1%), while Yahoo! has a sizable fan following in North America (11.2%) and the Asia-Pacific region (7.9%). Google sites are prominent in Latin America (19.4%), Middle East and Africa (9.7%), Europe (9.6%), and North America (9.1%).

While both Google and Microsoft’s Bing, have made separate deals with just Twitter, Yahoo! is reportedly in talks with OneRiot for a much broader real time search offering.

Reuters reports that Yahoo! Inc is looking to match its rivals in providing up-to-the-minute Internet search results. The company is supposed to be running tests with several real time search partners, according to sources familiar with the matter.

According to Reuters, Yahoo! is currently holding talks with several companies to provide users with realtime search results on a trial basis. OneRiot is one of those companies.

However, there have been no official announcements on this score from either Yahoo! or OneRiot.

OneRiot, which is based in Boulder, Colorado, taps into several sources including Twitter, Digg and their 3-million-strong user base to collect real time information.

Initially, Yahoo! will provide the real time search results in a separate box at the top of the search results page, to see how their users react to this service.

While Yahoo! and Microsoft have already signed a 10 year search deal last July, it is not expected to turn operational until next year. Until then, Yahoo! needs to fend for itself. Understandably, they would not like to be left behind in the real time search race, and hence this trial with OneRiot seems like a good option to pursue.

The site, which was first created way back in the 1990′s, was one of the world’s oldest Internet neighbourhoods. Most new surfers built their space on sites like GeoCities and Tripod, marking their space on the Internet long before the arrival of social networks and social media profiles.

Yahoo! bought the site almost a decade ago, for a whopping $3.57billion, in stock.

All the data and information on GeoCities, which was stored on Yahoo! servers has been deleted. Some sites like the Internet Archive and the newly formed The Archive Team have tried to retrieve and store some of this data but have probably not managed to save all of it.

Yahoo! had stopped accepting new users for this site last April itself, as they were considering this move, and in June they announced that the site would be closed on the 26th of October 2009 for good.

A spokesperson for Yahoo! said that they will now “focus on helping [their] customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways”.

This landmark has been achieved in just five and a half months since photo number 3 billion was posted on the site, and that in turn was achieved almost 18 months after photo number 2 billion was posted there. This shows that the rate of growth of photos being posted on the site has gone up by over three times what it was between photo numbers 2 billion and 3 billion. While photos number 2 billion and 3 billion are still posted on the site, photo number 1 billion is no longer available.

At the centre of all the hullabaloo thus created over the 4 billionth photo is user Punimoe, who has been receiving a lot of congratulatory messages on uploading photo number 4 billion.

While this growth rate is certainly substantial it is nowhere near to the rate at which the numbers of photos on the popular social network Facebook, are growing. Their unlimited storage space has lured away a lot of users. They had reported having 15 billion photos on their site, way back in April 2009, and are believed to be getting about 2 billion new photos every month since then.

Flickr, which was set up in February 2004 by Vancouver based Ludicorp, and was bought over by Yahoo! in 2005, is still a very popular photo sharing site, but is facing stiff competition from Facebook.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

Yahoo! has now started serving ads from the Yahoo! Search Marketing system on mobile phones. These ads are served on all smart phones including iPhones and Android mobile handsets.

Ads on Yahoo! Mobile Search

The best part about this new feature for marketers and advertisers is that unlike Google AdWords, the Yahoo! Search Marketing system will not require the usual process of creating new campaigns, mining keywords and writing new ads.

Standard sponsored search ads are displayed automatically on mobile search results pages. The ads are just 2 lines long, consisting of the ad title and the display URL.

One ad is displayed at the top of the search results page and two more ads are displayed at the bottom of the page.

All advertisers will be able to reach an ever increasing audience of mobile Internet users with the introduction of this new feature.

Marketers who wish to specifically target mobile search users will also be able to continue using the Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search service at:

Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search

The number of mobile websites has been growing rapidly, and so has the number of mobile Web users. The number of mobile websites has now grown to almost 2 million while an estimated 31% of mobile phone users browse the mobile web at least once a month, to look up routine things such as weather, news and search.

While mobile websites are improving in general, the report from the Yankee Group found that only 4 of them received good usability scores. These were Google, Google News, Yahoo! and MLB.com.

Carl Howe, a director at Yankee Group, says, “Unlike last year, most of the sites we reviewed adapt their content to many differing feature phones and smartphones. And some companies are also starting to incorporate location-awareness, something other sites should strive to emulate.”

Of the 27 sites studied, it was found that for news, both Google and Yahoo! have done well and scored 73 points each. They have managed to walk the tight rope between providing sufficient information and flooding the user with excessive details.

Again, in the field of search, Google has retained the number one slot as would be expected with 81 points and is followed quite closely by Yahoo! with 76 points. Yahoo! just needs to strengthen itself regarding some of the relatively minor features such as extraneous content and HTML validation errors.

In the field of sports, the Major League Baseball mobile site scores 71 points and is followed by Rival.com with 58 points and ESPN.com with 57 points.

As far as U.S. mobile carriers are concerned, they all need to improve their own mobile presence. Sprint, though not very good, is the best with just 53 points.

Read the full report: Best Of Anywhere Web 2009

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.

Some time last month, Yahoo! launched a new homepage layout. Their search team is now concentrating on unifying this homepage with the search results page. They have undertaken a lot of research with eye-tracking studies and usability experiments to achieve this. This new search results page is expected to provide which are personally more relevant to the user.

Yahoo! engineers are currently trying to align the framework of the search results page with the new homepage, in order to provide quick access to various search applications which are available in the left hand column of the three column page. The left hand column also provides direct one-click links to other pages, thus managing to retain the user on the Yahoo! page, which advertisers are bound to like.

One important new feature is a section ‘Show Results From’ which allows users to see results from the sites they are most used to and interested in.

The newly launched note-taking application, Yahoo! Search Pad’ is at the top of the left column to provide easier access to research carried out.

SearchScan and SafeSearch features are also in this column to protect against viruses and spam during the search process. The Search Assistance feature is placed directly below the search box.

New Yahoo! Search results page

Yahoo! is also looking out for new ways for users to explore the organic results through a ‘Related Concepts’ section in the left column. They are essentially trying to find easier ways to display enhanced results from a larger number of sites.

A few random users from the USA have already been selected as test subjects for the new search results page. Feedback from this test will be used to fine-tune the page before the general launch.

In light of Yahoo!’s recent search agreement with Microsoft, it remains to be seen how much Yahoo! itself will benefit from these innovations.

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.