LBi Search: LBi Search Newsletter: August 2009

Newsletters

2010

May (1)
March (1)
February (1)
January (1)

Year

2010 (4)
2009 (12)
2008 (12)
2007 (13)
2006 (1)

New Product Launches

Google unveils its 'caffeine update' for the world to try

Google recently announced plans for its "caffeine update", a major update to Google's search infrastructure. Google says this update will let it

"push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions"

What is interesting about this update is that Google has invited people to test its new results via a website side by side with existing results and give feedback. Google has not yet said when this new infrastructure will replace its existing one.

Acquisitions & Partnerships

Google to buy On2

On2 is the company that owns the software codec used by Adobe Flash to display videos. It is also the company which wrote the original code for what later became Theora, the open video format which may possibly become the standard video codec for HTML 5. The deal still has to be approved by On2's shareholders and the regulatory authorities.

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Facebook has purchased real-time search engine FriendFeed in a deal estimated at $50 million. Most industry observers expected Google or Twitter to buy FriendFeed, especially Google given that the founders of FriendFeed are ex-Google.

Microsoft and Nokia team up.

The deal between the two companies will see Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, appearing on Nokia phones.

When Nokia released Symbian as open source it left Microsoft with the only mobile operating system that requires mobile manufacturers to pay a licence fee.

Wolfram|Alpha to team up with Bing?

According to the Guardian, Wolfram|Alpha is opening up its API to allow others to use its data. At the same time there have also been reports that a licensing deal between Wolfram|Alpha and Bing has been made that will place Wolfram's specialized data within Bing results. So far representatives of the two companies have declined to comment.

Search News & Research

Eric Schmidt resigns from Apple Board

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, is leaving Apple's board of directors. Apple released a statement which included the following:

"Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."

Yahoo! expands SearchMonkey to support many new microformats

Yahoo! has expanded SearchMonkey to support a number of additonal microformats where it will generate enhanced listings automatically, without the website owner having to create a SearchMonkey application.

The formats which Yahoo! newly supports in this fashion are for products, local businesses, events, discussions and news items. Yahoo! already supported automatic generation of enhanced snippets for videos, documents and games.

Google forecasts future search trends

Google has added a forecasting feature to its Insights for Search tool. Using historical search patterns, Google Insights now predicts what search volumes for keywords will be. These predictions are only available for some keywords where Google's algorithms determine that forecasts are possible.

Bing Shopping increased cashback

Announced in the Bing Community blog that there will be increased cashback rewards from "select merchants" when using Bing Shopping.

The scheme seems to be working as Hitwise reports that Bing Shopping has increased its weekly market share from 4.04% in June to 10.86% by the start of August, a 169% change.

Voucher searches in the UK up 47.5% in a year [Hitwise]

According to data from Hitwise, searches in the UK for discount vouchers have increased by 47.5% over the last 12 months. Hitwise also notes that the type of voucher searches is changing - although searches for vouchers have increased significantly, generic searches for terms such as [voucher] or [discount voucher] have decreased or remained flat. This means that searchers are increasingly using targeted queries to locate vouchers for specific sites or deals.

Microsoft to continue IE6 support

Following the increasing pressure last month to end the use of Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft has repeated that it will continue to support it until the end of the lifespan of Windows XP. BBC News has is reporting that Microsoft is to continue to support it until 2014.

In related news, Microsoft has announced that it is set to introduce a "ballot screen" system in Windows to allow users to choose their web browser. Read the full story on our blog.

Google the most satisfying

A recently released report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index for Q2 2009 shows that more users were satisfied with Google than other search engines. The second place entry is actually "All Others", ahead of Yahoo!, MSN (pre Bing), Ask.com, AOL and AltaVista.

Search Industry Market Share Updates

Global search market data, July 2009 [comScore]

comScore has released worldwide search market share statistics for the period from July 2008 to July 2009. Google dominates worldwide searches with 76.7 billion searches conducted on this search engine, a 58% increase since last year. This represents a 67.5% worldwide market share in search.

Yahoo! is the world's second largest search engine with 9.8 billion searches. However, this represents only a 2% increase over the course of one year. The world's third-largest search engine is China's Baidu, which saw 8 billion searches, an 8% increase. Microsoft is fourth with 3.3 billion searches, which is a fairly significant 41% increase over the last 12 months.

The report also examines search behaviour around the world. Europe has the largest share of searches worldwide, at 32.1%, followed by the Asia Pacific region (30.8%) and North America 22.1%. According to the report Internet users in Latin America are the heaviest searchers, with an average of 130 searches per searcher in July.

US search engine rankings, July 2009

comScore

According to comScore, Microsoft was the only search engine to increase its market share in July. The market share of Microsoft sites increased by 0.5% to 8.9%, although Microsoft still remains firmly in third place. The two largest search engines Google and Yahoo! each lost 0.3% of overall market share, with Google now on 64.7% and Yahoo! on 19.3%. Ask and AOL remained unchanged with market shares of 3.9% and 3.1% respectively.

Compete

Compete also saw gains for Microsoft in July and drops from Google and Yahoo! The data shows that Microsoft (without Club Live) gained 0.3% share in July, rising to 6.8% overall market share. Google dropped very slighly from 73.90% to 73.75%, with Yahoo! posting a rather larger loss, dropping 1% to 15.6%. Unlike the data from comScore, Ask posted significant gains in July, rising from 2.1% to 3.0% market share. AOL remained unchanged with a 0.8% market share.

However, despite the increase in visits to Bing, Compete's data shows that Bing actually saw a slight decline in paid clicks. Google, despite its slight drop in traffic, gained a small amount of paid click market share.

Note: Differences in statistics will inevitably arise due to different samples, sample sizes and methodology.

Twitter overtakes MySpace in the UK [Hitwise]

According to Hitwise, Twitter has overtaken MySpace in the UK in terms of visits. For the week ending 29th August Twitter accounted for 1 in every 400 UK Internet visits, ranking as the 27th most popular site in the UK. Hitwise also notes that Twitter's market share is likely to be even greater than its numbers suggest, due to the popularity of accessing the site via mobile devices, which Hitwise does not measure.