LBi Search: LBi Search Newsletter: December 2009

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LBi Search Newsletter: December 2009

Google launches cross-domain canonical link element and extends personalised search to all users. Also this month: Newly independent AOL lays off one third of its staff; Google and Yahoo! launch real-time search; Australia filters the web; Microsoft and EU agree on browser ballot screen; Google updates its Toolbar PageRank; and we show you the top searches of 2009.

Acquisitions & Partnerships

Microsoft News Corp deal?

Microsoft is reported by The Seattle Times as being in talks with News Corp, the company behind The Sun, News of the World, The Times, New York Post, Fox and BSkyB amongst others. The deal is said to focus on Microsoft paying News Corp for exclusive access to content on its news sites.

Ask.com not selling after all?

Following revelations in October that the CEO of IAC, Ask's parent company, was considering selling Ask.com, Reuters is reporting that IAC is not necessarily looking to sell the search engine outright. Instead, IAC is looking towards some sort of partnership or co-operation in the field of search.

AOL becomes independent, plans to lay off a third of its staff

AOL became an independent company on the 10th of December, finally splitting from Time Warner. One of its first actions has been to inform the SEC that it plans to lay off "approximately a third" of its employees. This will include both voluntary and involuntary redundancies.

Search News & Research

Top Search terms for 2009

Google, Yahoo! and Bing have all published their top search terms for 2009. Here are the top 10 search terms from the top three search engines:

	Google	Yahoo!	Bing
1	Michael Jackson	Michael Jackson	Michael Jackson
2	Facebook	Twilight	Twitter
3	Tuenti	WWE	Swine Flu
4	Twitter	Megan Fox	Stock Market
5	Sanalika	Britney Spears	Farrah Fawcett
6	New Moon	Naruto	Patrick Swayze
7	Lady Gaga	American Idol	Cash for Clunkers
8	Windows 7	Kim Kardashian	Jon and Kate Gosselin
9	dantri.com.vn	NASCAR	Billy Mays
10	Torpedo Gratis	RuneScape	Jaycee Dugard

Other top keywords of the year are available from AOL (UK & US), YouTube and Twitter.

Study: More than 4 out of 5 viewers stop watching if a video rebuffers

A recent study by video analytics company Tubemogul looked into the issue of rebuffering of online video streams. The study looked at more than 192 million video steams from six top video sites and platforms over a period of 14 days, and found that the vast majority of viewers - 81.19% - clicked away if they encountered a rebuffer even once. The research also found that 6.84% of streams rebuffered at least once, 2.5% rebuffered twice and 0.96% rebuffered at least four times.

Carol Bartz comments on decline of Yahoo!

During a recent keynote presentation, Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, commented on the causes of the company's decline in search market share. Bartz attributed the decline to lost toolbar deals with HP and Acer Computers. Acer switched its default search toolbar provider to Google and HP switched to Live Search (now Bing).

Google made nearly 500 ranking changes in 2009

Google recently wrote a piece which looked at, amongst other things, what it has done in 2009. Amongst other changes, Google claims that in 2009 it has:

“released many improvements: nearly 500 ranking changes; well over 100 UI changes; tripled how much you see in local universal results; brought personalized search to all users; and tripled the frequency with which you see images when you enter a query.”

Australia filters the web.

BBC News is reporting that Australia plans to implement a web filter which will block certain types of websites. ISPs will be required to use an official Government filter to block "criminal content", with additional filters being made available to block access to certain other types of websites, such as gambling sites.

Microsoft and the EU agree on browser ballot scheme

Microsoft and the EU have finally agreed (PDF) on the remedy for the antitrust charges that Microsoft faced earlier this year over its bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating system. The solution, similar to the version proposed in August, involves the inclusion of a "ballot screen" which allows users of its Windows operating system to choose their web browser.

In total, twelve browsers will be included in this new ballot screen, although only the top five (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera) will be shown on the front page. The browsers shown will be based on the most used web browsers, as determined by three independent metrics agencies. Only users in the EEA (all EU states plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) will be shown this ballot screen.

See blog posts tagged 'browsers'.

Google Toolbar PageRank Update

Google updated its Toolbar PageRank on the 30th of December. So far there has been no official comment from Google, although there was an update on New Year's Eve last year, leading to speculation that this might become an annual tradition.

See blog posts tagged 'PageRank'.

Bing disappears for half an hour

Bing went offline for around half an hour on the 3rd of December. According to Bing,

“The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.”

Bing used Twitter to announce when it was working again.

New Product Launches

Google extends personalised search to all users

Google has expanded search personalisation to all of its users. Previously, personalisation was only given to users who were logged into a Google account. Google's personalised search stores search history for 180 days and adjusts the user's search results pages based on this, using a cookie. When Google has enough data, it will display a link within the results page that will show the changed results and allow the user to turn off the feature.

Google supports cross-domain canonical element

Google has announced that it now supports using the canonical link element to handle duplication across different domains. At the time of writing, this only applies to Google but it is expected that other search engines will soon follow.

Google and Yahoo! add real-time results

Following the recent deal with Twitter, Google is including real-time data in its search results. These real-time results appear within its search results pages, with new items shown as they happen. Google's real-time results are not limited to just Twitter data - Google has also partnered with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. Google also says that it includes "headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before".

Yahoo! has also announced that it is now including Twitter in its web search results. This follows on from its integration of Twitter with Yahoo! News in November. Google and Yahoo! are both following Bing, which launched its Twitter integration in October.

From the blog this month: We ask whether or not including all of these features makes the search results look too cluttered.

Google adds region tags to search results

Google has introduced a new feature called region tags in its search results. This feature adds the name of the region the website is targeted at in the search results, and is added in green at the end of the URL for a result. This is only included for generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .com or .info, but not for ccTLDs (such as .co.uk) where the TLD already conveys a geographic meaning. Webmasters of sites which use gTLDs can register their intended site in Google Webmaster Tools. Google estimates that roughly 1% of search results will include this new tag for the initial release.

Googlebot News

Google has introduced a new spider specifically for fetching news stories. The new spider's name is "googlebot-news". This allows publishers to control the way in which their content is included within Google News independently to how it is included in Google's main web search index.

Yahoo! adds local results for non-local queries

Yahoo! has announced that it is now showing local information for queries which do not specify a location. For example, when searching for [dentists], Yahoo! will now show local business information relating to this term. Previously Yahoo! would only include local results when a location was specified in the search query. Google has been showing local results for non-local queries since April.

Search Industry Market Share Updates

iPhone leaps past Windows Mobile in the US [comScore]

Recent data on smartphone market share from comScore shows that there are now more iPhone users in the US than Windows Mobile users. The iPhone's market share in July 2009 was slightly lower than that of Windows mobile but, as of October 2009, Apple now has a significant lead. The top smartphone OS in the US is still RIM (Blackberry), which is also increasing its user base at a rapid pace.

US search market share

comScore

comScore's data for November shows gains for Google and Bing, and losses for Yahoo!, Ask and AOL. Google's market share rose by 0.2% to 65.6%, while Bing's rose by 0.4% to 10.3%, breaking the ten percent barrier. Yahoo! lost the most market share, dropping by 0.5% to a 17.5% market share, whilst Ask and AOL each lost 0.1% of search market share, dropping to 3.8% and 2.8% respectively.

Hitwise

Hitwise's data for November shows Google gaining market share, with Yahoo! and Bing losing share, whilst Ask's market share remains fairly static. Google's market share has now risen by around 1% to 71.57%. Yahoo! lost 0.75% market share, dropping to a share of 15.39%, whilst Bing dropped by around a quarter of a percentage point to a 9.34% share. Ask's market share was fairly static (a 0.03% rise), with its share of searches currently standing at 2.65%.

Nielsen

Nielsen has also published November data for US search market share. When compared with October's market share figures, Google lost 0.7%, dropping to a search market share of 65.4%. Yahoo! also lost market share, although the drop was by a much smaller 0.1%, with its market share now standing at 15.3%. Microsoft sites rose by 1% compared to October, breaking the 10% barrier with a 10.7% market share.

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