LBi Netrank: LBi Netrank Newsletter: July 2008

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Year

2008 (12)
2007 (13)
2006 (1)

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Microsoft's biggest customer switches to Google

NSW Department of Education (Australia) is believed to be Microsoft's biggest customer in the world. Its 1.3 million users have been switched to GMail. The cost for the previous contract with Microsoft was $30 million (over 5 years) and the new contract is for $9.5 million (over 3 years), which makes the new deal rougly half the price of the old one.

In related news, Google have listed a number of colleges and universities in the US which have recently signed up for Google Apps in the coming academic year, and they claim to have over a million users worldwide on campuses who are using these services.

Microsoft/Yahoo! deal updates

The Yahoo! and Microsoft saga may possibly be finally drawing to a close. Microsoft tried teaming up with billionaire investor Carl Icahn to attempt to buy Yahoo! and split the company between them, however Yahoo! again rejected this offer. Yahoo! eventually staved off the threat by striking a deal with Carl Icahn which resulted in him gaining some places on the Yahoo! board. There are still ongoing rumours that AOL may be sold to either Yahoo! or Microsoft, possibly being broken up in the process.

Google ads to appear on Yahoo!

Following on from the deal brokered in June, it is expected that Google ads will start appearing on Yahoo! search results pages. A "possible Yahoo! search Page" was included in a presentation to Yahoo! shareholders showing the inclusion of Google ads underneath Yahoo!'s "sponsored search listings" on the right hand side of the page. Google are trying extremely hard to ensure that this deal passes the competition authorities, but this is still far from guaranteed.

Ask drops their own maps products for Microsoft Virtual Earth

Ask have dropped their own mapping product in favour of Microsoft's Virtual Earth product. Virtual Earth can now be found on Ask Maps, Ask City, and within Ask's search results as Smart Answers.

Microsoft signs ad deal with Facebook

Microsoft have signed a deal with Facebook which will result in Live Search functionality and paid search ads being incorporated into the social networking site, including in the United States. Microsoft were previously providing advertising for Facebook outside of the United States, and bought a stake in the company last year.

Google buys Russian contextual ads company "Begun" for $140 million

Google have agreed to buy Russian contextual advertising service ZAO Begun for $140 million. Begun is owned by Rambler Media, one of the major players in the search market in Russia. It is being reported that this deal will include Google search and ads on the Rambler portal site.

Search News and Research

Google Keyword Tools now shows search volumes

Google AdWords Keyword Tool now shows the approximate number of search queries, matching the keywords entered, that were performed on Google and on the Google search network. These additional metrics are a useful addition to the keyword research toolbox, although their purpose is primarily aimed at helping Google to sell more advertising.

Yahoo! Ambassador program closing

Following on from the recent news that Yahoo! wasn't allowing new advertisers to join the Yahoo! Ambassador program, Yahoo! has informed their current ambassadors that the program will be closing completely from the 30^th of September.

Google PageRank updates

High profile Google blogger Matt Cutts has announced that the "Toolbar PageRank" is being updated. Although PageRank is calculated on a regular basis within Google itself, the PageRank values which are seen in the Google Toolbar is only updated around every 3-4 months. With this update, new PageRank values should be visible.

Microsoft buys search company Powerset

Powerset are a startup that uses natural language processing to understand the meaning of what is written, rather than simply matching keywords, for their search technology. Microsoft's aim is to use Powerset technology to enhance Live Search.

Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! profits warnings, but Baidu profits up sharply

Google's slow Q2 results have resulted in their stock taking a beating, and Microsoft's Q4 results missed forecasts leading to their stock also dropping. Yahoo! have suffered a drop in profits in Q2 since last year. Contrasting all this gloom in the search sector, Baidu's profits are up sharply, which is believed to be due in part to the Olympics.

Click fraud levels unchanged

According to Click Forensics 2008 Q2 results show that levels of estimated click fraud are mostly unchanged at a 16.2% rate. It appears that despite the various measured implemented by the major players to reduce click fraud, the growing use of botnets, responsible for one quarter of all click fraud, has left the overall rate static. The previous quarters rate was 16.3%. The rate for Q2 in 2007 was 15.8%.

More Chinese web surfers than American ones now

China now has an estimated 253 million web users, a 56% increase from last year. This is higher than the 223 million web users in the U.S. It is also noteworthy that these 253 million Chinese web users still only represents 19.1% of the total population of China, leaving substantial room for further growth. It is however interesting to contrast these figures with the amount of total revenues of Chinese net firms, which was $5.9bn in 2007, compared to $21.2bn for net advertising alone in the U.S for 2007.

New Product Launches

New search engine Cuil launches

Cuil (pronounced "cool") is a search startup by some ex-Google employees. On launch they claimed to have the biggest web index, totalling 120 billion pages vs. the last known figure of 40 billion for Google (although shortly after the launch Google wrote on their blog that they had now seen over 1 trillion web pages present on the internet at the same time). Cuil suffered a few teething problems at launch, and was unavailable during part of the launch day, and their relevancy has been widely panned.

We have more coverage of Cuil on the LBi Netrank blog.

Google Knol open to everyone

Google's new product Knol has been opened for all to use. Still in beta it has been called by some Wikipedia with moderation. One of the key differences with Wikipedia is that multiple "knols" on the same topic are allowed, and even encouraged. Google are hoping that survival of the fittest will see the best articles rise to the top. Another key difference, called "moderated collaboration" by Google, allows an author to accept edits to an article but to only permit the author to actually make the changes to the live page. This should make spamming a knol owned by someone else very difficult.

Facebook Connect

Facebook announced the introduction of Facebook Connect. This gives users the ability to use their profiles on other websites, and is being seen as competing against Google's similar service, Google Friend Connect, which Facebook have blocked from their site.

Yahoo! Launch BOSS (Build your Own Search Service)

BOSS, the new search service from Yahoo!, allows developers to build search applications based on Yahoo!'s search infrastructure and technology. It takes vast hardware resources to create a new search startup which can handle the modern web, and this is seen by Yahoo! as a way of helping smaller search startups to experiment. Yahoo! believe they will be able to generate new revenue streams from these partnerships.

Google Merchant Search now Live in the UK

Google have launched yet another assault on price comparison companies, this time with the launch of a price comparison for secured loans in Google UK. The data compares quotes from several financial services companies to provide the best quote, and can be found when searching for [secured loans]. Although still in early days (and in beta), if Google expand this to other types of financial needs it could spell rough times ahead for financial price comparison websites.

Amazon targets PayPal and Google with new payment systems

Amazon has launched two new online payment systems, in a bid to muscle into this lucrative market. The first system is called Checkout, and is targeted at online merchants, enabling them to easily provide payment services for their customers. The second system is called Simple Pay, and is aimed at providing a method for Amazon account holders to easily purchase goods on other websites.

Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider

ISPs are now able to sign up as Google Webmaster Tools Access Providers and make use of Google APIs to automatically provide Google Webmaster Tools accounts to their customers at no cost. This was originally piloted with web hosting company Go Daddy, but now all hosting agencies can apply to join the Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program.

Search Engine Market Share Updates

Google has over 75% of search ads market in the US

Efficient Frontier have released a "Search Engine Performance Report" for Q2 2008, which found that Google now accounts for around 77.4% of total search engine spending in the US, up 2% since last year. Yahoo! lost nearly 2% dropping to 17.8% of the total, while Microsoft Live Search stayed mostly stable at around 4.8%.

Windows to drop below 90% online market share this year?

A new survey of operating system use from Net Applications suggests that the use of Windows might drop below 90%, OS X rise to double digits, and Linux break 1% by the end of the year. Net Applications measures market share by recording the operating system used to browse a set of hand-picked sites that it says are representative of the overall market.

Firefox breaks 50% market share in Indonesia

According to market share reports from Net Applications, Firefox surpassed the 50% mark in June 2008, believed to be the first country in which the upstart browser has over half of all net users. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, but has a relatively low (but rapidly growing) internet usage. Mozilla also believe they are close to passing the 50% mark in several European countries, including Finland, Slovenia and Poland.

June Search Engine Market shares - Google, Ask, AOL down, Microsoft and Yahoo! up

comScore has released June 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings. They show that Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June. This is the first time Google's share has dropped since December 2007. Interestingly the actual number of searches over all core search engines (except AOL) increased, with Google handling 7.1 billion core searches, up 6% from May.