LBi Search: LBi Search Newsletter: November 2008

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Acquisitions and Partnerships

Microsoft say No but... Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang quits

Following on from the breakdown in the Google/Yahoo! ad deal, Jerry Yang CEO of Yahoo! while speaking at the San Francisco Web 2.0 summit seemed to suggest that Yahoo! would be interested in being bought by Microsoft.

Steve Balmer Microsoft CEO has been quoted as saying that Microsoft are open to a search only deal with Yahoo, but is still not interested in buying the whole company. This caused a 21% slump in Yahoo! shares.

Following on from the break down of the Yahoo/Google ad deal, Jerry Yang announced in the Yahoo corporate blog that he would be stepping down from his role as CEO. Yang will continue to be involved with Yahoo! in the role of Chief Yahoo

Yahoo! sells Kelkoo for cut-down price

The price comparison site Kelkoo was bought for €475 million in 2004 but is reported to have been sold by Yahoo for less than €100 million to the U.K. private equity firm, Jamplant Ltd.

Lycos to close Lycos Europe

After undergoing a strategic review process it seems likely that Lycos Europe will close. Their website states the following.

As a result of this strategic review process the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of LYCOS came to the conclusion that the best available option of the company is to (i) strive for a sale of its domains, Danish portal and shopping activities and (ii) to discontinue the portal and webhosting activities.

The final decision will however, require the approval of shareholders

Yahoo! wins deal to be default search provider for T-Mobile

Yahoo! will be the default search engine on the new Web2Go portal by T-Mobile. They were already in a similar relationship with T-Mobile in Europe. This deal will bring the number of relationships between Yahoo and carriers to over 80, giving Yahoo the potential to reach 850 million people.

Facebook fails to buy Twitter

Facebook offered $500 million in stock, but Twitter questioned the value of the stock and reportedly asked for a cash deal. Facebook's stock valuation of $15 is thought by some to be overvalued.

Search News and Research

UK shoppers spend 40% more online than US shoppers

According to a report by JupiterResearch, commissioned by LinkShare, UK shoppers are more likely to use the internet to make decisions about what goods and services to purchase than those in the US Additionally UK shoppers are 13% more likely to make regular purchases online than US shoppers.

Yahoo November update

Yahoo announced that they would be rolling out a search update over the weekend beginning 22/11/08. As is usual with these updates there will be changes to Yahoo's crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms.

iCrossing sued by Agency.com for poaching clients and employees

The Wall Street journal reports that Agency.com is suing iCrossing for breach of contract, tortuous interference and conspiring to misappropriate proprietary information and trade secrets. Agency.com is seeking $19.5 million in damages. Agency.com also blames iCrossing for the closure of their Dallas office and the decimation of the firm's Chicago office.

New Product Launches

YouTube launch Sponsored Videos

Content owners will now be able to include their advertising videos in a listing along side YouTube searches. Using a pay per click model the promoter can choose keywords that the sponsored video listing will appear for. Currently the sponsored videos are only available for US users.

Google launch SearchWiki

SearchWiki allows Google account holders to rearrange, delete and add sites to the Google search engine results pages they receive for words they search for. The modified pages re-appear if the user enters the same search query in the future.

The changes do not affect the results other Google search engine users see, at least for the time being.

Google Ad Planner available to everyone

The Google Ad Planner was previously only available to AdWords customers but has now been made available to all Google account holders. The media planning tool allows the user to plan online advertising campaigns with a host of features.

Google launches keyword suggestion tool for AdWords

Google have released a new tool which suggests keywords that you could be bidding on. You enter the website URL and keywords you are bidding on and it suggests others and gives monthly search volumes and AdWords price information.

It's aimed at AdWords users but is available for everyone to use (although if signed into AdWords it will hide keywords you are already bidding on). It is also possible to search without specifying a URL. The tool is currently in beta.

Google Finance gets ads, and Google testing ads on Google News

Google have announced that they are testing ad placement in a variety of new places including Google Finance and Google News. Google have already been testing ads alongside Image search results in the US.

Search Industry Market Share Updates

US search market share stats for October [comScore / Nielsen]

comScore shows Google up 0.2% to 63.1% and Yahoo! up, by 0.3% reaching 20.5%. Microsoft were unchanged at 8.5%, while Ask and AOL were down by 0.1% and 0.4% respectively, ending up with 4.2% and 3.7% respectively.

Nielsen (pdf) statistics are year-on-year, and show Google and AOL with rising over the last year, while Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask were all down since October 2007. Google rose 8.1% over the last year to reach 61.2% market share. Yahoo! is second with 16.9%, followed by Microsoft Live Search with 11.4%, AOL with 4.3% and Ask.com with 2.3%.

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

UK mobile web growing 8x faster than the normal web [Nielsen]

The report says that there are now 7 million mobile web users in the UK. This is in comparison with over 40 million in the US. These figures represent about 20% of total internet users in both countries. The growth rate in the UK internet audience is 25% for mobile.

Japan market share stats for September 2008 [comScore]

Yahoo! share of searches 51.2% with Google a strong second with 39.0% (although this includes searches performed on YouTube). No other sites had more than 2%, with Microsoft fourth at 1.5%.