LBi Search: LBi Search Newsletter: November 2009

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LBi Search Newsletter: November 2009

Google goes shopping - buys AdMob, Gizmo5 & Teracent. Also this month: Bing localises for the UK market and partners with Wolfram|Alpha; Google and Bing make changes to their search results pages; Google Caffeine edges closer to release; Yahoo! dips toes in real-time search; and research about the long tail of search and how Google treats non-HTML files.

Acquisitions & Partnerships

Google goes shopping - buys AdMob, Gizmo5 & Teracent

Google has announced its acquisition of AdMob, a mobile display advertising company. The deal is reported to be worth $750 million. Google says that the deal will:

“bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising, and will lead to more effective tools for creating, serving, and analysing emerging mobile ad formats.”

Google has also bought Voice over IP (VOIP) startup Gizmo5. Gizmo5 provides free US calls and cheap international calls. Google gave the following statement:

“While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience.”

Teracent are behind technology that uses thousands of creative elements to produce ads in real-time. The elements are optimised according to factors including location, content of the website, time of day and the past performance of different ads. From the Google Blog:

“We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the web. That's why we're pleased to announce today that we've entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Teracent. The transaction, which is subject to various closing conditions, is expected to close this quarter.”

Australia and Canada clear Bing-Yahoo! deal

It is being reported that the Canadian and Australian anti-trust authorities have both cleared the Yahoo!/Bing deal. This leaves the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the European Competition Commission to clear it in order for the deal to go forward. Microsoft and Yahoo! already have a deal in Australia whereby Microsoft uses Yahoo!'s paid search advertising platform.

Search News & Research

Bing Localises for the UK

Bing has announced that it is introducing localisation for the UK version of its search engine. Newly localised features include the Bing homepage, which will now have UK-specific images and "hotspots", and an "integrated shopping experience" with Ciao UK. As part of this launch, Bing has now shed its "beta" tag in the UK.

Non-HTML files can have PageRank

LBi conducted a piece of research, published in November, which looked at how Google treats non-HTML files (such as Microsoft Office documents and PDF files). This research showed that these non-HTML files can have PageRank.

Msnbot 1.1 retired

Microsoft has announced that it has finally retired its old web crawler, Msnbot 1.1. From now on, only Bing's newer spider, Msnbot 2.0b, will be used to spider websites.

The long tail keeps getting longer

An article from Hitwise looks at the increase in the use of longer search phrases. Hitwise states that, over the last three years, there has been a marked decline in the use of one-word and two-word searches, and an increase in 3, 4 and 5 word searches. The article is specifically about Australian search, but it states that the trend is global.

We covered an earlier report on the increasing length of searches back in February.

Google Caffeine sandbox closed, moving to a live datacenter

Google has closed its preview site for its upcoming "Caffeine" infrastructure. Google's message states that it plans to initially roll out the Caffeine infrastructure on a single datacenter (one of many which power Google's main search results). Google engineer Matt Cutts has said that it is not likely to be present on more than one datacenter before January.

New Product Launches

Google adds "breadcrumbs" to search results

Google has added site hierarchies (commonly known as breadcrumb trails) to its search results. When this feature appears within a search result on Google, the URL contains a clickable breadcrumb trail rather than the standard URL listing. This allows searchers to visit the section homepages of the listed page directly from the search results. This feature is not yet available for all sites but Google has stated that it intends to expand the feature in the future.

New search ad formats at Google

Google is testing new search ad formats on its core search engine. Limited to the U.S. initially, the new ad formats include use of visual elements (such as pictures or videos) or more detailed information (such as reviews, prices or maps). It remains to be seen how users will react to these new ad formats, which mark a significant departure for Google from its well-known text ads.

Changes at Bing, including Wolfram|Alpha partnership

Bing has started rolling out a number of improvements to its search engine, starting with Bing's US site. The new features include a travel vertical on the Bing sidebar; a new event search feature; social media links for products search; and better results for medical queries. The preview feature has also been made more obvious to users.

The Bing partnership with Wolfram|Alpha, which we reported in the September, has come to fruition. Initially, Bing is including nutritional information and tools from Wolfram|Alpha in its search results, as well as using it for "hard math" and "homework help".

Google Commerce Search

Google has introduced a new enterprise search offering that allows e-commerce sites to use Google's hosted search platform. Google Commerce Search allows site visitors to search for products by category, price or any other attribute, as well as allowing site administrators to highlight products and make connections between related ones.

Google notifying site owners of out-of-date software

Google has started to inform webmasters when their website software is out of date. Google is sending messages within Google Webmaster Tools when new versions of software packages or plug-ins are available where Google identifies that the site has not upgraded yet. This should hopefully help to reduce the number of sites which get hacked, as many software updates are released to close security holes.

Yahoo! tests real-time search and includes updates for news

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! has confirmed recent rumours that it is testing a real-time search feature. The reports say that this is through a partnership with OneRiot, a real-time search engine that aggregates Digg, Twitter and other results.

Following the rumours, Yahoo! later announced that it would be including real-time updates in its news shortcut.

Bing launches Web Page Error Toolkit for PHP users

Bing's Web Page Error Toolkit, previously available only for ASP.net, is now available for PHP sites, including websites hosted on rival web server Apache. The Bing Web Page Error Toolkit provides enhanced 404 pages for websites using Bing's search technology.

Microsoft begins work on Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft has announced that it has begun work on the next version of Internet Explorer, the world's most-used web browser. Microsoft claims that it is already significantly faster than IE8 and is much more competitive with rival browsers in terms of speed. Microsoft also states that it is adding or improving support for key standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Google Related Links

Google began testing a feature called Related Links in 2006. The tool was intended to display links to other related web pages from within a particular page. It didn't make a huge impact at the time and Google quietly killed it in 2007.

Google has now re-launched its Related Links product. The key difference between the new version of this tool and its previous incarnation is that the widget now only shows related links from within the same website, which may mean greater uptake from webmasters this time around. The related searches function also restricts results to pages on the same site. The service is still being tested and is not available to everyone, but site owners can request to take part in the early test.

Yahoo! tried to introduce a similar feature in 2005, called Y!Q.

Search Industry Market Share Updates

US search market share

Compete

Compete's data for October shows that Google gained search market share whilst all of the other top search engines lost market share. The data shows Google with a 73.6% share of searches, up 1% from September and up 5% from October 2008. Yahoo! is second, with 14.4% (down 0.3%), followed by Microsoft with a share of 9.2% (down 0.1%), Ask with 1.9% (a steep drop from its 2.6% market share in September) and AOL with a share of 0.8% (down 0.1%).

comScore

comScore's data for October shows Google and Bing up, with Yahoo! posting the biggest loss. Google's market share was recorded as 65.4%, up from 64.9% in September. Yahoo! dropped 0.8% to down to 18%, while Bing gained 0.5% market share, rising to a nearly double-digit 9.9% share. comScore's data shows Ask remaining unchanged with a 3.9% share, while AOL dropped very slightly to a 2.9% share.

Nielsen

Nielsen has also published October data for US search market share. Its data shows that Google has a market share of 66.1%, followed by Yahoo! with a share of 15.4%, Microsoft with a search market share of 9.7%, AOL with a 3.0% share and Ask with a 1.7% share (Ask-owned My Web Search had a 1.0% share). Nielsen's data cannot be compared with previous results due to recent methodology changes.

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

European search market share [AT Internet Institute]

The AT Internet Institute (XitiMonitor) has reported its October search market share data for Western Europe. The report looks at four Western European countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain). Since September, Google has gained market share in all countries except Germany, where it saw a slight decline (down 0.1%). Google experienced its largest market share increase in the United Kingdom, where it jumped by 0.5% to 89.4%.

Yahoo! lost market share in all four countries, with its highest market share still in the United Kingdom, where it has a 4.3% market share (down 0.1%). Ask also lost market share in the three countries in which it ranks amongst the top five search engines, with its largest market share also being in the United Kingdom, where it has a 1.3% share (down 0.2%).

Bing's market share in October was exactly the same as it was in September in all four countries, as was AOL's share in the two countries in which it made the top five search engines.

Asia-Pacific Search Market Share [comScore]

comScore has reported on September search market share in the Asia-Pacific region. Its data shows that Google commands 44.1% of searches across the whole region, a big increase compared to the previous figure of 33.5% in comScore's July 2008 report for the region. Chinese search engine Baidu is second, with a 21.3% share, dropping from 27.4% in the previous report. Baidu is now significantly further behind Google, with the market share difference between them more than tripling, from around 6% to around 23%.

Yahoo! remains in third place in the Asia-Pacific region, although its 13.8% market share in September 2009 is significantly down from its 19.7% share in July 2008. Fourth place is Korean search engine NHN, which has gained market share compared to the previous report, with its share of searches rising from 4.6% to 5.1%.

Microsoft has jumped to fifth place in September 2009 with a market share of 2.8%, a significant increase from its 1.7% share in July 2008 which had previously resulted in it ranking in seventh place in the region. However, the number of searches per searcher on Microsoft's sites was over four times lower than any of the other top six search engines.