LBi Netrank: LBi Netrank Newsletter: September 2008

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Acquisitions and Partnerships

Google-Yahoo! ad deal struggles forwards

Despite pressure from all sides Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed at the end of August that the Google-Yahoo! advertising partnership would proceed with the launch set for early October. The partnership would mean that Google AdWords sponsored ads would appear along with Yahoo! ads in the Yahoo! search results.

The deal has encountered opposition from a number of sides. The Association of National Advertisers in the US has sent a letter to Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Barnett objecting to the deal. This was then followed by the World Association of Newspapers calling on the US Department of Justice, the European Commission and the Competition Bureau of Canada to block the deal.

The deal has been voluntarily submitted to the US Justice Department for review and it has since emerged that the US Justice Department has hired the well-known lawyer Sanford Litvack to look into a possible antitrust challenge to the deal. In addition the European Union Competition Commission has also announced that it is investigating the deal as whilst the actual ads would not be shown within the EU it is thought that the deal will affect European advertisers.

Yahoo! AOL merger talks resume

The talks originally became serious when Yahoo! was trying to fend off the Microsoft bid earlier this year, but the board of Yahoo! has now cleared the path for a new round of talks with AOL and its owners Time Warner. Interestingly, this is the first board meeting where the investor Carl Icahn is present.

Microsoft buys Ciao-owners Greenfield Online for $486 million

Microsoft appears to have bought the company for its Ciao subsidiary, and is likely to sell off the rest of the company according to reports. Microsoft is intending to integrate the Ciao shopping comparison site into its Live Search offering.

Yahoo! launching new unified ad platform APT

Yahoo! has announced the launch of Yahoo! APT, an evolution of what was formerly called Yahoo! AMP. Yahoo! has admitted that the old programme was much more complicated, requiring over 30 steps, several days and even use of faxes in order to move from an advertising strategy concept to launching the advert itself. The new programme will be much faster, with Yahoo! claiming that it will allow you to do this in minutes instead of days.

Google partners with NBC and Bloomberg to sell TV ads

Google has announced two significant agreements to sell TV advertising. The first announcement was with NBC and will see Google TV advertising initially appearing on the Sci Fi channel, Oxygen, MSNBC, Sleuth and Chiller networks. Later in September Google also announced a deal with Bloomberg.

Yahoo! to provide search services for AT&T mobile customers, Google in talks with Verizon

An estimated 70 million US mobile phone customers are set to have access to Yahoo! Onesearch through AT&T's mobile internet portal.

Google is also in talks with Verizon, the second largest US carrier, about becoming its default search provider.

Google buys Korean blogging company TNC

In another attempt to crack the competitive Korean market, Google has acquired the Korean blogging company TNC (Tatter and Company). TNC is a "blog speciality" company and makes the blogging platform Textcube, used by the majority of Korea's high profile bloggers. This is reportedly Google's first acquisition of a Korean company.

Search News and Research

United Airlines stock drops 75% after 6-year-old bankruptcy story surfaces on Google News

The stock price of United Airlines plunged 75% after a bankruptcy story from 2002 accidentally surfaced on the front page of Google News, triggering widespread automated selling. A total of 1.14 billion dollars was wiped off the value of the company, although after the mistake was realised the stock price rose again.

Google has published an explanation of the fiasco.

Google will anonymise IP addresses after 9 months now

Google has announced that it will anonymise IP addresses after 9 months, halving the previous timescale of 18 months. This comes after pressure from the EU, which wants the figure cut to 6 months in line with European data protection legislation.

Once this new nine months limit has been implemented, Google will have the shortest retention period of the three major search engines, with Yahoo! keeping data for 13 months and Microsoft retaining it for 18 months.

Yahoo! update

Yahoo! has had another of its regular updates in early September.

Google 'Toolbar PageRank' update

Google had another update to its 'Toolbar PageRank' scores. Although PageRank is calculated on a regular basis within Google itself, the PageRank values which are seen in the Google Toolbar are only updated around every 3-4 months. With this update, new PageRank values should be visible.

Possible Microsoft Live Search update

There are widespread reports that Microsoft Live Search is undergoing an update that is affecting its index and rankings. So far there has not been any official confirmation of this from Microsoft.

Google Labs adds audio indexing

Google has added a new entry to its experimental projects site Google Labs. The Google Audio Indexing (Labs) project performs speech recognition on YouTube videos (currently limited to the YouTube political channels for this first test) and allows full text search on the words spoken within the videos.

Whilst it is currently very limited in scope (restricted to just a few political videos, which tend to feature people talking relatively clearly) and is very rough around the edges (the number of speech recognition mistakes made is fairly high), this is a fascinating look at what search may look like in a few years from now.

Google to digitise and archive printed newspapers

Google has announced that it is expanding its archiving of old newspapers. Google began indexing a number of well known newspapers, including the New York Times and The Washington Post, two years ago, but is now launching an initiative to increase the number of old newspapers archived, many of which are not available online. The newspapers are fully searchable and can be viewed in their complete original layout.

New Product Launches

Google launches its web browser "Chrome"

Google have announced the release of Google Chrome, an open source web browser that uses other open source technologies, most notably components from Apple's WebKit and code from the Mozilla project (the makers of Firefox). It also features a new JavaScript engine called V8 which was built with the aim of running "next generation" web applications. It uses a tabbed browsing system that isolates the function of each individual tab, meaning that if an application in one tab goes wrong, it is unlikely to affect other open tabs, a model which Google is also claiming makes the browser more secure.

In related news, Google has extended its deal with Mozilla which features Google services integrated by default with the Firefox web browser. Google will now provide the default search in the Firefox browser until the end of 2011.

G1 - the Google phone arrives

The G1 smartphone, formerly nicknamed the "Dream", officially launched in September. It is the first ever handset based on Google's Android platform. It has received mixed but generally positive reviews, although comparisons have inevitably been drawn with the iPhone. Influential Wall Street Journal writer Walt Mossberg has called it the first real competitor to the iPhone.

Google is hoping that the open nature of the Android platform will be its killer app - to date, there have been over 1,700 applications developed as part of the Android Developer Challenge.

This first handset is firmly Google-oriented, and comes with easy access to Google search, maps, Gmail (and Contacts), calendar, Google Talk and YouTube. However, it is easy for a phone manufacturer to change this to any other competing search provider.

Search Industry Market Share Updates

Google US market share up

According to Hitwise, Google's US market share has risen to 71%. Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask have each seen their market shares fall.

comScore also shows Google as having increased its US market share, but gives a lower market share figure of only 63%. Their data shows Yahoo! and Microsoft down but also shows Ask as up by 0.3%.

Note: Differences in statistics will inevitably arise due to different samples, sample sizes and methodology. However, the trend in Google's favour is clear.

Mobile search growth 68% in US, 38% in Western Europe over last year [comScore]

The latest report from net statistics company comScore shows that mobile search is growing quickly. The number of users of mobile search was up 38% in Western Europe over the last year, and shot up by 68% in the US over the same period. The research also found that, in addition to the number of users of mobile search increasing, the average amount of searches per user being performed was also increasing.

Google leads in Asia-Pacific [comScore]

According to comScore Google leads in search market share in the Asia-Pacific region, with a 33.5% market share, but Baidu is only six percent behind with 27.4%. Yahoo! is third with a 19.7% share, with all other competitors having less than 5%. Microsoft is far down in seventh place, with only a 1.7% market share.

Google market share in Germany nearly 80% [comScore]

Google dominates with 79.8%, followed by eBay with 6.1%. AOL has 1.7%, Microsoft 1.0% and Yahoo! 0.9%. All other competitors had a market share of less than 1%.

If eBay is not counted, Google's market share easily breaks the 80% barrier.