It is official. Yahoo announced through their search blog Thursday that Yahoo has switched over their search results to be populated by Bing’s algorithm in the United States. Yahoo will still have it’s own platform, but will display the results that Bing’s search engine spiders and algorithm determine. International results will be transitioned in the future. At this point the US is the test marketing. Yahoo and Bing wanted to be sure the transition of both organic and paid search occurred before the holiday season.
To read more visit the post on Yahoo’s Search Blog
Tags: Bing, Organic Results, Yahoo, Yahoo Bing Alliance
The Search Alliance is a merger between Yahoo and Bing’s search results. The engines will still have their own distinct style for their results, but they will be merging their technologies to produce one feed. This means that when you complete a search on either Yahoo or Bing they should return the same results. The merger will allow search engine marketers to control more traffic through one interface, but it also means there will be less control. The new alliance will not allow marketers to opt out of either engine. RIC has been told however, that reporting should indicate where traffic came from and performance by engine. The true extent of what bells and whistles that will be available, probably will not be known until the roll out in October. With the latest rollout of the MSN Desktop tool, RIC is a little skeptical that the transition will be smooth.
Tags: Bing, Merger, Yahoo, Yahoo Bing Alliance
Google announced today that they began redirecting Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Google.com.hk is the Hong Kong version of Google and thus does not have censored results. This means that it is likely that China will begin blocking access to the search engine soon. Google is effectively pulling out of China.
Hitwise reported that Facebook passed Google in total traffic for an entire week. The first time that it has done so. Facebook’s traffic increased by 185% last week compared to the same week in 2009 and Google only increased traffic in 9% over the same time period.
Read more at Hitwise.com
Google reported in their latest SEC filing that virtually everyone is their competition on and offline.
We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:
- Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
- Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
- Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines.
- Other forms of advertising. We compete against traditional forms of advertising—such as television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and yellow pages—for ad dollars.
- Mobile applications. As the mobile application ecosystem develops further, users are increasingly accessing e-commerce and other sites through those companies’ stand-alone mobile applications, instead of through search engines.
- Providers of online products and services. We also provide a number of online products and services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs, that compete directly with new and established companies that offer communication, information, and entertainment services integrated into their products or media properties.
Read more at Royal.Pingdom.com
Tags: Google
The BBC is reporting that in a poll of 27,000 people from around the world there is strong support for the internet to be declared a fundamental right. This may be a strange statement for those who freely have access to the internet, but could mean quite a bit to those in countries that censor or complete restrict the use of the internet such as China and Iran. There has been a lot of strong discussion about internet freedom with comments from the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Google threatening to pull out of China over internet freedom issues.
Personally I agree with the major of those from the poll. The simple click of a mouse can bring all the information in the world to one’s computer screen. While there are a lot of filters and control of information that is available on the internet, there are also plenty of blogs and alternative sources of information that can provide knowledge and freedom to the masses. Where as there may only be two local tv stations and five radio stations, on the internet you can access opinions and news perspectives from opposing views. Users are no longer limited by the public opinion or the influence of the people they live around. Information from all sources can be accessed through the internet good and bad, and that is a powerful tool. One that all too often is taken for granted in countries with compete access. Start restricting internet access, increasing censorship, and the right of access to the internet become rather clear.
Tags: Internet
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google is testing a new programing with the Dish Network. It allows users to search Dish programing, as well as web content such as YouTube videos. The deal also includes Google’s video advertising platform. Users can search using their remote or a keyboard. This continues to trend of mixing internet and tv.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal
Tags: Dish Network, Google, TV
Yahoo introduced Yahoo TimeSense today at SMX West. The new tool is much like Google Trends. Yahoo described ‘Yahoo TimeSense as the company’s version of Google Trends, but (as you’d expect) says it’s better because
- TimeSense uses language modeling to determine what queries are relevant to “right now”
- TimeSense is better at identifying long-tail queries, whereas Google Trends is good at identifying “head” querie’
Google Trends allows a user to search single or multiple keywords to compare the amount of traffic that the queries receive over time.
Yahoo TimeSense is not available, but Yahoo hinted at it would be available in the near future. It is interesting they are introducing this tool as they are giving up their search results. This tool in the future will either need to use Bing data or be eliminated.
Read more at SearchEngineLand.com
Tags: Google Trends, Yahoo, Yahoo TimeSense
HTC has been accused by Apple of infringing upon 20 patents owned by Apple involving the iPhone.
‘In a statement Apple boss Steve Jobs said: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it.
“We’ve decided to do something about it,” he said. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”‘
As a result Apple has filed a lawsuit over the infringement. At this point they have not named Google in the suit.
As reported by BBC.com
It has been reported that Motorola’s new Google Android based phone will actually come standard with Yahoo as the search engine. Google has made many enemy’s by stepping in to compete with other large corporations. I am sure that AT&T’s brass considered that Google would be using the money to compete with them, and as a result switched out the search engine options. This is one of the flaws of Google’s open source model. It can be used for free and manipulated to compete against Google.
Read more at: Engadget.com