Filed under: acquisition, AOL, ask, fragmenting search market, internet marketing, microsoft, ppc, purchases, search engine marketing, search engines, seo, the future of search engine marketing, the future of search engine optimisation, useful article, yahoo | Tags: consolidation, fragmentation., microsoft, msn, purchasing, search engine marketing, yahoo, ysm
Ive finally gotten round to having a little think about the big news story of the week, Microsoft tabling a bid of $44.6 Billion in cash and stock to buy its rival Yahoo. There has been no official comment from Yahoo on the reports but I thought Id document my thoughts on the impace this could have.
The portal market
Yahoo and MSN are the two big players in the portal market, the one stop shop for all you web needs, search engine, web mail, news feed, weather reports, all in one place. This is where Microsoft will gain a massive advantage and pretty much gain complete dominance. Aside from the ISP sites, which gain their visitors through having a default homepage setting in the ISP setup process, Microsoft will have a dominance in this field comparable to Google’s in the search market (more of that in a minute!). So what does this mean to MSN? Well instantly they will take on board the lions share of the portal advertising revenues around the world. Yahoo has built an advertising model which is highly lucrative and brings in a huge amount of revenue each year, utilising the latest behavioural targeting technology to keep online advertising moving forward. MSN obviously has its own advertising model and ideas on how the market is going to advance but they will automatically boost their ad revenues with the purchase. It also sets them up well for the predicted rise in online ad spend over the next few years, from $40 billion to $80 billion if you believe the predictions, dominance in a market this size is a mouth watering prospect.
The search market
This is where it gets really interesting. Microsft has struggled to gain a foothold in the search market since it launched its own PPC model in 2006 and I forecasted in a previous post (Microsoft sets its sights on 40% market share) that a purchase may be on the cards if they were to achieve their targets. The purchase of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), if part of the deal, would possibly take their market share into the double figures in the paid search arena. Their system is good at present, the quality of their traffic is good, its just the volume they have been missing. YSM would help boost this and make them a legitimate number 2 in this arena and they undoubtedly have the fire power to make dents in Google’s dominance (see their response here). It does raise the question, what does this mean to search agencies? the market which was due to fragment with the launch of wikia search, AOL breaking out in the US, Ask hinting at the same, is now significantly consolidated if this deal does actually go through. Does this make SEM simpler? Not really but it could be perceived that way, a post for another time I think.
How do they manage it?
This will be interesting, does Yahoo become Microsoft branded? or is it just another property of the technology giant? Does it become Microhoo? Yasoft? Mahoo? or does it become Yahoo – a Microsoft company? and more importantly for internet marketers do they keep the two infrastructures separate, the advertising interfaces, the search algorithms, the display advertising models. This is what will be the key determinant of what this means to the industry and what it means to digital agencies.
Whether the deal goes through remains to be seen, when it goes through is another question yet to be answered. What is undeniable is that it is going to influence the online advertising market significantly, in what way, remains to be seen.
Filed under: acquisition, fragmenting search market, purchases, search engine marketing, search engines, useful article, world domination | Tags: microsoft, msn, search engine dominance, search engine marketing, yahoo
Exciting news in the world of search engine marketing, more thoughts and comments to come when I have the time!
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo
Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price on Nasdaq Thursday. Yahoo shares jumped to $30.75 in premarket trading.
Yahoo said the online advertising market is growing rapidly and expected to reach nearly $80 billion by 2010 from over $40 billion in 2007. Yahoo added it is “increasingly dominated by one player,” referring to Web search leader Google.
“We have great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in a statement.
Yahoo was not immediately available for comment.
The company has been losing market share to Google and warned earlier this week that it faced “headwinds” in 2008, forecasting revenue below Wall Street estimates.
On Thursday, Yahoo disclosed that nonexecutive Chairman Terry Semel was leaving the board, ending its formal ties with the former chief executive, who is credited with reviving the company and then losing touch.
Semel, replaced as CEO last June, had faced heavy criticism for failing to move faster to meet both rival Google’s challenge in Web search and advertising and, more recently, the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
U.S. stock futures jumped on the Microsoft news, which offset a disappointing earnings report from Google late Thursday.
Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services, said a deal made sense.
“Yahoo is having a really tough time competing against Google. Whether it’s a good price, I can’t see anybody else who is going to outbid Microsoft,” Mendelsohn said.
Microsoft said it had identified four areas that would generate at least $1 billion in annual synergies for the combined entity.
Tim Smalls, head of U.S. stock trading at brokerage firm Execution LLC, was less enthusiastic about the benefits of a tie-up.
“Shocking! To me, the premium seems exorbitant, for what is a dwindling business. I personally don’t see how the synergies of Microsoft-Yahoo is going to take on Google,” Smalls said.
(Reporting by Franklin Paul and Tiffany Wu; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn/Jeffrey Benkoe)
Copyright 2008 Reuters
Filed under: AOL, ask, combining paid and natural search, fragmenting search market, holistic search, image search, innovation. search engine marketing, msn, natural search, new products, personalisation, personalised search, personalising search results, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, search engines, search resources, serp, the future of search engine marketing, the future of search engine optimisation, universal search | Tags: ask.com, google, msn, search engine dominance, search engine marketing, universal search, yahoo
Search engine land reported today the release of some new functional by ask which allows a user to upload their own personal background image for the search engine. The functionality to add a skin to the background has been available since last year but this was only for predetermined images and wasn’t customisable. I like the idea of customising the results page and this is a much simpler solution than Google’s which involves xml information rather than a simple image upload. It is also much more flexible and interesting than msn and yahoo’s offerings which only allow the selection of different colour palletes for the page.
This functionality is just another stage in the battle for search engine supremacy but also for loyalty within internet users through added value. Yahoo had this a long time ago through positioning itself as an information portal and one stop shop for your internet needs (email, news, sport, search…) a similar position taken by MSN. Then Google smashed this with its simplicity and accuracy of results. But even the big G has recognised the need to give people more and through iGoogle struck a balance between information on the page and usability by allowing the user to choose which information feeds they received. The issue at the bottom of all of this is keeping people using your page/engine, setting it as their homepage, and a base for all their online activities. If they can use your site for everything they need online whey would they go elsewhere? The longer a user in on your site, the more searches they do, the more ads they view, the more ads they click, the more money you make! Simple. Expect a lot more releases like in this in the next 12 months as the battle continues.
It’ll take a lot more functionality for Yahoo, Ask or MSN to catch Google but I do know people who now use the Yahoo homepage as they prefer it to Google so there is some movement going on. You can check out the Ask function on the US site here, it is not yet available in the UK.
Filed under: fragmenting search market, innovation. search engine marketing, personalised search, personalising search results, search engine marketing, search engines, search resources, the future of search engine marketing, the future of search engine optimisation, universal search, wiki, wikipedia | Tags: wiki, wikia, wikia search, wikipedia
I had my first look at the Wikia Search alpha today and I have to say the results are absolute pants! To be fair to them the people at Wikia do say the results won’t be great at the moment as the basis of their engine is that of user reviews and not so much algorithmic search, hence results will improve rapidly over time as listings begin to get scored by users. I have to admit that I like the idea of a user ranked search engine, after all, how many websites do you come across which have absolutely no relevance to your search phrase? (my blog ranks rather highly for “search pornsex” for example!) But not only that, a user can make more judgements on things like usability and site layout than a search engine spider which should further help the best websites rise to the top. The process appears relatively simple, hover over a result and a five star scale will appear allowing you to score the result, this will then be used along with the algorithmic properties to determine a websites position. This will be wholly reliant obviously on users picking up on and participating in this ranking process so I will be watching with a lot of interest how the results improve over the coming weeks.Aside from the standard results there is also going to be a section at the top of results reserved for “mini articles” on each subject. According to Wikia “These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:
- Short definitions
- Disambiguations
- Photos
- See also “
Generated by the users these will obviously take the same form of the Wikipedia pages and will undoubtedly include some Wikipedia content for sections yet to be populated by the new system. Wikia Search undoubtedly has the potential to become the most relevant search engine but the worry, as has been the problem with tagging sites such as digg in recent times, is that people begin to play the system, creating alias accounts to boost their own contents ratings and therefore rank, totally devaluing the whole platform. If Wikia Search really does become the next number one contender to the big G then the temptation to find a “quick win” within its system will grow stronger in line with its visitor stats. At present I believe Wikia plans to get around the duplicate account problem by basing its user on IP address but that doesn’t sound like to much of a robust system to me and I cant imaging it will be long before the spammers have an easy way of beating it.
I may have sounded negative in this post but I honestly hope Wikia Search succeeds, I hate the dominance Google has on the search market. I also love the thought of users producing the search results rather than a piece of software. On this initial offering I think there is a long way to go with the next big pretender.
Filed under: google, innovation. search engine marketing, search engine marketing, search engines, the future of search engine marketing, the future of search engine optimisation, travel search, universal search | Tags: flight status, google, google flight search, google flight status, universal search
Google announced on its blog yesterday the launch of a new tool for universal search, the flight status function. All you have to do is search on the airline and the flight number and Google will tell you whether it is delayed or on time and its departure and arrival times. its a useful little tool this one as it removes the need to find the airlines web page and with a lot of people having Google as their homepage or using a tool bar it speeds up the process. I would be interested to see if it cover ALL airlines though and how accurate and frequently updated the information this as this is key. Without accuracy the tool may as well not exist.
Filed under: acquisition, facebook, microsoft, msn, purchases, search engines, social media, social media promotion, social networking | Tags: facebook, live search, microsoft, social networking
Following Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook for a small slice of their pie rumours are rife about this deal paving the way for the integration of live search functionality within the social networking site. The inflated valuation of the small stake is undoubtedly an attempt by Microsoft to keep Google at bay but could also be an indication that there is elements of the deal which incorporate an agreement to have live search integration. If this is the case then it could be a good investment for Microsoft as they have struggled to achieve any significant share in the search market place and the volumes available through their paid search platform have disappointed advertisers since its release.
The benefits to Facebook come from the simple fact that users would no longer need to leave the site to perform a search and so would spend more of their timeon the site, thus increasing appeal to advertisers. Oh, and theyve probably negotiated a revenue share on the money generated from Facebook based searches too. The only question that remains is will people using Facebook actually want to perform a web search? Well Myspace and Bebo both have the functionality, powered by Google and Yahoo respectively, so logic would suggest there is something in it. Whether thats worth $240 million, only time will tell.
How the search function may look:
Filed under: innovation. search engine marketing, search engines, the future of search engine marketing
Are any of the search engines below the future of search as we know it? we have been lacking a little innovation for a while and I would welcome a new contender. Some of those listed are more gimmicky than anything else and arent going to be scaleable as a business but that doesnt mean there arent a few little gems in here which could be utilised by one of the big guns to improve their results.
The Hunt for Search Engine Innovation, Part 2 by David Berkowitz, Tuesday, March 20, 2007
GOOGLE SHOULDN’T REST on its laurels just yet. Last week, we blazed through Charles Knight’s Top 100 Alternative Search Engines and found many areas where innovation was lacking. This week, we’ll visit some of the high-impact innovation categories and engines.
Sorting the engines into categories isn’t a perfect science, as many engines are hybrids. URL.com is a meta-search engine combined with user rankings, Ujiko combines a graphic display with user ratings, Exalead combines category filtering with image search, and Polymeta is a metasearch engine with filtering based on keywords and categories that also includes vertical and multimedia search. Don’t try too hard to sort it all out; by and large the most impressive engines have a clearer value proposition. Let’s see what they’re made of.
High-Impact Engines
Vertical niches: Goshme, discussed last week, aims to aggregate all vertical engines in one place. On the Top 100 list, the most innovative vertical search engine is Like.com. Microsoft’s recent Medstory acquisition also signals that the major engines are watching the vertical startups.
After last week’s column, Jessi Zambrano wrote about Indeed.com, a job metasearch engine not included on Mr. Knight’s Top 100 list. Job search engines have been among the most successful innovators, and they’ve also been among the priciest search-related acquisitions. Searching for jobs is also one of the few search activities that truly matters to consumers’ lives. Compare shopping search (“I want a good deal on something I plan on buying”) with job search (“I want a new/better job”), health search (“I’m trying to diagnose/care for myself or a loved one”), and dating search (“I’m lonely”/”I want to start a family”). The latter three categories really matter, so expect search pioneers to emerge from them. I’d include some kind of food search in that bunch, but once you’re online, searching for food is generally not a matter of fulfilling primal necessities but finding a decent takeout joint.
Multimedia search: Here’s where there’s the most need for improvement, and several startups have a leg up on the major engines — for now. The Top 100 list includes just a few examples of multimedia search engines, and they focus on video. Blabline is simply a Google Custom Search Engine. Clipblast bills itself as the world’s largest video search engine, though I’m not sure how it defends the title (my bet: the honor goes to YouTube, MySpace, or most likely Google). Blinkx has the most momentum, and it’s a favorite of Search Insider columnists; Aaron Goldman recently wondered if Google should buy Blinkx, and I predicted back in January 2005 that it was a ripe acquisition target.
Semantic Web: It’s getting harder and harder to write about any form of Internet innovation without factoring in the semantic web. John Markoff recently covered the topic in The New York Times, and by the time the Times gets to reporting on technology, you know it’s old news. The one semantic engine on the Top 100 list is Swoogle, a database impenetrable to anyone without a computer science degree (I can, however, tell you the difference between a rondeau and a villanelle).
That Swoogle is hard to parse is in a way ironic, as the gist of the semantic Web, to oversimplify it, is to provide a way for all forms of online content to better understand themselves and each other. For instance, if a search engine or other content site were to index or link to this column through the lens of the semantic Web, it would know that this column has everything to do with search engine innovation and nothing to do with obscure forms of poetry. It would also realize that Aaron Goldman is an esteemed MediaPost columnist and not this septuagenarian who has jogged 200 miles in 72 hours, and it would surely never mistake me for the more infamous individual who shares my name. In the most utopian visions for the semantic Web, such as those shared at a DoubleClick Industry Insighters Salon earlier this month, the Web will be so adept at understanding your own interests and wants that you won’t need to search for anything at all.
That’s one of those beautiful ideals, to become so good that you make yourself irrelevant. Could we really get there one day with search?
It’s unlikely. Even if any form of search became that good, we’re still hunters and gatherers at heart. We’ll always want the empowerment of thinking that searching is a skill, and if the right result is presented to us, we’ll take the credit, even if a computer programmer or algorithm actually made it happen. That means that the ideal search engine of the future, the standard every engine should shoot for that truly gives consumers what they want, will be one step shy of perfection.
This topic is one which greatly interests me, what is the future of search? Ive posted before at my disappointment with everyone’s desire to be Google and not better than Google. Through innovation comes change and I would like to think one of these categorise below represents the future of search engine evolution. Only problem is Im not sure which yet!!!
According to the metasearch engine GoshMe, there are more than 500,000 search engines. That’s more than one for every resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I dare you to search them all. If anyone will accomplish the task, it’s Charles Knight, a search engine optimizer who has made a name for himself publishing monthly lists of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.
I’ve attempted a number of grueling feats in my day. In college, I won a challenge to see who could eat the most Deadly Chocolate Sins, a rich, fudgy, warm brownie served at Applebee’s, and I subsequently learned that along with a sugar high, there’s also such thing as a sugar hangover. I am also one of few men who will admit to having endured watching nearly every episode of “The Real Housewives of the O.C.” (the things men do for love). The weekend I spent sorting through all of the Top 100 search engines wasn’t quite so demanding as brownie-eating or “Housewives”-watching, but it was up there.
With all these search engines, and I have no doubt that the 100 Mr. Knight compiled were truly among the best, I was mining them to explore where the real innovation lies. What aspects of all these engines will improve the search experience for users over the years ahead? Even if none of these are the next Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live Search, are there diamonds in the rough that can be polished and adapted into the major engines’ algorithms and results pages?
For the most part, the answer is no.
The engines on the Top 100 list can be segmented into a handful of categories, and those categories can be further divided based on which ones will have a low impact on innovation, and which ones will matter most the rest of the decade. This week, we’ll look at the low-impact categories, and then next week we’ll see which categories are more promising.
Low-Impact Engines
§ Clustering/graphic display: These engines organize search results in some sort of visual field. Quintura’s among the best of these, and it’s potentially useful for academics and brand managers, but I don’t get the benefit for general consumers. Gnod clusters results based on specific subjects, yet Amazon’s recommendations are usually more than sufficient.
§ Filtering based on categories/recommended keywords: This is one feature especially common in vertical search, but it’s also being used by other engines such as Factbites. If that’s the predominant feature, it’s not going to be incredibly useful, as it’s already being used by other engines, notably Ask.com and Windows Live Search.
§ Metasearch/aggregated search: These engines search multiple sites at once or individually. Dogpile, Mamma, and Goshme all are variations on the metasearch theme, while engines like FindForward allow more features for searching select sites one by one. Even if these engines are useful at times, Dogpile and its ilk are icons of the Web’s past, not its future.
§ User-ratings/voting: VMGO lets users rank search results. I’m skeptical of the longevity of this approach, as it’s too easily gamed and too biased toward early adopters. If an algorithm’s that good for natural rankings, voting won’t matter, though the whole idea of a Digg-based search engine might gain some fleeting buzz.
§ Q&A: These engines, like Lexxe, aim to give you direct answers to your questions. For the post part, the innovation here has already happened, as Yahoo Answers emerged as one of the company’s biggest success stories in recent years while Google Answers folded. One of my favorite entrants in the Top 100, Ask Vox, falls into the Q&A category. Built on the Yahoo Answers API, Vox is a talking avatar who answers your questions, and you can add in your own answers when she falls short. For added fun, Vox says on her MySpace page that she’s going out with the retired Ask.com butler Jeeves. If you ask her directly if she’s in a relationship, she’ll confirm the tryst, though the two-timer also says she’s single if you press her.
Even though these categories are low-impact, some of these engines are innovative in their own way. Quintura keeps evolving and grows more useful with each iteration, Goshme is awe-inspiring with its breadth, and Vox was so much fun, I shared her with every visitor to my office last week.
But enough playing around. Next week, we’ll look to the engines and categories that will fuel the future of search innovation.
Now this could be interesting! Wikipedia launching a search engine, but not only that, one which they want to be better than Google. I have been bugged for a long time at the search engines desire to be Google rather than be better than Google. Although Google are good at what they do, they are not perfect, somebody with the right backing and the right application could quite easily out do them in my opinion. On top of this wiki appear to be planning to incorporate some of their own philisophy of user approved and generated content into the project. Done correctly this could produce an innovative new payer in the search engine supremacy war, however it coud also just lead to another bit part player fighting for the scraps from Google’s table.
Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo
Fri Mar 9, 2007 5:38AM EST
TOKYO (Reuters) – The online collaboration responsible for Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., the founder of the popular Internet encyclopaedia said on Thursday.
Wikia Inc., the commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, is aiming to take as much as 5 percent of the lucrative Internet search market, Jimmy Wales said at a news conference in Tokyo.
“The idea that Google has some edge because they’ve got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now,” he said.
Describing the two Internet firms as “black boxes” that won’t disclose how they rank search results, Wales said collaborative search technology could transform the power structure of the Internet.
Wales, a former futures trader who has become an evangelist for the free sharing of technology, said users could work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users had tweaked and rewritten articles on the sprawling encyclopaedia.
The process of constant improvement would also make search technology less susceptible to spam, he said.
Founded in 2004 and now employing a staff of more than 30, Wikia hosts group publishing sites on a wide range of topics from psychology to the Muppets.
While Wikia gives away its tools free to users, the company requires that sites built with its resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising.
Using the same root software as Wikipedia, Wikia is likely eventually to carry more articles than its counterpart, Wales said.
Unlike the encyclopaedia, much of Wikia’s content is geared toward niche markets — a boon for readers obsessed with topics such as Star Wars films or trains.
Wikipedia currently has nearly 1.7 million articles in English alone, according to its Internet site.While Wales declined to give any earnings targets, he said the company had received a $4 million investment
