News broke on TechCrunch this morning after a leaked slide from an internal Yahoo! product team meeting fell into the hands of Eric Marcoullier, who co-founded blog social network MyBlogLog. It has since been removed from YFrog, but the slide depicts three columns titled Sunset / Merge / Make Feature with Del.icio.us, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Picks and Yahoo! Buzz listed under the not so subtle *Sunset* column.

Marcoullier tweeted the slide from his account and then all hell broke loose, with Yahoo Product Manager Blake Irving even threatening to fire whomever leaked the slide.

Del.icio.us fans in particular have been very vocal about the news, voicing their opposition to Yahoo’s decision using Twitter hashtags such as #savedelicious and #delicious and even creating an online petition which can be *signed* by retweeting it. Ironically, many of the top bookmarks at Delicious today featured it’s demise.

The product terminations come the same week Yahoo! announced layoffs for 4 percent of its global staff.

Search industry heavyweights like Google, Yahoo! and Bing are constantly jostling for position to be the most popular search destination, have the largest search database, have the most relevant results and grab the most market share.  As is typical for such a heated industry, it’s in a constant state of flux.

Since I joined the industry in 1996, I’ve watched search companies make deals, break partnerships, launch products, copy technology, sue each other or simply buy each other outright. Even if you live and breathe search, it’s hard to keep up to speed with what’s going on, so it’s not suprising that newcomers to the industry can be completely overwhelmed!

While writing new content for our Search Engine Optimization courses at Search Engine College, I thought it might be fun to put together a bullet point history of the major events over the past 10+ years to help students make sense of this crazy industry. So here it is:

A Short History of the Search Industry

• Feb 1994 – Stanford University Electrical Engineering graduates Jerry Yang and David Filo founded a website called “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which was later renamed Yahoo!
• 1995 – AltaVista, the first search engine to use a multi-threaded crawler (Scooter), was launched by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory.
• March 1995 – Yahoo! became officially incorporated.
• August 1995 – The Microsoft Network (later rebranded as MSN) debuted as an online service and Internet service provider to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.
• 1996 – Stanford University Computer Science graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
• 1997 – Page and Brin rebranded BackRub as Google. See the original Google Home Page.
• 1995 – The web portal Go.com was first launched by entrepreneur Jeff Gold.
• 1995 – Inktomi Corporation was founded by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier based on the success of the search engine they developed at the university.
• 1998 – Infoseek was merged into the Go.com network.
• 1998 – Go.com was acquired by the Walt Disney Company and redeveloped into The Go Network portal using Infoseek search technology.
• 1998 – The MSN.com domain name was reinvented as an Internet portal, putting MSN Search in direct competition with search sites such as Yahoo! and the Go Network.
• Feb 1998 – GoTo.com became the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service (a pre-cursor to today’s PPC programs).
• Sep 1998 – Google Inc. became incorporated as a private company and began operating out of a home garage in California.
• Feb 1999 – MSN Search launched a revised search engine which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi.
• Jun 2000 – Google became the official search results provider for Yahoo!
• Jun 2000 – Google reached 1 billion pages indexed, becoming the world’s largest search engine.
• Oct 2000 – Google launched the AdWords self-service ad program in direct competition to GoTo.com.
• Jan 2001 – Disney announced that it would be closing Go.com, its search engine and its volunteer-edited directory, prompting the creation of offshoot directories like JoeAnt, Goguides.org and Skaffe.com.
• Mar 2001 – Go.com rebranded as GoTo.com and switched over to providing search results from paid listings service GoTo.com, with non-paid results from parent company Inktomi.
• Oct 2001 – GoTo.com rebranded as Overture Services Inc.
• Dec 2001 – Google reached 3 billion pages indexed.
• Sep 2002 – Google News is launched.
• 2002-2003 – Google became king of the search engines and the most popular search destination with worldwide Internet users, wrenching market share away from Yahoo.
• Feb 2003 – Yahoo purchased the Inktomi search index.
• Feb 2003 – Google acquired the Blogger brand from Pyra Labs.
• Feb 2003 – Google was named Brand of the Year for 2002.
• Mar 2003 – Google launched AdSense.
• Apr 2003 – Pay-Per-Click provider Overture bought search engine Alta-Vista.
• Apr 2003 – Overture purchased search engine AllTheWeb from FAST Search.
• Jun 2003 – FAST Search purchased AltaVista Enterprise Search from Overture.
• June 2003 – Microsoft announced their intention to build their own search engine.
• Jul 2003 – Yahoo purchased Overture (including AltaVista and AllTheWeb).
• Oct 2003 – LookSmart lost their MSN distribution partnership.
• Nov 2003 – Google rolled out a major algorithmic update across data-centers, nicknamed *Florida* because of the hurricane-like impact it had on the SEO of many web sites.
• Jan 2004 – Pay-Per-Click providers FindWhat and eSpotting merged.
• Jan 2004 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Research Labs.
• Feb 2004 – Google expanded their web index to over 6 billion documents.
• Feb 2004 – Yahoo dropped Google results and launched their own search crawler.
• Mar 2004 – AskJeeves purchased Excite.
• Apr 2004 – Google announced an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
• Apr 2004 – Google launched Gmail.
• Apr 2004 – Google purchased Picasa.
• Jun 2004 – Overture (Yahoo) launched Local Sponsored Search
• Aug 2004 – Google and Yahoo resolved their patent disputes.
• Aug 2004 – Google rolled out their Initial Public Offering (IPO), listing on the stock exchange and becoming a public company.
• Sep 2004 – MSN launched MSN Music.
• Oct 2004 – Yahoo launched mobile search.
• Oct 2004 – Google launched Desktop Search
• Oct 2004 – Yahoo unveiled personal search.
• Nov 2004 – Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, codenamed Longhorn.
• Nov 2004 – Overture (Yahoo) extended sponsored search relationship with MSN until 2006.
• Dec 2004 – MSN launched the MSN Spaces blogging service.
• Jan 2005 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Desktop Search.
• Jan 2005 – Google launched AdWords API.
• Jan 2005 – Google launched Google Video.
• Feb 2005 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Music.
• Feb 2005 – Google added Movie Search.
• Feb 2005 – Google moved Google Local to their home page.
• Mar 2005 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Search Developer Network.
• Mar 2005 – Yahoo re-branded Overture as Yahoo Search Marketing.
• Mar 2005 – MSN launched the MSN adCenter online advertising platform.
• Mar 2005 – Google purchased Urchin Stats.
• Apr 2005 – Yahoo launched Personal Search.
• Apr 2005 – Google launched My Search History.
• Apr 2005 – Google launched Site Targeting in AdWords.
• Apr 2005 – Google launched Google Advertising Professionals program.
• May 2005 – MSN launched MSN China.
• May 2005 – Google launched Toolbar 3.0.
• May 2005 – Google launched AdSense for Feeds.
• June 2005 – Google launched Google Maps.
• Jun 2005 – Google launched Google Sitemaps.
• Jun 2005 – Google launched Mobile Web Search.
• Jun 2005 – Google added Personalized Search.
• Jun 2005 – Yahoo settles click fraud class action suit with Checkmate Strategic Group.
• Jun 2005 – Google released Google Earth.
• Jul 2005 – Yahoo revamped their home page.
• Jul 2005 – Google announced China office.
• Aug 2005 – Google launched Google Talk.
• Aug 2005 – Yahoo launched Audio Search.
• Sep 2005 – Google launched Blog Search.
• Sep 2005 – Google announces partnership with NASA.
• Oct 2005 – Google launched Google Reader.
• Oct 2005 – Google merged Google Local and Google Maps.
• Nov 2005 – Google launched Google Base.
• Nov 2005 – Yahoo launched a mapping service.
• Nov 2005 – Google launched Google Analytics.
• Nov 2005 – Google launched Froogle Local.
• Nov 2005 – Google launched AdSense OnSite Advertiser Sign Up.
• Dec 2005 – Google re-vamped and re-launched Book Search.
• Dec 2005 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Answers.
• Dec 2005 – Google and AOL announced global advertising partnership.
• Dec 2005 – Google created Music Onebox Search.
• Jan 2006 – Google launched the Google Video Store.
• Jan 2006 – Google News comes out of BETA.
• Jan 2006 – Google releases new version of Google Toolbar
• Jan 2006 – Google released Google Pack.
• Feb 2006 – Yahoo re-launched Yahoo Music.
• Mar 2006 – Google launched AdWords Local Business Ads.
• Mar 2006 – The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled by Microsoft.
• May 2006 – Yahoo re-designed Yahoo Search Marketing.
• May 2006 – Google launched the Google Co-op.
• May 2006 – Google launched Google Desktop 4.
• May 2006 – Google launched Google Notebook.
• May 2006 – Google launched video ads on Google AdWords.
• May 2006 – Yahoo re-vamped their home page.
• May 2006 – Yahoo announced strategic partnership with eBay.
• Jun 2006 – Google launched Google Spreadsheets.
• Jun 2006 – Google introduced Ad Scheduling for Google AdWords.
• Jun 2006 – Google combined Google Analytics with Google AdWords reporting.
• Jun 2006 – Google launched Google Checkout.
• Jul 2006 – Google launched Google Maps for Mobiles.
• Aug 2006 – Yahoo re-branded Yahoo Music to Yahoo Music Jukebox.
• Aug 2006 – Yahoo signed mobile search advertising deal with go2
• Sep 2006 – Google News introduced Archive Search.
• Sep 2006 – Windows Live Search officially replaced MSN Search.
• Oct 2006 – Google launched Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
• Oct 2006 – Google launched AdWords Website Optimizer BETA.
• Nov 2006 – Google acquired YouTube.
• Nov 2006 – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced joint support for the Sitemaps Protocol.
• Dec 2006 – Google added new features to Google Toolbar for Firefox.
• Dec 2006 – Yahoo launched the Yahoo Search Marketing PPC service to directly compete with AdWords.
• Dec 2006 – Google launched Google Patent Search.
• Jan 2007 – Google launched mobile search in China.
• Jan 2007 – Yahoo launched Internet Search for Mobile.
• Feb 2007 – Google made Gmail available to the general public.
• Mar 2007 – Windows Live Search was rebranded to Live Search.
• Mar 2007 – Google launched AdWords Pay Per Action BETA.
• Mar 2007 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Go for Mobile.
• Apr 2007 – Opera named Yahoo exclusive partner for mobile search.
• Apr 2007 – Yahoo and Comcast announced advertising partnership.
• Apr 2007 – Google announced acquisition of DoubleClick.
• May 2007 – Google launched a new version of Google Analytics.
• May 2007 – Google launched Universal Search model.
• Jun 2007 – Google acquired FeedBurner.
• Jun 2007 – Microsoft launched MSN Mobile.
• Jun 2007 – Yahoo launched Search Marketing APIs.
• Jul 2007 – Yahoo acquired Right Media.
• Aug 2007 – Yahoo re-launched Yahoo Mail.
• Sep 2007 – Google launched AdSense for Mobile.
• Sep 2007 – Microsoft launched MSN Video.
• Oct 2007 – Google launched video units for AdSense.
• Oct 2007 – Yahoo re-launched Yahoo Search.
• Nov 2007 – Google launched OpenSocial.
• Nov 2007 – Yahoo and Adobe announced advertising program for PDF publishers.
• Dec 2007 – FTC cleared Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick.
• Dec 2007 – Yahoo and CNBC announced a global distribution agreement.
• Feb 2008 – Google launched Google Sites.
• Feb 2008 – Microsoft made a bid to purchase Yahoo for 45 billion.
• Feb 2008 – Yahoo officially rejected Microsoft’s acquisition offer.
• Feb 2008 – Yahoo launched Yahoo Buzz.
• Mar 2008 – Google completed acquisition of DoubleClick.
• Jun 2008 – Microsoft and Yahoo ended acquisition negotiations.
• Jun 2008 – Yahoo started using Google ads in US & Canada.
• Jul 2008 – Yahoo rejected new Microsoft acquisition proposal.
• Sep 2008 – Google launched Chrome, a new open source browser.
• May 2009 – Google launched Google Wave.
• May 2009 – Microsoft re-branded Live Search as Bing.
• May 2009 – Microsoft launched MSN City Guides featuring Bing Maps.
• Jul 2009 – Microsoft and Yahoo announced major search and advertising partnership.
• Jul 2009 – Google announced the launch of their own operating system – the Google Chrome OS.
• Oct 2009 – Google launched Social Search.
• Oct 2009 – Google announced partnership with Twitter to include their updates in search results.
• Dec 2009 – Google redesigned their home page for the first time in many years.
• Dec 2009 – Google Real Time Search went live.
• Jan 2010 – Google entered the retail market by launching their own mobile device – the Nexus One.
• Feb 2010 – Google launched their social network Buzz.
• Feb 2010 – Microsoft and Yahoo announced the impending implementation of their Search Alliance.
• Feb 2010 – Yahoo partnered with Twitter to integrate content and enhance social search experience.
• Apr 2010 – Google Real-Time Search was enhanced with Twitter content.
• Apr 2010 – Google Local Business Center was renamed Google Places.
• May 2010 – Google rolled out a completely new look for SERPs and an algorithm update later nicknamed *MayDay*.
• Jun 2010 – Launch of Google’s new search index Caffeine provided 50 percent fresher results than previous index.
• Jun 2010 – Yahoo announced a partnership with Facebook to integrate their content into Yahoo Search results and allow users to link their accounts.
• Aug 2010 – Google announced discontinuation of Google Wave.
• Sep 2010 – Google Instant is launched, with predictive search results appearing as you type.
• Oct 2010 – Google launched Place Search functionality that helps you find local information by organizing websites around real world places.
• Oct 2010 – Yahoo rolled out new interactive features in their search results including rich content and multimedia search.
• Oct 2010 – Bing became the 4th largest search engine on the web by query volume.
• Oct 2010 – Yahoo Search Marketing PPC accounts were transitioned to Microsoft adCenter accounts, combining the services into a single brand.
• Oct 2010 – Bing announced partnership with Facebook, integrating more social signals into search results.
• Nov 2010 – Google added local product availability to Google Place Search.
• Nov 2010 – Bing launched Movie Search.
• Nov 2010 – Yahoo launched new social and local search features, including Twitter integration and local Search apps within Yahoo search results pages.
• Nov 2010 – Google rolled out a new interface for Google AdSense.
• Nov 2010 – Yahoo launched the Yahoo Contributor Network.
• Dec 2010 – Yahoo announced they would be shutting down Del.icio.us, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks and Yahoo! Buzz.

Wow. I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning. I know it’s not the most exciting way to present the data, but I’m working on a bells and whistles version for the new year.

I’ll keep this search industry timeline updated with major activities taking place, so make sure you bookmark it now.

Hi Kalena,

The website I maintain is informational and features largely political news. Much material reaches me in the form of e-mails which I wish to upload and make available to visitors. Can you point me to a website search engine which will index the site’s contents, including the email (.eml) files. The Windows Search facility on my computer (Windows XP) does this quite competently but I have been unable to trace a similar web search engine with the appropriate filter which will index the eml files (some of which have attachments (mainly Word or PDF). I should be grateful for any guidance.

With thanks Ezra

Hi Ezra,

As you are probably aware (but for the sake of other readers) the .EML file extension is used for Mail Messages saved from Outlook Express. The main purpose of an EML file is to store e-mail messages (and as you have highlighted may include attachment data as well).  EML files can be used with most e-mail clients, but can not be viewed directly by web browsers.  However, since EML files are plain text and formatted much like MHT (MIME HTML) files, they can be opened directly in most popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera), by changing the file extension from .eml to .mht.

Although search engines do crawl and index a wide variety of filetypes (see the filetypes that Google can index) as far as I am aware no search engines crawl or index EML file types.

EML files typically include the e-mail addresses of the sender and the recipient so from a privacy/security perspective I would expect that you wouldn’t want these types of files to be indexed anyway (and if I were one of your information sources I’d probably be pretty annoyed if you published my email address).

I suggest that if you wish to publish (and have indexed) information that you receive by email, that you extract the relevant content and publish it in a format that is recognised by web browsers and search crawlers (e.g. HTML, PDF, DOC, or even TXT, etc..)

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO (Brisbane)

At the SMX Melbourne Conference last month, a certain speaker made the valid point that Google has become such a money-making monolith that they seem to have lost sight of their original philosophy of Don’t Be Evil.

I’m protecting the identity of the speaker, in case he attracts unwarranted attention from Google, but his words really rang in my ears.

Let’s take a look at an extract from Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” philosophy:

“Don’t be evil… is about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can... The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put ‘Don’t be evil’ into practice. It’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.”

Apparently, “Don’t be Evil” was originally suggested by Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel at a meeting. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he “wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out,” adding that the slogan was “also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.”

It got me thinking – are Google still living up to this slogan? Or have they become so powerful that they are doing the very thing they were accusing their competitors of doing and exploiting users in their bid to keep market dominance? Has Google been placing the needs of their shareholders above the needs of their users? Have they lost sight of their own motto?

Some of Google’s recent product releases and acquisitions do seem to be dollar-driven as opposed to user-driven. Some of their business decisions lately have also seemed questionable. Their move into China, for example, required them to self-censor data for Chinese users, a seeming hypocrisy which attracted skepticism worldwide. Then there was their collection of personal WiFi data during Streetview routes in Europe, triggering concerns over personal privacy. It’s hard to see how decisions like these are beneficial to users.

The SMX speaker suggested that Google has such massive market share that they AND their users have become blase about search quality. The tendency is for everyone to reach for Google whenever we need to search for something online and only use other engines for comparison shopping. His point was that the more blase we become about Google’s dominance, the more blase Googe will become about users.

The only way to take a stand against Google’s market dominance is to use other search engines regularly. That’s why he suggested that one day a week, instead of automatically reaching for Google, we should make the effort to use a different search engine, with Bing Friday being a good starting point. If enough people do it, Google might just sit up and take notice, but even if they don’t, at least we will shake ourselves out of our Google stupor and stop taking everything they do as gospel.

Now if you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I am a big fan of Google. But I have been worried about the direction they’ve taken lately, particularly some of their recent acquisitions. I also believe that more competition is good for the industry and keeps all players on their toes for the benefit of everyone.

There are aspects of Bing Search I prefer over Google and I’m keen for Bing’s partnership with Yahoo to work out so it will help them leverage some market share away from Google. But I admit to being a lazy searcher and using Google as my automatic default engine. If I’m to make a difference, I need to take a stand and I feel this is a great start.

Will you join me and participate in Bing Fridays? To show your support, please comment on this post and/or tweet about it using the hashtag #BingFriday. Let’s see if we can get some traction!

POST SCRIPT : The speaker who came up with the concept of Bing Friday has given me permission to publish his name now. It was none other than Greg Boser of BlueGlass Interactive, Inc. He tells me that Bing Friday seems to be gaining momentum and to keep an eye out for a new project a friend is working on in relation to it. Sounds intriguing!

The initiative provides 25 charities or not-for-profit organizations per year the opportunity to learn search marketing skills at no cost, to help them make the most of their limited marketing budgets.

Well the idea launched with more of a whimper than a bang, so today we’ve distributed an official Press Release to try and drum up more publicity.

If you know of a charity or not-for-profit that might benefit from free online marketing training, please direct them to our release, encourage them to get in touch, and/or spread the word by linking to this post.

Thanks!

Yes, it’s  our second issue even though it’s nearly June. Shut up. The delay has nothing at all to do with my procrastination skills. It’s all Google’s fault and you’ll find out why when you read it.

This month’s newsletter includes an article about Social Search – the biggest thing to hit the SERPs this year since, well, Personalized Search a week before. It also contains some of the more interesting FAQs answered in this blog and a recap of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference in Sydney.

If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber catch it here and then quickly go and subscribe before you change from a geek into a nerd.

I’ll be live blogging as many sessions as I can and writing up the others later. Today we kick off with the keynote from Chris Sherman, Executive Editor from Search Engine Land.

Chris starts his presentation with a YouTube video by Raymond Crowe using shadow puppets to mime “What a Wonderful World”. Like shadow puppets, search marketing looks impossible to do but we’re just out there doing it.

Chris says that the last few weeks have brought incredible change. Seismic change in the industry! We’ve come out of the global economic crisis. Online ad spend is picking up. WE’ll see $54B in global ad spend. Search is 47% of that spend, which is promising for our industry. B2B lead generation spend is still lower than before the economicdownturn, but that may be a lagging indicator.

Chris then showed a series of videos to describe online search marketing.

1) The Renaissance Site:

Video from 1969, taking a look at the *future* of electronic technology. Chris says that what they’re describing in that video is really the Google of today. Although they started laser-focused on search, now they offer “something of everything to everybody”.

Google Fast Flip

New product – combines Google News with a easy view layout.

Google News Timeline

Takes news and shows how stories are developing over a specific timeline.

Google Dashboard

Allows you to see what info Google is tracking about you. How you are represented as an entity on Google. Showed his own dashboard. The amount of data is extraordinary. The dashboard now gives you control over how much of this information is public and available. Demonstrates Google’s commitment to privacy.

Google Australia new products:

- Google Insights for Search – compare one search with another etc.

- Google map icons – allows you to claim a local business using Google Places on Google Maps.

- Google Sponsored Listings – within maps now.  An alternative to Google AdWords.

- YouTube promoted videos – You can now sponsor videos via YouTube so your videos come up the top – not officiallyavailable in Australia yet, except via AdWords AU.

- Google AdWords Webinars – new to GG Australia

- Google Speaks ‘Strayan! New feature to hep Aussies find local info, in local jargon. Cute!

This week, GG has hired a team of photographers to use cameras within the Streetview cars to focus in on more interesting visual data they come across (similar to what Bing are doing with virtual reality?).

Google Woes

- legal woes

- privacy issues

- China and censorship

Google: The new evil empire?

Chris has heard rumors of GG replacing Microsoft as the new evil empire.

- Photographers have sued over book deal.

- EU looking at antitrust

- Execs convicted of privacy violations in Italy

- Xerox and Quintura sue over patents

- Streetview lawsuits in multiple countries

- Launch of Google Buzz

- and the beating goes on…

Chris doesn’t think they will get into major legal difficulties. In terms of privacy though, they might have trouble. When they launched Buzz, they did it without permission and that was a major concern – especially if you use public shared computers.

In response, Matt Cutts went into great detail on the European Public Policy Blog about privacy and transparency. Mind you, he link dropped in a nuclear fashion in that post which amused Chris greatly.

Keep in mind, Facebook’s privacy is MUCH more relaxed and dangerous, in his opinion.

Dealing with the Great Firewall

- Google moved Google.cn servers to Hong Kong last month

- But China is blocking access to the site from mainland computers

- Excellent analysis at http://bit.ly/93pmnY

- Not just China: Google is censoring in other countries as well

- You can use proxies from within China to get past the censorship

- Chris has never personally experienced censorship when running SEM conferences in China

New as of Yesterday

The Google Govt Requests and Removal Tool – a new tool which is a maps overlay to allow people to request information to be removed or request more data. You can even see in real time what requests have been complied with or not. When you mouse over China, it says “Chinese government considers this information a State secret so data is not available”. Article at: “Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With…”

2) Emperor’s New Clothes

Showed video of a plane experiencing a very very dodgy landing. Chris says this represents Yahoo.

- Yahoo is the proud owner of the Emperor’s New Clothes

- Microhoo competition: Salvation or sellout? Microsoft does the heavy search lifting while Yahoo sells ads.

I was discussing this with Chris last night at the Tweetup. Chris thinks this is a clever move by Yahoo, but it really gives all the power to MS/Bing.

- Yahoo has divided the labor – “we’re more interested in what happens before and after search than search itself. In other words, we’re going back to our *browse* / portal mode.

3) Assimilator as Innovator

Showed a clip from Star Trek from The Borg. This represents Microsoft / Bing.  “You will be assimilated”. In other words, Chris says, MS is very clever at making people do what they want. Acquisition after acquisition.

Now part of the collective:

medstory

tellme

aquantive

jellyfish

multimap

farecast

Fast Search & Transfer – AllThe Web

Powerset

Bada-Bing!

- Bing is arguably a better na,e than Live Search, but what does it mean? In Chinese it means “Very certain to answer”.

- Fun image licensing for their home page means rotation of photos – always different. Chris uses Bing as his home page because he loves their home page photos so much.

- Powerset does a semantic search rather than algorithmic. Different to other SE’s. Uses Freebase to gather data. If you drill down, it will give you options like Wikipedia on steroids – will go and semantic search ALL Wikipedia articles on a topic you search for – very powerful.

- Bing Maps – geolocation can be an issue (e.g. Thinks Chris is in Melbourne right now). But they do some things very well. Mapp Apps are very cool. What’s Nearby also good. Signs and Billboards etc.

- Bing has captured billions of data sources for travel sources and put them into searchable form. Based on historical data, Bing.com/travel can tell you things like when is the best time to buy a ticket to New York – when it’s cheaper etc. This is powerful stuff! Shows graphs and charts and heat maps to tell you costs of flights, accommodation etc. Unique to Bing.

Chris sees this as the way going forward. This type of travel data may get rolled out to retail, eg volume of sales etc.

Bing SearchRank – another new feature not yet available in Australia. Get an idea of what searches are popular right now, similar to Google Trends.

4) The Shiny New Disruptor

Wofram Alpha. It’s a new computational knowledge engine. Wolfram’s founder believes the complex world can be reduced to simple rules and those rules are computable.

- WA contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50K types of algorithms and models and linguistic data for 1000 languages.

- In WA, put in a mathematical problem and Google will shoot out an answer. But in WA, it will give you the ellipse, a visual definition of the calculation. Put in a chord search and it will come up with the scale visually, plus allow you to play it.

- Ask questions and WA will give you all the data you could ever wish for. People can type in things like “When will I die?” Scary answers. *10 peanut M&Ms* WA will respond with the dietary calories. *Who’s the fairest of them all”?* Snow White. They are obviously paying attention, as answer has changed since Chris first started asking it some months ago. *Am I drunk?* Will give you the alcohol percentages of common drinks.

Social Media

- love it or hate it, SM is huge.

- How big?

- Globally, 1 billion+ users wasting spending 2 billion minutes/month

- Share of global online time:

Facebook 16%

YouTube 9%

Google 5%

This is HUGE. If you’re SEOing for Google, you might want to rethink your priorities and start advertising on Facebook and YouTube.

Email’s not going away anytime soon, but stats show that Social Media is more popular with people. Email has flatlined in terms of time spent, while SM has gone to vertical curve.

Twitter

- 75% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs

- Twitter has become a *real* search engine

- Twitter has just announced monetization – “promoted Tweets”. Chris finds this disengenous, although he concedes it will probably be successful.

- Based on KW bids, ads will be displayed at top of search results

- Resonance reuqired (think Quality Score), based on retweets, replies, hashtags, clicked links etc. Searchers need to engage with the ads for them to maintain position – this is a Google approach. Makes sense given key staff are ex FeedBurner / Google staff.

- Third party distribution

- Twitter palns to expand program to it’s partners and then it will become massive.

- other options – Tweetup – contextual sponsored tweets displayed on  publisher sites, using a CPM model now with cost-per-click and cost-per-new-follower.

- TweetUp – is a new tool -the brainchild of GoTo.com’s founder. It’s a network of the world’s best tweeters. Response has been sceptical, but hey, the response to GoTo’s idea of PPC caused the same reaction in people.

Facebook

Chris says Facebook is here to stay. So many ways to reach people and the size of the audience is astonishing, he says. You can’t ignore Facebook. There are definitely ways to measure the impact of a Social Media campaign.

- If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

- lots of fertile options for marketers

- pages, apps, ads, polls,

- And analytics via Facebook Insights

If you’re looking for ways to leverage Facebook, try:

InsideFacebook.com
AllFacebook.com

One third of the people ON Facebook are interested in marketing on Facebook – encouraging. Chris says, if you’ve avoided SM until now? STOP and reconsider.

Real Time Search & SEO

- As real time search becomes more commonplace, it is displacing *traditional* search results

- Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real-time algos

- At it’s heart, Caffeine is an attempt to capture real time crawl. Larry Page is very impatient about this concept.

- Real time search impacts SEO in a huge, huge way. The algorithm has basically been re-written. Can’t do much right now except continue to use best-practice.

Personalization

- This will amplify things

- Personalization affects search results

- For text results, can’t do much

- However, opportunities to gain real estate via universal search are still good

- Think *digital asset optimization*

Chris says, don’t despair, these changes offer oppportunities for you to use them to your advantage. Because most people won’t be – now’s your chance.

Mobile Search

Chris says “Are we there yet?” YES we are. Tipping point has hit this year – mobile advertising has become popular with the advent of smart phones.

-mobile advertising is the new Point of Sale

- 5.8 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2013; 30% will be smartphone users (Portio Research)

- Mobile ad spend 2015

New Data from Morgan Stanley:

- Sometime between 2013 and 2014, there will be more mobile Internet uers than desktop PC users

- Growth of the iPhone happened at 11x the growth of Desktop Internet!

- These stats will impact Facebook users too obviously

- If you’re not already doing so – GO MOBILE NOW

- Little competition right now

- Go multi-mobile – see Cindy Krum’s article on Search Engine Land

- Consider optimizing your site for mobile search

- Use GPS based mobile apps to leverage your business e.g. 4Square, Gowalla, Placecast (GPS based advertising)

Video Marketing

- YouTube is second largest search engine right now

- Syndicate your videos widely

- Use video because your competitors probably aren’t

- Embed meta data, relevant titles & filenames

- Use appropriate on-page SEO

- Descriptive text

- Include your URLs in the video to encourage viral linking and viewing

A Huge Trend: Targeting

- Types of targeting include device / geographic / demographic / behavioral

Device Targeting

- GG, MS Yahoo

- Device platofrm tgt allows you to target your ads to PCs and iphones and others

Goegraphic Targeting

- GG, MS, Yahoo

- Language targeting occurs at country level or radius

- Also beningn, used to reach specific groups and exclude others

Demographic Targeting

- MS (full), YH (partial), Google (exploring options)

- Targeting ads based on age, gender, income etc.

- similar to direct mail, but uses data from volunteered information

- Can be problematic, especially on shared computers

Behavioural Targeting

- MS, YH, Google content only. Not search or Gmail

- Ads targeted based on online behavior (visits, pruchases, queries etc).

- Benefit = ads match interest closely

- Concern = privacy? What privacy?

Merging Online and Offline Data

- Exelate & Aperture pull data from Neilsen and other co’s to combine data with search behaviror

Opting out of Targeted Ads

- Google makes it kind of fun but not clear and hard to find

- MS uses legalese and it’s boring

- YH also makes it unclear and difficult to find

- You can opt out of 200 Ad networks by going to NAI (inc big ones)

Conclusion

- Web search has consolidated to few major players

- Good news – competition among majors has also increased, good for SEM and searchers

- Counterintuitive: Advertising may DECREASE as search engines continue to refine targeting options

Search Engine College tutor Micky Stuivenberg (@contentwriteroz) alerted me to the changes via Twitter – which she had been observing on Google Australia since midday today. Micky says she is seeing the following:

1) The radio button options that used to appear under the search box at Google.com.au to Search: *the web* or *pages from Australia* have disappeared.

2) A searcher’s default location now appears under the search box on the SERPs (Micky’s says Sydney although she is located on the NSW mid North coast). See this demonstrated in image 2 below.

3) On SERPs, the main search options that used to appear at the top of the page and are now also listed in a left hand navigation column:

• Everything (default)
• News
• Images
• Videos
• Maps
• Blogs
• Shopping
• Books
• More

These options appear to be dynamic, based on your user search preferences. You can filter the navigation to only display *blogs* for example.

3) Underneath that it has the option to search only pages from your region (a long way from the search box!)

4) Then there are 3 options to search results for

• Any time (default)
• Latest
• past 2 days

5) Then the standard view (default) with Wonder wheel.

6) At the bottom of the redesigned SERPs is a button for *More search tools*.

Here’s a couple of screen grabs of the changes:

A major difference is that all the above options are now displayed permanently on the SERPs, whereas before you had to click *show options* to see all of them. The changes can only be viewed on selected data-centers right now – I’m not seeing them yet so am grateful to Micky for the scoop!

I haven’t seen any posts about it on official Google blogs, although it may be related to the local search changes they announced recently.

I’ve only seen one other blog discussing the revisions so far, so I think it’s fair to call BREAKING on this one.

* images courtesy of @contentwriteroz and Softpedia

The deal will result in tweets appearing in Yahoo Search as well as other Yahoo properties such as the Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo will also integrate Twitter clients into their various applications so that Twitter users can tweet from within the Yahoo network.

The partnership announcement was delivered to media with an embargo, but within a few hours the story broke on the blogosphere and Yahoo pretty much gave the game away with the *clues* they posted on Twitter.

With a worldwide audience of 600 million, Yahoo offers Twitter significant exposure to add to their existing partnerships with the other major search giants Bing and Google.

Now keep your hands up if you’ve verified your site with Bing Webmaster Center? Oh dear.

Seems quite a few webmasters are concentrating on Google and forgetting about the other major search engines. If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you really need to verify your site and sitemaps with the big 3 and monitor your stats regularly.

Most people are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, but today I want to give you a brief overview of Bing Webmaster Center.

To add a site to Bing Webmaster Center, simply login to your Bing account (or create a new one) and then type in a URL and a sitemap if you have one. You will be prompted to verify your site via either a meta verification tag you place in your home page header, or an XML file that you upload to your server.

Once you’ve verified your first site, you’ll see a dashboard that looks quite similar to Google Webmaster Tools, with the following tabs:

• Summary – lists the date Bing last crawled your site, the number of indexed pages, your domain score and the top 5 pages of your site.
• Profile – lists your URL, the verification process you used and the email address associated with your site.
• Crawl Issues – lists any issues Bing discovered while crawling and indexing your site, such as 404 errors, malware infections and long dynamic URLs.
• Backlinks – lists which webpages (including your own) are linking to your site.
• Outbound Links – lists the web pages your site is linking to.
• Keywords – allows you to see how your pages are performing in search results for specific keywords.
• Sitemaps – provides various ways for you to notify MSNBot of new sitemaps or when you change an existing sitemap.

The following additional tools are available when you’re logged into Webmaster Center:

• Robots.txt validator
• HTTP verifier
• Keyword research tool

So don’t ignore Bing Webmaster Center. Remember that Google is NOT the Internet.