31 Jul 09 Microbingahoo

Obviously plenty of commentary knocking about on this one already, the news that Microsoft is going to provide the Yahoo search results for the next ten years with their Bing search engine, essentially closing the book on Yahoo Search forever.

Quite frankly, this is no great surprise given the fact that MS have been aggressively pursuing a tie up with Yahoo for some time, and overall, it is a piece of good news for everyone, searchers, advertisers, and yes, even the search engines, although it is also a bit worrying.

What no-one seems to have mentioned is that one of the main reasons why Google was able to capture so much marketshare early on in their life is that they had immediate access to a huge market when they first launched, because they were at one time (until 2004) the providers of Yahoo’s search results - a similar deal to what Bing have just arranged (see here for the divorce).

This long term marriage of convenience was definitely a major help with the growth of awareness that Google was able to gather, and mirrored similar deals with AOL, and even Microsoft - Google also provided results for MSN at one time.

One thing is for certain, Ballmer and Gates are no fools, they know that the more people they can get searching with Bing, whether they are doing it at Bing.com, Yahoo, or even Facebook, the more advertising they can sell, and the more that they can charge.

SE development is not cheap, Google have thousands of engineers working constantly on their algorithms, and claim to release 300 or so updates each year to improve their technology.  While MS are happy to lose money on search for now, they will not be forever, they are experts at turning their businesses into cash generators - apart from Zune maybe…

The Yahoo tie up will give Bing a 25% market share in the US, which is certainly enough to make a big difference to them, and the fact that since the new search engine launched it has grown and continued to grow indicates that users are happy with it.

I can’t see them unseating Google from their position as market leader, at least for the next few years, and tbh, the model that they have chosen to follow is costing them a lot more than it did Google 5 years ago, however it worked then, and it will no doubt work again now.

There are a lot of people saying that Google are the winners here, especially on Matt Cutts Blog, but I suspect that there is also a great deal of concern in Mountain View.  Google know that a credible rival means that more spend will be diverted towards Bing now, and that budgets which have already been cut back in the recession are likely to be spread elsewhere.  The chances are that average bid prices for PPC ads will drop slightly in Google as advertisers divert spend onto Bing, where prices will no doubt rise (its a zero sum game - there is only a finite amount of advertising cash available, and it has to go somewhere).

Advertisers will want to get as much traffic as they can, and I’ve seen plenty of good evidence that Bing traffic converts better than Google (this is likely to be a demographics thing and probably won’t continue for ever), but it is a good case study for advertisers and PPC companies - especially since MSN still offer pretty good kick backs for growth agencies.

I don’t think that Google will be the winners here, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we could well see the return of best practice funding from the big G in some form as they try to recapture market share in 2010-11, which will eat into Google’s considerable margins.

Tags: Bing, Google, PPC, Search Engines, seo, Yahoo

21 May 09 Google Suggest: Now with added revenue stream

If there is one thing that you’ve got to admire about Google, its their ability to find ways of making money out of literally everything.  They are literally experts in taking any possible tool or service and plastering it wiath adverts.  Blogs, Search Results, Email, Every spam site on the planet, and now they’ve found a way of monetising their Google Suggest tool.

Which means that at last, the only place in the Google empire that isn’t an advertising hoarding - the Google Home Page - is now just that.  They no longer even need to push a user through to the results of their search before offering them the unique opportunity to click on a subtle advert and make them a couple of quid.

Now, I’ve no problem with google making money, and to be honest, I could see this being a bit of a winner even though I can’t see many people using it.  Google Suggest is intended to make it easier to refine your query in line with what other people are looking for, and its a pretty cool little add on that can give you a good idea of what you might want to look for, but it is also a bit flaky.

The engine that powers Suggest appears to use advanced stemming coupled with search volume metrics to generate a list of options that you might be looking for that is refined on the fly as you type more into the box.  This is all fine and dandy, but what is painfully obvious is that the initial targeting of any advert served will be pretty poor - imagine you are looking for “Cheap trousers” - presumably you are a man of very little taste.

The first thing you type is “Cheap”, for which Google has the following suggestions:

• cheap flights
• cheap tickets
• cheap hotels
• cheap airfares
• cheap cruises
• cheap textbooks
• cheap prom dresses
• cheap car rental
• cheap books
• cheap furniture

And you can pretty much guarantee that the advert will be for “cheap flights”. When you add the t of trousers to the search box, the list changes to

• cheap tickets
• cheap textbooks
• cheap tyres
• cheap trick
• cheap tvs
• cheap tickets to India
• cheap t shirts
• cheap train tickets
• cheap tyres for sale
• cheap treadmills

When presumably the advert served will be for “tickets”

The problem is that you’ve got to get a long way into typing “cheap trousers” before you get a listing that includes “cheap trousers”, which means that you are fairly unlikely to give up and suddenly click on the advert.

Gut feeling about this is that the CTR on these adverts is going to be shockingly low, but I guess that doesn’t really matter, beccause with 80% of the search market, which equates to billions of searches each day, even a fraction of a percent of people clicking on the ads will probably result in a significant jump in revenue for the big G - after all, they will have done extensive monitoring of how people interact with the Suggest function.

The only losers here are likely to be the people who rank top of the natural search results through their SEO campaign, and even they will only be likely to drop a couple of clicks a month even for the highest volume terms that they target.

Overall impact on marketers: Negligible

Overall impact on search traffic: Negligible

Overall impact on Google Revenue: Negligible

However, I would still expect a disproportionate rise in the GOOG share price off the back of this, because with Google, even a small percentage increase in their revenue is vast in terms of the actual cash sums it represents.

Tags: Google, seo

14 May 09 And after all, you’re my Wonder Wheel…

You could never accuse Google of being innovators.  but what you can applaud them for is the ability of their engineers to develop existing ideas and bring them to the masses.  Like Apple, they seem to have a great way of taking something that is already there and making it more user friendly and appealing.  From the time when the original Google.com search engine launched and did away with every trick that existing search companies utilised to keep you on the page, they have been dedicated to bringing users and content closer together.

The latest shiny toy that Google have “invented” is the fantastically named Wonder Wheel for those who haven’t seen it yet, you access it via the new “show options” link at the top of the search results, and it looks like this:

Essentially, its a nice Ajax implementation that fits in with the standard Google design aesthetic of less is more, and allows users to explore concepts related to their original search.  It is almost the same as the interface that Quintura uses - although rather than producing a tag cloud, Google produces a nice little spider chart.  FYI, since about 3 people have ever visited Quintura, it looks like this:

What I like about this is that while it keeps people on the search engine for longer, it makes it much more straightforward to refine the search. and even encourages people to look into different areas - after all, how many times have you been to Wikipedia to check a quick “fact” before finding yourself diverted into a vortex of articles about everything related to the main subject before emerging blinking a week later, none the wiser about what you were originally looking for.

The impact that I see coming from Wonderwall wonder wheel is a better quality of user coming through to the website.  My theory behind this is that if a user has refined their search, they are more likely to be satisfied with the results that they get, and less likely to bounce out.  So, the question is, how do you check if a user has visited from search results refined via Wonder Wheel?

Like this:

Any visitor to the website who has used wonder wheel to refine their search will come complete with a referrer string that includes tbs=ww:[somenumber]&, which means that you can compare the bounce rates that they have.

The only problem with testing this at the moment is that very few people outside the hallowed halls of SEO & Online Marketing are aware of the function, and since it is very new, it is pretty hard to get a decent sample.  Having said that, I’ll be keeping an eye on the traffic to a couple of websites with high numbers of natural search visitors so that I can copmpare the bounce rate for visitors who used Wonder Wheel, and those who did not.

I’ll post back with the results in a couple of weeks

Tags: Google, search engine optimisation, seo