Microsoft
Search News: Yahoo and Microsoft Deal Begs The Question: Nature or Nurture?
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 30, 2009 | Share This
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By now I’m assuming you know that Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a groundbreaking 10 year deal that sees Microsoft’s Bing search technology replacing Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo’s sales team taking the lead on high-end search sales for both channels. This is just the kind of news that sends us into our search geek clubhouse here at Reprise Media, where beers are opened, feet are kicked up, and opinions start flying around the room like mosquitoes in a swamp (apologies to Dan Rather.)
One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo. There are three reasons this might be:
SEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 29, 2009 | Share This
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Google’s ubiquity in search is such that many clients feel that a website that is optimized for Google is good to go. Today’s announcement of a search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft ought to put a decisive fork in that thinking. Consider this – the combined share of the market that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will have is nearly 30%. Assuming this holds, businesses simply can’t afford not to optimize towards Bing’s algorithm when it will be powering results for both Bing and Yahoo.
So how different is Bing from Google when it comes to SEO?
Search News: Google Decides it’s Hip to be Squared
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 4, 2009 | Share This
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At the beginning of the year it looked as if Google was battening down the hatches and withdrawing from its previous flights of fancy – no more dirigible mounted servers or cotton-candy machines in the lavatories for them! Yet the release of new tools like the Wonder Wheel and Google Wave suggest the search giant isn’t ready to rest on its laurels. Now we have the Google Labs release of Google Squared, a promising search tool that needs some work but is likely to find its way into the main search options menu sooner rather than later.
Search News: 5 Cool Ways to See Bing Do its Thing
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Written By Alex Staunton | June 3, 2009 | Share This
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Microsoft launched their new “decision engine” this week called Bing. Bing is called a decision engine in part because it was designed to help users find what they are looking for without having to keep going back to refine their initial search query. Bing officially replaces Microsoft’s former search engine, Live. After lots of in-office sampling, we came up with 5 cool Bing features that you can see right on the initial response page that show exactly how Bing does its thing:
Search News: Search Engines Sprucing Up SERP’s in Lieu of Algorithmic Advances
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 6, 2009 | Share This
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Pity the poor programmers at major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live Search. It’s clear that, like Netflix’s recommendation engine, search algorithms as they exist today are so well-advanced that any movement forward is so incremental as to be practically invisible unless you are industry geeks like us.
For anyone who isn’t Google that makes distinguishing yourself a near-impossibility. And if you do happen to be Google (and if you are, I have a venture opportunity to discuss with you strictly on the QT, and hush-hush), keeping searchers on your site and just keeping things interesting becomes a challenging process.
Search News: Getting Kosmix Intervention Through The Holy Trinity of Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 19, 2009 | Share This
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I was pretty harsh on new search engine Kosmix’s chances at whupping Google’s butt in yesterday’s post, and I don’t take back any of those conclusions even as I have continued to play around with the engine myself. Ultimately Kosmix has come to reinforce my sense that the best search campaigns are the ones that use all three of what I like to call the holy trinity: Paid search, SEO, and social media.
What sparked this thought was seeing how the Kosmix results page shuffles things around and surfaces stuff that would get knocked to a different page on Google.
Search News: How are Search Engines like Blowing Your Nose?
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 12, 2009 | Share This
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You know that a product has reached market domination when it becomes a verb. It’s an age-old maxim that has held true from the days of Thomas Crapper (early British plumbing mogul) through to Kleenex tissues, Jeep SUVs and Xerox copy machines.
Did I mention Google’s search engine? Googling has been a verb for some time now, Webster’s Dictionary (among others) says so.
Recently Microsoft announced that Live Search is going to be pre-loaded as the default search engine in most new Dell computers and on Verizon’s wireless phones. This got us to thinking – how can you fight a Google-like verb? How do you knock off the dominant player in a market, especially when their name is synonymous with their main offering?
The Year in Search and Social Media: Predictions 2009
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 31, 2008 | Share This
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After a tumultuous and fascinating 2008, what might be in store for 2009? We interrogated our best sources using enhanced techniques (bright lights, bamboo and the music of John Mayer were all deployed) before turning to the entrails of a goat (the vegans on our staff settled for an artichoke) to bring you our predictions for the world of search and social media in 2009. We make no guarantee of actuality. Void where prohibited.
In the Year 2009…
Horizontal is the New Vertical - The first wave of vertical search engines such as Business.com or Shopping.com was launched with the intention of starting search businesses from the get go. What’s interesting about the new breed of search engines is that they weren’t originally intended to be search engines at all. Instead, they were born out of the need to sift through the mass volume of content being produced on social media sites.
The need to retrieve and categorize user created content is already leading many social media platforms to become alternative and relevant search indices for specific needs beyond the general search engine results page. For example, Twitter search gives you visibility into “now”, Facebook search scours people (while LinkedIn offers more professionally oriented info), Flickr search delivers a better, more diverse image result set than Google images while YouTube features superior video search results.
Marketers will take notice of this trend to the horizontal in 2009 and these platforms will respond with more compelling SEM offerings to help lure them in.
The World of Online Ad Networks will Finally Consolidate – with many companies merging in an effort to survive, while others disappear altogether. This gives Google AdSense the opportunity to suck up even more of this market, resulting in:
1. Higher overall revenues for Google, but…
2. Lower revenue shares for smaller online publishers as Google takes a bigger cut of the pie and it becomes harder for them to monetize.
3. The collapse of online companies with no clear monetization plans.
Analytics becomes the Chocolate to Social Media’s Peanut Butter – Spending on social media marketing will rise despite the recession as more marketers discover useful analytics tools to measure success across the distributed web. Clients will be impressed by YouTube visitor counts, bit.ly’s url tracking and Omniture’s ability to track behavior in iPhone apps. This improved capability to test social media campaigns and see results before committing to major spends, helps open the floodgates and deliver real meaningful value - and revenue – for the first time.
Social Media Will Help Make Us Better Citizens - Phase one of online activism was powered by applications that allowed people to spread the word about their causes (e.g. Facebook “Causes”), phase two will be powered by microgiving services (e.g. Tipjoy and Microgiving) that allow people to put their money where their mouth is. As a result, funds given to charity through social networks will finally get more in line with the number of people who profess to be interested in them. The integration of Paypal into these services will help facilitate these transactions.
Furthermore, as the recession drags on and access to credit becomes increasingly difficult, Paypal will play a larger role in many online transactions including peer-to-peer lending, replacing some traditional banking services.
Is the Domain Friendfilter.com Taken? - As “friending” continues to gain momentum (and dilute its real life meaning), context becomes more important than ever. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed will need to empower users with more parametric filters so that they can publish – and parse - information to and from different groups of people. For example, a person may have various interests ranging from social software to hockey to comic books – giving that individual more control of the distribution and consumption process will eliminate noise from the social graph and provide more meaningful connections. The web is filled with nooks and crannies of niche content, so there’s no reason the social networks, or the ecosystem born of out of them (for instance, services like Stocktwits) shouldn’t better enable those subject specific communities.
Mobile Voice Search Increases its Long Tail – People don’t speak the same way they type – we tend to be fluid and wordy instead of terse and structured. When you mosey down to the car dealer to look for a new ride (or a “whip” as the kids call them), the tendency is to ask something like “What do you have that gets good mileage but can haul a kid’s bedroom set and won’t make me look like a total tool?” rather than to use Search-ese like “SUV, fuel efficient?” Therefore, it stands to reason that as voice recognition software creeps into mobile search apps, the searches we conduct on our cell phones are going to start to look a lot less like those from traditional search engines. Spoken questions are longer and phrased differently than online search. Advertisers who hope to simply use their existing search keyword lists to reach mobile users are going to be in for a surprise.
Then again, we might be getting ahead of ourselves – 2009 will not be the year that advertising for voice search takes off. The user experience still needs too much work for mainstream adoption.
Yahoo is Broken Up – No year-end list is complete without a gratuitous Yahoo swipe – here’s ours: Microsoft reunites many Yahoo search refugees’ posteriors with their former chairs by acquiring Yahoo’s search business at a fire sale price.
The Phrase “Google Killer” Will Become the New “Munson” – The term becomes synonymous in hip-hop to describe a hyped young rapper who steps to the big guns only to come up short and be forgotten. When was the last time you used Cuil?
Mobile Gets More Social - Time spent logging into social networks from a mobile device will approach 50% of total time spent on social networks in ‘09. In a related event, incidences of hit and run accidents and people walking into open manhole covers will rise dramatically in ‘09 as they use their fancy new iPhones and G1 Android phones to throw snowballs at each other on Facebook.
Google TV Ties Together Recessionary Threads – The two most resilient places for advertising in a recession turn out to be search and TV. How convenient for Google’s fledging offline ad biz as the search model of targeting, accountability, and responsiveness continues to migrate to offline platforms in ‘09. The timing is now.
Fame is Measured in 140 Characters Instead of 15 Minutes – Twitter celebs (plane crash guy, Egyptian jail guy) find fame far more fleeting in ‘09 – it lasts as long as it takes to refresh your screen.
Facebook Connect Takes Off – Brands and marketers embrace the ability to use Facebook Connect as a way to socialize websites cheaply. In fact, it’s already starting to.
Twitter Will Surprise Their Critics With Their Ability to Monetize – We’d explain what that monetization plan will look like in more detail, but unfortunately, we only have 140 characters.
Search News: Last Night a SERP Saved my Life – Cyberchondria and SearchWiki
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 25, 2008 | Share This
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My wife and I have a particularly naughty cat at home. Like many urban dwellers we find it necessary to place those little Raid roach discs around to keep unwanted visitors from parading through our kitchen area. This cat is obsessed with the discs – if they are not placed somewhere very inaccessible she will invariably locate it and bat and bite it to her heart’s content.
The first time we found a disc in the middle of the floor full of bite marks we freaked out, convinced that she had poisoned herself. While my wife called the vet I did what any right-thinking idiot would do and looked up the roach trap ingredients online to see what pet interaction warnings there were. To my relief, while not recommended, the discs would not kill her outright or even make her sick if she wasn’t regularly chowing them down whole.
In retrospect though, perhaps the interwebs wasn’t such a great place to turn to for feline health advice. After all, when it comes to human health the Internet is anything but infallible.
Weekly Search Roundup: Scraping the Newsworthy Scum Off The Surface of the Cesspool That We Call The Internet
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 10, 2008 | Share This
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The negative campaigning continues. John McCain this week suggested that Obama was some kind of crypto-socialist terrorist Muslim while Obama pointed out that McCain is, well, John McCain. Surprisingly though the harshest attack came from atop the mighty Googleplex as CEO Eric Shmidt called the Internet a “cesspool.” At press time the Internet had responded with the charge that Schmidt was once seen in an elevator with Bill Ayers. In all fairness Schmidt made his observation to a group of publishers to whom he also explained,”We don’t actually want you to be successful…” at getting good search engine rankings. Okkkaaaay then. This of course was followed by an obtuse non-explanation of Google’s quality score rankings.