Bing continues to confound its critics and rivals with impressive statistical data just a couple of weeks after it was first launched. In the latest statistics provided by comScore, it has seen a 3% rise in both searcher penetration and share of search result pages, to leave it at 16.7% and 12.1% respectively for the week ending 12/06/2009.
It will certainly be interesting to keep an eye on the rise of Bing and where it eventually levels off. Google of course remain well out in front, but rivals like Yahoo and Ask may well be looking like also-rans if they’re unable to gain back some momentum from the marauding Microsoft Bing.
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Barely a day goes by currently without someone talking about the new Microsoft Bing search engine. Some of it positive, a good deal of it negative. But the word of mouth campaign that appears to be happening is seemingly getting under the skin of a few of the rival execs.
Yahoo executive Carol Bartz hasn’t pulled any punches in her damning criticism of Microsoft and Bing itself. She had this to say about Statcounter’s results that found Bing had overtaken Yahoo last week (as we reported in the post Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo! in First Week) “They didn’t beat us by much. It was one day. I think it’s gosh maybe it was in Omaha some place; It was some small area.”
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WebProNews, courtesy of statistics provided by Statcounter, today announced that Microsoft Bing has leapfrogged Yahoo as the number two search engine.
As reported earlier in the week in ‘The Birth of the ‘Decision Engine’: Microsoft Bing Goes Live’, Bing isn’t a Google-killer, not yet at any rate. The primary objective was instead to oust the current incumbents of the second most popular search engine spot; something they appear to have done with remarkable ease and swiftness.
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Yahoo! announced on Friday another change to his search engine rankings algorithm. This comes soon after the last update in January.
Expect to see some movement in the natural results. It also serves as a useful reminder that having a position in the search engine results is not a right. SEO is about setting your site up to be seen in the best possible light by the search engines but cannot act as a cast iron certainty that you will get the positions you desire.
It’s one of those rare occasion when the three major search engines come together in an effort to improve search by agreeing on common standards.
Search Engines Unite With Canonical Tag
This time, it’s the turn of duplicate content and the issue of canonicalisation. Canonical, in this context, refers to the issue of duplicate content and there’s many reasons why this may occur. For legitimate reasons, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have now agreed a new standard tag to be used in the header section of a web page to specify the preferred URL.
All very good as it will flag up to the search engines and work in a similar way to 301 redirects, i.e. consolidate your link popularity to the preferred location.
Further Reading:
Yahoo has recently updated the terms and conditions of its pay per click (PPC) advertising program to allow it to optimise your account.
I’m not going to repeat what has already been written on this topic but if you’re a Yahoo Search Marketing PPC client, it would be in your interest to read this summary from Econsultancy:
Is Yahoo’s proactive account ‘optimization’ legal?
Yahoo! has announced that Co-founder Jerry Yang has agreed to step down from his role as Chief Executive.
Jerry Yang
The embattled CEO has had a difficult period since taking over just over a year ago. Yahoo! Rejected a multi-billion dollar takeover offer from Microsoft and have recently seen Google walk away from a joint-venture advertising deal.
The Internet company (yes, that is a broad description!) stated that Jerry will remain in post until his replacement is appointed by the Yahoo! board of directors.
It is assumed that, despite overseeing the dramatic fall in the Yahoo! share price, billionaire Yang will cope with this change of role announced a month after the company published plans to make 10% of its employees redundant.
Whilst not quite as predictable as Sarah Palin not being the next American Vice President, it is still worth noting Google’s announcement on their blog that they’ve ended the agreement to serve it’s ads on the Yahoo! search engine.
This has been put down to the legal hassles with government regulators and concerns of some (!) advertisers.
I don’t know what impact this will have on the Yahoo share price but I’m sure that someone wishes they’d accepted the $31 per share offer from Microsoft.
As a footnote to this, Yahoo have already emailed their PPC advertisers to convey their disappointment and express their wish about how they want to reach out and work with their advertisers. I wonder if this is in the same way they were going to force PPC costs up by jumping into bed with Google?
In a world full of mega-money purchases and deals, Microsoft has set the Internet alight with an offer of $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and stock to buy Yahoo.
This offer is 62% higher than Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday 31st January 2008.
As of today, there’s been no comment from the search company so at the moment it’s just a question of ‘watch this space’.
Let’s just hope that the Internet doesn’t just end up being divided up between Google and Microsoft with any hint of individuality being snuffed out my the mere offer of a few billion dollars…
At Impact Media we believe the most important search engines are the ones that deliver the most traffic and this changes from country to country but for the UK and USA the big 3 are the same.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are the big 3 in question and control one big slice of the internet traffic, approximately 91% of all UK and 93.4% of the USA search engine traffic.
UK Search Engine Share:
USA Search Engine Share:
At Impact Media we offer the real deal and optimise website’s for the main 3 search engines so that you get quality relevant traffic to your website.
Bottom line, if your not in the top 3 search engines you are missing out on nearly all natural search enquires.
(Statistics from may 2006 Source: Hitwise)
