An overview of some of today’s search, advertising and tech news.
Google Adwords was granted victory by U.S. District court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee in Alexandria, Va, in the case on the alleged trademarks infringement brought against it by Rosetta Stone. Lee declared the plaintiff’s arguments invalid and said that Google even increased brand awareness for Rosetta Stone through the use of “trademarked terms as keyword triggers and as words within sponsored link titles and advertisement text.”
Google sites remained the most visited in the U.S. during the month of June but Yahoo is closing in on its rival, comScore’s numbers show.
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Among the top five most popular web properties in the U.S., Google sites remained #1 with almost 179 million visitors in June. Yahoo edged ever closer with a mere 9 million lag, or 170 million visitors to its sites. Microsoft sites ranked third at 161 million visitors during the period. Facebook came in fourth at 141 million visitors, ahead of AOL sites at 107 million visitors. The most notable gains were those of Adobe properties, which went up 10 positions and ESPN, who won 12 spots as it benefited from traffic generated by the World Cup, comScore said.
When AOL is in the news, it means business… CEO Tim Armstrong said advertising would be AOL’s primary source of revenues in his turnaround plan for the company. As such, AOL already demonstrated its willingness to leave non-viable operations behind by selling its failing and ailing social site Bebo for a reported $10 million. Now it’s building a new future, starting with the launch of an innovative political ads platforms and at the same time looking for its future head of music operations.
AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search as its $700 million-a-year deal with Google is set to expire in December. Whether it renews its agreement with Google or switches to another search company, AOL is likely to sign in its partner for the few years to come by September, according to various reports.
Google is once more number one search engine in the U.S. for the month of June with a market share of 65%, research firm Nielsen said in a report.
Google’s cut of the U.S. search pie was 65% or almost 6 billion queries out of the total 9.1 billion conducted in June, just 0.1% below May’s level and compared to a 66.1% share a year ago.
Yahoo came in number two. It registered 1.2 billion queries, or 13.7% of the total market, or the same slight 0.1% weaker month-on-month performance but a more significant drop from 16.2% the same period last year.
AOL has confirmed in an SEC filing this morning that it has sold its ailing social site Bebo to digital media investors Criterion Capital Partners. Although the value of the deal was not disclosed, reports have the price tag at a mere $10 million although AOL had forked out a hefty $850 million to acquire the company in March 2008.
According to a variety of sources, AOL plans to sell or close Bebo, the social network that it acquired two years ago for $850 million.
Image via CrunchBase
In a memo sent to employees, AOL Ventures Executive Vice President Jon Broad, said, “Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space.”
He added, “AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.”
On Monday, Nathania Johnson wrote about “The Unlikely Heroes of Search and Social Media” who used abso-freakin-lutely no SEO. Today, I’d like to highlight one who did.
Sarah Ivey Rock, Search Marketing Manager at AOL Living, was one of the speakers on the “Spotlight on Fashion: Blogging for Style” panel at SES New York 2010. Rock works on AOL Living sites such as Stylelist, That’s Fit and Slashfood.
Rock has worked in the search industry for ten years. (Seriously has it been that long.) She loves keyword research and was a librarian in a former life.
Quality copy is supposed to attract links, so why don’t you have any?
At last Tuesday’s keynote panel at SES New York (I know you’re sick of hearing about it, but bear with me), Jonathan Blum, Principal at Blumsday LLC, lamented the fact that beautiful writing doesn’t attract traffic. He said his heart was broken that gorgeous writing was largely ignored.
Co-panelist Brad Hill, Director at Weblogs, Inc. / AOL was not heart-broken. And why should he be when sites like Engadget are so popular?
If your NCAA March Madness brackets are as messed up as mine, you’ll need a distraction this weekend.
So, catch up with these search stories from the week that just didn’t make it into their own post.
Google Analytics is now integrated into the Microsoft Silverlight framework. They also announced they are developing a global, browser-based opt-out plugin.
Google Commerce Search added advanced synonym options.
Google Android has added Gesture Search to versions 1.6 or higher.
Yahoo! is acquiring CitizenSports.com.
AOL is expanding their local efforts.
MapQuest adds “Search Along Your Route” functionality to its mobile version.
