The popularity of Google Doodles has not been overlooked by Bing and Ask, both engines are buying low costing paid search traffic for Yuri Gagarin figuring the people who click thru may stay and use Bing News or Ask.com.
The arbitrage brings back memories of when search sites would actively buy traffic from other small and less expensive engines and directories to resell for much higher numbers. Now it appears that Bing and Ask are making a smart play for a term that will not cost too much, but for the day will have a lot of traffic from users that want more information on Yuri Gargarin.
Yes, Ask has joined Jeeves in retirement, officially bowing out of the search business last month in favor of concentrating on the question and answer service they returned to in July.
However, those questions asked on Ask.com are from users searching for answers to their most pressing questions…such as where to get the best coffee under $10 (answer: Dunkin’ Donuts).
Plus, this list has become a yearly tradition at Search Engine Watch — well, two years running anyway. So without further ado, here is the complete list of Ask.com’s top questions of 2010.
Search advertising spend is on the rise for small- and medium-sized businesses. In fact, that would be the understatement of the year: SMB ad spending in the second-quarter soared 159% from last year, according to a WebVisible report. What’s more is that Yahoo is pulling the dollars away from Google and Ask.
WebVisible, the provider of local online marketing products and services, published its second-quarter report on SMB paid search advertising showing a strong recovery from the same period a year ago.
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.
Experian Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 69.97 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 15.04 percent, 9.62 percent and 3.44 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches.
Image via CrunchBase
In other news, Hitwise reported that longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were flat between February 2010 and March 2010. But, searches of eight or more words increased 1 percent.
Experian Hitwise today announced that Bing’s share of searches has increased for the third straight month.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
In other news, Google accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Feb. 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search accounted for 15 percent. Bing accounted for 10 percent. And Ask.com received 3 percent. The remaining 73 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for less than 2 percent of U.S. searches.
Although marketers probably don’t need to change anything that they are currently doing because of the trends above, Hitwise reported another trend that may require some adjustments.
The loss comes at the advantage to several smaller players.
Google and lost an entire point in the search rankings last month, according to Nielsen Online. Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and other smaller players gained.
Most appeared to gain queries compared to December.
According to Experian Hitwise data released today, searches on Bing increased 5 percent and search on Ask increased 4 percent in January 2010, while searches on Google decreased 1 percent and searches on Yahoo! decreased 2 percent.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
In terms of market share, Google accounted for 71.5 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 31, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 14.6 percent, 9.4 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.9 percent of U.S. searches.
Ask.com U.S. President Doug Leeds answers our questions.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to chat with Ask.com U.S. President Doug Leeds about the new “Question of the Day” feature that debuted this week. Leeds championed the new feature internally at Ask.com and is quite passionate about how it reflects the brand’s larger search strategy.
Leeds informed me that the Question of the Day feature first launched in the U.K. It did so well there, that they’re trying it out stateside.
“Before search, asking questions is the way we got that information,” said Leeds. “We changed our behavior. You couldn’t just ask a search engine a question.”
Over at Ask.com today, there’s a “Question of the Day” box over the main search box. Apparently, today’s question is “How many women have received the Medal of Honor?” We haven’t seen this on Ask.com before, though we have seen hints of it with specific ad campaigns, such as the one for the Night at the Museum sequel last spring.
Click on the question and it takes you to a page, where the answer appears at the top and then organic results and other Ask features such as related searches appear as well:
