Hot on the heels of the organic results integration in the US, Yahoo & Bing both announced today that now is the time to begin preparing your paid search accounts for the final integration, in which Microsoft Adcenter will power all paid search ads on Yahoo! Search in the U.S. & Canada.
It’s a race for market share!
The combined product will enable advertisers to reach audiences on both search engines and will, for the first time, create a truly competitive alternative to Google AdWords. The combined audience of searchers is reported to be 159 million in the U.S. and 15 million in Canada.
An overview of some of today’s search, ad, tech news
Departures
Yahoo is forging on in its management reshuffle process. Following the steps of Larry Cornett, it’s now Srinija Srinivasan’s turn to leave the company after 15 years of service. She was the fifth employee Yahoo had hired at the time and has become “the most powerful person in search,” according to Search Engine Land who also reported on the departure of Tim Mayer from the company. Prior to Yahoo, Mayer had “worked for practically every search engine,” the report said.
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.
As Yahoo and Bing progress on the Search Alliance, Yahoo said it is live testing results of Microsoft organic and paid search on its platform this month. In its update, Yahoo also gave a few other prospective dates and steps. Read on.
Testing
Yahoo said the testing volumes this month will fluctuate although those for paid search “in particular [will be] kept low enough to help minimize any potential impact to your account.” Full transition is still slated for the third quarter but Yahoo indicated that the two involved companies may elect to delay it until next year, should they “conclude that it would improve the overall experience.”
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.
Search engines are a hot topic at the moment, especially for governments wanting to regulate them in one way or another. The most recent tension came from Pakistan’s decision that it will monitor Google, Bing, Yahoo (and other sites) for blasphemous content. Now it is the EU’s turn to try to impose checks on search engines through its controversial “Written Declaration 29.”
Written Declaration 29
Italy’s European Member of Parliament, Tiziano Motti, is the author of the proposal, commonly known as Written Declaration 29, adopted last week. His aim was to protect children from abusers and paedophiles lurking on the web by requesting that user data from search engines be stored and used by governments to track sexual offenders.
On Monday, Microsoft and Yahoo invited search marketers and vendors to an all-day overview of the upcoming Microsoft-Yahoo Alliance. Here are some of the highlights from the day.
Timeline. Both MS and Y reps assured us that they are on schedule for a full rollout of the Alliance by October. November and December is the “protected holiday period” that is so key to search marketers, and the Alliance is on target to have all US and Canada PPC advertisers moved over to the shared platform by October. API migration will also be complete by then.
Google has been feeling the heat over the past few days with the global uproar over its rogue StreetView wifi data collection and its increasingly difficult relationship with Apple. The iPad maker, who was widely rumored to be looking at leaving Google for Bing, has now included Bing as a search engine choice on Safari.
It’s also turning Google into an estranged partner by changing the developers terms of use for the iPhone, thereby supposedly barring the company’s AdMob app from sending information to marketers on who clicked on their ads and when on the iPhone.
After announcing the upcoming extinction of Bing CashBack, it seems Microsoft’s search arm has decided to remain under the spotlights but this time for some positive news. Read on for iPhone integration and maps announcements.
iPhone 4 Integration
First, he’d denied rumors of Apple being in talks to drop Google for Bing during AllThingsDigital’s D8 conference but yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced at the company’s worldwide developers’ conference WWDC that in fact Bing would be added as a search engine choice to Safari on the new iPhone 4 to be rolled out next month.
Microsoft said it will “bid farewell” to its Bing Cashback feature on July 30, 2010, citing lower-than-expected adoption. However, looking closer at the situation, it appears that the program may well have been a victim of its own success. Read on.
Disappointing Results?
In a post on Bing’s official blog, the company said “we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for,” and promised to deliver new programs.
