This just handed me: Experian Hitwise has just announced that Google accounted for 72.15 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010. That’s up 1 percent over the previous month.
Meanwhile, Bing powered search received 23.64 percent of searches for the month — down 2 percent from August.
Yahoo! Search received 13.54 percent — down 5 percent from the previous month — and Bing received 10.10 percent — up 2 percent from August.
As I mentioned last month, on of the big stories at SES San Francisco is the Microsoft Yahoo! Search Alliance, aka MicroHoo.
Byron Gordon of SEO-PR, interviewed Tamara Colagrossi, Group Product Marketing Manager, Search, Microsoft, and Michael McMeekin, Senior Strategist Search Optimization & Strategy, Yahoo!, about the new Microsoft Yahoo search alliance while they were both at the event.
Microsoft’s Greg Nelson and Yahoo’s Mark Morrissey recently gave interviews to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Nelson and Morrissey are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate the massive search and online advertising partnership that their companies struck last year. According to Swisher, their job “essentially is the search equivalent of herding cats.”
So, if Nelson and Morrissey are out talking about creating a seamless search and online advertising product that works quickly and well across two major Web properties, I wonder what the gang from Bada Bing and Bada Hoo will be saying in a couple of weeks at SES San Francisco.
How do you get Canadians from Victoria to Petawawa to put their town on the map? You ask them politely to submit photos they have snapped of their hometowns to the Bing photo contest.
Image via Wikipedia
And that’s exactly what Microsoft Canada in connection with Walmart PhotoCentre and Kodak Canada Inc. did today when they announced the launch of the national Put Your Town on the Map with Bing photo contest.
The grand prize winner, and future hometown hero, will have his or her photo featured as the Bing.ca homepage image on Canada Day and will also win a photography prize pack courtesy of Kodak Canada Inc. and Walmart Photocentre. In addition, Canadians have the chance to win daily prizes.
One of the reasons marketers went to SES New York 2010 was to see new products and services. And they weren’t disappointed.
Microsoft used the conference and expo to announce that it was adding new features to its Bing search engine, including Quick Tabs, an Answer box, and new mapping tools powered by Foursquare to deliver real-time data embedded in maps.
Google used the the original search engine marketing event as the place to announce AdWords Search Funnels. It shows you all the keywords that assisted in conversion made through Google AdWords, rather than just the last one before a buy or conversion action.
The top story on Day 3 of SES New York 2010 was the morning keynote by Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business for Bing. Check out the story by Sharon Pian Chan in the Seattle Times entitled, “Microsoft adds Foursquare to Bing Maps.”
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
Or read Paul McDougall’s story in InformationWeek entitled, “Microsoft Builds A Better Bing.”
Or read Paul Thurrott’s story in Windows IT Pro entitled, “Spring Cleaning: Major Bing Update on the Way.”
Or read Frank Reed’s story in Marketing Pilgrim entitled, “Bing’s Features for Someday in the Future.”
February is always a weird month for search data.
It’s a short month. Query volume is always down. And this year was particularly odd with all the snowstorms. Were people on the Internet more or less as a result?
An interesting note in comScore’s rankings for last month is that Facebook search query was actually UP. So, there’s one thing people like to do when it snows. (I think we all knew that already by the sheer number of snow pictures uploaded by people in our network.)
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.
Personalized search suggestions now available from historical search clues.
Bing has made an update to its query suggestion feature that incorporates a bit of personalization. Since many web users tend to return to similar search topics, it makes sense to incorporate relevant terms into query suggestions. And that’s just what Bing has done with its Autosuggest feature. It will now take query history into consideration when serving up suggested keywords.
Suggestions based on query history are in purple, similar to a visited link. The other suggestions are in blue, similar to an unvisited link.
Phones are due out by the 2010 holiday season.
It’s called the Windows Phone 7 series and, despite the name, it’s nothing like Windows. Sure, there’s mobile versions of Office, Outlook and Internet Explorer. But if Windows was more like this phone, it wouldn’t have image and reputation problems.
No, this phone is more like Zune HD, which is smooth and sleek. There’s room for games and music and video. There’s also XBox Live integration – you can tinker with your avatar on your phone. Plus, you can update social networks like Facebook directly from your phone. No need to wait for apps to be developed (with apologies to my husband, an iPhone app developer).
