In our last blog post, we alerted you to Microsoft’s unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo! for almost $45 billion. A study released last week by comScore, which revealed that the Chinese search engine Baidu.com is the third most popular search query source in the world, provides even more insight into why the Seattle software shop is eager to gobble-up the Yahooigans.
Today, DMNews reported that the current CEO at Ask.com, Jim Lanzone, will be stepping down, and be replaced immediately by Jim Safka, the current CEO of Primal Ventures, a new venture firm that identifies business opportunities for Ask.com’s parent company IAC Search and Media.
In a January 3, 2008 article titled “Global Search Revenue on the Rise” from DMNews, JPMorgan is upping its prediction of total 2008 global search revenue from $26.6 billion to more than $30 billion. Not only is the investment firm predicting $30.5 billion in global search revenue this year, they also expect this number to reach $60 billion by 2011.
In yet another attempt by the software shop up the road from EngineWorks to make gains on the G-Men from Mountain View, yesterday Microsoft introduced its own version of Google’s AdWords Certification program. The AdWords Certification program enables search marketing firms, media agencies, and advertisers to tout their proficiency in professionally managing Google AdWords Paid Search advertising campaigns. Now, Uncle Bill’s team has introduced Microsoft adExcellence.
Microsoft’s Live Search (formally known as MSN) has reinstated the link command after disabling it back in March. This is the command that allows users to view inbound links for a site indexed by Live Search. The new command is slightly different with a plus (+) sign added to the beginning. For example:
An interesting study was released last week claiming that consumers now express more satisfaction with Yahoo! than Google, Ask.com, MSN, or AOL. The study by the American Consumer Satisfaction index was reported in the article titled “Is Yahoo! Better Than Google?” on eMarketer.
Microsoft Live Search has finally announced that they support XML sitemaps! However, in typical Microsoft fashion, they are using a different auto-discovery method. Instead of submitting an XML sitemap through a webmaster console (i.e. Google, Yahoo!), or providing a way to ping the search engine (i.e. Google, Yahoo! & Ask) Microsoft would like webmasters to add the following line to their robots.txt files:
At the end of this post, I list the May 2007 market percentages of the largest players in the current online search industry. Once again, Google dramatically increased its lead in our space with an impressive 42.1% year-over-year growth rate in the month of April, to command more than 55% of the total search market.
What’s crazy to think about is, that when I entered our fledgling space back in the late 1990’s, Inktomi (purchased by Yahoo! in late 2002) was the T-Rex of the search engine landscape (with a combined market share of more than 42% at the time), and the now obscure Northern Light and AltaVista were nipping at its heals. Here is a snapshot of the other dinosaurs (and a one little furry creature) from August 1999:
Interesting article today across the wire from The Associated Press titled “Microsoft,Yahoo become latest to improve Internet search privacy” proclaiming that the search engines are limiting the length of time that they retain potentially sensitive user data. The article points-out that “the search engines all appear interested in staying a step ahead of regulators as the industry mines personal data to customize online ads tailored for the tastes and interests of each individual visitor.”
This quote was stated today by Sheryl Sandberg, the vice president of global online sales and operations for Google, during a forum with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask at Fortune’s iMeme tech conference in San Francisco. As CNNMoney.com also reported today, the four giants of search didn’t always play nicely during this presentation.
Check out “Search Leaders Get Defensive” for a little insight into the competitiveness of our space at the very top.
