Hitwise, just released searches traffic for February 2008. Google accounted for 66.44 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending February 23, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.59, 6.95 and 4.16 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.87 percent of U.S. searches.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search EnginesDomain Feb.-08 Jan.-08 More»

Labels: Microsoft, Search, Yahoo

Ask.com is abandoning its effort to compete with Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives reports the SF Chronicle. About 40 employees will be laid off as a result.
The company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions - about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework. The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the Southern and Midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.
Ask ran the Internet’s fifth-largest search engine More»

Labels: Internet Marketing, Search

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo and AOL’s parent Time Warner have stepped up talks over creating an alternative to Microsoft’s and Google. The talks center on a deal that would fold Time Warner’s AOL Internet unit into Yahoo. If the merger is successful and executed well it could be a strong alternative to Google & Microsoft.
AOL has been organizing all their advertising divisions into a single unit to better compete with Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo ( More»

Labels: AOL, Search, Yahoo

Bill Gates will today announce the launch of Search Server 2008 to rival Google’s Search Appliance. The software allows users to search files and documents inside their corporate network. However unlikely the expensive Google Appliance which is a box with software, Microsoft will offer the service as a free software download. Yes, you heard that right! No hardware, no packaged software. It will be a web offering featuring online administration, reporting and provisioning features.
Essentially, Microsoft is beating Google at it own game with this web offering. Today’s announcement More»

Labels: Microsoft, Online Advertising, Search

In the January 2008 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 7.7 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.5 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), and AOL LLC (903 million).

comScore Expanded Search Query Report January 2008Total U.S. – Home/Work/University LocationsSource: comScore qSearch 2.0

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Labels: Microsoft, Search, Yahoo

According to Click Forensics, click fraud rates for content networks grew to 28.3% in Q4 2007. In other words 28 cents from every dollar went to fraud. What this report is saying is 28.3% of (PPC) providers and publishers revenue/profits are attributed to fraud. I found it disturbing that the rate was so high and if concerned that advertisers could use the information to take legal action against pay-per-click (PPC) providers and publishers to reclaim their ad spend. So I set out to clarify it.
I asked Click Forensics CEO Tom Cuthbert if he could provide me more More»

Labels: Click Fraud, Online Advertising, Search

Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is all about online advertising. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO has said that in a few years online advertising will account for as much as 25% of Microsoft’s revenue. Ballmer is hoping that acquiring Yahoo will help Microsoft catch up to Google. However, acquiring Yahoo will not give Microsoft the revenue nor the search market share it is seeking for, as Yahoo’s strength is in display advertising not search advertising.

Microsoft Seven Times Bigger Than GoogleMicrosoft’s share of the display advertising market is already about 7 More»

Labels: Microsoft, Online Advertising, Search, Yahoo

Microsoft Chairman and Founder Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook and has delete his account after being hassled by thousands of fans. The Chairman was inundated by over 8,000 friend requested a day and thousands of loan refinance requests fueled by the mortgage meltdown.
Chairman Gates became so hooked on the site that he decided to invested $240 million regardless of valuation just to own a piece of it. He spent about 30 minutes a day chatting with friends and searching the site (ah that’s where he got the idea More»

Labels: Bill Gates, Facebook, Microsoft, Search

Just last week, in an email exchange with another search blogger, I wondered when Google would provide options for disambiguation of search results.
When you think about it, that’s an obvious requirement for the Results page of any serious search engine. If I query for the search term “Java” - does it mean that I’m looking for results about the programming language, the coffee, or the island in Indonesia?
There’s no way for the search engine to be able to tell, although personalization could provide clues. The easiest solution, as I wrote back in 2006, is for More»

Labels: Long Tail, Search

Andy Beal recently wrote that Google’s stock is far from the $2000 a share predicted by Henry Blodget publisher of InternetOutsider. After missing analyst estimates and the announcement of the Microsoft - Yahoo takeover (predicted here), Google’s shares (GOOG) have been hit very hard. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram who own majority of the Class B shares (which control the company) have seen the fortunes drop by US$16 Billion collectively. The Microsoft Yahoo overture shows Google’s vulnerability. Over 90% of the company’s revenue comes from search advertising. If I ran Google, I More»

Labels: google, Online Advertising, Search, web applications