Bing Continues to Show Growth in Search Activity
Story from ComScore
Microsoft Sees Gains in U.S. Searcher Penetration and Share of Search Result Pages During the Second Week of Bing’s Debut
RESTON, VA, June 17, 2009 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a follow up study on the performance of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, during the second week of its public launch. The results show that Microsoft has continued to increase its position in the search market following the initial week of Bing’s debut.
Microsoft Sites saw its average daily searcher penetration and share of search result pages in the U.S. continue to climb during the second week of Bing’s introduction. Microsoft Sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 work week prior to Bing’s introduction. Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S., a proxy for overall search intensity, increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, also climbing 3 percentage points from the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29.
Microsoft Sites Search Performance
Work Week: 5/25/09 – 6/12/09
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Work Week *************5/25/09-*************6/1/09-*************6/8/09-
****************************5/29/09**************6/5/09***********6/12/09
Searcher Penetration**13.7% ***************15.8% ************16.7%
(Avg. Daily)
Share of Search**********9.1%****************11.3% ************12.1%
Result Pages
“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”
China Accuses Google Of Lewd Behavior
Beijing Continues Its Fight Against The Public Square In Cyberspace
Story from Mercury News
Damming the Web: Days before a deadline abruptly imposed by China, computer makers are scrambling to comply with an order to supply Web-filtering software with PCs amid concerns about what it might do to their reputations.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Taiwan's Acer — the top three global producers — are asking regulators for details of the order that takes effect July 1 to provide Green Dam Youth Escort software with every laptop and desktop PC sold in China.
The conflict comes as Beijing launched new criticisms this week against search giant Google, which a foreign ministry spokesman accused Thursday of spreading pornography. Chinese users were unable to connect to Google's main site or its China-based service, google.cn, from late Wednesday into today. But spokesman Qin Gang, speaking at a regular briefing, sidestepped questions about whether the government was blocking access.
Government regulators say Green Dam must be supplied with every computer to prevent children from surfing the Internet for pornography. But technical analyses of the software — developed by a previously unknown Chinese company — have shown embedded programs to filter out content the government deems politically objectionable.
Yahoo To Build Data Center Near Buffalo
Story from the Mercury News
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Internet giant Yahoo plans to open a data center in western New York.
Gov. David Paterson says that the center in Lockport north of Buffalo is expected to begin operating in January 2011 and will create about 125 jobs.
The governor says construction of the center, housing computer systems and other equipment, is expected to begin this fall.
Based in Sunnyvale, Yahoo has been expanding its number of data centers around the country. The centers use a large amount of energy, and Paterson says Tuesday that the New York Power Authority came up with a low-cost power plan to lure Yahoo to Lockport.
More Time Online For Americans
Story from Biz Report
On average, American adults are now spending just under 4 hours each day online; that is an 81% increase over 2006 numbers, according to a new report from The Media Audit. Researchers have found that the Internet now accounts for more than 30% of a 'media day' for adults in the US.
This is good news for marketers, as long as the marketer can find the consumer at the right time. For many, the bulk of their online time is being spent with local or national newspapers. More than one hour each day is spent with online papers, according to the report, and the reach of these papers just keeps growing.
New Orleans Times Picayune reaches about 85% of the population while the San Antonio Express-News reaches just over 80% of their readership. Syracuse's Post-Standard reaches 84% and Buffalo News reaches 83% of their populations.
So, then, online newspapers could be a good place for local marketers to reach out to their customer base.
Bob Jordan, President of The Media Audit said, "Daily newspapers were the first to embrace a multi-platform distribution strategy amidst a period when consumers were spending more and more time with the Internet. And as a result, newspapers followed the way of the consumer. By doing so, they have broadened their reach to include younger consumers. And these consumers are buying new cars and driving sales for retailers who represent a significant portion of the newspaper industry's revenue."
Yahoo's Carol Bartz: We're Not Google
Story from Mercury News
Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz asked shareholders to stop comparing the Sunnyvale Internet company to Google, its biggest rival, at a sparsely attended and subdued annual meeting Thursday morning.
The meeting marked a break from the past, when shareholders have repeatedly voiced their disappointment with Yahoo's management and its failure to respond to competitive threats and increase the value of the company's shares. Last year, shareholders withheld support from the board of directors in record numbers after the company rejected a bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion or $33 a share.
"I was hoping that the Microsoft deal would go through, not because I'm a big Microsoft fan but because I don't think the share price will get that high again," said Richard Hackenbery, who became a Yahoo shareholder in 1999.
Hackenbery and his wife, Marilyn, drove from Berkeley to the meeting, which was held at the Santa Clara Marriott, to hear Bartz, who became CEO in January, replacing co-founder Jerry Yang.
Yahoo's shares traded at $15.53 on Thursday, up 8 cents and up from a low of $8.94 in November last year.
At the meeting, Bartz said if and when there is a deal with Microsoft, they would announce it; otherwise, she had "nothing to say."
Yang, who sits on the board of directors and holds the title Chief Yahoo, attended the meeting but did not address it. He later chatted informally with shareholders. David Filo, the other co-founder, did not attend.
Directly addressing shareholders for the first time, Bartz said they should think of Yahoo as the largest online media company, "the place where millions of people come to check what is important to them every day and organize their lives."
She also described how she was streamlining Yahoo's organizational structure and shutting down poorly performing properties, which she described as "space debris."
When asked why Yahoo continues to lag Google in financial performance and employee productivity, Bartz said it was time to stop comparing the companies to each other because they have different business models. "Please, this direct comparison model to Google is not fair and is frankly not relevant," she said.
While Google is purely a search-advertising company, Yahoo SEO is only part of Yahoo's business, she explained.
Bartz also said that Yahoo did not have a "vision problem" but that it had an "execution problem," which it was working hard to fix.
"I was very impressed with her," said Marilyn Neuterman, a retiree living in San Jose. "She gave good, clear answers and conducted a nice meeting."
In formal business at the meeting, shareholders re-elected the board of directors and followed the company's recommendation on four additional proposals, including three that dealt with appointing an accounting firm, the stock plan and employee stock options. Shareholders vetoed a fourth proposal that would have given them a say on executive pay.
Google searches for ways to keep big ideas at home
Story from the Wall Street Journal
Search giant concerned on lack of formal process for reviewing '20 percent time'.
Google Inc. is revamping how it develops and prioritizes new products, giving employees a pipeline to the company's top brass amid worries about losing its best people and promising ideas to start-ups.
The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.
"We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview.
Google can no longer afford to let promising ideas fall by the wayside. The Internet search giant's once-torrid growth has slowed. At the same time, it faces fresh competition from Microsoft Corp.'s new search engine, Bing, and start-ups such as Twitter Inc., which was founded by former Google employees.
In response, Google has recently started internal "innovation reviews," formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.
The meetings are designed to "force management to focus" on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.
The efforts have been behind several services that Google has recently unveiled, including software that allows companies to use Microsoft's Outlook email and calendar software while storing their data with Google. Microsoft said Wednesday the Google software interferes with an Outlook search function; Google disputed the severity of the problem, but said it is working to improve its software.
Another project, an imaging product that is based on facial-recognition software developed inside Google, is expected to be released this summer.
Google has also begun to give a few engineers broad leeway to start big projects of their choosing, Mr. Schmidt said. One result of this effort: Google Wave, a collaboration tool that the company previewed last month.
The moves are a shift for Google. Previously, its early-stage projects weren't systematically vetted by top executives. Employees with a new idea would lobby their bosses for resources and time. Once approved, a project could linger or die without getting much attention from senior management.
Google needs new products to jumpstart its growth. While it remains a juggernaut with one-third of all U.S. advertising dollars spent online, its year-over-year revenue growth has slowed from 56% in 2007 to 31% in 2008 and was just 6% in the first quarter of this year.
What's more, employees continue to leave Google as it evolves into a mature company with 20,000 workers."Most product managers evaluate [whether to stay] every six months," said Chris Vander Mey, a senior Google product manager who worked on the Microsoft Office integration.
While praising how Google has supported small projects like his own, he said he still expects to leave the company over time to explore other interests.
Google has taken cracks in the past at the retention problem. In March, it repriced millions of employee stock options whose value had been wiped out as Google's share price has fallen over the past two years. The company has also begun testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews.
David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who studies technology and e-commerce companies, said prioritizing is important for Google. While Google has launched hordes of new experiments,"in the absence of focus and promotion" few have turned into blockbusters, he said.
In the case of Google Wave, the company singled out Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen to test its approach to developing ideas.
The brothers, who are based in Australia, had been working on Google Maps. On the side, they were also thinking about creating a new communication system to replace email.
Messrs. Schmidt, Page and Brin were intrigued and gave the engineers a long leash."We said go do something really interesting and take as many resources as you need," Mr. Schmidt said. They gave the Rasmussens dozens of employees, he added, substantially more people than most early-stage projects.
To allow the duo to stick to their vision for the product, the top executives kept Wave secret from the rest of the company. Wave wasn't opened up to broader employee feedback until later in the development cycle.
Lars Rasmussen said the conditions freed his team from concerns such as fighting for engineers and removed pressure to integrate with other Google products."We knew we had to do something different," he said.
While Google has high hopes for Wave, which combines communications like email and messaging through a new service that updates in real-time, some are skeptical. Search analyst Danny Sullivan said he was "underwhelmed" by Wave and sees the service as a feature rather than a whole new way to share information. The service is scheduled to be released to the public later this year.
Other current and former Google employees see Wave as an exception. Sean Knapp, a former Google engineer, left the company in 2007 and started Ooyala Inc., a start-up that distributes and manages advertising around online video.
Mr. Knapp said Google managers offered him the chance to start the project within the company, but he declined. He worried he wouldn't feel the same pressure to succeed."If you're really aggressive, you want that sink or swim environment," he said.
Mr. Schmidt said it is "a fact of life" that some Google employees will ultimately choose the risk and reward of a start-up. But he added the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."
Google Shares Some Secrets
Story from Mercury News
Google shared one of the closely guarded secrets of its success with a roomful of developers this morning, revealing the tricks it uses to get Web pages to load in less than a second.
At Google Its All About Speed
"We really think that if the Web gets better and the Web gets faster it is good for everyone," Marissa Mayer, a vice president of search products, told attendees of the O'Reilly Velocity Conference. From its launch in 1998, Google distinguished itself from competitors with a focus on speed. While Excite and Yahoo weighed down their home pages by turning them into massive portals, Google's page featured mostly white space.
For years, Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, has joked that the reason was he refused to learn HTML, a computer language used to design Web pages. But there was another important motivation: White space loaded instantaneously. When Mayer started working at the search engine 10 years ago, she recalled, her boss closely monitored her code to make sure that she didn't add a single extraneous byte of data.
As Google grew, the number of Internet searches its computers conducted from several hundred thousand in 1999 to several billion in 2009. Speed became more important than ever. The home page was pared down and new products were vetted in a "latency lab" that measured how long a user would be forced to wait. The results sometimes led to surprising decisions. When Google launched an online payments system in 2006 called Google Checkout, engineers were instructed to render the blue shopping cart, which was the site's identifying icon, in painstaking HTML.
It was as if a newspaper, which use computers to produce each day's edition, had reverted to hot-type technology, which used massive machines to set type in a painstaking process. "Who would have thought that this big blob of HTML would load faster," Mayer said. "But the latency lab showed that it did."
It turns out that a delay as short of the blink of an eye — about 400 milliseconds — could turn users off. Last year, Mayer said, Google experimented by injecting a 400 millisecond delay into its delivery of search results. Searches per user started dropping. After six weeks, searches per user had fallen nearly 1 percent. That seemingly small figure represented several hundred million dollars a year in potential ad revenue, Mayer noted.
Mayer said Google has started sharing tips for speeding up Web pages, because it believes the faster the Web becomes the more people will ultimately use it — and use Google. In July 2009 Google unveiled a new Web site it had created for developers containing tutorials and performance tools. "Many Web sites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire Web," senior vice presidents Urs Hoelzle and Bill Coughran wrote in a blog post.
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Nielsen: Is It Time To Rethink Search?
Story from Biz Report
May search numbers are in and, while the numbers are much of the same, there is a new twist and it's called Bing. The question is, can Bing help to rethink and redefine search? Or is there no way for search engines to conquer the Google mountain?
First, the numbers. Nielsen Online found that of the 9.4 billion search queries made in the US in May more than 5.9 billion of them were made on the Google engine; that is a 63% share. Meanwhile closest competitors Yahoo (1.6 billion search queries, 17% share) and Microsoft (890 million searches, 9% share) continue to lag behind. This despite the fact that Yahoo posted a 22% YoY growth spurt.
One thing going against Google is the amount of time spent on-site. Although more consumers are searching via Google, consumers are spending more time on Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL engines, in some cases hours more per searcher.
And then there is Bing. Debuting on June 1, Microsoft's new Bing engine immediately doubled the number of unique visitors to the MSN/Windows Live hub, pushing Microsoft's search share for that week up about 6%. However, after the relative newness wore off, consumers seemed quick to return to their old Yahoo, Google and AOL haunts rather than continue pushing Bing to the forefront.
So, is there simply too much of a lead by the Google's and Yahoo's of the world for a new engine - even a Microsoft engine - to fare well for a long period of time?
"I think that many of us can agree it is very optimistic to think of Bing as an entirely new piece of technology, but the point is that online search hasn't really changed during the last ten years. So in order for Microsoft, or any other competitor, to pick up search share in this market they will have to redefine what people think of search," said Jon Stewart, via Nielsen Online Blog.
Google Tricycle Snaps Views From Philly Campus
Story from Detroit News
A pedicab-like vehicle mounted with an 8-foot-high camera has been rolling around the pedestrian walkways of the University of Pennsylvania to collect panoramic images of the campus for Google Maps' Street View feature, which gives users detailed, street-level views of map locations over the Internet.
Google Inc. has been using car-mounted cameras to prowl streets in the U.S. and around the world. The human-powered version allows coverage of pedestrian-only areas on campuses, in public parks and at theme parks, as well as along hiking and bicycling trails, as Google seeks to expand coverage of its maps.
The effort comes as Google faces complaints from many individuals and institutions that have been photographed around the world. Since launching in 2007, Street View has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide.
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the industry news site Search Engine Land, called the new effort a good public relations move by Google.
"This is a nice way for them to say 'Hey, look, Street View: It's really warm and fuzzy,'" he said. "It's not just about taking pictures of people's houses. We can find these footpaths that people want to go on and walking areas, places people will like."
Officials say the photos of Penn's tree-lined Locust Walk mall and other places will allow prospective students and their parents to get a good feel for the campus, give incoming students a way to map out the best route to their classes -- and let alumni fondly remember their school days.
"We see this as an opportunity ... for people to see as much of Penn as possible from their computer," said Marie Witt, University of Pennsylvania vice president for business services. "Students can show their parents where they're living, where the student union is, where their favorite classroom building is."
The 250-pound vehicle, which resembles the pedicabs that carry tourists around Philadelphia and other cities, has the cyclist pumping the pedals up front, with the camera mounted on a tower in the back. On the rear is a red generator along with a large white chest that looks like it might dispense ice cream but actually contains the computer recording the digital images.
On Friday, the tricycle trundled through the Ivy League school quads enclosed by student housing buildings, along campus footpaths and Philadelphia apartments, drawing stares from students and employees.
"I think it's fantastic," said Caitlin Hanrahan, 28, a nursing student. "This campus is really confusing ... and when you try and explain to people how to get to the building, people get lost all the time. I think something like that, where you can see a picture of it and what you have to walk through to get there, would actually be really helpful.
Lyndsey Hauck, 25, eating Chinese takeout on a bench in front of a green campus pond, dove for her cell phone to grab a picture as the tricycle apparatus swooped by, ignored by ducks and turtles even after it got stuck on the path and needed a slight push.
"Pretty cool -- always kind of interested in how they've done it, so now we know," said her companion, Cody Strohl, 29, also a Penn employee.
The tricycle has also been cruising around other colleges and universities, including Penn State, San Diego State and the University of San Diego, Google spokesman Sean Carlson said.
It has also been seen cruising past Rome's Trevi fountain, at Santa Monica's Third Street promenade and pier and along a Monterey, Calif. bicycle trail. Soon, views will be featured from along walkways of theme parks such as Legoland near Carlsbad, Calif., Carlson said.
In other countries, privacy concerns have been raised about the images.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google this week acceded to German demands to erase the raw footage of faces, house numbers, license plates and individuals who have told authorities they do not want their information used in the service.
Last month, Greek officials rejected a bid to photograph the nation's streets until more privacy safeguards are provided. In April, residents of one English village formed a human chain to stop a camera van, and in Japan the company agreed to reshoot views taken by a camera high enough to peer over fences.
Witt said university officials escorting the Google teams around campus were working to make sure privacy concerns were addressed. The company says faces and license plates will be blurred, and anyone can quickly flag for removal images they consider inappropriate by clicking a box on the bottom of each page.
One of the tricycle operators, Martin D.F. Angelo, 27, said the camera occasionally gets a leery reaction from older people but seems universally embraced by the young.
"The biggest disappointment that most people seem to voice is that we're actually going to blur out their faces," he said, "so they're not going to be Internet-famous or something like that."
!!! Attention Men: Gu1lty Pl3a From Sp@m K1ng !!!
Story from the Detroit News
Detroit -- A West Bloomfield man identified by a federal prosecutor as "the world's most notorious illegal spammer," pleaded guilty Monday to federal fraud and money laundering charges.
Alan M. Ralsky, 64, known as the "Spam King" for his years as a prolific and sophisticated e-mailer for hire, entered pleas before U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani to crimes that could cost him $1 million and put him behind bars for more than seven years.
Ralsky also agreed to help the government in future investigations in return for a possible reduction in his sentence.
For years, Ralsky has flooded the Internet with unsolicited promotions for everything from mortgages to male enhancement pills.
He pleaded guilty to being the mastermind of a scheme that boosted the value of "pink sheet" Chinese penny stocks by spamming tens of millions of Internet e-mail addresses with promotional messages.
When the prices rose, Ralsky and his co-defendants unloaded their stocks at a profit, according to government investigators.
It was alleged that Ralsky made about $3 million from illegal spamming in the summer of 2005 alone.
Also pleading guilty Monday were Ralsky's son-in-law, Scott K. Bradley, 48, of West Bloomfield; and co-conspirators James E. Fite, 36, of Culver City, Calif.; John S. Bown, 45, of Fresno, Calif.; and William C. Neil, 46, also of Fresno.
When indictments were handed up by a grand jury in January, the case was described by federal authorities as the largest criminal spam and Internet fraud action in American history.
"Using the Internet to manipulate the stock market through spam e-mail campaigns is a serious crime," U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg, the prosecutor in the case, said in a statement released Monday.
"This case serves notice that federal law enforcement has both the capacity and the will to successfully investigate, prosecute and punish cybercrimes."
The defendants from China, Canada, Russia and throughout the United States were accused of using elaborate software to send millions of spam e-mail messages daily between 2004 and 2006. Federal agents raided Ralsky's $750,000 home and other locations in September 2005, seizing computer equipment.
At that time, Ralsky told The Detroit News he wasn't a spammer, but described his work as "a commercial e-mailer."
...the case was described by federal authorities as the largest criminal spam and Internet fraud action in American history
But, John Mozena, a Grosse Pointe Woods resident and co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, said it's the illegal actions of Internet buccaneers like Ralsky that clog e-mail boxes with junk mail and cause untold expenses for legitimate businesses.
"We are all paying the 'Spam Tax' because of spammers like Ralsky," said Mozena who helped law enforcement when it launched a three-year investigation of Ralsky.
"A huge percentage of e-mail is spam, which loads mailboxes and causes money to be spent on teams of experts bent on stopping it.
"Your computer can be hijacked and used in a 'botnet,' like a zombie, to send more e-mail without you even knowing about it until your service provider suddenly cancels your service.
"There is a large added cost to being on the Internet and we are all having to pay this cost for unscrupulous unethical people who are trying to hijack it to make money."
Ralsky is a former insurance agent who lost his license in Illinois and declared bankruptcy. He served three years probation for a felony conviction of falsifying bank records.
In the late 1990s, he sold his car to buy computers and launch a business sending bulk e-mail messages.
In 2002, Ralsky agreed to an undisclosed cash settlement to end a lawsuit against him by Verizon Internet Services, which alleged he twice paralyzed the network in 2000 with massive e-mailed pitches for items like diet pills and vacations.
He boasted of getting offers from colleges to lecture on his Internet practices.
Federal laws enacted in 2004 making electronic mail fraud a crime describe signs of illegal spam as including efforts to disguise the source and nature of e-mails, and using techniques to evade spam filtering programs.
"He was one of the bigger guys out there, but it's so hard to figure out who is actually doing this because of hidden identities, shell companies and offshore servers," Mozena said.
"In the end, I believe it was old-fashioned police work that caught up to Mr. Ralsky. The feds followed the money. They tracked his profits and that's a lot easier than trying to convince a judge and jury of the details of network topography in China."
Prior guilty pleas were taken from Judy Devenow, 56, of East Lansing, Francis Tribble, 41, of Los Angeles, Calif., and How Wai John Hui, 50, of Vancouver, Canada, and Hong Kong, China. No date has been set for sentencing. Ralsky and the others will remain free until then.
T-Mobile To Launch Google Phone In July
Story from USA Today
Following huge introductions of the Palm Pre and new iPhone 3G S, T-Mobile on Monday announces July availability of MyTouch 3G, the second phone on Google's Android operating system.
It's the first of 18 new Google-powered phones coming worldwide by the end of the year, Google says, declining to provide specifics. Tech and telecom analysts expect Sprint to have an Android phone by year's end.
T-Mobile has sold 1 million of its first-generation Google phone, the G1. That's tepid compared with the 21.2 million iPhones sold in the last two years, but T-Mobile says it's thrilled with the response. It expects the new phone to sell at a faster clip, and to outpace the competition in mobile SEO.
The MyTouch is smaller, can sync with Microsoft Outlook and has an improved battery, T-Mobile says. "We've addressed some of the concerns from customers," says Andrew Sherrard, T-Mobile vice president.
Current T-Mobile customers can order beginning July 8 for delivery later in the month. General retail availability is planned for early August.
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The touch-screen phone — made by HTC — sells for $199 with a new two-year contract. Sherrard says T-Mobile will offer a discounted rate for current customers but hasn't finalized pricing.
T-Mobile's selling point is personalization, with customizable menus, wallpapers and icons. A new program called Sherpa learns your favorite locations and preferences and makes recommendations accordingly. The phone also has instant access to Google services.
Even though the Android platform hasn't taken off in public consciousness as the iPhone has, "It's important to remember that globally, this is a market of billions and billions of users," says Andy Castonguay, a Yankee Group analyst. "There's plenty of room for lots of different players."
Google first announced Android in 2007. It gives the operating system to manufacturers for free. Google product manager Erick Tseng says getting phones from idea stage to manufacturer is an 18- to 24-month process. "What you're seeing now is the outcome of the development."
Google has 5,000 applications available for Android from its network of developers, and the list is growing, says Tseng.
Apple has a huge lead, with more than 50,000 applications available from about 20,000 developers, says Forrester Group analyst Charles Golvin. "But in the United States, there are probably more developers working with Google, after Apple, than any other mobile platform."
Google's Grab For Display Ad Market
Story from Business Week
The search king aims to unseat Yahoo and Microsoft with new, ultra-targeted banner ads. Will Web publishers and online ad agencies bite?
For all its success selling text ads alongside search results, Google (GOOG) can't seem to make a go of it anywhere else in the ad world. In January, it shut down a two-year-old operation that sold print ads in newspapers. A few weeks later it abandoned an effort to buy and sell radio spots. And a TV ad project has been slow-going. To make matters worse, the economy has hit Google's mainstay search ads: First-quarter revenue growth of 6%, though better than many companies in the recession, is far below its high double-digit gains of years past.
In its hunt for new growth, the search giant is redoubling efforts to grab a bigger piece of the largest online ad market it doesn't control: display ads, the pictorial banners and videos that account for more than a third of the $40 billion online ad market. "Google has won the search battle, so its whole future is display," says Jay Sears, executive vice-president for strategic products and business development with online ad firm ContextWeb.
Google faces a tough challenge. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN have a huge lead in display ads, largely because they can put ads on their own pages of content, like Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Google hopes to place more display ads on its YouTube site as well as on thousands of partner sites, from small blogs to The New York Times.
MATCHING ADS TO BUYERS
But it aims to do more than simply help BMW, say, plaster brand ads on car videos or car sites. The fastest-growing kind of display ads, called performance ads, work more like search. They allow advertisers to use data analysis and user-tracking technologies to match ads more closely to likely buyers and measure mouse clicks and other actions so advertisers pay only when ads deliver. Google spies an opportunity to apply its mathematical wizardry to make those ads even more effective. The idea is to make display ads useful knowledge instead of visual clutter. "It's like search—matching people with information they want," says Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology. "It just happens to be promotional."
This summer, Google will begin demonstrating what may be its most potent weapon in this emerging battle: an overhauled version of the advertising exchange that it picked up in the $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick last year. Ad exchanges are sort of like stock exchanges for online ads. Web sites put ad space up for auction, and ad agencies, armed with demographic and behavioral data about the people who visit those sites, bid to place ads for their clients' campaigns. Yahoo, Microsoft, and others also run exchanges.
Until now, Google's and DoubleClick's ad-placement systems used different software, so ad agencies had to cobble together programs to place, monitor, and measure ads. In the revamped exchange, they'll be able to use the two systems seamlessly, making ad buys simpler. At the same time, Google is pushing Web publishers, which have been wary of putting prime ad space on the exchange for fear of turning it into a low-value commodity, to pony up more space. In return, Google is expected to give Web publishers more control over pricing and who can bid on the space.
Google will also help advertisers and agencies buy ads more easily and quickly: When ad space with price and audience demographics matches those advertisers set for a particular ad, the spot runs instantly. "The exchange will allow Google to make a go of it in display," says Michael Hayes, executive vice-president and managing director of digital for ad agency Initiative. "It really turns the business model on its head."
The exchange is part of Google's overriding goal to make display ads, which can be expensive to create and complex to manage, so easy that even the smallest businesses can use them. "Google's vision is to grow the pie for everybody," says Neal Mohan, Google's director of display products. For instance, Google introduced a free Display Ad Builder last fall that lets anyone use simple building blocks to create an ad.
Some 80% of those using it had never bought a display ad before. Marc Loge, who handles online ads for the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles, had run search ads exclusively and didn't want to bother with display. But at Google's urging he quickly created a bare-bones ad and ran it on Google's Web sites. "We've gotten great returns—even better than search," says Loge.
DEPARTING AD EXECS
At the same time, Google wants to bring onto the exchange more large Web sites, which control the bulk of display-ad revenues. DoubleClick's relationships with the biggest Web publishers may give it a leg up. "Google is very central to our strategy," says Curt Hecht, president of the tech development unit at VivaKi, ad agency Publicis Groupe's media and online operation.
Still, the exchange won't be an instant game-changer. Since exchanges require a new mindset at agencies and publishers, they may take time to catch on widely, says Mike Walrath, founder of Yahoo's Right Media exchange. And some think anything but search gets short shrift inside Google. "Display is still the redheaded stepchild of their ad initiatives," says Rob Leathern, CEO at CPM Advisors, which helps advertisers improve their online campaigns.
Insiders say that's partly why Google has seen a stream of departures of ad executives in the past two months who see more opportunities elsewhere. Most recently, David Rosenblatt, president of Google's display-ad efforts and former DoubleClick CEO, left in May. But Brin insists Google is serious. "Display is going to be a large business for us," he says. "It's not just an experiment."
Nielsen: Is It Time To Rethink Search?
Story from Biz Report
May 2009 search numbers are in and, while the numbers are much of the same, there is a new twist and it's called Bing. The question is, can Bing help to rethink and redefine search? Or is there no way for search engines to conquer the Google mountain?
First, the numbers. Nielsen Online found that of the 9.4 billion search queries made in the US in May more than 5.9 billion of them were made on the Google engine; that is a 63% share. Meanwhile closest competitors Yahoo (1.6 billion search queries, 17% share) and Microsoft (890 million searches, 9% share) continue to lag behind. This despite the fact that Yahoo posted a 22% YoY growth spurt.
One thing going against Google is the amount of time spent on-site. Although more consumers are searching via Google, consumers are spending more time on Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL engines, in some cases hours more per searcher.
And then there is Bing. Debuting on June 1, Microsoft's new Bing engine immediately doubled the number of unique visitors to the MSN/Windows Live hub, pushing Microsoft's search share for that week up about 6%. However, after the relative newness wore off, consumers seemed quick to return to their old Yahoo, Google and AOL haunts rather than continue pushing Bing to the forefront.
So, is there simply too much of a lead by the Google's and Yahoo's of the world for a new engine - even a Microsoft engine - to fare well for a long period of time?
"I think that many of us can agree it is very optimistic to think of Bing as an entirely new piece of technology, but the point is that online search hasn't really changed during the last ten years. So in order for Microsoft, or any other competitor, to pick up search share in this market they will have to redefine what people think of search," says an internet marketing consultant.
