X SEO

Both Bing and Yahoo gained market share this month, while Google’s share declined.

• The overall picture and trends remain the same – Google Powered engines (Google and AOL) continue to slowly lose traction monthly; while the Bing Powered engines (Bing and Yahoo!) continue to gain momentum.  Google Powered share declined 1.2ppt, while Bing Powered increased its share by those 1.2pppt’s.
• Google Powered now represents 68.3% of the market and Bing Powered has 32.5% of the market.
• Bing experienced the biggest share increase of 0.7ppt’s to now represent 17% of the US search market.
• Yahoo! witnessed its first share gain in 4 months, currently owns 15.5% of the market.
• Google experienced a decline, and now accounts for 66.7% of the market.
• AOL’s share remained flat.
• The overall search market – as defined by these 4 engines – saw an 4.9% M-O-M increase of total search query activity from December 2011.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself to be part of the anti Search Plus Your World crowd. I think it has its pros and cons.

I will say that I don’t like when it leads to Google serving me less relevant results (which I think is happening more as a result of other algorithm tweaks as well). I searched for “mark zuckerberg” and Google returned me his Google+ profile as the very top result. Not his Facebook profile. His Google+ profile.

Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared publicly? Zero.

Any guesses as to how many Google+ updates Zuckerberg has shared with me personally? Same answer.

So how is Zuck’s Google+ profile supposed to help me as a user for such a general query? I don’t know. Perhaps Google is delivering this result because I do have Zuckerberg in a circle (in case he ever does make an update). I’m not sure, because when I try to test this by taking him out of the circle, Google doesn’t accept the removal. A bug I guess. Either way, if it’s because of the “personal connection” between Mark and myself, does that mean Google’s algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to realize that there is virtually no content on Zuckerberg’s profile? Isn’t that against the rules of search quality, which Google has driven into the ground since the unleashing of the Panda update in 2011?

Of course it’s sophisticated enough.

Isn’t it also sophisticated enough to see that Mark and I have never actually exchanged a piece of information with one another via Google+?

Probably.

I don’t want to get into all of the talk about Google’s competitive practices here, because that’s not the part that bothers me as a user. It’s the whole making the results less usable thing.

As a Google user, I want integration among the various Google services I use. However, sometimes Search Plus Your World benefits the results, and sometimes it does not.

Two months ago, we announced our plans to roll out a new design for the Google bar. Our goal was to create a beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. Based on your feedback, we realized there were some elements of the new bar that we could improve, and with that in mind, we’re introducing an updated version that we believe will provide a better experience.

The new design retains many of the feature changes we made in November that proved popular, including a unified search box and Google+ sharing and notifications across Google. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.

We’ll be rolling out this new version of the Google bar over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we invite you to read about the new design in our Help Center, and send us your feedback.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Technical Lead

This morning we brought you news of Google’s Screenwise program. Participants in Screenwise install an extension in their Google Chrome browser that lets Google monitor their internet activity. Participants are compensated with a $5 gift code to Amazon as soon as they install the browser extension, and another every three months for a year, totally $25 in Amazon credit for participating in the program.

As part of this morning’s story I contacted Google’s PR department about the program. Shortly after the story ran, a Google spokesperson got back to me with the following statement:

Like many other web and media companies, we do panel research to help better serve our users by learning more about people’s media use, on the web and elsewhere. This panel is one such small project that started near the beginning of the year. Of course, this is completely optional to join. People can choose to participate if it’s of interest (or if the gift appeals) and everyone who does participate has complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel. People can stay on the panel as long as they’d like, or leave at any time.

So it looks like Screenwise is a fairly ordinary market research panel, just with a browser extension in place of a questionnaire. Participants have a high degree of control over exactly what Google sees and for how long. Google is apparently also shooting for a small focus group-type program. In fact, the Screenwise sign up page no longer has a place to put your email address. Instead visitors to the site are greeted with the message, “We appreciate and are overwhelmed by your interest at the moment. Please come back later for more details.”

What do you think of Screenwise? Did you sign up for the program? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Specs
Who Simon Fleming-Wood 
Age 43 
New gig CMO, Pandora
Old gig Founding vp of marketing, Pure Digital Technologies

Pandora is 10 years old, but you’re its first chief marketing officer. Why was the position created now? 
I think Pandora hired me partly because they’ve grown so significantly that it makes sense for someone to come in and be the shepherd of the brand and build in even more disciplined approaches. That’s both in terms of how we approach new customer acquisition as well as maintaining and growing what we call “listening intensity.”

Listening intensity?
It refers to the way we compete for greater share of somebody’s music listening requirements, so to speak.

How will you use branding to differentiate from new competitors like Spotify and iHeartRadio? Or will the selling point merely be, “We’re the biggest”?
No, the beauty is in the fact that it is so inherently differentiated based on its focus on personalization. You come and you tell us a little bit of information about what you like and this sort of magic thing happens. Nobody else has the magic thing that we have, which is the Music Genome Project. Ten years of work have gone into building this hand-built database of musicological DNA that allows people on the fly wherever they are to find music that they love. That is the differentiation.

So what’s your vision for the brand?
What makes Pandora so interesting to me personally—most recently I was on the founding team of Pure Digital Technologies, which was the creator of Flip Video, so I was the architect of that brand …

That was a great brand.
It still is! It was the James Dean of brands—it went out in its prime. So I get interested in technologies that reinvent categories. In that world, Flip Video sort of reinvented consumer video for people by making it simple, and then the Flip brand became what was new in video. We branded that difference. Pandora to me is the same opportunity as it relates to radio. There’s a tired old category, and Pandora has come along to reinvent that through this concept of personalized radio. In that world lies the opportunity to create a very rich brand around personalization.

For a while, Pandora had positioned itself as an underdog in its conflicts with the music labels. That “Save Pandora” rallying cry gave the brand a more mainstream awareness. Is that an image the company continues to embrace? 
I think one of the brand attributes for Pandora is that, even though it now has over 125 million registered users, people still have this personal association with it, and in some ways, it’s still like a secret. I don’t want, from a brand perspective, to ignore that. I think that’s cool. But do we see ourselves as adversarial with the other players in the music industry, and is that part of our way of hyping the brand? Absolutely not. We feel that we are an important part of a healthy music industry. We pay royalties to artists. We pay much higher royalties than traditional radio does.

What’s your favorite station on Pandora? 
I’m a Canadian boy, so my current favorite station is The Tragically Hip Radio. It brings up a lot of Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and mellow stuff.

In the office, do you all fight over which station is played?
It’s a lot of people on headphones.

“We’re not going to become a cable network,” declared Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff, explaining the rollout last week of The Huffington Post Streaming Network.

Yet questions on what exactly it is going to be will continue to dog the network until its planned early summer launch.

For 12 hours a day and five days a week, HuffPo will stream live and archived video ranging from breaking news to celebrity interviews to debates between HuffPo writers and commenters.

Already heavily scrutinized is HuffPo’s eschewing of a set programming schedule. Sekoff likened it to mirroring the Internet’s serendipitous experience, which would be fine if Internet users weren’t so much like hummingbirds flitting from one site to the next. Advertisers will not be guaranteed TV-level eyeballs at any given time for the simple reason that the network won’t be able to sustain them.

While Fox News, CNN and CBS News have been streaming live news in one form or another for years, none has become a veritable success. HuffPo conceivably could carve away marketshare and stake itself as the go-to online news broadcaster for many consumers, echoing the online news publisher’s original ascent.

That a leadership vacancy exists doesn’t mean, however, that HuffPo will be able to fill it. Paul Slavin, svp and gm of Everyday Health Studios and former ABC News svp who oversaw the company’s digital network ABC News Now, said while ABC News lowering its pay wall for a breaking news story would sometimes result in up to 10 million viewers, HuffPo’s “challenge is going to be day-to-day. They’ll be able to get people to watch when there’s big news like a hurricane, but they need to train people to come regularly.”

HuffPo will also need to attract advertisers to sponsor the network on a regular basis. The site is seeking five or six founding sponsors. (Select advertisers and agencies received the earliest previews around the time of last month’s Consumer Electronics Show.) The network will use a premium sponsorship model, featuring “a handful of partners” sharing a voice across online, mobile and tablet, said Janet Balis, svp and head of sales strategy, marketing and partnerships at AOL Advertising. Advertising opportunities include preroll ads and segment sponsorships.

HuffPo doesn’t appear to be too concerned about competing for TV advertising dollars. Balis said she doesn’t think about it in those terms and pointed to digital’s interactive capabilities as a key differentiator. Advertisers, said Sekoff, could sponsor a tweet that would appear atop the network’s social feed à la Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.

Steve Minichini, president of interactive marketing at TargetCast, had an early look at the network and said the offering will impress marketers, provided that HuffPo doesn’t bombard viewers with ads. “Online video’s done really well with advertisers for brand recall and brand affinity because the commercial load has been light,” he said.

“I am unclear…how HuffPo is going to roll out its video ad sponsorships,” Minichini added. “But if they keep the load light, they have enough inventory to make a decent amount of revenue and still have a different, meaningful consumer connection to their marketers.”

Mary Shirley, vp of digital media activation at Horizon Media, hasn’t seen the network yet but said a key consideration for her is the context in which an ad is shown. Given the network’s seat-of-the-pants programming, an airline could sponsor a segment on holiday travel only to see HuffPo cut to a breaking story about a plane crash. Shirley assumed there will be safeguards in place to avoid that pratfall.

“It has to be for advertisers who are already comfortable in news in general,” she said.

Beyond advertisers, it will be interesting to see how HuffPo's potential live-news-on-the-Web competitors react, given that they've got plenty of time to formulate a strategy. One thing to watch for: will Fox News and MSNBC follow CNN's lead, and start streaming their cable networks live online — albeit only to paying cable subscribers, as CNN does.

Image from: Smart Boy Designs

Bing ended 2011 as the second largest search engine in the US.  While Google is still the top used search engine for core web searches, Bing gained the most traction year over year and grew its share of the market by 4.4ppt’s to 16.3% while Google experienced a decline of 3.7ppt’s and now stands at 67.9% of the market.

What is driving Bing’s growth?

Bing is changing the way consumers engage with search.  In the late fall of 2010 they rolled out Bing Rewards, a loyalty program that encourages consumers to search and share on Bing by earning credits available for redemption at various retailers such as Red Box and Amazon.  You’ll notice the first wave of monthly share gains began in January of 2011.

Then they began to integrate Facebook “social signals” into their search results in May.  This coincided with the steady increase in share that they began to experience in June.  Their renewed partnership with Twitter was announced in September.  Bringing this channel of real-time information into its search results could have provided Bing with a competitive advantage that precipitated the share gains they experienced in last few months of the year.

Bing is not just gaining share in terms of query volume but their strategies are also getting more unique users to its engine. Of the top three engines, it saw the biggest absolute increase in the number of unique users in 2011:

The first commercial for its new campaign “Bing Is For #Doing” will air during the Super Bowl on Sunday, and positions Bing as an engine that is not just for information retrieval but as something people use to “do more” in their lives.  Will this new approach to search lead to further market share gains for Bing?  Will Rewards, Facebook, and Twitter provide a better user experience than the recently launched Google Search Plus Your World (integrating Google+ information within Google’s search results)?  Stay tuned.

Image from: Stephen Coburn / Shutterstock

I recently saw an advertisement on the train for much-hyped, new kid in the online food delivery space, Seamless.com. As an online and mobile food ordering company, users can browse over 7,000 restaurants throughout the U.S. and place their order online for free. Now, ordering take-out is no new phenomenon. But what Seamless offers is the ability to craft your meal from a variety of your favorite restaurants.

Whether ordering for one or a group deciding what to eat for dinner is always a little tricky with so many good choices out there.

I decided to look at Compete.com and see who was searching to “order food online.”

Among the top 4 sites was Seamless.com, followed by Delivery.com, GrubHub.com and Eat24Hours.com. I decided to look into these and see how many people actually order food online.

Grubhub.com has gained headway over its competitors in the last 6 months, while Seamless.com is taking a downward dive.

Seamless.com hasn’t been around as long as Grubhub and with less monthly visitors the website has a longer average stay than Grubhub.

Seamless has capitalized on search and once visitors come to the website they stay longer than competitor sites.

Do you order food online? Which site do you prefer?

While thousands of lucky fans will brave the crowds at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. to fill the coveted seats at this Sunday’s Super Bowl, many more in the U.S. will enjoy the game from home—in front of the TV, with mobile phones and tablets at the ready.

As the New York Giants and New England Patriots prepare for kickoff, here are several ways to make the most of the big game with Google—wherever you’re watching. You can explore the full list in our Game Day with Google playbook, a new page on Inside Search that we’ve filled with tips on how to use Google to enjoy the game.

Get the inside scoop
Visit the Giants and Patriots Google+ pages for behind-the-scenes coverage and details on a chance for you to join the Giants pre-game hangout on Thursday for a face-to-face chat with the players. Be sure to leave a comment on their post for a chance to participate.

On Monday, Feb 6 at noon ET, stop by the NBC Sports Google+ page for a Hangout On Air with CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell. He’ll chat about the previous day’s game and review the best commercials with fans that drop in. Leave a comment on this NBC Sports post to throw your name in the hat to be one of the lucky participants who will chat with Rovell On Air.

Plan your party
Super Bowl party rivalry is already in full swing with Indiana leading the pack in Google searches for [super bowl party], ahead of both New York and Massachusetts. Despite New York being the home state of the buffalo wing, searches for [chicken wings] are nearly 50 percent higher in Massachusetts.

If you’re looking for a dip recipes, [hummus] reigns supreme, followed by guacamole, queso and bean dip. Use Google Recipe search to find a recipe with the ingredients to make everyone happy. Or, swing by ChefHangout on Google+ to join a cooking class on favorite Super Bowl party foods.

Talking babies or barking dogs? You decide.
It wouldn’t be the Super Bowl without the commercials. We’ve already seen a flurry of pre-game teasers pop up on YouTube and Google+, but which commercial will reign supreme? Our fifth annual YouTube Ad Blitz in partnership with NBC Sports enables you to replay and vote on your favorite commercials online from a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Tune in to the YouTube Ad Blitz channel or NBCSports.com to watch and rate the commercials.

Watch the Madonna premiere on YouTube
If the halftime show interests you more than counting yards gained and lost, get an early taste of the show with Madonna’s music video premiere for “Give Me All Your Luvin” featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A on her official youtube.com/Madonna channel this Friday and on the YouTube Ad Blitz channel pre-game on Sunday. You can pre-order her deluxe album right there in the video description. And make sure to tune in to Madonna’s Google+ profile all week long for her latest news.

May the best team win!

Posted by Sue McCauley, YouTube Ad Blitz program manager (and die-hard Giants fan)

Image from: ModCloth

From mp3 players to custom shoes, we’re a culture obsessed with being different. This is apparent in the success of companies that have harnessed crowd sourcing techniques for women’s fashion. The community around ModCloth is clutch because the pictures and comments they add under the product descriptions make you feel more comfortable with buying clothing online. Community aside, the simple fact that a clothing manufacturer actually cares what designs the consumer likes and allows them vote up the best designs is incredibly attractive. If you’re not yet familiar with ModCloth.com, I’m certain it’s your fashionable lady friend’s best-kept secret. Putting the shameless gushing over Modcoth’s technology and community aside for a moment, I must comment on what a killer job their marketing department is doing. Whomever works with Modcloth’s paid search campaigns deserves a raise (if I were a recruiter with this information, I’d be looking to poach your team). If you take a look at the graph below, you can see how the paid search spend had directly impacted their growth over the last 2 years (the proof is in the pudding).

If you take a closer look at their keyword activity for the last 90 days, 60% of their top 10 keyword phrases include the word “dresses” -of which 80% have over 40% keyword spend. This blows competitors like ShopRuche.com out of the water.

From a competitive search stand-point they should look out for copy-cats like ShopRuche.com. Judging by the experience I had when searching for “ModCloth” via Google and ShopRuche.com coming up as a paid referral, the technique of paying for ModCloth’s branded terms (albeit a popular search term) seems to be an ill-fitting strategy.

Competitive Recommendations

From an incoming traffic strategy stand-point, ModCloth.com could stand to learn something from ShopRuche.com’s social networking success. For example, if I were ModCloth, I’d be standing over my web developer’s shoulder right now adding Pinterest to my social sharing bar, ShopRuche has more than twice as much traffic from this source as ModCloth does. I’d also likely be spying on ShopRuche’s Twitter stream and engaged followers as well as racking my brain to figure out what connection they have to the boutique.com look-a-like polyvore.com.

If I were ShopRuche.com I’d be looking into what makes ModCloth.com’s search strategy so incredibly vivacious and also checking out if their Facebook activity is most engaging from a “be the buyer” stand-point or if it’s another initiative.

Given some of the information above and your experience with these up-and-coming brands, what observations can you glean? Is ModCloth’s model the future of fashion, or just a passing trend?