No prizes for guessing the leader; Google is still hugely dominant with over 90% of market share. Bing & Yahoo make a notable contribution with just over roughly 3% each, leaving the other two major search engines, AOL & Ask, trailing with less than 1% each. These of course all still way ahead of all other search engine brands, which combined only account for less than 0.2% of this year’s market share. When you consider just how many are included in this bracket, the significance of these results really starts to sink in – remember Lycos, AltaVista or MSN search? All have practically sunk without trace, scary stuff.

So what does this mean for your marketing? Well, if you’re not advertising on Google, you should be. Whether you like it or not, Google has total dominance in the Search market. It’s been reported that globally Google receives over 1 billion monthly unique visitors, that’s huge – it equates to approximately 1 in 7 people around the world visiting Google each month. To see just how popular Google is, use the below link to see a great 3D representation of the number searches around the globe – it’s something to behold:

click here >> Google Search Globe << click here

To find out more about Search Engine Marketing, click here, or alternatively give us a call on 0845 275 1225.

Sources: StatCounter.com, SearchEngineWatch.com, ComScore.com, Google Trends

Speculation continues to spread within Search Marketing circles as to whether or not Yahoo and Microsoft are planning to work together in some capacity. Even following the collapse of Microsoft’s efforts to acquire Yahoo for a massive $44 billion over a year ago rumours have reignited about the two companies working together following the recent launch of microsoft’s latest Search/Decision Engine Bing. This has been further fuelled by comments made from executives from both companies.

It is now thought the pair are looking to combine to create a more effective rival to search engine giants Google. Bing is said to be set to become the search provider on Yahoo.com allowing the two companies to compete for further market share and inventory.

A recent report from AdAge suggests that a deal is likely to be announced this week and could potentially give Microsoft up to a 30% share of the international search market. According to the report the deal would be structured as below:

“Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure. The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media.”

Basically, the idea behind this would be to cut Yahoo’s costs whilst opening a much larger revenue stream. In addition, the deal would allow Microsoft the opportunity to become a bigger player in the search market.

However, this deal is far from secured and until both parties can happily agree on way to effectively work together in may take time for this arrangement to be hugely positive for the businesses. Remember, both Yahoo and Microsoft have desperately struggled to organically improve market share by any meaningful percentages over the past few years and a deal between the two is unlikely to change this insantly.

Microsoft still have to ensure that Bing is a much much better product than Google for any significant changes yet.

Source: Mashable

Top Search Engines by Visits and Volume

Top 10 Social Networking Sites

Top 10 Entertainment Sites

Top 10 most fast moving search terms

Source: Hitwise

Recent reports show that online advertising spend is holding up much better than previously predicted.

A new report from ZenithOptimedia suggests that global internet advertising will grow by 10% in 2009 and also forecasts online adspend to achieve a 15.1% share of world wide advert expenditure by 2011.

The predictions from the Publicis Groupe-owned media agency are up 1.5% from previous estimations in April of a 8.6% growth in 2009. Furthermore, by 2011 online advertising is projected to make up 15.1% of overall advertising spend, an additional increase in forecasts from 2008 when it online ad spend was predicted to make up 10.5% of overall.

The growth is predicted across in various online portals but particularly in search marketing, where a 20% increase in forecasted. In addition, display advertising is predicted to grow 3% and an online classified growth of 1.8%.

The recent launch of Microsoft’s search engine Bing and the ever increasing usage of Google are suggested to spur further expenditure in search marketing spend.

ZenithOptimedia also forecasts that offline media such as newspapers will continue to decrease. The newspaper ad market is suggested to continue to shrink, it said, every year over its forecast period, falling to 22.7% below its 2007 peak in 2011.

Source: Brand Republic

Of all the major online brands it seems as though Microsoft have won the race to get their update made first. Bing now displays recent Tweets from well-known people / celebrities. It seems that Microsoft were just rushing to win the race rather than implementing an exciting new tool to its search engine. The only way you can actually see these results is when you physically type in a celebrity name and ‘Twitter’ in the same search query.

The latest announcements from Facebook also suggest that they are looking at the advantages of ‘real-time web’. It seems as though Facebook is looking to transition towards becoming more public – some have said even more Twitter-like. Reports from last week also announced that Facebook will be beta testing a new publishing feature in which your Facebook status updates can be optionally made public. Essentially, this will allow users to use Facebook a lot like Twitter broadcasting your updates publically.

Source: Mashable

Microsoft have started to engage with web masters at last with a new document giving advice on optimising your website for Bing.

The document content makes interesting reading and it is good to see Microsoft engaging with us all.

• Download a copy here >>

Microsoft seem to have become a little desperate in their attempts to get internet users using their latest version of Internet Explorer.

The page has now been removed but click here to see the full version >>

Top 20 websites

Google and Facebook still display their supremecy in online usage. The main proportion of the top 20 websites is dominated by Social Networking sites, search engines and news portals.

Top 10 Search Engines

Google is stil by far the UK’s favourite search engine. Google.co.uk, Google.com and Google UK image search made up over 85% of visits to search engines.

Top 10 Overall Search Terms

Again search terms are dominated by Social Network search phrases as they continue to grow in popularity.

Top 10 Social Networks

As Facebook continues to grow and grow in the UK so does the websites rankings in terms of visits making up almost half of all visits to Social Networking sites as visits to competitors bebo and MySpace struggle to keep up with the pace.

Source: Hitwise

Bing is currently unavailable to the public, however, we are told that as of June 1st some Microsoft Live users will receive Bing search results. By June the 4th Bing will apparently be Microsoft’s default search tool.

According to Microsoft, Bing provides users with a greater search experience, helping them make better decisions. It has even been dubbed a “decision engine” by some due to the fact many of the new features involve assisting searchers chose the best option be it in making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

So does Bing have a chance of competing with Search Engine powerhouse Google?

Well, that is the real question. One major factor is how much Microsoft are willing to invest in promoting the new search engine. Obviously, the company is certainly not short of money, but look at their rivals – Yahoo! and also more recently Ask who have invested millions with only little improvement in search market share.

Google’s dominance doesn’t look set to be challenged. Least of all by a brand new search engine, it is also key to remember that Microsoft only launched Live Search in 2006 – less than 3 years ago, with minimal success. Marketers have also critisized the branding of the new search engine deeming it a ‘fail’.

So what does Bing have to offer?

On the surface it may not seem to offer much different to Google, but Bing has some great features that are definatley worth investigating.

Check out the video above, areas of particular interest are: bing local, bing shopping, bing health & bing travel.

Sources: Microsoft , TechRadar & Cnet

Microsoft are to attempt to take a noticeable amount of earch space market share from leaders Google and Yahoo.

After a pretty poor start and struggling initially with branding Micrososft have had little impact on the search market. It was recently suggested by AdvertisingAge that Microsoft are going to spend between $80 and $100 million on turning this around.

What the branding may be is still fairly unknown (Microsoft, MSN, Live?) but they did reveal tests of their latest search interface, code named Kumo, a short time ago. The campaign is set to consist of Online Ads, TV, Print and Radio.

Source: SearchEngineLand