2006 Search Industry Changes Recap

It has been a year of changes in the search industry in 2006, as many major updates were implemented by the search engines, either purely for keeping the competitiveness of their PPC programs or as strategies of an entire company. The major changes include:

Google

Google implemented 3 major updates on Adwords to combat search arbitrage.

In July, Google forced advertisers to raise their minimum CPC to keep their ads running on Adwords, by implementing the quality score change to landing pages. The impact was explained on Adwords Quality Score Change.

In September, Adwords advertisers with non-US dollar accounts had their Minimum CPC amounts rounded (or raised). This seems to be another evidence in which Google was further combating search arbitrage, though this time mostly affected the non-US based advertisers. Google’s explanation on this can be found on Adwords Automatic Minimum CPC Changes.

To combat arbitrage on the content network, Google incorporated landing page quality into the quality score of the contextually targeted ads in November. Read more on Adwords Landing Page Quality For Content Network.

In formally entering the Chinese search market, Google rebranded itself with a new Chinese name ‘Guge’, as well as launched the CN domain (www.google.cn).

Yahoo!

Yahoo! launched new Search Marketing platform Panama. Selected advertisers were invited to upgrade, while the rest of existing advertisers are only expected to be fully migrated to this new platform by early 2007. By making this move, Yahoo! Search Marketing will have more advanced features than before. Read more on Yahoo! New PPC Platform.

Yahoo! had its internal memo leaked in which the Internet portal giant has been criticized by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice-president at Yahoo!, for being lack a focus, lack clarity of ownership and accountability, and lack decisiveness on its company strategies. Vinny Lingham’s blog has coverage on the topic with some great insights.

Baidu

Baidu made a change to its PPC ad ranking algorithm by finally introducing the Combined Ranking Index so that price is not anymore the only factor in determining ad rankings. Read more on Baidu PPC Algorithm Change.

This year, Baidu further dominated its number 1 Chinese search engine status by improving the search market share in China with 62.1%. Read more about this on Baidu Gaining 2006 China Search Market Share.

MSN

MSN finally departed with Yahoo! Search Marketing and started in July to serve its own PPC ads to US audiences. Read more about it on Yahoo! Parts Way With MSN Search.

MSN launched Live Search as its new search engine brand, with the expectation to capture more of the search market share globally. Read more on Microsoft Live Search.

Ask

Ask upgraded its PPC platform to include more enhanced features. Read more on Ask Launching New PPC Platform.

Ask expanded its search market reach by starting to power Lycos on both organic and paid search. Read more about it on Ask.com Powering Lycos Organic & Paid Search.

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