Now we all know what had happened to Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing search engine:

• Yahoo Search Marketing Problems – The beginning of the Yahoo Search Marketing’s scalability issues and other technical issues
• Yahoo PPC Global Strategies – Even PPC experts run into trouble managing and optimizing through a search ad platform that sucks on globalization
• Yahoo Exits Search, Replaces by Microsoft Adcenter and Bing – The start of Yahoo’s falling in search
• Bing-Yahoo Search Alliance Update – Microsoft’s Bing taking over to power Yahoo search

Here is Lingham’s original post:

It’s fascinating to see the press mull over the search wars that are currently being waged.

Here is an article from Business Week entitled “The Counterattack on Google”. This article outlines much of how Google’s Adwords system employs a yield based mechanism to monetize their search results, as opposed to the current bid to position model pioneered by Overture, which Yahoo currently employs. In recent months, Google has added the Quality Score variable to improve the rankings in favour of greater relevance and less price emphasis. The virtuous cycle is that the happier the users are, the more they will search on Google, and this strategy is most definitely working. It’s working so well in fact, that Yahoo has rebuilt the system and relaunching it (currently dubbed Project Panama), which they hope will compete with Google.

I’m not going to go into all the current flaws in the Yahoo system which is being relaunched soon, but I’m going to address the strategic flaws in the Yahoo/MSN battle with Google.

This is something that both companies have really overlooked, and also the analysts trying to figure out how MSN & Yahoo are going to compete, which they need in order to forecast the share prices going forward. The flaw is that these analysts don’t realise that there are some critical flaws in the strategies of the two giants playing catchup. I don’t believe that unless there is a critical change in strategy, that MSN/Yahoo will beat Google in the short term and Google is going to grow very quickly in foreign markets in particular.

So what are MSN/Yahoo doing wrong?

The Internet is the world’s largest economy. What Google does right is that it allows advertisers based in any geographic area, to use a centralised system and buy advertising across multiple countries, without relying on reloading their campaigns, etc etc. Someone targeting all French speaking countries, for a French language product, simply selects Canada, France, Belgium, etc and all IP targeted traffic from those countries are served with the ads in questions.

Google has solidified their position in global markets, including smaller ones such as South Africa, by allowing anyone in the Internet Economy to participate in their global ad marketplace. This further increases relevancy. As a South African, when I search Yahoo.com or MSN.com, I don’t see commercial ads targeting me, but I do on Google. Yahoo & MSN insist on a decentralized model, which makes no sense to me whatsoever and companies in South Africa are unable to target local users on MSN.com & Yahoo.com.

MSN & Yahoo have strong brands outside the US, but they are not able to easily monetize their search, because of this decentralized “region by region” strategy. Google’s has really built a classy system around allowing anyone from anywhere to participate in their global marketplace in any language and any currency. This is where I believe the Yahoo\MSN will fall short in the long term.

By looking at Google’s earnings growth outside the US, I believe that not enough focus has been placed on the global market by the other search engines and also, US advertisers do try to target foreign countries with their products. Kudo’s to Google on this one.

Furthermore, this strategy will leads to other complications in the Contextual products in that Yahoo\MSN are not able to target international publishers very well. If the ads that Yahoo serves through YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) only have US advertisers – and Yahoo US Advertisers only wants this traffic (i.e. no international traffic) – they will fail to deliver the solution that serves the needs of the publishers and hence does not compete with Google’s AdSense solution. Yahoo needs to focus on taking on Google globally, not just in the US. Many of the Yahoo search solutions are too locally (US) focused. It looks like MSN may follow this route as well.

Google has succesfully used Geo-Targeting to build it’s business, but MSN & Yahoo have gone with proprietary marketplaces – a key differentiator. Google tries to provide relevance while monetizing as many searches are possible, regardless of where they are based.

If Yahoo/MSN wants to take on Google, I do believe that they need to go back to the drawing board and rework their global strategy, and not to focus purely on each geography separately. They need to increase the monetization potential per search. Focus on the Internet as a medium, not a geographic location. In order to be relevant, you must act as a marketplace, connecting advertisers to searchers, by placing restrictions or hindrances such as geographic location, currency, language, etc, they will not maximize the revenue per search.

Take this example:

For every hundred searches on a search engine this could be the sample demographic:

• 40 US – English
• 10 US – Hispanic
• 30 Other Countries – English
• 10 Other Countries – French
• 10 Other Countries – Other Languages

For these hundred searches on Google.com – Google could yield a Clickthrough Rate of 100% because it has advertisers targeting every search, in it’s global marketplace.

If you looked at Yahoo or MSN, they would only be able to yield good results past US English, and maybe France. Also, because the auctions are run in multiple countries, they do not get the benefit of overlaying multiple bids and relevancy to get higher CPC’s and a mix thereof. Forget CPC auction benefits for just a second – their listings are now less relevant and have lower yields per search – something their stock prices are reflecting.

This is the brutal truth, whether they like it or not. MSN has got a great new angle with their demographic targeting capabilities and this shows that they are focused on revenue per search, but I’m not happy that the strategy is correct, especially given MSN’s strong international presence and brand. MSN have also integrated Search into MSN Messenger, which gives them an even stronger international base from which to grow their search capabilities. The problem is that when users search, they’re not going to see the local plumber advertising unless MSN has a local marketplace.

The funny thing is that I’ve had this discussion with MSN & Yahoo representatives and both companies are either dismissive or blast about this particular strategic approach. If you carefully analyse the numbers, you’ll see that search is going to grow alot faster in many smaller markets, and if MSN & Yahoo are going to roll out marketplace by marketplace (slowly) they’re going to have to battle an even bigger Google ( I know, scary though). This is just one of the major flaws in the counterattack, but there are probably more than I can count.

It’s simple math that for every search, you need to display the most relevant adverts which generate the most money across the widest net of advertisers, and if they’re not doing that, they’ll never beat Google…

• Expedia.com
• Booking.com
• Orbitz.com
• Travelocity.com
• LastMinute.com
• Priceline.com
• Ctrip.com

Vertical Travel Search

Travel sites are available as vertical search in the form of travel search engines. Travel search engines allow travelers to narrow down hotel/flight search results through hotel/flight price comparisons:

• Google Flight Search
• Google Hotel Finder
• Bing’s Travel Destination Visual Search
• Kayak Travel Search
• Travel Muse Inspire Search

Travel Reviews, Travel to China

Travel reviews including hotel reviews, attraction reviews and destination reviews that are written by travelers can be found on travel review sites:

• TripAdvisor.com

To get good brief overview about different places in China before you travel to China, use:

• ChinaTravel.net

Online Travel Industry

The travel industry was one of the first industries that have been made available “online”.

Wikipedia defines travel websites as:

A travel website is a website on the world wide web, that is dedicated to travel. The site may be focused on travel reviews, the booking of travel, or a combination of both. Approximately seventy million consumers researched travel plans online in July 2006. Travel bookings are the single largest component of e-commerce.

Wikipedia defines travel agencies as:

A travel agency is a retail business that sells travel related products and services to customers on behalf of suppliers such as airlines, car rentals, cruise lines, hotels, railways, sightseeing tours and package holidays that combine several products.

Travel Websites in Screenshots

Google Flight Search:

Bing’s Travel Destinations:

Kayak:

Travel Muse:

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.

All the current advertisers on Lycos’s PPC platform, InSite AdBuyer, are to transfer to Ask Sponsored Listings platform. My belief is that the two PPC advertising programs will just perfectly complement one another. While Lycos is in possession of a lower traffic but higher quality search network, the user interface of Ask Sponsored Listings gives the advertisers a platform of higher usability.

The partnership as a whole is expected to give Ask.com the edge to catch up with AOL and even MSN. I believe in a short time Ask will be able to overtake AOL in US search market share.

Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone explained, “Ask.com has worked very hard to develop one of a kind search technology and search features that help users get the information they want more quickly. With stiff competition in the marketplace for syndication deals, we are pleased that LYCOS recognized the merits of our search technology and advertising products. This new relationship will enable Ask.com to broaden its search offering to new users while also increasing the reach of Ask Sponsored Listings inventory.”

Under the agreement Ask will provide:

Web Search: Delivers highly relevant search results through its ExpertRank proprietary algorithmic search technology, which ranks results based on popularity within topic communities on the Web, rather than mere link popularity.

Image Search: Combines Ask.com’s proprietary index of pictures with ExpertRank and patent-pending image search technologies to deliver dramatically improved relevance and quality of search results. Ask.com Image Search has been touted by some as best of class for searching the Image Web.

Zoom Related Search: Offers conceptually-related suggestions to narrow or expand a search query. Zoom related search is placed on the right side of the search results page where most search engines place advertisements. No other search engine has the ability to offer conceptually-related suggestions.

Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) Search Advertising: Provides highly relevant keyword-targeted, pay-per-click advertising. Advertisers bid for placement through Ask.com’s automated open-auction system that also allows marketers to manage and optimize campaigns on Ask.com and its publisher network. ASL sources more than 5 billion queries each month, and supports over 10,000 advertisers bidding on more than 10 million keywords.

The Lycos Network includes Lycos.com, Hotbot.com, Tripod.com and Angelfire.com. Lycos is currently the number 5 most popular portal in the US and consistently ranked as a top 20 US web property, with more than 6 million monthly unique visitors using Lycos Network Search.

Within only a few weeks I was able to get his website indexed on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. A couple of targeted keywords of his website were even ranked in the first search engine result page. The next search engine we wanted the website to rank on is the formerly Askjeeves search engine, in which the website was not even indexed.

After pointing one of the links to the client’s website from another web page which was indexed on Askjeeves at that time, I explained to the client that it is the nature of organic search and each search engine’s specific preference of when his website is indexed and ranked.

Even till now, Ask.com’s spider still has a lower rate in visiting websites comparing to the bots of the other 3 search engines.

Some SEO experts even totally ignore indexing and optimizing websites for Ask.com due to the relatively low search volume comparing to Google. However, I still like Ask.com as a technology company in the Internet space. Based on Ask.com’s new search algorithm focusing on grouping related topics, it is rare search engine which is truely providing a set of an alternative search results to searchers.

Ask.com, the search engine formely called Ask Jeeves, currently still has less than 6% of US search market share, though it has been in the search industry since 1996, while Google only emerged in 1998 and is currently dominating the US search market with 51% share.

Since dropping Jeeves, Ask has come up with a new algorithm in order to stand a chance on competing with Google. This new algorithm retrieves and ranks search results based on the number of times groups identified as related to the topic reference the site. Ask’s new algorithm is still to prove its superiority though it theoretically avoids displaying generally popular sites that are not frequently referenced by other sites on the topic.

Ask’s new algorithm lets it suggest related queries from within the topic group. A good example is that a search on John Lennon would also bring up related searches about Beatles and Yoko Ono.

On the other hand, Google’s natural search algorithm PageRank focuses on ranking web pages according to both the quantity and quality of links pointing to them.

Google, however, is recently showing signs of shifting away from its core business, search, and diverting its focus on varieties with the objective of getting more information about its individual searchers. This includes Google launching a finance site (finance.google.com) to compete with Yahoo! Finance, an online payment system (checkout.google.com) to compete eBay’s Paypal, and a basic online office (docs.google.com) to compete with Microsoft.

To defense its criticisms on being lack of focus, Google engineer Matt Cutts earlier explained, “In no way is Google taking its eye off search. We have more engineers working on core search technology than ever before. Most employees spend about 75% of their time tweaking the main search algorithm to make results faster, more relevant, and more comprehensive for users. There are always changes going behind the curtains, and changes happen weekly or faster than weekly.”

Only time will tell if Ask will be able to prove itself a well deserved spot on the search algorithm game, though with a small tweaking of its algorithm Google can be way to much for Ask to handle.

If you are worried about leaking your privacy through you search history, follow the rules below:

• Firstly, never log in to your search engine account when you are performing your search activities.
• Use 2 type of browsers (IE and Firefox). Perform all your search activities on one of the browsers, and do everything else on the other.
• Use anonymizing proxy tools.
• Do not accept cookies from any search engines.
• Never perform search activities via the search engine which is owned by your ISP.
• Finally, do not put personally-identifiable information in your search activities.

Yahoo Search Algorithm vs Google Search Algorithm

Yahoo is building its content through numerous acquisitions of innovative business startups in the Internet space. Yahoo search algorithm has been improving by “copying” many factors of Google’s search algorithm.

Google’s Gmail vs Yahoo Mail

In the space of last year alone, Yahoo has signed up almost 12 million new Yahoo Mail email users. Google only managed to captured 8.6 million email users in the first 24 months after the launch of Gmail.

Google’s Risks, Yahoo’s Risks

Google risks launching too many new products which may not become popular to Google’s users, including:

• Google Answers
• Google Finance
• Google Desktop Search
• Google Docs (Google Spreadsheet)

Yahoo may risks “late launch” of good products into the Internet market in which similar products were often previously launched by other Internet start-ups. Yahoo may have moved large number of resources to improving search algorithm to catch up with Google in search and lacked the pace for other innovative products that Yahoo could have done better.

July 2006

• 2 word phrases 28.91%
• 3 word phrase 27.85%
• 4 word phrases 17.11%
• 1 word phrases 11.43%
• 5 word phrases 8.25%
• 6 word phrases 3.68%
• 7 word phrases 1.59%

July 2005

• 2 word phrases 29.60%
• 3 word phrase 27.55%
• 4 word phrases 16.21%
• 1 word phrases 13.42%
• 5 word phrases 7.58%
• 6 word phrases 3.21%
• 7 word phrases 1.34%

More searches seem to know that by increasing the number of words in their search queries, they can better filter their search results.

It has always been important for PPC experts to know what kind of keywords (or keyword phrases) they have to use to drive more traffic to a site. Knowing the searchers are more like to search with a 3 word keyword phrase than a 1 word keyword phrase certainly makes a difference in how to optimize a PPC campaign.

Email is still the number one primary daily activity of Internet users with 77%, while search is closing at second place in with 63%.

Kelsey Group has also discovered that on a regular basis 35% of online shoppers used only one search engine, 53% used no more than three search engines, and 10% used at least four search engines. Also, 54% of search users have replaced phone books with Internet search.

Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was initially founded in 1996 in Berkeley, California and was the first commercial question-answering search engine in plain English or natural language on the Internet.

Ask was bought by IAC Interactive Corp in 2005 for $2.3 billion.

On 27 February 2006, Ask rebranded by dropping Jeeves, hoping that the switch would draw more attention to a series of improvements that it introduced in recent years including the acquisitions of Teoma, Bloglines and other technologies.

In June 2006, Ask has rolled out a new blog and feed search capability that combines the best features of both Bloglines and Teoma.

Unlike many blog and feed search services which use specialized crawlers to identify content in the blogsphere environment, Ask uses the data it has collected from subscribers of Bloglines to identify blogs that people have actually subscribed to.

Ask then uses the number of subscribers to a particular blog as a proxy for popularity, instead of the most common method in which blog popularity is determined by the links to the individual blog posts.

Ask also uses the Expert Rank which is a category-specific technology it has been evolving since its purchase of Teoma back in 2001 to fine tune its search results.

Small logos about the 4th of July can be found on both Yahoo! and MSN. Google, however, has made no change to its home page.

Today, the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN find and index website pages using programs called spiders or crawlers. Search engine spiders automatically browse the web with some pre-programmed methods. The spiders create copies of all the web pages they have visited and store them for the search engines to use later. The search engines index the copies of the web pages so that these pages can be found again quickly.

The spiders of the search engines, even Google Bot (Google’s Spider), can only crawl a portion of the web due to the enormous size of the entire web. The ranking of the ‘crawled’ web pages has become important. Using mathematical formulas or algorithms, search engines can rank the web pages in the order of importance. For example, link popularity was one of the first important elements invented and factored into Google’s complicated ranking algorithm.

• Google: 42.7%
• Yahoo!: 28.0%
• MSN: 13.2%
• AOL: 7.6%
• Ask.com: 5.9%
• Others: 2.6%

Google searches include searches generated at any Google owned website (Google.com, Google Image Search, etc). Yahoo! searches consist of all Yahoo! owned websites such as AltaVista.com, AllTheWeb, and Overture. For example, a search performed at Yahoo Sports also counts towards Yahoo!’s search total. AOL searches include Time Warner owned websites like AOL Search and Netscape Search, though AOL’s search results are powered by Google. Ask.com searches consist of Ask.com and all its network partners such as Excite Network including Excite, MyWay, iWon and My Web Search.

Within the global online search market share in April 06, Google has captured 61%, while Yahoo! has 20%, according to ComScore.com.

In April 06, Ask.com has the biggest increase in paid searches (PPC or Pay Per Click) up 126% year-over-year, though Ask.com has a relatively small user base comparing to both Google and Yahoo!.