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| Posted: 19 Feb 2013 03:41 AM PST Growing search marketshare is hard work. At a recent investor conference Marissa Mayer stated that: "The key pieces are around the underpinnings of the alliance themselves. The point is, we collectively want to grow share, rather than trading share with each other." Part of the reason Yahoo! & Bing struggle to gain marketshare is Google's default search placement payments to Mozilla and Apple. If the associated browsers have nearly 1/3 the market & Chrome is another 1/3 of the market then it requires Yahoo! or Bing to be vastly better than Google to break the Google habit + default search placement purchases. Danny reported some interesting comments from Nikesh Arora:
A friend sent me a screenshot where he was surprised how similar the results looked between Bing & Google. If Bing looks too different it feels out of place, if it looks to similar it doesn't feel memorable. And if Google is optimized for revenue generation then Bing is going to have a fairly similar look & feel to their results if they want to earn enough to bid on partnerships. Another factor helping Google maintain their dominance in search marketshare is the shift of search query mix to mobile, where Google has a 95.8% marketshare. Mobile search has a significantly higher CTR than desktop search, due in large part to there being less screen real estate. By the end of this year tablets will likely account for 20% of Google's search ad clicks & drive $5 billion in ad revenues. Add in mobile phones with tablets & mobile search will drive 1/3 of paid search clicks by the end of this year. With mobile becoming such a huge share of search clicks Google is forcing advertisers into buying all platforms with their ad purchase via their enhanced AdWords campaigns. Google builds off that sort of dominance & Yahoo! is only making about $125 million a year in total revenue from Yahoo!'s mobile traffic.
Yahoo! also buys ads on some smaller ad networks & sends those through to a search result with almost no organic results. Yahoo! has had a long history of search arbitrage, but they typically did it through a partner network which lowered click value. That was part of what lowered their click prices & made them sign the deal with Microsoft (you couldn't even opt out of Yahoo!'s partner syndication until after they signed the deal with Microsoft). I recently saw the above ad for Bing which highlighted how they want to work with brands, but Bing still has a number of issues they are dealing with on the monetization front: tighter broad matching, smaller ad ecosystem, regional issues with ad targeting, and no serious effort to develop a contextual ad program open to the long tail of publishers. In spite of those issues, the Yahoo! / Bing ad network was finally starting to build a critical mass & Yahoo! responded by signing a deal to carry Google's contextual AdSense ads. As Google continues to layer contextual search layers into mobile devices, launch their own physical stores, layer their social network into the search ecosystem, expand their venture investments, inserts themselves at an ISP level, shape the news, control a greater share of ad budget with programmatic bidding, control measurements of success, redefine words, scrape-n-displace publishers with the knowledge graph, de-fund competitors, & hyper-target ads at users, their leverage & market dominance will only grow. Google is great at growing the search pie. Yahoo!, not so much. ;) Categories:  |
| Posted: 19 Feb 2013 03:40 AM PST As Google has went from ad platform for illicit content (both ways) to host of illicit content & reseller of legit content, they have cracked down on competitors & are now trying to police the ability of other sites to accept payment:
While Google is partnering with big media (that has long had a multi-polar approach to copyright) Google continues to gain in a game of inches. Last month Google announced a new format for their image search results, where they pull the image inline without sending the visitor onto the publisher website. At the same time they referenced some "phantom visitor" complaint from publishers to justify keeping the visitor on Google & highlighted how there were now more links to the image source. If publishers were concerned about the "phantom visitor problem" we wouldn't see so many crappy slideshow pageviews. Google's leaked remote rater guidelines do mention something about rating an image lower under certain situations like where the author might want attributed for their work that they are routinely disintermediated from. On Twitter a former Google named Miguel Silvar wrote: "If you do SEO and decide to block Image Search just because it's bringing less traffic, you can stop calling yourself an SEO expert." Many "experts" would claim that any exposure is good, even if you don't get credit for it. Many clients of said "experts" will end up bankrupt! Experts who suggest it is reasonable for content creators to be stripped of payment, traffic & attribution are at best conflicted. One of the fears of microformats was that as you add incremental cost to structure your data, the search engines may leverage your extra effort to further displace you. That fear turned out to be valid, as in the background Google was offering vertical review sites the "let us scrape you, or block Googlebot" ultimatum. Google Shopping has shifted to paid inclusion & Google has made further acquisitions in the space, yet people still recommend that ecommerce sites get ahead by marking up their pages with microformats. As Google continues to win the game of inches of displacing the original sources, they don't even need you to mark up your content for them to extract their knowledge graph. Bill Slawski shared a video of Google's Andrew Hogue describing their mass data extraction effort: "It's never going to be 100% accurate. We're not even going to claim that it is 100% accurate. We are going to be lucky if we get 70% accuracy ... we are going to provide users with tools to correct the data." If you as a publisher chose to auto-generate content at a 70% accuracy, pumped it up to first page rankings & then said "if people care they will fix it" Google would rightfully call you a spammer. If they do the same, it is knowledge baby. Eric Schmidt recently indicated that Google was willing to sacrifice relevancy to collect identity information. Their over-promotion of Google+ has become more refined over time, but it hasn't went way. Google pays for default placement in Safari & Firefox. Former Google executives head AOL & Yahoo!. Google can thus push for new cultural norms that make Microsoft look like an oddball or outsider if they don't play the same game. Google isn't the only company playing the scrape-n-displace game. "The innovation in search is really going to be on the user interface level" - Marissa Mayer It's worth keeping an eye on Yahoo! (the above types of scraped rich listings, lead generation forms in the organic search results, contextual ad partnership with Google) to see where Google will head next. Categories:  |
| Posted: 19 Feb 2013 03:40 AM PST "Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance." - Eric Schmidt Authoritarian Regimes & Data MiningOne wonders how Mr. Schmidt can balance the above statement along with warning about authoritarian governments. And the risks from such data mining operations are not just in "those countries over there." The ad networks that hire lobbyists to change foreign privacy laws do so such that they can better track people the globe over and deliver higher paying ads. (No problem so long as they don't catch you on a day you are down and push ads for a mind numbing psychotropic drug with suicidal or homicidal side effects.) And defense contractors are fast following with mining these social networks. (No problem so long as your name doesn't match someone else's that is on some terrorist list or such.) Large & AnonymousWhat's crazy is when we get to the other end of the spectrum. Want to know if your hamburger has pink slime in it? Best of luck with that. Then you get the mainstream media sites that get a free pass (size = trust) and it doesn't matter if their content is created through...
... no matter how it is created, it is fine, so long as you have political influence. Not only will it rank, but it will be given a ranking boost based on being part of a large site, even if it is carpet bombed with irrelevant ads. Coin Operated IdealsBut then the companies that claim this transparency is vital for society pull a George Costanza & "Do The Opposite" with their own approach. Whenever they manipulate markets to their own benefit they claim the need for secrecy to stop spammers or protect privacy. But then they collect the same data & pass it along without consent to those who pay for the data. When Google was caught vandalizing OpenStreetMaps or lying to businesses listed in Mocality, those were the acts of anonymous contractors. When Google got caught in a sting operation pushing ads for illegal steroids from Mexico they would claim that behavior didn't reflect their current policies and that we need to move on. Then of course there are the half dozen (or more) times that Google has violated their own search quality guidelines. So often that is due yet again to "outsourcing" or a partner of some sort. And they do that in spite of the ability to arbitrarily hardcode themselves in the result set. If we don't exam the faux ideals push to shift cultural norms we will end up with a crappier world to live in. Some Googlers (or Google fanbois) who read this will claim I am a broken record stuck in the past on this stuff. But those same people will be surprised x years down the road when something bizarre surfaces from an old deranged contact or prior life. Anyone who has done anything meaningful has also done some things that are idiotic. Is that sort of stuff always forever relevant or does it make sense at some point to move on? When that person is Eric Schmidt, the people he pontificate to are blackballed for following his ideals. After all, his ideals don't actually apply to him. Categories:  |
In spite of losing share on browser defaults & mobile, Yahoo! managed to 
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