Google, Yahoo & Portals Are Top Online News Sources: Study
Major news portals — like Yahoo News, Google News, AOL, and Topix — are the most commonly used online news sources, beating out the web sites of major news outlets like CNN, CBS, and the New York Times. That’s according to the the State of the Media report issued tonight by the Pew Research Center’s [...]
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Life’s No Picnik for Yahoo as Google Acquires Flickr Partner
Yahoo partnered with photo editing company Picnik way back in 2007. It was an important partnership for Yahoo’s Flickr, leading to senior executives to proclaim:
“Providing the ability to edit directly within Flickr is an important step in offering our 20 million members around the globe a complete photo experience.”
Then along came Google.
…we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.
What hope is there for Yahoo, if it can’t even keep Google stealing away what should have been a solid partner?
9% of Mobile Web Page Views are Google Search
Mobile search, like the rest of the mobile web, is really in its infancy. While we are definitely making leaps and bounds all the time, a lot of the future of the mobile web is TBD—including which provider, if any, will dominate mobile search.
Or so we thought. Using browsing info from its popular mobile client, Opera Mini, Opera Software recently found that Google search accounts for 9% of all page views on the mobile web. That’s right, not just 9% of all mobile searches—9% of all web page views.
That’s a lot of searches. Not all desktop behavior has translated well to the mobile web, but a preference for Google for web search might be one of those things we have a hard time shaking. It also helps that Google’s name has become synonymous with searching.
As on the desktop scene, Google is well ahead of the other popular search engines—Yahoo! accounts for 4.3% of page views and Bing serves 0.03% of all page views.
We have to note here that that doesn’t include text/SMS searches (Google has a service for that at 466453 — GOOGLE, as does Yahoo [92466], but other well-known providers include ChaCha [242242] and KGB [542542]).
What do you think? Are Opera users just strong Google users, or is this representative of all mobile web usage?
Yahoo and Twitter Announce Partnership
Better late than never is what they say right? Everyone else and their brother have made their deal with Twitter so Yahoo doing so only makes sense. What is interesting is that while this kind of announcement should be a big deal it comes off as sounding a little “after the fact” which, unfortunately, seems to be how Yahoo is perceived more and more these days.
To be fair, Yahoo has more properties to tie Twitter into so the deal is likely to be more complex than the “real time search” deals that have been struck with Google and Microsoft. Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog sings the deal’s praises
What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!
Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.
This kind of a play is probably most important to Yahoo because now that it is not a search engine (although the average person may never have a clue that Yahoo doesn’t actually do the search behind the scenes which is for another discussion). The social side of the web is about content and that’s where Yahoo is hanging their hat for the future. In their blog post they are showing their hand that while they are making this announcement they are not quite there yet. Here is what we can look forward to
Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here [http://developer.yahoo.com/updates], here [http://buzz.yahoo.com/publisher/about], and here [http://developer.yahoo.com/homepage].)
Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.
So there are a lot of changes coming down the line for Yahoo. The question still remains though whether these are enough to keep Yahoo as a relevant player in the space.
How do you use Yahoo today and does this look attractive enough to make you more of a user in the future?
Xerox Sues Google & Yahoo Over Search Patent. Copy That!
Google, Yahoo Sued by Xerox Over Search Query Patents Bloomberg reports Xerox has sued Google and Yahoo over search patents Xerox holds.
Xerox says one patent automatically generate a query based on keyword searches, where Google’s AdWords & AdSense and Yahoo’s Search Marketing, YPN and other products allegedly infringe on. Another patent Xerox [...]
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Facebook Corners 44% of Social Sharing
TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld talked to sharing-widget producer Gigya recently to find out what site people tended to share content on the most. Gigya’s widget power social sharing from sites such as ABC.com, Reuters and Answers.com (and 5000 more). When people shared content, where did they tend to post it? Facebook was the #1 choice for 44% of content sharing.
(Sub-lesson of this article: lying with statistics. Can you guess what share the other three got from the chart?)
Gigya also looked at sign-in data for these sites—for example, whether users signed in via Gmail/Google, Yahoo or Facebook Connect to interact with or share content. For some types of sites, they were nearly equal—but not others. News sites saw 31% Facebook sign ins, 30% Google/Gmail sign ins and 25% Yahoo sign ins (Twitter saw 11% and AOL 3%). But for entertainment sites, Facebook was the far more popular choice at 52%, with Google (17%), Yahoo (12%) and Twitter (11%) trailing far behind. (MySpace, 7%, and AOL, 1%, fared even worse.)
Facebook chat is also popular—more than half (56%) of all live chat events Gigya monitors were hosted on Facebook. Twitter was second with 28%, and Yahoo (9%) and MySpace (7%) eked in there.
So what were the overall share numbers for Facebook’s competitors in overall sharing? Twitter had 29%, Yahoo 18% and MySpace 9%. If you really study the tilted 3D graph, you can approximate it pretty well—but it looks a little more proportional even at a glance in the 2D graph, doesn’t it?
Upon seeing the data from Gigya, another sharing widget company volunteered its data. AddThis, used in 600,000 (smaller than Gigya’s, for the most part, since AddThis’s clients include Blogger users), shared the top ten services their users choose to share with. While Facebook was still tops, their lead wasn’t quite as decisive as in Gigya’s data.
Facebook: 33%
Email: 13%
Print:9%
Twitter: 9%
Favorites: 8%
Google: 6%
MySpace: 6%
Digg: 3%
Live: 3%
Delicious: 3%
What do you think? Is Facebook the way you prefer to share things online?
The Sky Is Falling! (And So Is Google’s Market Share)
Neilsen has reported their search market share numbers for January—and Google seems to have forgotten which way is up. While the search giant is still #1 and in no danger, they lost a percentage point of the search query market from December, falling from 67.3% to 66.3% of all queries.
If Google’s, losing, who’s gaining? Just about everyone else, actually. The other major search engines either held steady or gained slightly—Yahoo was up 0.1 percentage points (to 14.5%), Bing gained 1 percentage point (to 10.9%) and nearly all the smaller search engines in the top ten increased their share month over month.
The overall search query market increased by over 300 million searches. About a third of those queries were run through Google. Yahoo saw over 50 million more queries in January, while Bing fielded 130 million more queries than it did in December.
Is this a significant trend? Of course not. Most likely, other search engine monitoring services won’t see the same change. And it doesn’t seem like a percentage point is going to hurt Google much in the long run, since their overall number of search queries is still growing anyway.
Or maybe Google bought that Super Bowl ad just in time.
What do you think?
Study Reveals Google, Yahoo & Bing Users Perceive Your Brand Differently
Previous blind-test studies have shown that results across different search engines are pretty much considered equal–once you remove the logo from such results.
Now, a new study from Wunderman, BrandAsset® Consulting, ZAAZ and Compete goes one step further and demonstrates how the search engine used, influences the perception of the destination brand. In other words, Walmart’s brand is perceived differently, depending on whether the visitor arrived at its site via Google, Bing or Yahoo.
The study summarizes two distinct reasons why this happens:
Bing users, for example, tend to be mostly from the tip of the adoption curve (innovators and early adopters) where Yahoo! and Google’s passengers tend to be middle majority [and] each search engine demonstrated different degrees of consumer engagement ranging from visiting to finally purchasing.
Interestingly, if you use Bing, you are an early adopter. Who knew that using a Microsoft product made you one of the cool kids!
The study shares a few examples of how the search engine used, affects the type of interaction with the brand.
So, while Walmart tends to benefit the most from Bing users:
Hotwire, gets better conversions from Google:
So, how does this data help you? Well Shane Atchison of ZAAZ suggests “This research demonstrates that marketers have a real choice to make when formulating search strategies.” Oh if it were only that easy! First, you have to work to get the actual rankings and you also have to consider the search volume of each search engine. Place all your seo efforts in Bing and you could starve to death!
Still, for those that handle the PPC accounts for big-name brands, it’s worth taking a look at the study to see if you can spot any opportunities for your campaign.
Vancouver Olympics Logos From Google & Others
The Olympics are just around the corner and Google has their widest ever logo on their home page this morning, for the special event that kicks off tonight in Vancouver. Here is a picture of the special Google Winter Olympics logo:
Yahoo and Bing also have special logos or themes up already. Here they [...]
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Google Buzz? MSFT, Yahoo Say ‘Been There, Done That’
The dust is still settling on Google’s PR blitz today over Google Buzz, but that hasn’t stopped both Microsoft and Yahoo from speaking up. Their message is simple: been there, done that.
Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, shared this statement with Search Engine Land this afternoon:
Busy people don’t want another social network, [...]
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