Skype is in demand but not from members or users.

Discussions are at the beginning and being totally specific is going to be difficult, but according to reports from good sources, Skype is hot property. There have been no public releases to its members or to the public; however you might not have to wait for long.

A partnership deal for Skype is not something that has been talked about before. This time the reports involve giant businesses. Google and Facebook are considering separate bids to get their hands on the video conferencing service.

If you were Skype what would you do (assuming that the bids were identical)? Would you take the Facebook partnership and combine the instant chat with the additional feature of running live video connection as well or the Google bid and generate more members and more business users using your services.

As we know from previous blogs, Skype has a lot of members, but the percentage of members that actually pay for Skype services is very low. This poor revenue stream may not be solved with a Facebook partnership – it could increase the number of members but not the percentage of paying members. On the other hand Google with the PPC and SEO services that are very business related, could boost revenue when offering conference video calling features to a business audience.

This deal could be very important to both parties (Google and Facebook) particularly as Google is losing ground against Bing and Facebook could continue its domination of the social network. Google could also integrate the Skype services onto its Google Android Phones as well.

As mentioned this is an early report, so we will have to wait and see. In the meant time what, would you do?

BlackBerry exchange Google for Bing…

After being on stage at the annual RIM BlackBerry show, Microsoft announced that Bing will be providing the search facilities on Blackberry devices. This will then be a new partnership for Microsoft, with the aim to help people make better decisions with Bing on Blackberry Devices, while boosting handset sales.

The partnership will include Bing as the default search provider for the search app and the browser. However, it is unclear at this point which of the blackberry devices will be defaulted to Bing. It might be the new Blackberry Bond and also the Blackberry Playbook that is due for release soon.

This is good news for some and not so good for others. The benefits are for Microsoft and their Bing search, hopefully this will boost handset sales for blackberry.  The biggest loser in this deal is Google; as they where the default search provider on the Blackberry handsets.

Bing has been in this position before, in terms of having their search facility exclusively on a produced handset. Also, you may remember that deal that was pending between Microsoft and Nokia, which did sound very similar to the Blackberry and Bing arrangement. Perhaps Microsoft is planning a worldwide domination to be the default search providers of mobiles and Smartphone’s.

Let’s assume that both Microsoft deals happen and are completed as expected, what might happen to the market share of Google against Bing? What is known is that Bing is growing fractionally month on month, 2011 has started very well for Bing. This slow but consistent pace is worrying for Google, as it has been stated if Bing’s growth was erratic it would show that its decline just as quick as it grows. Unfortunately that is not the case which is why it could be very damaging for Google.

Specifically in the mobile search, Google have a strong hold on the Android and the iPhone devices, but if Apple that make the iPhone decided to change the default search provider, Google would be in a lot of trouble and would lose a lot of crucial market share. Having said that, Microsoft and Apple are not on best of pals anyway, so the chances are remote that these two businesses will come together.

Google is not helping itself in a number of areas because of the changes that have been made to its search results and the algorithms.  Add Bing’s increasing fortunes and we could be in for an entertaining online battle for search facilities.

Microsoft cause delays for Yahoo!

Yahoo has stated that the partnership with Microsoft is not going swimmingly. The top level email provider and search engine have a drop in revenue because of technology delays. The internet company has announced a 28% drop in profits as it has to halt development while Microsoft make amendments to their technology.

28% in Yahoo terms is about $300m – Yahoo stated that the new systems at present are not paying off.  Yahoo was also hoping that this partnership with Microsoft would have been the missing component in their business model in achieving a greater market share.

Two years ago Yahoo brought in a new chief executive to improve the growth of the company, and over the two tears there have been mixed fortunes. The comment was made that Yahoo will not re visit the revenue levels that they experienced before they merged with Microsoft till the end of the Year. Many experts believe that this might not happen as well.

The chief executive forecasted that the revenues would pick up around mid 2011. However delays have caused Yahoo to miss this forecast.

Yahoo is striding forward and making progress because of its efforts, the goals are that they will be expanding into a fast-growing mobile internet market – utilising the very receptive video marketing platform.

After the short decline in share price and much criticism, Yahoo’s turnaround is on schedule, and all people involved are confident that Yahoo is going in the right direction.

Bing finally crack the 30% search market share in the United States

For the first time, Bing has exceeded 30% of the search market share in the United States.  It could be argued that this is partly down to their coalition with Yahoo.

Bing commanded a 28.48% search share in January.  However, in February that increased by 5% to 30.1% according to Experian Hitwise.

Whilst the coalition may have had a bearing on the increase, both Bing and Yahoo search traffic increased.  Yahoo increased from 14.99% to 15.69% while Bingo went from 13.49% up to 14.32%.

Whilst this may get the attention of Google, they don’t have too much to worry about yet.  Despite their market share slipping from 66.69% to 64.42% they still hold double the market of Bing and Yahoo.

In order to try and compete with Google, Bing joined forces with Yahoo in July 2009.  The alliance saw Bing run Yahoo’s search engine.

The coalition was permitted by the US Department of Justice and the European Commission in February 2010.

Bing Challenge Google local with Bing Deals

In competition to Google Offers and Yahoo Local Offers, Bing is launching their own local deals service in America.

Microsoft’s offering will be called ‘Bing Deals’ and will cover 14,000 towns and cities, offering over 200,000 offers to users.

Rather than create their own platform, Microsoft has teamed up with service provider, The Dealmap.

Andy Shu, director of product management for Bing Mobile said, “Bing’s mission is to help you cut through the clutter of the web to make decisions more quickly – whether that’s through our own innovations or by teaming up with industry experts.”

Access to Bing Deals is relatively widespread with access available from desktop PC’s, the iPhone and Android mobile devices.  However, because it does not run on HTML5 software, users will not be able to access the service on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating systems.

Bing Deals users can look for offers by location (geolocation when accessing by mobile) and by category.  Offers can be shared with contacts via email and saved.

Google threw their hat into the ring in January by launching Google Offers in an effort to cash in on the ever growing social commerce trend.

It’s not a surprise that it’s not available in the UK yet as Google usually test the water in the US prior to rolling out globally.

Microsoft + Nokia = a possible improvement for ‘Bing’ or Not?

As we have mentioned before, the Smartphone market is getting inundated with many manufacturers including Samsung, Apple and Nokia, all wanting a bit if the action. The more Smartphone’s that are in people hands, the more mobile searches will be done, so Microsoft and Nokia coming together is an excellent opportunity to push ‘Bing’ forward and challenge the other big search engine operatives.

Bing has been growing steadily, but disappointingly slowly over the past few years.  There have been many marketing adventures and technological investments to promote Bing’s growth, but the response was poor and not what Microsoft were expecting. The development of Bing had been restricted by the release of the Android phone, and the work to increase market share that Microsoft have (4.2%) in the Smartphone sales.  However, the stated market share has been restricted mainly because Apple has kept Google as there default search engine provider.

Nokia are a massive supplier of Smartphone’s and are arguably the largest in the world, so you would imagine that using Bing as a default search engine provider on a Nokia Smartphone would be just the thing. The ground work has been done by Nokia because of its global handset sales. Bing would have a market place and a significant leap forward in mobile search numbers. But, and there is a big but, by having a default search engine on a handset does not mean that it can’t be changed to a competitor just like you can change your search operator on a desktop PC, so there is no guaranteed usage.

If Microsoft had secured the default search engine with Apple – things could have been a lot different. Perhaps Microsoft will nail this chance to advance Bing as a search engine and not miss it. Nokia Smartphone’s did out-sell Apple iPhones by 10 to 1 last year so it could cause a problem for other search engines particularly on the mobile search market if Microsoft and Nokia can collaborate to make this work. Let’s not forget that Yahoo is also a partner of Microsoft, with a very popular email and chat service that could be installed into future Nokia handsets.

This topic could rumble on for many months and possibly years, but it’s an excellent window of opportunity for ‘Bing’ to development market share and start the growth.

Google Continue to Lead the comScore Rankings

The findings of the latest rankings report from comScore confirm that the most popular search engine in America is Google.  No shock there!

The report advises that Google had a staggering 65.6% share of searches carried out last month.

Yahoo! came in second with a 16.1% share.  Microsoft’s Bing followed Yahoo! with 13.1% which is a rise of 1.1%.

The January results saw a decline for Google.  In the December 2010 comScore results saw Google with a 66.6% share of searches.  However, not too much for Google to worry about yet as during December there were more than 16.4 billion core searches carried out on the web as a whole.

January saw almost 17 billion core searches carried out on the web with 11.1 billion of them belonging to Google.

Bing reply to Google’s ‘Cheating’ Accusations

Following Google’s claim that Bing has been cheating earlier in the week, Bing have fought back.  Not only has Bing denied copying Google, it has also accused Google of committing click fraud.

Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Services, Yusuf Mehdi published his response on the Bing Search Blog.

His post was made in reply to the claim made by Google on 1st February that Bing had been copying their search results.  Google ran tests that manually promoted and ranked random web pages when a nonsense search term was entered into Google.com.  During testing, Google discovered that a small percentage of test queries later replicated the same ranking on Bing.com

Mehdi said:  “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.”

The war of words between the two has seen Bing accuse Google trying to trick them on purpose and Google saying that Bing is just a cheap imitation of Google.

And it hasn’t stopped there; Mehdi has put another post on the Bing Blog suggesting that the Google test was a form a click fraud.

“Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers and produce bogus search results. What does all this cloak and dagger click fraud prove? Nothing anyone in the industry doesn’t already know. As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index.”

With both sides seeming determined to have the last word, god only knows how long this debate could go on for.  As things stand, Bing are in front but watch this space!

Is Microsoft Bing Focusing on the wrong areas?

Microsoft is continually looking to improve its offerings and gain ground on Google.  One suggestion could be investing some time in sitelinks.

Sitelinks offer website owners a handy way to channel shoppers into the section of the site that they are interested in after a one-word search. 

Could Bing be accused of copying Google? Quite possibly yes.  However, Bing could implement their own version with different options and could offer more in terms of reporting.

What else could Microsoft’s Bing improve?  Well, they could implement things that Google are already doing but provide users with a better service than Google.  Things such as local details in PPC adverts and integrating feeds to improve PPC ads (better regulation of which goods are shown for different searches).

We’ve no doubt that the Techies at Microsoft are already hard at work brainstorming the next innovation.

Bing need to ensure they don’t purely concentrate on increasing traffic and attracting new advertisers and spend time focusing on innovative improvements.

Failure to move fast will see Bing leaving it too late and as usual Google will benefit.  This will not be good for any of us as Google will go on to further dominate the search industry.

Bing copy Google’s Search Results. Nothing less than cheating?

Google says that they have proof that Bing has been watching what their customers search for on Google.  Google mounted a sting exercise that gathered results showing that Bing has been watching users Google search results and the sites the customers choose from those results.  Bing has then replicated the information to populate the same results it their search listings.

This basically means that thanks to work done by Google, Bing has potentially improved their relevancy.  Google likens the behaviour of Bing to that of one student looking over another’s shoulder during an exam.

Amit Singhal, who manages the Google search engine ranking algorithm said: “I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine.  I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The amazing thing is, Bing are not denying Google’s claim.  In fact, an email to Search Engine Land from the director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Stefan Weitz, appears to confirm the allegation:

As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query.

Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals

Watch this space as we don’t think we’ve heard the last about this!