Why do people in the UK not like Microsoft very much? Why knows? Well to be fair, no one knows whether it’s an actual dislike of the multi-media giant, but the fact remains that Google holds roughly about 90% of the search market share there. Microsoft has thus far had to be content with a paltry 3%…thus far. Word is that Microsoft is planning a major push in order to increase the popularity of its own search engine, Bing.

The news was revealed by MediaGuardian.co.uk. Apparently Microsoft is set to pump a few million pounds into television ad campaigns. The problem though isn’t that people don’t know about Bing, not with the innumerable number of threads at various forums. They’re just not using it. Google has taken a lot of time to refine their search parameters and they’re always tweaking the system. Perhaps that’s what accounts for their huge lead in the market share.

Microsoft will definitely have their work cut out for them but, should they be able to make some inroads, it could be a good thing for search marketers. After all, competition drives companies to offer better things to their customers in order to keep their business. With this in mind, what could be expected should Google and Microsoft end up in a head to head battle? We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Well the news is out. Apparently the much discussed search advertising deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft has been given the go ahead by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union. Many are heralding that decision as the end of the Yahoo! search market share, which is sad because that’s kind of what Yahoo! has become known for over the years. Sure Yahoo! has their Shopping, Mail and News categories but they’re most thought of as a search engine.

So what does this deal mean for Yahoo! Essentially their free search capabilities will be transferred over to Bing while a paid search platform will become known as adCenter. The justification for this was that the deal would increase the level of competition amongst advertisers. Well this is good news for the companies, but not so much for search engine advertisers since more competition for ad space will ultimately drive those prices up.

So what’s an advertiser to do? The most logical step is to disperse advertising resources across fewer high cost methods and look for effective low cost methods to invest in. One of these is social media, which is possibly the cheapest way to get access to a large number of people. Some SEO gurus are already predicting that 2010 will be the year of social networks, with more and more advertisers moving away from search campaigns. After all, there aren’t that many effective search engines left.

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Love them or hate them Google have been the number one search engine for years, they have become a brand in themselves and a huge household name.

With the current real time phenomenom, which is completley overated in my opinion in terms of search, Google have been getting into a panic because they think that if they do not stay on top of things they are going to lose out on valuable market share. So how have the search giants responded to this?

• Social Search
• Real Time Search
• Google Wave
• Tons of other products and services

We know that Google do a lot of lab testing, but to see things such as real time search be fed into the main index, sometimes even above the organic listings is absolutley mad! These real time results are in no way relevant to what I am looking for and it just looks like a whole lot of spam.

What really is real time? Why are Google in such a panic? If you are looking for a product or a service, real time results are not what you want to see, what you want to see is trusted sites that give you what you are looking for.

So you ask yourself why has real time communication grown so much? Well, it hasnt… What has happened is that more people are now online than ever before and these people just want to talk to each other, most users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter just want to talk to people and view their pictures etc.

Real time communication has been around since the dawn of the internet, does anyone not remember the old MSN Chat?

Now this was genuine real time communication, where you could talk about all of the lastest and greatest happenings on TV/news etc. MSN Chat was hugely popular/successful and well ahead of its time in my opinion. The best thing was that it was moderated by the community, the community got to decide who entered their rooms and room creators were awarded with gold hammers to moderate the room. (This was infact how I first got into SEO, optimising the chat rooms to appear on the first page of the category).

MSN Chat was a real time community like no other.. So why then did it end up shutting down? One of two reasons really:

• Rooms were getting spammed constantly by advertisers
• Because it was extremeley busy, a big reason for MSN chat shutting down was that it provided another opportunity for pedophiles to have access to underage prey through the chat rooms.

So now if we take a look a Twitter as example, have any of these problems been addressed? No!

Twitter are bombarded with spam after spam and because it relies on users there will ALWAYS be spam. I mean even http://twitter.com/twitblacklist shut down, simply because it was getting so bad and this was in July 2008.  This is why Facebook can avoid this merely because its you talking to people you know.

Real time communication has still got the same interest it always has had, the only reason more and more people are using these services is because there is now a heck of a lot more people online.

But do we need real time spam (which will always be there) among us when we search? No we do not, all people want Google to deliver is trusted sites, in the end this is what people are looking for when they perform a search on Google. By all means use sites such as Twitter to see posts or pages which are being talked about, but including nonsense, spammy and irrelevant personal conversations in the main index is not a good idea. Past experience and internet history has always shown that when you give users full power things start to slide.. Just look at the redundant MSN Chat and MySpace more recently.

Google go back to your roots and display highly relevant results of pages online, use busy social sites as a ranking factor but do not include conversations in the results.

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Here’s something to ponder upon. It’s not that ordinary surfers weren’t already confused about which search engines work best, here’s news of another choice. Ask.com has decided to go big and make hay while the sun shines. We’re already aware of all the competition between Google and Yahoo, and as if that wasn’t enough, Ask.Com plans to launch itself against Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

They plan to follow a Super Verticals strategy that will enable them to answer factual questions directly. Another interesting thing that one must know is that Ask.com will also be the NASCAR official search engine. The system isn’t up and working jut as yet. All enthusiasts and critics will have to wait till next month, February 15th, 2009. They plan to make a launch on the day of the Daytona race, a new beginning ad certainly ample marketing for the big day in all fronts.

It certainly is a great strategy to launch  a competitive search engine because all NASCAR fans will now head to one destination, Ask.com. The company is obviously hoping to convert current users loyalties through this approach. It’s still too early to predict results but this certainly is a smart tactic by Ask.com.

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According to the recent news from the world of webmasters, search engine giants, Microsoft and Google has been sued by a company called Cygnus Systems. This is over the patent of icon Software infringement. The leading company Apple is also involved in the list of companies sued by Cygnus.

The company had already claimed that it holds the patent rights on a feature used by browsers. This feature for common file preview is being used by operating systems for showing the snapshots of files to users, before being opened. The company’s court filings, declare that Windows Vista, Google chrome etc are using this feature.

The company has the rights for the System and the patent of the management of the iconic software. The company had applied for this in the year 2001 and the US Patent and Trademark office granted this in March 2008.

The company is now investigating on some other potentially infringing products, which they have already identified. It is expected that the company will be trying to file suits against several other companies apart from Google, Apple and Microsoft. The company will be publishing this list in a short while when they go for court filing against them.

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Usually when you search for results using queries with the help of search engines, you will get details including web pages and URL links.

A recent patent application from Microsoft describes how images could be displayed as web pages to the searchers, when search results are being shown. This patent application also considers how images could be displayed to the users, if there is more than one image in a single page.

The search engine will determine the importance of each image in the website using automated process. Based on the features of the image, the dominance will be evaluated. If different images have same dominance, one that is more relevant to the query will be considered for display. The features generally considered include the size of the image, the location of the web page etc.

For this patent, Microsoft explored different image level features as well as page level features. This even included the features from a website level. Thus, images will help in determining the page rank by the search engines. As a result, this will change the interests of website users, especially search engine users when using Microsoft search engine patent in getting images for their searches.

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Search engines care much about the presence of spam in their search results. SEO optimization cares a lot about technical as well as informational base for the websites so that users will get all relevant information and data from the search engines. Microsoft has come up with a recent patent application stating the classification system that helps search engines in working with the spam. This will help the search engines to optimize those results which are not useful for the particular queries. This system normally works on the basis of the comparing features which will search queries and other features of the web pages. In fact, this helps to rank the pages better for the queries as well.

When the pages that is more relevant for the search is displayed, those pages which are spam are less likely to be displayed. The patent describes that, there are various reasons for keeping from displaying the spam pages along with the web page results of searches. The most important reason is that when the spam pages increase, users might switch to other search engines. Another reason is that websites might start using spamming techniques to increase their ratings over the spam pages.

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Back in June 2008, Yahoo and Google have planned for an online advertising marriage. This was an attempt initiated by Yahoo as a tactic to keep away from the grasp of Microsoft. 

But as per the latest news from the number 1 and 2 search engines, this marriage is now dead. Even when they walk away from this agreement, Google agrees to the fact that, this association will be beneficial to the parties involved, in online advertising. Yahoo will be able to show more ads for the queries which generate no advertisement in the current scenario. News ads will be highly useful for the users as well as advertisers. This will be valuable for the publishers as well. 

In June, when they decided to have a join venture, they announced that the implementation will be done after four months and by this time, they expected to receive green signal for the launch. After this period, Google is now moving away from Yahoo without trying to face the legal issues. They abandoned the agreement altogether. On the other hand, when Microsoft offered shares to Yahoo in the beginning, they denied this, going after Google.  As per Google, their success lies on what they offer to customers, their products and features.

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Recession has many faces and the SEO industry isn’t all together safe. First there were desperate attempts by Microsoft to take over Yahoo, but having failed hasn’t stopped Microsoft from being interested. In fact they’re even hopeful regarding the Yahoo and AOL merger because they can again make attempts to take over. In fact, many market experts still suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo would rather find some common ground and seal the deal than have Yahoo cut up and used in different ways. The implications are serious and the outcome will have long lasting effects on the SEO industry.

The third quarter has already spelt doom for most companies and before the end of another disastrous 4th quarter; it’s likely that AOL and Yahoo will wrap up talks. Both companies are in serious talks and management at different levels are negotiating to find the best outcome. The financial meltdown has affected stocks of both companies and trends don’t suggest that things will stabilise if not handles immediately. From $3, to a value of $11 or $12, things don’t look too good for Ballmer. As if tension wasn’t mounting, there really is time factor that’s playing havoc. The SEO industry is faced with unknown changes; the world is waiting and watching.

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Microsoft has recently released a patent application which has creative suggestions and strong outlines to change the search interfaces over the internet. The traditional way of displaying information over the interface will take a kinking spin as it would pave the way for story board or story line sort of a result display. 

    This publication of Microsoft indeed is a matter of concern for the SEO sector, as researches have to be conducted whether this change would attribute to a rethinking of SEO strategies or SEO techniques to be adopted to yield better results. Considering the interest of stock marketer for example, he would love to see a better documented search result in the form of a story line with lines and sections portraying the data in a better way. Easier understanding and manipulation of data will be made possible. 

   The methodology going to be adopted is termed as “query line tracking”, which essentially manipulates the search queries. The search result will be pulled out in the conventional manner, but the before interfacing the result, a “tracking system” re models the pulled out data to form story lines or statistical pictures, depending on the search query forwarded by the end user. Anyways, SEO has got something to think about, when interfaces are heading for a sharp spin.

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