Happy Veterans Day and thank you to all our Veterans, past and present, who served our country for us and generations to come! God bless you and God bless America!

Earlier today in a post about Bing’s announcement of a deal with Twitter and Facebook I wrote, “Look for Google to introduce its own social network data integration soon.” Little did I know soon would be today.

According to Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search, a new Google Labs app called Social Search will launch in the next few weeks. Social Search will add relevant updates and posts from your social network friends to the bottom of your search results page. How will Google know what networks you belong to and who your friends are? It’s in your Google Profile. As long as you have added your social networks to your Google Profile. Don’t have a Google Profile yet? Get one here.

Ms. Mayer also announced that like Bing, Google has signed an agreement with Twitter to display its real-time tweets in its search results.

Based on the two companies’ announcements, it sounds like there will be some differences in how Google and Bing will handle social posts. Google’s Profile integration means that it pulls only from within your network. Bing however, will pull from all public posts. Google will pull from all social networks that you add to your Google Profile. Bing on the other hand will only pull from Twitter and Facebook. To know more, we’ll have to wait until Google and Bing launch their new features.

Meanwhile, make sure you have accounts set up on all the popular social networks, develop your connections on those networks, and keep your keyword list close by as you post, tweet, blog, microblog and whatever else you do on the social net.

And they have a photo to prove it!

Microsoft employee Kunal Das recently traveled to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro – the world’s highest free-standing mountain – and left a Bing sticker at the top (see it on the sign right after “Africa’s Highest Point”).

Unfortunately for Bing though, Google is still the king of the search engine mountain with 64.7% of core searches according to comScore‘s July 2009 US. Search Engine rankings report. The good news for Bing is that the new and improved search engine did continue its upward trend with an increase of 5% for it’s number of searches. It’s just going to be a long trek to try to dethrone Google!

]]> http://katybarrilleaux.com/2009/08/bing-is-at-the-top/feed/ 3 http://katybarrilleaux.com/2009/03/ask-may-be-the-engine-that-could/ http://katybarrilleaux.com/2009/03/ask-may-be-the-engine-that-could/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:00:56 +0000 Katy Barrilleaux http://katybarrilleaux.wordpress.com/?p=886

comScore released its February 2009 Search Engine report and to the surprise of no one, Google maintains its dominance with 63.3% market share among the top five search engines. Yahoo! comes in second with 20.6% share, followed by Microsoft with 8.2% of the search market. Ask.com is the “also ran” engine with a mere 4.1% share of the core search market.

However, what I found interesting is that when comparing the search volume from January to February, Ask.com shows an unusually high jump of 21% more search queries — despite February’s three fewer days.

Looking back at previous months, Ask.com has not experienced an increase nearly as big as this…not even double digits. So why this increase now?

Obviously I’m not privy to everything going on at Ask.com. But, I have seen television ads for Ask.com lately. With a little digging, I found that Ask has in fact been aggressively using offline advertising to promote its online search engine.

Ask Climbs on Board with NASCAR

In January, Ask.com inked a deal to become the Official Search Engine of NASCAR. According to Ask’s CEO Jim Safka,

Our goal is to win over the millions of loyal fans by providing them with the best NASCAR search experience on the Web, and introduce them to all of Ask’s capabilities when they come.

The advertising campaign features slices of life of a “typical NASCAR-loving family” as they follow racing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQbQNPC9mrA]

Airing approximately 4-5 times during each of the 36 NASCAR race broadcasts, the :15 and :30 Ask.com spots feature content tied to that particular race broadcast. And, Ask.com is running television spots during non-NASCAR related programming.

Ask.com also has begun running a series of crawler ads on the bottom of the screen during some cable shows. The ads pose queries to viewers, who can then find the answers by using the search engine. The questions, which are tied to show content or subject matter, are appearing on 18 channels, including AMC, FX, National Geographic Channel, MLB Network and NFL Network.

Keep an Eye on the Little Engine

Of course, one month does not establish a trend. But it is a start. And with aggressive offline advertising and promotions, this may be the beginning of the long haul towards the top of the search. I’ll keep an eye on the comScore monthly search reports to see if Ask.com sustains this growth. I’m sure that Ask is saying, “I think I can, I think I can!”

The top search engines are on Twitter.  Are you following their tweets?

@InsideGoogle

@Yahoo

@Live_Search

@AskDotCom (UK)

And one of my personal favorites:

@Viewzi

Google is the most represented of the companies, with many more accounts set up for various products: news, apps, etc. Here is a link that lists all Twitter accounts with Google in the name; just beware of  immitators!

comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for December 2008, compared to November 2008.

December 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, unchanged from November, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.9 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for November 2008, compared to October 2008.

November 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, up 0.4 percentage points from October, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.4 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (4.0 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.