Microhoo! - The Microsoft/Yahoo! Search Partnership

Microsoft(Bing) and Yahoo! announced a search partnership to begin in early 2010. You can read more at CNN Money. This partnership will put Bing search results from between 25-30% of total market share. Yahoo will still be responsible for attracting premium advertisers, no word yet direct effect this will have on PPC advertisers.

The search partnership has great timing as Bing continues to spend its way to popularity. This should lead to another swing of talk about the, now more interesting, Bing vs. Google competition. Although Google is still king, and will be for the foreseeable future, this is the first real competitor (as far as search share goes) they've seen this decade.

With Bing now a substantial piece of search results, will PPC costs in Google begin to become cheaper as advertisers shift budgets around? Or will advertisers even bother shifting budgets any more than they already have? Will the relatively low PPC costs of Yahoo! and Bing begin to cost more?

Plenty of questions around this merger, should make for an interesting 2010 for SEM.

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Microsoft Bing! Bomb? Boom?

Here's a very quick summary of events, just in case you haven't been following the soap opera courtship between Microsoft and Yahoo the last 2 years: Google is kicking their butts in search.

According to Comscore numbers, Google holds roughly 64% of all Internet Searches. Yahoo and Microsoft want a ticket to the ball but their search algorithms have long lagged behind Google's stronger ability to serve relevant results.

Enter Bing!

Microsoft decided to take the bull by the horns and write a new search algorithm - named Bing! The new engine launched the last days of May and reviews are in. They're mixed.

At First Scribe, we are relatively indifferent. The Bing engine seems to work, although it appears to fall for some old SEO techniques in the area of keyword-loaded directory structure. We are most impressed with the persistent search history feature and the image search but that doesn't seem to be enough for my staff to be using Bing any more than Google.

The Big Budget

Multiple news sources have stated the marketing budget for the launch of Bing between $80 and $100 million.

The payoff?

With a month of the open market behind Bing, Comscore is reporting that Bing received 8.4% of the Internet search queries in June, '09. Up from 8% in May. Google sat flat at 65% and Yahoo dropped from 20.1% to 19.6% in the same time frame.

What's the ROI?

It's always difficult to measure an ROI from such a broad-reaching marketing plan as this. However, we can tell you that many of us were looking for Microsoft's share to break the 10% range of search market share and they fell short of that expectation.

We have a suggestion -

Maybe Microsoft would have done well to spend a portion of the budget on a Google Adwords campaign.

Huh! Looks like they did. I wonder if they use Omniture Analytics:

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God More Popular Than MSN?

July 6, 2009 marked an important date for Christians when the world's oldest bible went online. The Codex Sinaiticus dates from the 4th century and it is arguably one of the most important texts in all of Christianity. The book contains nearly 800 of the original 1,460 pages, including roughly half of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament.

Pages had been separated from the whole and traveled to institutions across Europe. Starting in 2005, the project coordinators collected the existing pages and scanned each to a digital format. The composition became available online last week.

Instant Popularity

Now, the kicker -

The Codex Sinaiticus received 96.4 million hits in the first 48 hours online.

With some simple math we can extrapolate a number for the entire month. Please know that we recognize that we are taking phenomenal liberties in our analysis so these numbers are dubious at best. But let's not forget that we are talking about God on a Technology blog...

With a little math, presto - 96.4 million in 48 hours converts to 1.45 billion in 30 days

For comparison purposes:

• The April 8, 1966 edition of Time Magazine stated that "God is Dead". You can purchase a copy of that magazine for $9.99 today on eBay.
• The world's most expensive Bible available for purchase sells for $130,000
• World population estimates for the 4th century are between 190-206 million
• According to Comscore, Microsoft sites received 1.21 billion searches in April, 2009

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Yahoo and Microsoft Back To The Table?

It appears that Yahoo and Microsoft are back to the table talking about a search partnership. The talks appear bereft of discussion for a takeover and the general news surrounding both companies appear to support the death of any takeover bid.

Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, has joined ranks after the multiple takeover bids and doesn't appear to display any of the baggage from the multiple battles between the two companies in 2008. Microsoft appears to be moving on with their new search engine development (internal name Kumo).

What does it mean for the search world?

From our Search Engine Marketing perspective, we are happy to see Microsoft and Yahoo speaking in terms of combating Google's huge market share (multiple sources put them around 63%). Whether or not they can actually perform in this arena is questionable but we prefer they state that they will attempt to do so...

Until then, track your PPC numbers closely and diversify where you are able.

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