Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Search Volume’

Bing Keeps Growing While Yahoo’s Steady Decline Continues

Google’s dominance in the search engine market isn’t likely to end anytime soon, but Microsoft’s Bing managed to continue its slow but steady growth last month. According to the latest data from Compete, Bing’s market share only grew from 8.7% in August to 8.8% in September, but the total query volume on Bing grew 8.2%. All the other major search engines except for Ask (+1.3%) registered a decline in total search queries last month.

Sponsor

Yahoo

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google’s market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo’s market share, but isn’t growing at Google’s expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete’s Mark Madjarac points out that Bing’s numbers are even more impressive when you take into account that Bing’s users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google’s users (5.6 searches). Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

As Other Real-Time Search Engines Fizzle, OneRiot Gets Some Early Traction

While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.

This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). This would be a rounding error for any major search engine, but at least it is going in the right direction. Its investors think so. They ponied up another $7 million in a new round at the end of last month

OneRiot started to be noticed when it added link search from Twitter last May. But its search volume didn’t really take off until it launched its API, allowing other sites to tap into its real-time search and add it as a feature to their own Web app or site. OneRiot has 40 API partners, including Microsoft (sometimes bundled with IE)., browser add-ons Yoono and Shareaholic, and desktop apps like Nambu and EventBox.

All of these API partnerships add up. In fact, about 80 percent of OneRiot’s searches are coming through its APIs rather than directly on its site. OneRiot is building up market share by offering real-time search to others. (Rival Collecta is preparing to do the same thing by offering its own APIs soon). Search is a volume game, where the more search queries you can process, the better your results become. So OneRiot wants to power as many real-time searches as possible.

To the extent that OneRiot can familiarize people with the concept of real-time search in as many places as possible, that’s a good thing. But ultimately it needs to drive people back to OneRiot.com where it can control the entire experience (and the cash).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…

Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing

One of the least appreciated, but smartest, moves Yahoo has made in the past year is to launch Yahoo BOSS, its open search APIs which lets developers create their own custom search engine using Yahoo’s algorithms. We use it to power search across the TechCrunch network. And we are not alone. It has become immensely popular.

By last May, Yahoo BOSS was serving up 30 million search queries a day. You can see the rapid growth in search volume in the chart above, which comes from a Technology Review profile of Vik Singh, the 24-year-old engineer who was one of the main champions behind Yahoo BOSS. (He is one of Technology Review’s 2009 Innovators Under 35)

At 30 million queries a day, that comes out to about 900 million queries a month, which would make Yahoo BOSS the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. with about a 6 percent share. That is just below the 9 percent share (and 1.2 billion queries a month) comScore estimates for Bing.

But that is based on data from April. The chart is missing the last three months because Yahoo won’t update the numbers (I asked). Depending on the growth rate of Yahoo BOSS search queries since then, BOSS should now either be at par with Bing or even slightly larger. Between February, 2009 and April, 2009, search queries grew 50 percent (from 20 million a day to 30 million). Here are three different growth scenarios for the period May through July and the corresponding search volume numbers they would imply:

Growth Scenarios

1. 50 percent growth = 45 million queries a day = 1.35 billion queries a month
2. 40 percent growth = 42 million queries a day = 1.26 billion queries a month
3. 30 percent growth = 39 million queries a day = 1.17 billion queries a month

Remember, Bing was at an estimated 1.21 billion queries a month for the month of July. So BOSS might very well be as big as Bing. In fact, a couple months before the Bing-Yahoo deal, I kept hearing from people connected to Yahoo that BOSS on its own was bigger than Microsoft search. Now Microsoft owns BOSS as part of its deal to take over Yahoo’s search operations.

On the day the deal was announced, Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi told me that he wants to keep BOSS alive because “there is a lot of goodness there.” I’ll say. It adds about another six points to Bing’s overall search volume market share. (Click the market share table below to enlarge).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…

Yahoo Got Binged

Today, Yahoo died as a search engine. If the deal with Microsoft is approved, what will replace it will be Bing, the search engine that Microsoft launched only two months ago. Within a few months time, Microsoft will go from owning 8 percent of the U.S. search market to 28 percent (comScore). That is still less than half of Google’s 65 percent, but it could give Microsoft a fighting chance in the search wars against Google.

While the agreement was a long time coming, Bing was the cherry on top, so to speak. Earlier today, I spoke with the two executives who oversaw the negotiations for both sides, Yahoo EVP Hillary Schneider and Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi. I asked how big an impact Bing’s sudden success had on bringing the deal to a close. “Seeing Bing as a live experience was a nice assurance,” says Schneider, “but did not change our rationale or timing. This was a conversation that went on over several months. Bing was introduced after we had material momentum in how we wanted to approach this partnership.”

Yet Bing was able to gain market share in its very first month, and it took it from Yahoo, not Google. And Bing is just going to get better. Yahoo faced the very real prospect of market share erosion from below as well as from above. Now in one fell swoop, Microsoft will control all of Yahoo’s search volume. In a conference call today, Steve Ballmer explained how important market share is in search:

Do we think we will have better algorithms for relevance? Yes we do. There is a feedback loop in search. the more searches you serve, the more you learn about what people click on. Scale drives knowledge. There is a return to scale from seeing that much activity [that is more] than Yahoo or MSFT see independently

Microsoft will measure the success of this deal in two ways: increased market share with advertisers and increased market share with consumers. When I asked Mehdi what success would look like a couple years out, he defines it in terms of “shares of queries and spends.” Even before mentioning gaining share with consumers, he says: “Success is a smooth transition for advertisers as they shift more share of wallet from traditional media and competitors to get the better ROI.”

Microsoft will also become the new home for Yahoo’s search technologies. That is a good thing because even before this deal was announced, the spirit of technology innovation at Yahoo which produced projects such as Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey seems to have fizzled. These efforts will now be passed on to Microsoft. The fortunate news is that Mehdi says he wants to keep those projects alive. “For Search Monkey and Boss, we will integrate that technology and determine how to take that forward. There is a lot of goodness there.” At least Microsoft knows a good developer platform when it sees one.

So the deal is good for Microsoft. It puts them in the game, and they didn’t even have to pay $1 billion upfront. But is it good for Yahoo?

Instead of that upfront payment, Yahoo is getting 88 percent of search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites every year for the next five years (at which point the so-called TAC rate will be renegotiated for the last five years of the deal). “This is a materially higher TAC than any of the previous arrangements,” says Schneider. But it’s also not much higher than what big affiliates like AOL are believed to be getting from Google today. And Yahoo needs to keep paying its sales force, but can only keep 88 percent of the revenues they generate. (Although there are some revenue-per-search guarantees baked into the deal to protect Yahoo on the downside).

Investors aren’t thrilled with the deal, and it is not just because they tend to value cash over potential. This is a ten-year arrangement between two lumbering giants that is filled with execution risk. It is a very complicated deal. Yahoo’s sales team has enough trouble communicating with its own engineers. Now they have to learn how to talk to Microsoft’s.

The two companies will work hard to pull this off. Their futures depend on it. And the deal is structured in a way that makes sure both sides make more money the more searches and advertising dollars Bing generates. Getting to that ideal state, though, won’t be easy. In the meantime, as they work through all of the implementation issues, Google could strengthen its position and take even more share.

No matter what happens, Yahoo just took itself out of the search game. It got Binged.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…