Google Continues to Squeeze the Market Share

When talking about search engines “the big three”, which includes Google, Bing, and Yahoo!  they hold a combined 97.71% market share.  This is an all-time high of market share between the big three.  Google’s market share has reached an all-time high of 85.34%.  While the increase has significantly slowed, this is still up 5% from two years ago for Google.  As of December 2009, Yahoo sits at 6.29%. Bing is at 3.27%. 

Google talks about what’s going to happen in 2010

Google talks about what’s going to happen in 2010 and the biggest word in the Google vocabulary for 2010 is speed.  Everything is about speed now from the data transfer rates of video to the ability for real-time search to real-time individual status updates and the explosive growth of information coming to us.

Experimentation is the next biggest word in the Google vocabulary as new technologies are coming to us faster and faster every year. The consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas this year is unveiling many new products from 3-D television to hold the shift in PC computing.  You’re going to see a lot of Internet experimentation with television viewing.

Based on trends of 2009, Google talks about popular blogging topics and how the topics that were of interest in 2009 are going to affect business in 2010.  Items like Google chrome have 2.6 million unique page views.  Other Google products include Google wave, Google voice, and Google translation. 

Google Provides Insight on Geographical Triggers

This wasn’t announced in the last week or so, yet Google has very recently started to let us know the factors that influence the Geo triggers to start a local search.  For example, if you were to do a search for [pizza delivery] Google is going to give you a Geo search based on different factors. This is determined by three unique triggers. 

• Query characteristic. The language used, location information and query, revisions to the query etc. The search engine will look to see if there are geographic relevance to a given query to establish efficient start looking for documents relating to the geographical area.
• Interface characteristics; what are the language settings of the browser? Mobile or desktop? IP address?
• SERP characteristic;  once a SERP is displayed, the search engine will look at the top documents were given query or using historical query analysis in the search engine can determine if that search is a Geo search are not.

As a reminder, on December 4 Google announced the introduction of load times as a ranking factor. Don’t forget to learn about the Google page the tool and the inclusion of a new site performance graph and good webmaster tools suggesting that Google is going to put heavy emphasis on page speed.

Facebook’s Status Messages Are Now Public By Default

Facebook is just recently changed the privacy settings. For whatever reason, Facebook changed it’s privacy that there’s certain information that absolutely cannot be made private including somebody’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, the networks are part of, and their friends list.  This is a big deal as a marketer and the consumer. Using a product called friend finder will allow you to “hack” the Facebook platform without breaking any rules or laws. What this means and what this hack provides is a system with a list of e-mail addresses.  I can run and pull up all Facebook users including Maine’s locations networks that are involved with and their friends list on those e-mail addresses. This is a marketer’s dream. You can then scan that data that you’ve collected for a variety of wall posts.  Different affiliations, names of friends and runtime analysis or create an algorithm with this data so you can start to make inferences about race or income actual orientation and interests. There is no way that Facebook can allow this to last.

SEO is Bad

There continues to always be talk that SEO is bad.  Last week there was a lot of hoopla that was created for a post that said that SEO is bad for small and medium businesses. This is just crazy talk. The bottom line is you have local businesses that need to market themselves. You have their buyers that are on the Internet researching these businesses. Therefore businesses will always be marketing themselves on the Internet, as long as there is an Internet. Some people call that SEO. I will never argue that the strategies of SEO come and go.  As you know, we don’t follow any hard SEO strategies.  We simply focus on transparency and exposure. Businesses have been focusing on transparency and exposure forever. Bottom line, continuing to focus on business transparency and exposure utilizing the Internet will always continue even if SEO as we know it is dead.

Pepsi Opts out of Super Bowl Commercials

That’s right.  After 23 years of including themselves in the much anticipated commercials during the Super Bowl, Pepsi pulls out. The reason why they’ve done this is that they are allocating more of their budget to online marketing. FedEx has also stopped advertising in the Super Bowl this year.  Between us, FedEx does not invest a lot of money in online marketing today anyway.  With everything that’s happening on the Internet right now, remember to set yourself up so everything that you do, you can test.  Test…Test…Test!