SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Microsoft Corp. has finally reached a long sought and expensive goal — its Bing search engine now ranks second behind Google in the Internet’s most lucrative market.

Bing and Microsoft’s other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. during December, catapulting in front of Yahoo Inc. for the first time in the jockeying for runner up to Google Inc., according to statistics released Wednesday by comScore Inc.

Bing’s December volume translated into a 15.1 percent share of the U.S. search traffic, comScore said. Yahoo processed 2.65 billion search requests, representing 14.5 percent of the U.S. market.

Google remained Internet’s go-to place for information, with 12 billion U.S. requests in December. That works out to a 65.9 percent market share.

Other research firms track the Internet search market. But comScore’s numbers matter the most to industry analysts and the companies trying to attract queries so they can make more money from the ads that appear alongside the results. Google’s dominance of online search is the main reason it has established itself as the Internet’s most profitable company.

Analysts have expected Microsoft and Yahoo to flip-flop their positions in Internet search since they announced a partnership in July 2009. The 10-year agreement has enabled Yahoo to save money by relying on Microsoft to provide the bulk of its search technology.

Microsoft wanted the deal so it would have billions more search requests to analyze each year, giving it a better chance to learn about people’s tendencies and preferences.

Pursuing Google has come at a huge cost for Microsoft, which still makes most of its money from the Windows operating software and other software it sells for personal computers. Microsoft’s online division, which is anchored by Bing, has suffered operating losses of about $7 billion since June 2008.

Even though it leans heavily on Microsoft’s technology, Yahoo hasn’t totally abandoned search. It still offers some unique features within its results in hopes of persuading more people to search on its website instead of going directly to Bing. The main reason: Yahoo still gets 88 percent of the ad revenue from searches conducted on its website and receives nothing from queries entered on Bing.

The efforts haven’t been enough to prevent a steady slide in searches at Yahoo. The company’s share of the U.S. search market stood at about 19 percent when it joined forces with Microsoft, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s market share has climbed from roughly 9 percent.

Yahoo’s eroding search share is one of the reasons that its revenue has been falling during the past three years.

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RESTON, VA, March 11, 2011 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in February with 65.4 percent of searches conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in February with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft sites with 13.6 percent (up 0.5 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.7 percent.

*“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

More than 15.4 billion explicit core searches were conducted in February. Google Sites ranked first with 10.1 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.1 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 267 million.

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 64.9 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.3 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.4 percent (up 0.6 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.9 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.

* “Total Core Search” is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual 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 these numbers.

Americans conducted nearly 17.0 billion total core search queries in February. Google Sites ranked first with 11.0 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.9 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion.

“Powered By” Reporting

In order to accurately represent the continued evolution of the search landscape, comScore is providing insight into the share of algorithmic explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing, and branded as such to the consumer. Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask. Bing’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Microsoft entities as well as branded Yahoo! entities.

In February, 68.0 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 26.2 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results.

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The Huffington Post
Joanna Zelman
02/ 8/11 05:51 PM

The Yellow Pages phone book. It’s been used as packaging material, a dangerous booster seat, fire kindling, and perhaps a box for illicit items if holed-out. But in an increasingly digital age, just how often is the phone book actually used to make phone calls? San Francisco believes it’s not often enough to warrant general distribution.

According to GreenBiz.com, San Francisco has proposed a law banning the distribution of unsolicited phone books. If the law goes into effect, phone companies and Yellow Pages publishers will be prohibited from leaving phone books on doorsteps and lobbies without advanced permission — fines could be up to $500 per violation.

The companies could still contact consumers to ask if they want a delivery, and the books would still be available for pick-up at distribution centers. But the new rules could cut down on a huge amount of waste generated per year.

According to the Sierra Club, AT&T distributes nearly 1 million phone books per year to San Francisco alone — that’s over 5 million pounds of paper for that one area of California.

Statistics suggest that approximately 70% of U.S. adults rarely or never use the phone book. Even the National Yellow Pages Association and the Association of Directory Publishers has recognized this statistic, and recently launched YellowPagesOptOut, a website where customers can easily cancel their home delivery service.

But a simple opt-out website is much different from a ban on mass distribution, and not everyone is happy with San Francisco’s new proposal. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, Amy Healy, a top representative of the Yellow Pages Association claims that the law “would be an infringement of our constitutional rights – the right to distribute speech.” Healy also argues that the law targets just one industry, without addressing other forms of solicitation. She also states that the Yellow Pages book is far from obsolete, citing the industry statistic of 12 billion lookups per year.

But with an estimated $54 million spent per year by local governments to dispose of unwanted phone books, something has to change. If banning unsolicited materials does indeed infringe upon the Yellow Page’s “right to distribute speech,” could taxpayers argue that by receiving and having to dispose of these unsolicited materials, their rights are then infringed upon? As San Francisco Board of Supervisors president David Chiu proclaims, “If we’re serious about the environment, it’s time we recognize that phone books are a 20th century tool that doesn’t meet the business or environmental needs of the 21st century.”

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By Jolie O’Dell, Mashable
September 30, 2010 10:06 a.m. EDT | Filed under: Web

Since the button launched, many publishers are reporting large increases in traffic specifically due to this kind of social plugin.

Facebook like button is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web
User who “likes” your content has more than double the friends than a typical user
Button bringing Facebook closer to competing with Twitter in the area of referral traffic

(Mashable) — The new-this-year-yet-somehow-already-ubiquitous Facebook Like button has been around just long enough to generate some interesting numbers relating to Facebook users and web traffic.

The button, which launched in April at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other kinds of publishers.

A media analytics lead on Facebook’s Developer Network Insights team crunched some numbers and found that Facebook Likes not only generate interesting data about the “likers” (a.k.a. Facebook users who are also active on your website) themselves; this data also speaks volumes about clickthrough rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics.

Read entire story at http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/09/30/like.button.web.traffic.mashable/index.html?hpt=C2

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(CNN) — Concerns over Facebook’s new privacy policy and the online social network’s recent efforts to spread its information across the Web have led some of the site’s faithful to delete their accounts — or at least try to.
On Wednesday’s episode of a podcast called This Week in Technology, host Leo Laporte, a well-known tech pundit, said he had to search wikiHow, a how-to site, to figure out how to delete his Facebook account permanently.
After finding the delete button, which he said is hidden deep within the site’s menus, Laporte proceeded to delete his account during the online broadcast.

“That’s it. It’s gone,” he said during the show. “And I think that’s the right thing to do.”

Read entire article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/13/facebook.delete.privacy/index.html?hpt=T2

Internet Explorer losing grip on browser market

Many people complain about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There have even been campaigns to kill old versions of the Web browser.

But despite the haters, IE has always remained way on top. In June 2002, 95 percent of computers accessed the Internet through the product, which comes installed as the default web-surfing tool on Microsoft Windows computers.

IE remains dominant today. But, compared to its heights in the early 2000s, it’s slipping. This week, the market researcher NetApplications released a report saying IE has fallen to less than 60 percent of the browser market.

Meanwhile, alternative browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are catching up a bit.

Firefox makes up nearly a quarter of the browser market; and newer Chrome is at about 7 percent, up from about 2 percent a year ago in May.

A new version of Internet Explorer – IE9 – is expected to debut soon.

Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann tells the BBC that alternatives to IE continue to catch consumer attention:

“There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” he says.

That’s impressive, considering there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that many Web users don’t know what a browser is. (If you’re one of them, don’t feel bad. It’s the program you open in order to access the internet. It’s what you’re using to view this story.)

What do you make of IE’s slipping market share? Which browser do you use and why?

Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

Read rest of article at TechCrunch

The mobile ad space continued to heat up last week with Amobee’s acquisition of RingRing Media, a 2-year-old London-based startup, for an undisclosed sum. The move surely isn’t anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s $750 million AdMob buy or even Apple’s $275 million pick-up of Quattro Wireless, but it’s the kind of smaller-scale deal we’re likely to see many more of this year as the segment consolidates.

Mobile ad startups are hot commodities once again thanks largely to in-app marketing, which has given the segment a much-needed lift over the last year. Established Internet companies and software development companies alike are scrambling to gain a foothold in the space, much like in 2007, which saw a flurry of activity including AOL’s acquisition of Third Screen Media, Yahoo’s pick-up of Actionality, the Microsoft ScreenTonic buy and Nokia’s tie-up with Enpocket. While 2010 may not see as many blockbuster deals, the number of tie-ups could end up surpassing that of three years ago, Rich Wong of Accel Partners told me last week:

Brand managers now are spending in this medium. It’s real, and it’s genuine. I do think it’s going to be hard to have a quarterly earnings call as a major Internet company and not have an answer to the question, ‘What’s your mobile strategy?’

The landscape is far different now than it was just three years ago, though, when a handful of startups were quick to emerge in the nascent space. Recent figures from IDC indicate that Millennial Media is clearly the largest startup left on the field (see chart); the mobile search firm JumpTap is the second-largest potential acquisition despite a mere 4 percent market share. Yahoo and Microsoft claim a combined market share of only 19 percent — which may prompt the high-profile players to make an acquisition or two this year in order to build their mobile businesses.

The field also teems with smaller player that specialize in targeted areas such as search or that serve specific geographic regions. And recent growth in the space has given rise to a host of startups that play supporting roles by providing analytics and other tools. Flurry, which pocketed $7 million on the heels of its recent tie-up with Pinch Media, may be especially attractive to ad companies that don’t have their own mobile analytics operations.

So while we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

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By Stephanie Chen CNN

(CNN) — If you’re on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim.

That’s because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

It starts with a friend updating his or her status or sending you a message with an innocent link or video. Maybe your friend is in distress abroad and needs some help.

All you have to do is click.

When the message or link is opened, social network users are lured to fake Web sites that trick them into divulging personal details and passwords. The process, known as a phishing attack or malware, can infiltrate users’ accounts without their consent.

Once the account is compromised, the thieves can infiltrate the list of friends or contacts and repeat the attack on subsequent victims. Social networking sites show there is ample opportunity to find more victims; the average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site.

Read rest of article

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