Baidu, a “local Chinese Google”, who leads the search engine market with over 75% share (Google only has 19 percent), is also one of the biggest and popular websites in the world. Alexa currently ranks it as the 6^th popular in the world, just above Wikipedia and below Live. As do most big players in the SE industry, Baidu offers various services – such as video and image storage, website building platform, online encyclopedia, discussion forums, and more.

However, in today’s dynamic world, standing still and cherishing your achievements will very quickly lead to dethronement, at the very least. That’s why Baidu is looking to expand even further, especially when the number two Chinese website, Tencent, is also gaining ground, entering Alexa’s “world’s top 10″ this month, after surpassing Twitter.

Tencent is largest internet company in China, and, with Facebook being unavailable to users, it is trying to utilize the social networking niche to compete with Baidu. The “satellite” services that are being offered by Tencent are very similar to the stated above Baidu products, making the clash between the two a “hot” battle for dominance. Baidu’s response, according to Robin Li, the CEO of the company, lies within expanding its own network of users and making it more “social”. In addition of fighting Tencent, this should also serve as additional income channel for the Chinese market leader.

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Have you ever heard about KidRocket, Konqueror or Amaya? I bet you didn’t. What about Safari and Opera? Sounds more familiar, right? And Google Chrome? Is there anybody who did NOT hear about Google’s web browser? Probably not.

Launched slightly over two(!) years ago – compare that to 14-yeard old Internet Explorer and 7-year old Mozilla Firefox – Google Chrome is gaining ground rapidly, at the rate of about 5% a year. Reportedly it is now the choice of over 15% of internet users. And the good news for the browser is that it is not only attracts IE users (the world most popular web browser is constantly losing popularity as new search engines are emerging  all the time, and users do tend to “try something new”), but FF followers as well. During 2010, the Mozilla browser lost about 4% of US market share – mostly to Google Chrome.

While only a fraction of internet users actually utilize more than 20% of browser capabilities and features, the competition is mostly about two things – GUI and advertising. Google Chrome is pretty successful in both. The tabbed layout was adopted successfully (later than FF, earlier than IE) and the marketing efforts are enormous. Advertising is done both on and of the internet, with buses carrying the “part of your life – part of your browser” theme in addition to endless promotional banners al over the web.

Whether it is superior to others or not, Google Chrome is definitely making a huge progress. Will Chrome take over and dominate, as did Google? I doubt it. Will it compete and maybe become the most popular web browser in the future? Quite possible.

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Beside the big and known Google, Yahoo, Bing, Blekko and Ask.com and the local leaders Baidu and Tandex, there are several other, “little” search engines – such as HotBot and DuckDuckGo. The latter was launched in 2008 and has a very, very limited market share with about 2.5 million searches a month. However, everyone is trying to gain ground these days – and if this is done on expense of Google – it is even better.

DuckDuckGo tries to gain users by emphasizing their pretty unique approach – they do no store search data. Either this is done on purpose or the company simply does not have the necessary resources, the manner is now advertised as being solely correct.

In an aggressive marketing campaign, the company specifically highlights “the Google way” of “invading your privacy”, stating that with little effort, your search history associated with computer IP and, stored at Google servers can be tracked down to you in person. Next goes your personal data, credit history, insurance policy etc.

Although the campaign (as most advertising campaigns) is not entirely correct, purposely exaggerating the “big brother” threat of in its quest of “making the privacy aspects of search engines understandable to the average person” (quoted is DuckDuckGo founder, Gabriel Weinberg), it might have an effect on certain privacy-concerned users. Will they switch to DuckDuckGo or go elsewhere? That is another question, of course…

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Ask.com and Bing are very anxious to prove the world they can beat Google. Even in minor things, like Image Search that Bing was enhancing constantly over last several month. Or in a Search Engine Jeopardy contest, managed by Stephen Wolfram. Well, it seems Google competitors still have some work to do, as the Search Industry leader was victorious once again.

The SE Jeopardy consisted of Jeopardy questions randomly selected form a database of around 200000 that were fed into the search queries of various engines. The developers then looked at the number of correct answers that appeared in the search results page and also at the number of correct answers that were included in the page that search engines presented as the top result.

The results were as follows:

Percentage of correct answers appearing somewhere on the first page: Google – 69%; Ask.com – 68%, Bing – 63%, Yandex – 62%, Blekko – 58%, Wikipedia – 23%.

Percentage of correct answers appearing in the top result of the page: Google – 66%; Bing – 65%, Yandex – 58%, Ask.com – 51%, Blekko – 40%, Wikipedia – 29%.

Obviously Wikipedia didn’t stand too much chance, as it was only one website competing against “the whole internet”. Still, it must be noted that only about one-third of Jeopardy answers are already in Wikipedia…

As to Search Engines – Google has beaten the competition, although the margins are not that big. But based on these results, Ask and Blekko have to do a better job of listing the most relevant link at the top (see how their percentage dropped when they looked into the first document. And Bing is “almost there” – but still a fraction behind Google.

Yandex numbers were very impressive, as it is basically a local Russian search engine. If the test has been done in Russian (or at least, based on Russian Jeoprdy Analogue, “Svoya Igra”, which includes fewer questions about American culture and history) Yandex would probably beat Google – exactly as it does in the Russian Search Engine market.

In summary, nobody can beat Google in providing relevant information. Not just yet. So, when you want to know “What is” something – don’t ask and don’t bing. Google it!

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With Google being the most popular search engine in the world, and particularly in the US, it is not yet gained enough ground in non-English speaking countries. While in India, the UK and Australia Google is the runaway leader in Search Engine competition, there are still countries in which local search engines are quite successful in opposing the G- giant. Baidu is number one in China (and there is also a new player in the SE field, supported by the government – goso.cn), and most former USSR-countries internet users (Russian speakers) prefer Yandex over Google.

Yet, Google is trying hard to get into the local markets. Recently, it has reported a successful takeover of the number one spot in Czech Republic, surpassing the local leader Seznam.cz in the first week of 2011.

Seznam, however, does not agree, stating that the statistics are not conclusive, and presents different figures, such as having almost 70% of Czech internet “population” with about 4 million users. Moreover, Seznam.cz emphasizes the misleading inaccuracy, as Google statement is based on report that takes into account both local and global pages, while Seznam only concentrates on Czech-based domains. They are also accusing Google of “refusing to participate in official measuring”.

Well, whether Google report is accurate or not is not very significant. The important fact is that Google puts an enormous amount of effort to increase the grasp of local, non-English-speaking markets.

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It has only been several months since Google had announced and completed the “New Adsense” – a redesign of the familiar GUI, adding several features to impress the users. And here it is – they are already adding more attributes to the popular money-making feature.

According to recent report, there will be now more things you could do in your Google Adsense account, such as creating and editing channels in Adsense for Games and Adsense for Video, blocking specific products by names and view the reports by page, and not only by unit.

There have also been some “renames” – the HTML is now “rich media” and Dynamic Images are called “Animated Images”. All those (as well as text, image and Flash) are included in the performance reports as “Ad types”. In addition, “Ad Requests” is the term that is now used instead of “Unit Impressions”, counting each time the request to show the ad is sent by the website towards Google service.

Google hopes these updates will be beneficial to Adsense users, making the popular “monetize you website” option preferable over Affiliate marketing, specific client banners and other possibilities.now

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Google Webmaster Tools are a popular feature, servicing hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of website owners and web analytics over the world. Everybody works with the provided numbers, without questioning the reliability of the data. However, ask a mechanical engineer – and he will tell you that everything in this world has a “tolerance” and no value is absolutely accurate.

The same mechanical engineer will tell you that usual general acceptable tolerance is about 1%, so when certain parts should be 10 inch, it can easily measure 10.1 inch or 9.99 inch – and will still pass the Quality Assurance test.

It seems, Google is not yet ready to go into Product Design. Reportedly, the numbers offered by Google Webmaster Tools are only 90% accurate. According to Google’s Asaph Zemach, who was asked about number of impressions staying constant for three months time: “…when you see 24,900,000 you should really think 25M+/- 2.5M…”

Thus, if you think that your website is ahead of competitors, with 50 million impressions compared to their 48 million, they might be already ahead of you, as your actual figure might be as low as 45 million and theirs – as high as 52 million… As usual, statistics can be deceiving – and Google’s +/-10% just makes it more so…

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The marketing has always been about customer’s psychology – learning the specific needs of a potential client and trying to satisfy them. Google has demonstrated once again that targeting certain audience is mandatory. And if you are into SEO, you should be aware of it.

According to one recently published study, Google Search results on a smartphone will vary by over 80% from those produced by a desktop computer query. If you think about it – this is actually quite logical to have a slightly different search algorithm for smartphones. For example, smartphone users like downloading various applications. Thus the mobile Google Search presents many results that include the word “app” or “download”. Brand filters and store filters cannot be applied to mobile Google search and it is even more biased towards “local” domains, with Google places usually appearing higher in the vertical results list.

With the smartphone market growing quickly, it seems as only a matter of time when “SEO for mobile” will become a separate branch in the industry.

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We all know Facebook is one of the fastest (if not THE fastest) growing websites around. The popularity of Facebook is amazing and the number of hours spent by the users on their Facebook pages, playing games, posting and tagging photos is increasing every day.

And here is another indication of the website’s growth: unique visitors. This is a statistic that keeps track of websites (really webpages) being accessed by users based on their IP (which is very similar to physical location). Google is leading the way since very-long-time-ago, with an average of about 1 billion hits a month, and Microsoftis is second, about 100 million unique visitors behind.

According to Geek.com, Yahoo! has been pushed down to fourth place in November 2010, by (guess who?) Facebook, of course. The numbers reported (648 million for FB and just over 630 million for Yahoo!) were supplied  by comScore, providing yet another confirmation of Social Media progress towards taking over the internet.

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If we are going to understand the latest nuance of online searching we need to know just which fundamentals we’re dealing with. If we are going to understand how to fine-tune and adjust our Web-based lives we need to know something about the tools we’re planning to use.

We’ll start from the announcement of “the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools,” as announced in July on www.bing.com.

According to the information provided at the time, “After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the Webmaster Tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.” That’s the word from Anthony M. Garcia, Senior Product Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools.

New and Improved

The goal, according to the Webmaster Center, was to change everything, or, in the staff’s words “hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up.” The latest tool was announced by Garcia in the same forum on Dec. 14. He wrote that a new Inbound Links feature was released to provide “registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites. “

Bing apparently got a lot of feedback from SEO pros and Web-site owners about “the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing.”

Users can now learn details about the number of inbound links over time, with details on URL and anchor text. In addition, users can export this link data so it can be studied offline.

Garcia wrote, “It is important to note that the count of inbound links will be based on content stored in the Bing index vs. a complete, comprehensive count of links between every page on the Internet.” This could be a crucial distinction for many site owners and other industry professionals.

Building Blocks

New top-floor tools such as the just-announced Inbound Links item have to be supported by a strong and well-constructed foundation and lower floors. That was the goal when Bing “hit the reset button” a few months ago. Developers were aiming for a simpler experience that was also more intuitive.

The focus, according to Bing, was on “three key areas: crawl, index and traffic.” The new work included Index Explorer and Submit URLs, which basically provide more information about Bing’s crawls and indexes, but also gives the user improved control. Garcia wrote:

Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages.

In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

At this point we should have a better-than-average idea of what the developers and managers intended with the new Bing Webmaster Tools. But if we don’t understand the overall changes made we might find that we’re a bit confused about the latest innovation. Let’s take a look back at some foundation material.

Back Then

In previous incarnations, Bing was Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search. This new “decision engine” came under the broader category of Web search engine and was introduced to the general public in San Diego in May 2009. It was online a few days later.

That first product included such changes as search suggestions listed as queries are entered. According to information from the company Bing also included a list of related searches based on Powerset semantic technology. (Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008.) Bing was also introduced as the muscle behind Yahoo! Search.

To get to the roots of Bing predecessors you have to go back an entire lifetime (in Internet terms) to 1998 and 1999. At that time, the company offered MSN Search and gradually added such improvements as self-constructed search-engine results that could be updated on a regular basis. Serious upgrades were moved out in 2004 and 2005, with results made available to other search portals.

In 2006, the world was introduced to Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search. This new iteration used such tabs as Web, images, news, desktop etc. It was at this point that Microsoft no longer used Picsearch to provide images within the service. In-house developers created their own image-search mechanisms.

A year later the company effectively changed the playing field by moving the search products away from Windows Live services. The new product became Live Search, under the Platform and Systems division of the company. It’s important to also understand that Live Search was integrated with Microsoft adCenter at this time.

There’s More

Some of the key elements in the transformation of Microsoft search tools (from Windows Live Search and MSN Search to Bing) include:

• 2008 – Separate search categories/tools for books and academic subjects were discontinued. These were integrated into the overall search program
• 2008 – Live Search Macros discontinued
• 2009 – Live Product Upload discontinued
• 2009 – MSN QnA lived briefly between February and May

It’s also essential for industry watchers to understand the significance of the change from the “Live” moniker. This decision was made by a company that was concerned about brand image and brand awareness. Bing was born.

So, we’ve come from the last century and MSN/Live Search to Bing, in about 10 or 11 years. Where does that leave us? Well, in 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo! signed an agreement to replace Yahoo! search tools with Bing. The contract is intended to last 10 years.

Not only has Bing become the power behind another brand it has resurrected Microsoft’s share of the search market. Industry figures show that the big company’s market share was declining until Bing gave it the adrenaline rush needed. In October 2010 Bing was in the top five among search engines by volume.

Painful Birth?

Was the transition from Live to Bing painful for users? It would be necessary to survey a majority of those folks to get an accurate picture of what the change meant. Microsoft and the people behind Bing introduced the change as good news.

In July, Garcia wrote, “We have good news for all the veteran users of the Bing Webmaster Tools. Your existing Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools. This means that starting today, you’re already a registered user of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s no need to create a new account, change ownership verification codes, or re-enter site data. If you don’t have a current account, you can easily sign-up and register your sites to begin using the new tools.”

A few veterans have classified Bing Webmaster Tools as good, if not the best. There were some preliminary problems with Bing reporting targeted United States Web sites as being United Kingdom sites. The problem seemed to be with specific tags that have the letters “gb” in them. This was written about on SEORankings by founder Wesley LeFebvre, based in Seattle.

At the time, LeFebvre asked if some of these sites were suffering in the organic-ranking category because of the mistaken information. He also questioned the validity of Bing, Google and Yahoo! local rankings in light of this information. LeFebvre set a goal of finding out if other organic search engines use this tag.

In October, Steve Tullis wrote on the Webmaster Center blog “In keeping with our themes of rapid change and responding to input and feedback from the webmaster community, we are working on future feature planning for the Bing webmaster tools and we would like to hear your thoughts in a few areas.”

Tullis discussed Crawl-Delay and asked several specific questions about support and control in this area. He asked users and webmasters if they preferred to have crawl-delay supported in robots.txt, in addition to several other pointed questions.

The door to getting assistance with Bing Webmaster Tools is on the Bing Webmaster Center Help page. While that may seem obvious, it doesn’t hurt to make contact with the source somewhere in your search for information about new versions, upgrades and additions. Judging from initial reports from both the company and a few users, the new tools are workable and the Inbound Links addition is absolutely essential.

It’s a bit early to try any detailed comparisons on Bing Webmaster Tools and its Inbound Links structure. But rest assured there are plenty of people out there who will be providing useful reports.

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