All About Content

Nielsen//NetRatings today reported its market share data for the top 10 search engines. Google, no surprise, continues to lead with Nielsen NetRatings reporting 4.03 billion searches having been conducted on Google last month. That translates to nearly 45% year over year growth and 56.3% of total U.S. market share.

Yahoo Search is in second place with a little over 1.5 billion searches and 21.5% of the total. MSN trails a distant third with only 8.4% of all U.S. searches conducted on the Windows Live search engine. Rounding out the top 5 search engines are AOL Search and Ask.com, with 5.3% and 2.5% of search market share, respectively.

At the bottom of the list is the search aggregator Dogpile, which saw fewer net searches than the previous year, with year over year growth a -10.6%.

HitWise, a competing market research firm, also released its May search data today. According to HitWise, in May Google captured a whopping 65.1% of all U.S. searches, up from 59.3% last year. The number of searches attributed by HitWise to Yahoo are in line with Nielsen’s data: 20.9%, a figure that’s down slightly from May 2006. And MSN/Live Search garnered 8.4% of searches, down from 12.1% of marketshare 12 months prior.

Ask.com fared a little better based on HitWise data, with 3.9% of the market compared to 2.5% that Nielsen reported. Either way, IAC’s Ask.com continues to lose market share to the bigger players.

The first SMX Conference is over and I’m back home. Here are a couple of pics from the Google Dance.

More of my photos from Seattle.

Head over to the SMX Blog for a list of all the session coverage.

Tagged: Google Dance

Google announced it will begin deleting personally identifying information from its computers 18 to 24 months after it gets logged, addressing a major privacy concern of consumers and government officials alike.

According to a Google FAQ document about the new policy: “We had previously kept the logs data for as long as it was useful. When we implement this policy change, we will continue to keep server log data so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses, but we will anonymize our server logs after 18-24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer.”

Source: Beta News

I get the Google Friends newsletter. I thought this was a cute story, but what I found most interesting is the use of “google” as a verb. For a company that doesn’t want its tradename used as a verb, to the point of having its lawyers send cease and desist letters, it certainly seems counterproductive to publish a newsletter that appears to encourage it:

We admit it: we love learning about all the things people use Google to do. Such as … how to find a lost tortoise. Here’s a story we got from Jim Lyness: “After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead, and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night, and into the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife Susan and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door?
Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang — we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys’ bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter! “

If you have a story about how Google search has made an impact on something on your world, we’d love to hear it. Use either of the links below - either submit your tale through a web form or upload your story on video to YouTube. (If you shoot video, be sure to tag it “google testimonial” when you upload it.)

Web form: http://www.google.com/contact/success.html

As for my success story, I googled “Google sues media for using google as a verb” to find the article I needed for the link in the first paragraph.

I noticed this a while ago and thought maybe it was just a test, but Google has started auto-correcting without prompting for certain types of misspellings. In the example below, Google simply assumed I meant ’sprint razr’ when I typed ’sprint razor’ — so it’s showing me the results to a search different than the one I entered! Very different results if you search “sprint razor” (same search but with quotes) and slightly different even if you choose sprint AND razor (which isn’t supposed to change the results since “and” is supposed to be treated like a stop word).

I’ve also seen what looked like similar highlighting of variations without actual reordering of results. In the example below, I searched for ‘cingular razer’, and Google’s results highlight both ‘razor’ and ‘razer’.

But I think the highlighting of the search term misspelling in the snippet and title is a separate from auto-correcting search queries.

This is a big step forward in the search engines’ efforts to “think like a user.” Afterall, if a user types ’sprint razor’ he’s not looking to see how many pages use the term ’sprint razor’; he’s more likely looking for the Sprint RAZR product, and that’s what the results reflect.

Although I’m sure continual refinements will need to be made and a lot of assumptions will be incorrect at first, I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of cleaning up the SERPs. If this trend continues, it will help businesses avoid having to optimize for common misspellings of their keywords in addition to their regular target search phrases. Even better, it means Google will stop rewarding sites that don’t spell things correctly.

In a departure from my usual snarky self, I’m genuinely thrilled to say I had the opportunity today to talk to one of the Google engineers who works on organic search. It was an hour-long web/teleconference during which we talked about pretty basic SEO (most of which everyone on my team obviously already knew, but there were a couple of gems in there that surprised me), and then we actually walked through part of our e-commerce site evaluating certain pages and things that could be improved. Again, no huge surprises there. But it was great validation to have him praise all the things we’ve been fighting so hard for (and that we still should implement those things we haven’t gotten to yet).

The funniest part, however, was at the very end when I asked him to tell me about the minus 30 penalty, and he immediately said “there are things I cannot talk about” (read: I will neither deny nor confirm the existence of this alleged penalty).

According to just-released data from Compete, Google continues to gain search market share at everyone else’s expense (yawn, what else is new), everyone but AOL that is. Now there’s a twist. Is AOL the little search engine that could? Well, no. While it’s market share might not have declined last month, it’s still in a distant fourth place, with no hope of catching up, unless something dramatic happens in the search landscape. And then there’s the issue of AOL not using proprietary search technology.

ComScore released its own market share findings this week as well. According to comScore’s press release,

In December 2006, Google Sites captured 47.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.4 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites grew 0.3 share points, maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.4 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent).

ComScore further says, “Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.”

More info on these data at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land.

I missed this earlier: apparently Google is killing its search API. Not a blow to the spine kind of killing, but a removing the feeding tube kind of slow but assured death. That’s going to be a problem for those of us who rely on the search API to track our rankings (since you can’t track manually as many keywords and domains as I do). Read the discussion on Search Engine Watch, to get other SEO’s opinions on this development.

I’ve only noticed this in the last few days, although I’m sure others have been posting about this already (I’m a little behind on my industry reading), but Google seems to be testing the display of related search terms (again). This is something that MSN/Live and Yahoo have been doing for a long time, and a feature I always found particularly helpful as a searcher. Should drive traffic for these tail terms, which might make you happy if you rank well for these types of secondary phrases but not the general one.

In “related news” (har har), Google has also been displaying links from old news stories:

Happy Festivus!

Tagged: Google

Just when it starts to seem like I haven’t learned anything interesting in a while, I come across a thread called “Cloaking for Religious Reasons.”

Is there ever a good reason to engage in cloaking for the purpose of fooling Google? Even if God insists?

Turns out no — the problem being discussed could better be solved a different way (The problem: having to take down an e-commerce site in observance of Sabbath but needing to avoid search engine spiders replacing the entire site in their indexes/indices with the store’s “we’re currently closed” page. The solution: returning 503 errors).

Now I finally understand why B&H Photo wouldn’t let me place orders on their site at various times in the past. Turns out it wasn’t random… it was Saturday!