Market share is a clear indicator of how well a search engine performs, and affects the overall revenue the company can generate through advertising. Bing has made some strides since its launch in the attempt to challenge the mighty Google and their dominance in the search market – but over the past 2 years Bing has not shown much in terms of market share increases to become a viable competitor to Google – until perhaps now. How do the big players attempt to gain search market share? Buy it…

Google has been known for striking deals with manufacturers such as Dell and Acer to include preloaded Google toolbars, resulting in the use of the Google toolbar in software applications like Adobe Flash, FireFox and their own mobile OS, Android, which has gained mobile market share incredibly with the adoption in the market.

When exactly was it that Microsoft dropped so swiftly from cultural relevance? Let your mind wander back to the glory days of Windows 95, when Microsoft’s business practices consisted of releasing an OS update every few months and sitting back in their suede leather chairs as they counted the money pouring in. Today it’s a different story for the mighty Microsoft. Bill Gates is a figurehead now, with Steve Ballmer headlining as the face of Microsoft. The Xbox 360 is now their second largest selling product (after their operating systems) and the world no longer talks about Windows as if it gave birth to their second child. So where and how did it all fall apart?

Earlier this year I made my 2010 predictions for search engines mainly Bing & Google challenging the conversions through search. Since then a lot has come to pass, the new Google layout was implemented and was shortly followed by the controversial “Mayday update” and finally Caffeine going live across all Google data centres.

The new Google layout gave rise to concerns of traffic decreases to websites both in through organic and paid results. Whether or not this was the result of the new layout or simply the adjustments Google made in how they crawl and rank websites and pages that occurred during the same period, was uncertain. Simply put, Google’s “copy” of the Bing layout is not working. As we all know in the internet marketing world, copy and paste solutions do not work and Bing is definitely doing something right in search to drive such large scale changes by Google in an effort to keep up in the search race.

Leading web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen has found that Internet users spend a massive 80% of their time engaging with the information that appears above the page fold. Information ‘above the fold’ is that which is immediately visible on a page before a user has scrolled down.

Nielsen observed that while users do scroll down and glance over the content that occurs lower down, they allocate the majority of their attention to the information they are immediately confronted with.

This confirms what we already know about typical user behaviour. People don’t like having to work for information on the Internet – they expect that what they are looking for will stare them right in the face within the first few seconds of arriving on a page, and will move swiftly along if it doesn’t.

Search marketing specialists will agree: having a company blog and updating it regularly can be a time consuming task, but after you’ve read the benefits discussed in this article, you will realize that it’s all totally worth it. The two main areas in which a blog can help promote your company include SEO rankings as well as your relationship with your customers. Let’s take a look at these below, one at a time:

Company Reputation:

Company blogs are dynamic and can be regularly updated (unlike your website), thus you can effectively keep clients informed of the day to day happenings of your company. It is also an effective way to communicate your company’s true personality to your customers as blogs tend to be more opinion based than information based. Through this, readers feel like they are getting a peep into the real personalities of the people behind the scenes of the business.

A lot has changed since our last blog on the market share statistics in the search engine and social media industries. Twitter yesterday reached 50 million tweets a day, Facebook is just getting bigger and bigger and Bing is fast making and impression on the search engine market. Let’s take a look at some of the stats courtesy of Hitwise.

Search Engines:

First of all, let’s take a look at the UK search engine ranking report and compare it to last year’s report:

As you can see in the above search engine comparison, Bing didn’t even feature in the April 2009 report and now they are 3^rd behind Google. The Bing search engine most likely wont be ever be able to take on Google’s search engine, not in the foreseeable future anyway, but they certainly are making their presence felt. Yahoo on the other hand have dropped down one position even though they have remained steady as far as market share goes. Ask have dropped out of the top 5.

So, online ad spend finally overtook TV ad spend this year, but is the shift in spend gaining momentum or slowing down? Ecommerce growth estimates are forecast to slow (Forrester as quoted on business week) but that growth is still stealing market share from traditional ad spend.

At the beginning of this year, growth and spend for 2009 was predicted to fall somewhat as we all battened down for the long hard winter of recession.

I had a much gloomier picture in mind than what the actual figures to date reveal as quoted by e-marketer. Looking at this growth curve would hardly have me believe that we were in recession this year!