Marketing Pilgrim

I don’t know how much of the estimated $100 million marketing budget Microsoft has burned through in its promotion of Bing, but the ad bailout campaign is working!

According to new Nielsen data, Microsoft managed to increase its search share by 22.1% last month–bringing its total share of searches from 9% to 10.7%!

On the opposite side of the news spectrum, Yahoo’s search share dropped from 17.1% to 16%–with an actual drop of 75,000,000 searches–wiping out most of the growth it saw last month.

How did Google fair? It lost 0.2% share in August–which continues a downward trend for the search monopoly–but its actual search numbers grew from 6,809,116,000 searches to 6,986,580,000.

The rest of the data (below) is blatantly grabbed from SEL, because clearly Bloomberg doesn’t know how to cut and paste charts correctly.

It appears the newspaper industry is completely unable to figure out a way to innovate and monetize online content, so Google’s going to show them how it’s done.

When I started reading the official announcement for Google Fast Flip, I was pretty impressed by the novel approach to loading online news:

Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community.

The status of Internet anonymity continues to evolve in the courts. The most recent example is the “skank” blogger who was sued for libel. Although the blogger tried to play off the comments as “trash talk” and opinion (and to remain anonymous), the court ruled that Google must disclose her identity (and she’s ticked that the woman she said was “whoring” and a “skank” would put her out there for public judgment).

Another case also saw an anonymous commenter unmasked, this time from a comment on The Journal News website. A former congressman in NY, Richard Ottinger, was expanding his house, and there were concerns in the city that their application and permits were receiving special treatment. On a local news article covering this, a commenter claimed that their permits were illegal—and the Ottingers filed suit and got the Journal News to disclose his identity.

Let’s try something new here in the world of Internet marketing. Rather than rushing off and pronouncing next year as the year of (place latest over-hyped trend here) let’s enjoy the real beginnings of social media and networks. If you’re asking “What do you mean, that’s old news!” then you are one of the sheep who likes to follow the flock that is looking for “What’s next?” rather than staying in the “What’s about to really work?” reality of business.

Broughton, Buckinghamshire, England, has found a way to get on the map—by staying off the map. Back in April, an angry mob defeated a Google Street View car by forming a human chain, and apparently this is news to UPI.

It was a good thing the villagers acted when they did—the search giant is so powerful that merely by thinking about mapping the village, they caused a spate of burglaries! Thankfully, the villagers’ diligence will prevent future . . . wait. . . .

When the folks at Bing first demonstrated Visual Search, I was blown away. That’s quite an accomplishment for this search cynic. Now you get to try it for yourself–as the feature has just gone live.

It’s really hard to describe Visual Search, which is why I told Bing, “You have to do a video demo of this, because it’s going to be really hard to describe.”

They’ve obliged–although the amateur, over-the-shoulder shot wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Still, you’ll get the idea:

The real fun is in the testing. Visual Search is not available for every search, but, as you’ll see from the list below, there are a lot of topics covered.

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