Marketing Pilgrim

Human-powered search engine ChaCha has hung on (let’s face it) longer than anyone thought possible. Although it abandoned guided web-based search almost two years ago, ChaCha is still thriving in the mobile Q&A market. Back in December, they raised $7M in funding—and it looks like the ultimate result of that cash was an API and a Facebook app.

Yep—ChaCha’s getting into social search. The Facebook app takes questions users post to friends and connections and broadcasts them to ChaCha. The app checks the database of pre-loaded answers to see if they’ve already covered that topic.

Neilsen has reported their search market share numbers for January—and Google seems to have forgotten which way is up. While the search giant is still #1 and in no danger, they lost a percentage point of the search query market from December, falling from 67.3% to 66.3% of all queries.

If Google’s, losing, who’s gaining? Just about everyone else, actually. The other major search engines either held steady or gained slightly—Yahoo was up 0.1 percentage points (to 14.5%), Bing gained 1 percentage point (to 10.9%) and nearly all the smaller search engines in the top ten increased their share month over month.

The overall search query market increased by over 300 million searches. About a third of those queries were run through Google. Yahoo saw over 50 million more queries in January, while Bing fielded 130 million more queries than it did in December.

Previous blind-test studies have shown that results across different search engines are pretty much considered equal–once you remove the logo from such results.

Now, a new study from Wunderman, BrandAsset® Consulting, ZAAZ and Compete goes one step further and demonstrates how the search engine used, influences the perception of the destination brand. In other words, Walmart’s brand is perceived differently, depending on whether the visitor arrived at its site via Google, Bing or Yahoo.

The study summarizes two distinct reasons why this happens:

Bing users, for example, tend to be mostly from the tip of the adoption curve (innovators and early adopters) where Yahoo! and Google’s passengers tend to be middle majority [and] each search engine demonstrated different degrees of consumer engagement ranging from visiting to finally purchasing.

Google is learning a harsh lesson about social networking, thanks to its new Buzz launch.

Knowing someone and being their friend are often two different things.

After the initial “buzz” Google Buzz has pretty much been a buzzkill. The service has outraged many that believe it revealed too much about their private interactions, while others have simply greeted the service with an apathetic meh.

Still, Google’s determined to push forward with Buzz–even if it means taking its licks over privacy. To its credit, Google’s reacting quickly to privacy concerns, rolling out further changes over the weekend.

First, no more auto-following everyone in your Gmail contacts. Now, Google Buzz will auto-suggest those you should follow:

Watching video clips is a very popular pastime in the US and the rest of the world. Hey, it sure beats getting outside and taking a walk in that nasty fresh air. As a result of our obsession with this media there is some opportunity to do some real harm to a reputation if a group decided to do so. One such instance has made the F.D.I.C (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) take action because they claim a video making the viral rounds is just plain false. Whether it is or not may not be enough to fix the damage.

The New York Times reports

The battle rages on as to who may one day be the dominant player in the mobile world. Apple has jumped out to the early lead for sure with the iPhone, its App store and the mystique that is around the company and its products. But this is not a sprint by any means. This looks to be a marathon and the competition may make this closer than anyone may have thought just a few short years ago.

How’s this going to happen? Well, while I have no crystal ball I think that the announcement set for today at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain will play a part in making this a much tighter race. TechCrunch reports