Marketing Pilgrim

Twitter is aspiring to be the next big search engine and Biz Stone is claiming the numbers to prove it. Fast Company is jumping on the bandwagon to push Twitter up the search ladder past the bing / Yahoo! search cluster. Here’s their take.

According to cofounder Biz Stone, who spoke yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter now reaches some 800 million search queries per day. That’s over 24 billion searches per month, more than Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) combined.

While Stone’s company is still a long way off from Google, which supports around 88 billion search queries per month, Twitter is quickly catching up. Since last April, Twitter searches are up 33%. To put that in perspective, a study by Nielsen last year concluded that Bing was the fastest-growing search engine in the U.S. after it ballooned over 22%. Now it seems Twitter has taken the title.

Google appears to be in hot water over allegations that it’s deliberately penalizing rival search engines in its search results.

The European Commission, Europe’s highest antitrust authority [led by Joaquin Almunia], is currently looking into “some allegations of anticompetitive conduct in relation to search,” Almunia said in his speech in London. Although the work is at an early stage, “I am looking at the allegations very carefully,” given the importance of online search to the marketplace, Almunia added.

The commission began investigating Google in late February, spurred on by complaints from three competitors.

Two of the competitors are British search engine Foundem and French legal search engine ejustice.fr. Which will likely give Google a strong foundation in any official action. After all, I don’t recall Google complaining that Yahoo and Alta Vista were too dominant and didn’t rank “Google.com” high enough in their search results.

While I am admittedly not too enamored with geo-location services personally there is little denying the rise in popularity. Foursquare, Gowalla and others are experiencing some of the ‘hockey stick’ growth that was once reserved for Twitter and Facebook.

The problem as of late has been the nagging question of “What else is there to do other than just ‘check in’? Make believe badges and ‘mayorships’ can only go so far with most people. Well, if foursquare can do what is being reported in ReadWriteWeb even I could find myself playing along. The site reports

Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network Foursquare that will allow you to do just that. The Huffington Post launched a Foursquare layer today as well.

The Tribune Company is struggling to pull itself out of bankruptcy proceedings but it continues to try to move its business forward by becoming the latest publishing company to turn agency. This type of move by larger publishers is becoming more commonplace these days as they scramble to re-invent themselves in light of the digital ‘revolution’ that has kicked many in the tail pretty hard.

paidContent reports

With ad dollars for magazines and newspapers continuing to shrink, publishers like Meredith and Gannett have expanded the purview of their digital ad sales teams to include digital marketing services offerings outside of the content they produce. Tribune Company is the latest entrant into the interactive marketing space. The publisher, still struggling through its interminable bankruptcy proceedings, has formed a new interactive marketing consultancy called 435 Digital Services. Named for Tribune’s Chicago street address, the project will shift a small number of current ad sales staffers into the new 10-person unit, as well as making a few new hires, according to a piece in Crain’s Chicago Business.

Faced with an unfavorable RipOffReport web page ranking number one for his name on Google, Reddit user Carl Herold turned to his fellow Redditors for help. On June 30th, Carl posted a message on self.AskReddit asking for advice on how to deal with a complaint from a former vendor he claims is a lie. The post received so much attention that Carl’s name was the 5th most popular search term on Google (for a time), resulting in hundreds of thousands of web pages being created mentioning Carl’s name and helping him push the unfavorable complaint to page 5 of the search results.

In Carl’s follow up post thanking Reddit he claims that:

UPDATE: We are no longer accepting applications. Thank you everyone!

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As you know, the fabulous Jordan McCollum has retired.

So, we’re now looking for a new member of the team to help support Frank Reed, Joe Hall, and me. Here’s what we’re looking for (please read carefully):

• Write two blog posts per day, Monday to Friday.
• Posts must be focused around current marketing news stories–we’re not looking for “how-to” articles.
• You must have an understanding of internet marketing and must be willing to offer your opinions/thoughts/commentary/sarcasm on any news covered.
• You must be reliable and consistent. Two posts a day, M-F. I can’t stress that enough. Of course, there will be times when you need a vacation or can’t find anything to write about, but those will be the exceptions.