Online advertising revenue was 5.5 Billion U.S. dollars in the first quarter, a decrease of 5 percent over the same period last year, according to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is the first time since 2002 that there has been a year over year decrease in revenue. First quarter revenue was 11 percent lower than the fourth quarter of 2008.
Developer Preview of Google’s Chrome Released for Mac and Linux
Google has released the first version of their web browser Chrome for Mac and Linux, plans these were announced last September when Google introduced the Windows version of Chrome. The version released is “developer preview,” Google’s destination for releases that are least stable and designed for testing new features. The version released is missing many of the features currently available in the Windows version. The missing features including Flash support, modifying privacy settings, and printing. The Mac version requires an Intel CPU and Mac OS X 10.5, the Linux version currently requires Ubuntu or Debian, with support for other Linux distributions planned.
Microsoft Begins U.S. Television Campaign for Bing
Microsoft will begin a U.S. television campaign this evening to promote Bing, which was also officially launched today. The first ad will promote that users currently experience “search overload,” getting too much information and not the answers they need. Several weeks later a second set of ads will begin running which will dramatize “what it would be like if people had to talk to their partners or friends the way they do to a search engine” according to a News.com article. News.com also reports that next month Microsoft begin running ads that promote specific types of searches, such as travel search and that Microsoft will also be promoted Bing with online ads. Microsoft has been reported to be spending around $100 million on the ad campaign.
Google Shares Local Search Data With Listed Businesses
Google has announced that businesses will be able to see data on how users are interacting the listing for their location(s) in Google Maps and Google Search. The data includes how many times listing in appeared in a Google Search or Google Maps Search, how many times users interacted with the listing, what queries lead searchers to the listing, and, when users request direction to a location, the zip code of their starting location. The type of interactions that Google provides data are clicking for more info on Google Maps, driving directions, and clicking on the link to businesses’ website. The data, which can be displayed for specified date ranges, is available in Google’s Local Business Center. Data is currently available for the last month and new data will be added daily. Google already provides search data for websites through their Webmaster Tools. Businesses that are not already signed up for the Local Business Center, can claim their location or, if the are not already listed, add their location at http://www.google.com/lbc.
Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine is Now Available
Microsoft’s updated and renamed search engine Bing, formerly Live Search, is now accessible to the public at http://www.bing.com/. Microsoft has also begun to redirect live.com and searches from MSN to Bing. In addition to the more visible changes, which you can find out more about at http://www.discoverbing.com/, Microsoft has made changes behind the scenes. For example, previously the search engine did not handle 301 redirects set to deal with www. vs non-www. URL canonicalization for a website’s home page, while handling it for other pages on the same website. That has now been fixed.
Microsoft Announces Rebranding of Live Search as Bing
Microsoft today announced the rebranding of and update to the Live Search search engine. The update has been in testing under the name codename Kumo since late last year. Live Search was given the new name Bing, in a post on Live Search blog Microsoft explains why Bing was chosen:
We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.
As part of the rebranding is touting Bing as a “decision engine” as opposed to a search engine. Saying that Bing begins to move past experience of using a search engine to “a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions.” Microsoft says that it is four areas of focus for making better decisions will be “making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”
The update introduces new features to the search results page interface. On left side of the page a pane will show options to refine searches, including switching between different types of searches and related searches. To try to help users find quickly find result their looking for there is Best Match where the best answer is “surfaced and called out”, Quick Preview which is an overlay “that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy”, and Instant Answers that is “designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page”
According to Microsoft, Bing “will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.”
Microsoft will also be launching advertising campaign, reported to be around 100 million dollars, to promote the rebranding. Despite Microsoft’s lofty talk about the update and the advertising campaign, Microsoft does not expect much change in its share of searches any time soon. Steve Ballmer told the New York Times that he hoped that “over the next year we’ll see small results. Big as a percentage of our share, and small as a percentage maybe of Google’s share.” Microsoft search boss Satya Nadella told CNET that if Microsoft share “were to go from 9 percent share to 11 percent by next year, he would consider that a success.” For some time Microsoft’s share has fluctuated significantly, with it share being as high 14.1 percent and as low as 9.1 in the last year according to Nielsen Online.
The Bing rebranding will also occur for a number of related services, including the mapping service Virtual Earth being renamed Bing Maps for Enterprise. There will also be unspecified improvements to Live Search Webmaster Center as part of the rebranding. according to a post on the Live Search Webmaster Center Blog.
Microsoft To Reduce Cloaking Detection Checks from MSNBot
In a post on the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog it was announced that Microsoft has released a patch for their cloaking detector that “should significantly reduce the number of requests to a more acceptable rate.” The cloaking detector, which is an part of Live Search’s MSNBot crawler, checks to see if websites are providing different content to visitors than the provide to MSNBot to “weed out spammers”. The cloaking detector mimics a visitor coming to a webpage from the Live search engine. There has been a problem with detector causing it has been unnecessarily performing hundreds of checks a day on some websites, which uses server resources and fills website statistics with fake referrers. Due to similar problems Microsoft announced that it would make changes to the detector in December of 2007.
Microsoft also said the cloaking detector problem was “compounded by and also confused with” a new feed crawling function that was “overzealous in its attempt to crawl and provide up-to-the-minute results” and that a patch was released for the feed crawler. The new feed crawler is intended to “help provide fresh results” in Live Search. As part of the post Microsoft has asked webmasters to help them to discover content changes, saying:
You can do this via sitemaps and various meta properties per link or via RSS link to notify us about very important content. To prevent us from having to monitor lots of feeds often, we recommend aggregating content change onto a few feeds; adding the name, “Aggregate” somewhere in the feed name. We also suggest referring to them in robots.txt and your sitemap—both of which will help us detect them and their use.
Google Adds Features and Introduces Ads to Google Suggest
Google has added features and tweaked its search suggestion tool Google Suggest. The tool, which was introduced last August, suggests search queries in a box below the search box as searcher begins typing in text. The tool was previously only available when making searches from the home page and has now been added to results page. On the results page, the few suggestion show relate to the current search query. For searchers that are logged into a Google account and have Web History enabled, Google may show some relevant past queries.
Google has also added and removed information that is shown in the suggestions box. To help the searcher scan the list the portion of suggested queries that searcher has not typed into the search box will be in bold text. If Google thinks that a searcher is looking to navigate directly to a website a link to that website will shown in the suggestion box. Google will also begin to show AdWords text ads in the suggestion box when they “detect that the most relevant completion for what you’re typing is an ad”. The ad will be shown at the bottom of the suggestion box in a colored box and identified as a “Sponsored Link”. Finally, Google will no longer include the result count for the suggestion listed in the suggestion box.
Study Finds Increased U.S. Internet Use in Q1 2009
A study (PDF) by the Nielsen Company found an increase in the use of and time of use of the Internet in the United States in the first quarter of 2009. The study found that 163,110,000 Americans 2 years and older used the Internet monthly, an increase of 3.2 percent from the first quarter 2008. The study also found that the average American 2 years or older spent 29:15 hours a month on the Internet, up 4.6 percent from first quarter of 2008. The amount of time spent on the Internet by age was: 5:21 hours for 2-11 years old, 11:32 hours for 12-17 years old, 14:19 hours for 18-24 years old, 31:37 hours for 25-34 years old, 42:35 hours for 35-44 years old, 39:27 hours for 45-54 years old, 35:49 hours for 55-64 years old, and 28:34 hours for 65 years and older. Finally, the study found that 131,102,000 Americans 2 years and older watch video on the Internet, for an average of 3:00 hours, in the quarter. The figures were calculated using Nielsen’s Internet panels, which are measured electronically.
WordPress 2.8 Beta Released
The first beta of WordPress 2.8 was released on Saturday according to a post on the WordPress Blog. The new version features a new widget API that should lead to better widgets, a theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. Only minor changes have been made to the interface, following the major changes that occurred in the previous version. You can see a full lists of changes in 2.8 at the WordPress Codex.