Online Marketing News this Week – 23rd Sept 2011

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Bing adding ‘Action Buttons’

“Helping you get things done faster is a big focus for us at Bing

The idea here is that Bing will choose the most likely actions which a visitor is likely to want to take and display Action Buttons to take take you straight through to the relevant page. One of the examples they give is if you are booking a flight:

Bing-Action-Buttons

On the face of it definitely a good thing. Two comment streams on the Bing blog are worth a look:

Q: “This is brilliant. It’s not working perfectly – hotels just has a stupid “Locations” button, Bank is just “Login”. I can’t find a software company or restaurant that has buttons. PS, what a pain in the butt it is to figure out how to leave a comment on this blog!”

A: “Thanks for the feedback on the “comments.”  I will put something in place this week to make it easier to comment.”

and

Q: “Is it possible for webmasters to identify with a tag which 3 buttons are the most important action buttons on the site? Otherwise it could be possible that bing will display action buttons that are not very important.”

A: We use a combination of algorithms for site categorization, site structure determination and click log analysis to determine the top actions for each of the sites.  And we will be constantly looking at new ‘verbs’ or actions we can add – stay tuned.”

We’ll take that as a no then!

Bing Strategy to compete with Google

All this is well and good but not even Bing thinks that extra buttons will do much to help it gain market share,  make a profit and challenge Google’s dominance. Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since 2009. Independent commentators predict that at the current rate of growth they will move into profit in 3 years time which is not bad considering the size of the deficit.  It does of course depend on continued growth. The folks at Bing are not looking to maintain the current rate but to eat into Google’s market share as fast as possible. To do that they know that they must do something pretty dramatic. We do not ‘Bing’ we ‘Google’. Bing need us to start ‘Googling’ on Bing!

Microsoft’s director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, expressing the opinion that if they can change the way people think about search people will eventually move over them from Google, told money.cnn.com:

“Our challenge is that no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I really wish there was a better search engine.’  That’s why  for us, it’s always been about figuring out how to accomplish more than we thought was possible with a search engine. Eventually, people will expect to do more with search, and if they can’t, they’ll be disappointed.”

In this sense the competition can only be good for the consumer. We await with interest what will change the way we think about search. A good start will be to realise that there might be different or even better results available elsewhere and to start using more than one search engine at a time.

Google’s Eric Schmidt questioned at Senate Hearings

Google’s Eric Schmidt appeared before a Senate subcommittee this week. The issues revolve around unfair competition, monopoly and Google’s alleged favoring of its own sites. The best place to follow the story is over at Search Engine Land.  Greg Sterling found that very little new was said and describes the whole thing as more theater than fact-finding. He predicts that there will be some sort of  case brought against Google through the FTC’s antitrust investigation. Lest we forget that much of this is about power and money, here is a telling quote from Serling’s post:

Both humorous and unseemly, several senators explicitly asked Google to consider their states for projects before launching into questioning. Most obnoxious was New York’s Charles Schumer (Democrat) who first offered a kind of commercial for New York and then asked Schmidt to consider investing in the Hudson River Valley, all but implying it was a condition of his support.

In many ways it can be hard to decide which applies: It would all be very serious  were it  not so petty, OR, it would be so petty were it not so serious. This is what Sterling had to say about the break-down in cooperation being Google and Nextag and Google and Yelp:

Nextag CEO Katz credited Google with being a good partner in the past but now it was more self-interested and less fair and reasonable. I wish he had used the word “evil.” Alas he did not.

The most effective testimony against Google came, however, from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. He described a timeline of events in which Google and Yelp were partners. But after that ended, Google later began including Yelp reviews in Places (a competitive product) without permission. Yelp said that the company asked that those reviews be removed, which Google declined to do without removing Yelp from the index entirely. It was only after the FTC investigation was announced, said Yelp, that Google complied.

To redress the balance I should point out that Sterling felt that Eric Schmidt dealt with most of the questions put to him “quite effectively”.

Interesting also that one of the Google lawyers cited Facebook as a major competitor defending accusations of monopolization. In the process, Facebook was incorrectly stated to be the main carrier of SMB advertising. The fall of MySpace was used as an indication of the volatile nature of the market arguing that government regulation would be inappropriate. Today’s near monopoly can be struggling to survive tomorrow. Google of course has no intention of following MySpace nor does it look likely to do so in a hurry. Facebook as their main rival at the moment will not be resting easy, not least because:

Google + is now open to the public

As well as Google + opening to the public and announcing 9 new features, it has been a week of changes over at Facebook.

Related posts:

  1. Online Marketing News this Week – 9th Sept 2011
  2. Online Marketing News this Week – 30th Sept 2011
  3. Online Marketing News this Week – 16th Sept 2011
  4. Online Marketing News This Week – 2nd Sept 2010
  5. Online Marketing News this Week – 2nd Sept 2011
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