searchnewz: Latest Search News RSS Feed

Update: Google Will Spend Big to Outbid Yahoo for Hulu

Hulu must be one happy company at the moment " all the big names like Yahoo, Amazon, the Dish Network, and Google have placed an offer to buy out the company, so the bidding war has begun.

While most of the bidders placed a bid in the range of $1.5 to $2 billion, rumor has it that Google is so keen to purchase the company that it will make an over-the-top offer to out-do its competitors, especially Yahoo, who was the first company to show interest in buying Hulu.

Exact details on Googles offer amount havent been released yet, but its interesting to hear that it is willing to splash more cash, when it just purchased Motorola last month for a whooping $12 billion.

So what is it about Hulu that has attracted so many big names?

Well with this purchase comes Hulus video website and subscription service, along with two years of exclusive rights to their content. Currently, the site is a joint venture between NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment Group and Disney-ABC Television Group, who collectively supply the lions share of the sites content.

Google is very interested in the sites content licensing agreements, which YouTube doesnt have. This would give Google the opportunity to revamp Google TV which has met a lot of resistance from content providers who blocked their content from Google TV-powered devices.

While its not certain that Hulu will sell, Googles highly ambitious bid is sure to make its owners think long and hard about the opportunity.

So where does this leave Yahoo? The company will have to dig deeper into its pockets to find the spare change it needs to compete with Google, if it wants any chance of securing Hulu.

Comments

Google Chrome Speeds up Your Site from Search Results

Not satisfied to simply speed up their own site " Google is now speeding up yours (if it's the first result) from search results pages when you use the Chrome browser. They'll be making the technology open source when it is released - so that it will be available from all browsers. Here's a demo video:

Google had this to say about Google Instant Pages on their blog:

"When we trigger Instant Pages for your site, users can start interacting with your site almost immediately, without having to wait for text and images to load. We'll only trigger Instant Pages when we have very high confidence that your site is the exact result users are looking for."

They've put up a test page to show whether your page would properly pre-render in Chrome here, and discuss more details on the Google Code developers blog here.

Comments

90% of Searches in Latin America are Conducted on Google

According to a new report out from comScore, 9 out of 10 searched conducted in Latin America are conducted on a Google-owned website. comScore has released the results from a study of the search engine market in Latin America. In the past year, search queries in Latin America surged up 21 percent to more than 18.5 billion queries in March 2011.

The typical searcher in Latin America conducts about 167 queries during each month.

Google-owned websites are by far the top search destination in Latin America. Searches performed at sites owned by Google account for 90 percent of all searches conducted in Latin America. The data is based on data from the comScore qSearch service.

According to comScore, "Analysis of the top search destinations in Latin America revealed that Google Sites captured the majority of the search market in Latin America with 90.5 percent market share. More than 16.7 billion searches were conducted on the property in March 2011, with the average searcher performing 153 queries during the month on Google Sites. Across each of the six markets studied, Colombia accounted for the highest share of searches at Google Sites at 92.2 percent, with Argentina accounting for the lowest share at 89.4 percent. Facebook.com ranked as the #2 search destination in Latin America with 525 million searches (2.8 percent share) followed by Microsoft Sites with 513 million searches (2.8 percent share)."

Comments

Google Presents The +1 Button!

Google has rolled out one more feature to its social search. The +1 button is a button that will allow you to recommend search results, ads, web pages etc., to your friends. This feature is currently available for search results page. Google will add the +1 button feature to ads and also pages, you can sign up for e-mail updates for the same.

Google says that, "We expect that these personalized annotations will help sites stand out by showing users which search results are personally relevant to them. As a result, +1's could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to the sites people care about." The +1's will also be considered by Google just like it uses social signals from other services to determine a page's relevance and ranking. It works quite like the Facebook 'Like' option.

How it works

When you run a search, with your Google account signed in, and find a quality page in the organic search results, you can click the +1 button and recommend it (the site or page) to your friends. The next time your friends sign in to their Google account and run a similar search, he/she will find that you have recommended a particular site or page. Your friend can then quickly follow the recommended link knowing it is worth a visit as it has been recommended by someone he/she knows and trusts.

The +1's, according to Google, will make search even more personal and relevant. Users can recommend the content, ads etc., that are of high quality and the site or pages that has the quality content gets human recommendations and can expect better ranked for their quality. Here is a video of the +1 button released by Google. You can visit the Google Webmaster Central Help Center for any further +1 related queries.

Comments

Bing Gains Search 5% Usage In December

Hitwise has released their search market share numbers for the month of December 2010, highlights from their press release below:

Bing-powered search received 25.77 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.17 percent and 10.60 percent, respectively.
Google accounted for 69.67 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 1, 2011.
Bing and Yahoo! Search achieved the highest success rates in December 2010, meaning that for both search engines, 81 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website.

Comments

Google Rolls Out New AdSense Interface

Google rolled out the brand new interface for its AdSense users over the weekend. The new interface which is claimed to be easier, has been designed considering a lot of feedback from the publishers.

It helps the publishers in three main ways:

Increased Insights - There is better and improved reporting for analyzing the data. This helps you to find out the performance of the ads.

Increased Control " New ad controls are far more simple, which enables you to control your ads and advertisers.

Increased Efficiency- Now you can quickly see your earnings & payment information, run reports and make changes.

So far Google has received positive reviews from its early users.

Comments

Google Maps API Data Moving To Fusion Cloud

This via the Google Geo Dev Blog (http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com) as the company announces to nix the Maps Data API after Jan 31, 2011. Recall that as of several months agao, Google Maps API v3 renders data stored in Fusion Tables, a Google Research project for storing large structured data sets in the cloud as a result, Google has decided to recommend Fusion Tables as our cloud storage solution of choice for geospatial data going forward, and to deprecate the Maps Data API.

According to Google, The Maps Data API will continue to be accessible until January 31st 2011, and Maps created using the Maps Data API will remain accessible in Google My Maps beyond this date " See details HERE

Comments

Google Has Only Indexed .004% Of Online Data

Very cool Infographic designed by The Roxor, which shows the amazing size of the Internet including stats on data, social media, usage. Here are some highlights:

1.9 Billion people use the Internet

Over 5 million terabytes of data on the Internet

Google's index only includes 200TB (or 0.004%)

193 Million domain registrations

46% of domain registrations are .com

Comments

Yahoo Begins Shifting Ads To AdCenter

In the latest post on adCenter Blog MS has asked all the Yahoo! advertisers to move their accounts to the adCenter platform, to avoid any loss in traffic.

Here are a few things to to be kept in mind:

Since this is the pre-holiday season, make sure you don't miss on the traffic. MS anticipates 50-60% transfer of Yahoo! Search Traffic to adCenter by this weekend.
It is suggested that by 25th october , the accounts are funded with full budget to support the traffic from Yahoo! Search and Bing.
If there is a confusions regarding the budget, it is advised to allocate 1/3rd to adCenter.
Keep a close watch on the bids, since the transition may cause some initial fluctuations.

For any help, there are various options:

There are a plenty of useful tips and advice on blogs and discussion forums.
Take help from Microsoft adExcellence tutorials.
Tweet question to @adCenter on Twitter.

Last but no the least. Provide your feedback and ideas to the adCenter Feedback Thread.

Comments

Google Shares Impressive Video Stats

Google shared some impressive Q3 earnings numbers this week and for the first time broke down a bit more of how they achieved it. While Google didnt share specific revenue numbers for YouTube, they did say that they are now monetizing an impressive 2 billion views per week. That's a jump of 50% from last year. Recent reports suggest that YouTube is approaching $1 billion per year in revenue.

As part of an effort to prove that it's revenue wasn't just coming from search ads, the company also shared that mobile revenue had topped $1 billion and display advertising was now a growing $2.5 billion business.

Comments