At least according to Statcounter, Bing search engine edged past Yahoo into the number 2 spot in search. This was as of June 4th, and was true both worldwide and in the US. Whether Bing will hold this position over time remains to be seen.  Of course, you need to put this in perspective:  Google is still a huge leader in search, with about 87% of search worldwide (according to Statcounter).  Here’s what the trends look like:

Statcounter suggests the Bing gains are at the expense of Google — the lines in the graph suggest that. Could be true. We’ll see how it holds.

Hope – and huge financial incentives – spring eternal. Microsoft is going to be launching its newest attempt at search on Wednesday next week when Bing goes live.

MSFT has a sad history with search, slowly losing ground to Google (mostly). They’ve had some really bad decisions (what the heck was ‘live search’ supposed to do running parallel with the generic MSN search engine?) coupled with the fact that Google is good.  And Yahoo is fine.  It isn’t like people couldn’t find information on the web.

But the stakes are enormous, so here we go again.  Some early reviews talk about interesting new features that may appeal to users. For instance, the NYTimes reports that Bing will have a multi-layered search result page that will have a ‘table of contents’ that will be somewhat different for each search. It will suggest drill-down options for follow up searches to help the visitor get to what they want more quickly.

I am looking forward to trying it!

On May 12, Google introduced a new feature called ‘Rich Snippets‘ that will become a standard part of their indexing algorithm. This feature could be important for any business, but I think local businesses should be especially alert to it — it is one more tactic to use in the local search SEO campaign.  Pay attention to this one, folks – it could have a big impact on search over time.

The Rich Snippets feature is an evolving effort to use structured data in search results. Ordinarily, Google picks up a piece of text, usually the meta description, to insert a brief descriptive ‘snippet’ about a website along with the URL in search results. Beginning now, it will sometimes include structured data in the search result snippet in place of the text description.  Google is currently supporting structured data about ratings and people, but plans to begin using other kinds of data soon.

Here’s one example from Google how a rich snippet might look.  In this one, a local business with a rating on Yelp is shown in search results with rating information.

Google has tested this concept and offers an important clue to the importance they give it: It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. That’s the important thing for your business — attracting the click.

It’s not yet clear, to me at least, how individual local businesses will use this feature, but I am sure the issue will be all over the blogosphere for the next few weeks, and we’ll know a lot more soon.  The structured data does have to be tagged by someone who knows what they are doing (your webmaster, unless you build websites yourself), but as always Google is providing examples like the ones you see in the link above.

One last thing:  You might be asking, what is structured data?  Roughly, it is information that is defined by a variable that can take a range of values.  “First name” = “Glenn” in my case.  Ratings information is classic, since there is a structure that includes the name of the business, a ratings system (e.g., 1 to 4 stars), a price range, and might include a testimonial in text.  If you run a business that can be rated, in Yelp or TripAdvisor for example, it is described by structured data.

One more part of your SEO package.  Do use it.

Twitter seems to be my favorite subject these days, a little weird since I spend so little time on it.  Anyhow, here’s another two cents worth of thought about what it’s good for, from Dr. Pete at SEOmoz.

Dr Pete thinks Twitter is a way to connect online ‘friends’ with each other in the other ‘real’ world.  He says “The real power of Twitter is in transforming online connections into real-world relationships.”  He goes on to give a few examples of how Twitter helped him meet up with friends and colleagues.

Sure, I’ll buy it.  But I’m sticking to my guns on this:  Twitter is search.  It’s social search, to be sure, but it’s search.  You might want to find a person, thing, website, resource, directions, advice, or business, but you are using the people on Twitter to do it.  Social, real-time search.

Bloomberg posts today that Time Warner is close to spinning off its loss making AOL unit, maybe as early as tomorrow.  Wow, talk about a long fall.

I ran across a post about Microsoft’s mobile Live search and thought I’d give it a test drive (I’m usually a late adopter).   Kind of funny, kind of sad.

I decided to make it easy by dialing in and asking for services in San Luis Obispo since that’s a pretty well-known town (unlike Morro Bay which no one outside of CA has ever heard of).  After going through a minute or so of introduction, instructions, and options, the voice-activated system took me through a quick menu to find the kind of business I wanted to find — ‘restaurants’.  It asked me what kind of restaurant I wanted, and I said ‘california’ — no answer to that one.  So I tried ‘wine country’ and got the same response, and decided to let the system tell me what my options really are:  pizza, chinese, fast food, mexican, italian.  That’s a hip pocket survey of American culture right there isn’t it?

I chose Italian and we started down a numbered list — you choose by saying the number at any point.  I listened and tried #3 and got the response it didn’t have that option, and would you like to hear the list again?  So this time I picked ‘one’ and it clicked, giving me my options for ‘unna avola’  which I think means Buona Tavola, including one option to get directions.

The system did recognize ‘Morro Bay’ and it basically clicked on my home address as well!  I registered the home address and then asked for the directions:  after a few seconds, Live search announced it couldn’t find the directions at this time, and re-opened the main menu.  Square one.

By this time, I would have been half way into SLO and in the usual cell phone dead spot just north of the Cuesta campus.  I gave up.  A good idea but not well executed. I’m sure this is hard to do technically speaking, but when it doesn’t work well, people will leave for other systems.

Rumors have been flying around that Google is hot to buy Twitter.  Makes sense to me, since I see Twitter as a real-time search tool with a billion points of light (users) who can get the most up-to-the-minute answers to almost any question.  This has cooled off in the last week or so — but it still makes more sense to me than some of Google’s other acquisitions.  Why not own your most threatening competitor (much as I would not like to see that happen)?

In the past couple days, though, other stories have emerged that suggest that Twitter and Google might be dancing to a different kind of tune.

First up, in a Google to Acquire Twitter post from a couple weeks ago, Techcrunch‘s influential Michael Arrington said that Twitter and Google were in “late stage” negotiations on a purchase in the neighborhood of $250 million.  Arrington also believes Twitter is a search engine, like I do, and thinks it makes good strategic sense for Google.  But:  Twitter insiders apparently think the company’s value is closer to $1 billion — plus it’s beginning to dawn on people that Google acquiring Twitter might raise anti-competitive warnings among regulators.  On April 3, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted a brief reply that of course they were talking with other companies, but that they had every intention of building their own firm.

Then, on April 9th, Kara Swisher published a long article called Who Will Be Twitter’s Best Search Friend? with the remark that the hot property of the moment in Silicon Valley has been pursued before (notably by Google and Microsoft – who obviously have some of the deepest pockets) – she mentions Microsoft’s purchase of a tiny part of Facebook for $240 million after a lengthy battle with Google (who won that battle is an open question).  Finding a way to get ad distribution on Twitter would be a coup for either of the biggies — if there is a model that works.  The attraction of Twitter is that huge and growing audience, and the fact that it has a model whose applications are continuing to grow.  Lots of big companies are buzzing around it, attracted to all that mindshare.

Updating all this, Claire Cain Miller published an interview with Fred Wilson, one of the investors in Twitter, in the April 16th  NYTimes, with the summary that:   Yes, Twitter is talking to big Internet companies about forming partnerships with them. No, it is not looking to sell itself. Wilson says that Twitter has reached the scale (#3 social site in the US now, after Facebook and MySpace) that other people take seriously, but it is working to find out how to leverage its scale and model in distribution deals with other large properties like Google and Microsoft.

Then, finally, today sees an NZ site called The National Business Review reporting on Google’s recent healthy profits and Eric Schmidt’s (Google CEO) praise for Twitter. They note that this could be part of the competition with Microsoft, trying to butter up Twitter to favor a Google deal for ad distribution.  On the other hand, they also report that rumors persist that Google and Twitter are still in purchase talks, stalled over price.

I hope Twitter stays independent, much as I like Google.  I don’t see how Twitter could replace Google’s archive search, or vice versa, but melding the two would still reduce competition in this market.

The Twitter phenom is still gaining traction, and here’s why (imho):  user generated search.

When I first signed up for a Twitter account, my very first impressions were a lot like the ones comedians make fun of Twitter for:  someone told me every personal thing they did in tweet after tweet — and I stopped paying attention.  I have been a poor follower and worse tweeter (twitterer?) since.

But reports keep rolling in about how effective Twitter is as a real time communication tool, and most of these are about one thing:  search.  Our friend Martin  in Portland talked about how his team, working with the tourism industry in Oregon, started something called the ‘Twisitor’ Center (in this blog, you will also find posts about how Visitor Bureaus across the country are using Twitter).  You simply Tweet a question including the #inpdx hash to have your query posted to everyone following that conversation — and almost immediately you have an answer.

Most of the other success stories I hear about are similar.  Someone at a conference needs a laptop charger.  Someone else there has one.  They connect and problem solved.

I know the other famous stories about Twitter are things like the fact that the first reports of the Mumbai terrorist attacks were sent in tweets.  These real time alerts are important, but for the day to day, I think the search function is the killer app. It’s a perfect extension of the interactive logic of the Internet.

So, Web 3.0?  If we can have user generated content = Web 2.0, why not user generated search = Web 3.0?  OK.  I agree,  neither one is really a game changer in the biggest picture.  But the growth of the Internet tools we have — enlarging and enriching the network — is pretty amazing.

One complaint I hear from clients and students all the time is that their website’s traffic reports cannot possibly be right.  Or, on the other hand, I watch them counting ‘visitors’ as if the numbers represent actual people.  Neither is true.  Or completely wrong, either.

(Digression:  Winston Churchill once said that anytime you put two economists in a room you have two opinions.  Unless one of them is (was, obviously) Keynes, and then you have 3.  Opinions about online traffic stats are just about as varied as this — you need to get used to it.)

What got me started on this is a quote from Guy Kawasaki in an interview with Wordtracker’s Mark Nunney:

I learned that nobody really knows what their stats are because server logs, Google Analytics, and every service that purports to know “the truth” are all based on black magic.

Wow.  Should we just give up? For years we’ve been talking about how online marketing is different because we can measure traffic all the way to leads and sales, picking the paths that are most productive.  Now it’s down to ‘black magic?’

Not really, but there is certainly an element of truth in it.  I am constantly dismayed to find Google’s traffic estimates or advertiser competition estimates wildly out of whack with what I can observe in my own traffic data or search results.  Or, try a local search and 2 times out of three you get the 10-box (local results mapped with brief links adjacent) — but the 3rd time you don’t. Why does Google Analytics give me different information about my Pay Per Click account for a given period than AdWords itself does when the PPC account is directly linked via automated tagging?

These inconsistencies are not just ‘accidents’ or random noise introduced by the probabilistic functions of some overly-smart search engine’s algorithm, even though some really smart engineers might be able to ‘explain’ the anomalies. They are obtrusive evidence that we might not want to trust the search results, and maybe this is where some people get, just deciding that the search engines are a game to be played.

Well, I am a bit determinedly naive about some things, and this is one.  The SEs and our analytics tools do measure things probabilistically, and there is error in the results.  Plus, the measures depend on how well the hundreds of thousands (of millions) of hyperlinks are set up to track, and lots of them are not set up very well.  And they depend on whether the signals arrive via the measurement tools to begin with, and sometimes they don’t.

Then, there’s the human variation, thank goodness.  Humans have their own ideas about things like ‘cookies’ (good, OK, evil, dangerous, necessary, helpful, threatening) and they can delete those cookies whenever they want. Well, then the Google Analytics data is impaired for those visitors.  Research is difficult on this subject, for obvious reasons, but people who have tried to do it guesstimate that maybe 30% of surfers delete cookies.  That’s a lot of data.  And I bet it varies in unknown ways by market segment.

But if we use our data to estimate magnitudes, compare large volumes, watch trends over time, or identify specific tactics that work over a long period of time with adequate amounts of traffic data, we will learn real, useful information about our marketing campaign.  With enough time and traffic we WILL find out which keywords lead to conversions and which don’t.

Traffic stats are imperfect.  But I don’t think anyone wants to trade them in for a billboard on the freeway.

In an interesting bit of research recently published, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that Internet participation has been increasing across ALL generations.  No surprise, the younger you are the more likely you go online using more channels (there’s a lot more 20-somethings at MySpace than there are older boomers).  But important to note that age is almost irrelevant to some kinds of online activities, like researching products:  all ages do that at about the same rate.

In other words, SEARCH and using online resources to learn about products and services is so common at all ages that it is a MUST for marketers no matter what you are marketing.

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land posted some nice graphics about Pew’s Generations Online project.  I’ll share a couple tidbits here, but you might want to check it out.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the Gen X (ages 33-44) and younger Boomers (ages 45-54) make up a big chunk of the adult Internet population (45% of it between them), although the younger Gen Y group is proportionally larger (ages 18-32 with 30%).  And it wasn’t too surprising to see the pattern of certain Internet activities across these generations:  the younger you are the more likely to play online games, use social networking sites, or create a blog.

But what was a little surprising, and encouraging, was that for some activities, there is very little difference in participation rates across generations.  94% of Gen Y use email; 91% of the Silent Generation (ages 64-72) do.  90% of Gen Y use search engines; 85% of Silent.  65% of Gen Y makes online travel reservations; Silent: 69%.  Research products online:  Gen Y – 84%; Silent – 73%.

You get the picture.  Why it matters is this:  the activities that are most likely to lead to sales are common across generations.  Until we get a better handle on how to use all the social sharing, social networking, social news sites out there for marketing products, this will probably continue to be true.  And the change toward social media marketing is not going to be an easy road — the participants in those networks are sophisticated about their independence, and they (mostly) do not want direct marketing appeals.

We are left with limited options for social media marketing.  One important avenue is brand development.  Companies that operate in niches where they can have an impact via brand can benefit from participating in social media.

Of course, then they have to actually participate actively and faithfully, and that’s another story.