search Archive

Yandex has started powering search contextual ads on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Here is a screenshot and link to search result page on Bing.com for a search query “Туры” (Tours) that displays Yandex.Direct advertisements both above the Bing.com’s search results and alongside them (to the right).

Yandex has announced a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing on its blog. The Yandex.Direct ads has been tested on Bing since September 2009.  The blog post said that “in so far, a share of Bing in Russia is not that big, but [Yandex] is very glad that one of the world’s largest companies has decided to monetize in RuNet with a help of Yandex’s contextual technologies”.

Bing holds 0.8% search market share in Russia, behind Yandex with 58.3%, Google with 23.0%, Mail.ru with 10.2%, and Rambler with 3.8%, according to LiveInternet.ru. Yandex held 54.5% of searches in Russia, Google – 34.5%, Mail.ru – 7.4%, Rambler – 1.9%, Bing – 0.4%, said comScore last August.

Since the Russian contextual advertising market is vauled at $400 million per year, Yandex powering search ads on Bing will translate in several million in additional annual revenues for both Yandex and Microsoft.

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We’ve written before about the big deals you can sometimes find using the Bing cashback search. Tonight I found (via Fatwallet) that you can grab 15% on some purchases at Dell by starting at Bing.

Click here to view the search results for Dell on Bing. At the top of the results, you will see a sponsored result for Dell that displays the “Bing Cashback” link. Click that link and the Bing Cashback page will be displayed and then you can select if you want to browse products on the Business side or the Home side.

Here are the terms and conditions that were provided to me tonight:

• Shop at Dell Today and Earn 15% Bing CashBack
• Offer applies to purchases on Dell Home & Home Office and Small & Medium Business on this visit only.
• Purchases from Dell Outlet, Dell Public or Large Enterprise stores are NOT eligible for this offer.
• Dell reserves the right to end or change this offer at any time.
• View all Bing.com CashBack terms and conditions.

Fatwallet users are reporting that the cashback works on any product (e.g. laptop, monitor, mp3, tv, etc.) but as always, check the current terms and conditions before making any purchase to verify that the Bing Cashback applies to the specific item(s) you are interested in.

I haven’t used Bing Cashback yet, but if the 15% is around on Sunday, I may finally purchase a Wii.

I first met the founders of Germany-based search engine Faroo at Techcrunch40 in 2007. I enjoyed our chat and learning about their product which at the time was a P2P search engine.

This week they have launched a new search which they refer to as the, “Real-Time Social Discovery and Search”. Faroo notes that the new offering is a, “crowd-sourced approach to search, offering the discovery of new and relevant Web documents within minutes of their being published”

The new Faroo real-time search looks pretty interesting especially as you can’t attend a tech event without someone mentioning the concept of real-time search. Search results can be ordered by popularity or timeline. I can’t quite tell how they are getting their index as my startup post this morning shows a time of one-hour ago and a post on my startup’s blog this afternoon isn’t in their search results. I assume they are only indexing top and/or popular sources.

Some of the other features include:

• Tag search – refine your search based on a tag
• Preview – mouse over a result and see a visual preview before clicking to the destination
• Multi-language support – search results can include non-English language results
• RSS support – Users can subscribe to search results via RSS which can be useful for Google Reader and Friendfeed

You can also jump to search results on Wikipedia, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube.

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Guhmshoo put together a cartoon that I thought was interesting. The cartoon suggests that while we are celebrating our independence here in the U.S., worldwide we are all celebrating our dependence on Google.

James Thomas discussed his life without Google – could you do it?

Guhmshoo also recently revealed who he is and why he picked an alias to use when posting his cartoons.

Happy 4th of July to everyone in the U.S.!

It seems search engines are all the rage these days with a variety of launches over the past couple of months. Today Valley-based Surf Canyon and Ukraine-based Search Cloudlet have combined their technologies to create a new search engine.

Both companies previously offered browser plugins. We first reviewed Surf Canyon late last year and CEO Mark Cramer explained how the service works. Cramer explained how the application works — basically you enter a search query on Google or Yahoo as you always do. You select a search result and go to that page. If that page isn’t what you were looking for, when you come back to the search result, Surf Canyon looks at results 11-1000 and then recommends other results similar to the one you clicked on. It ignores results you skipped over because it recognizes you weren’t interested in those results.

We reviewed Search Cloudlet also late last year and the service provides a way to refine a search query by clicking on words in tag clouds.

The new search engine uses the technology from both companies to help searchers refine their queries to find exactly what they are looking for. Another similar service is offered by Russian-based Quintura.

Update: AltSearchEngines and Webware have additional coverage.

Last week was all about Bing and Wave – both products the respective companies believe will change something about what we do online. Master search engine journalist Danny Sullivan has an indepth review of Bing which is worth reading (along with his partners comparison review).

In the ”coming soon” video, Microsoft classifies Bing as a “decision engine”. The video makes it seem like a search engine.

Whether you classify Bing as a decision engine or a search engine, whether you compare Bing to Google or any other engine, I have one question for Microsoft….

WHY NOT USE LIVE.COM?

Something tells me that Microsoft hired an expensive agency which eventually (after large payments) came up with the name Bing. I’ve sat through hundreds of these type of presentations over my career and have found it funny how many times the agency misses what’s right in front of them. Now maybe the Bing name was developed in-house. Frankly it really doesn’t matter where Bing came from (note, when I hear bing, I think of the bing-bong chime on the subway when the doors close).

Live is nearly a perfect name. All of the social media techies are in love with “real-time” and Google and other engines have talked about wanting to add more real-time activities into their results. Microsoft could have worked towards branding Live as THE real-time results/decision/search engine. Real-time = Live. Everything inside of Bing could have been included along with the real-time results.

Will Bing be the next Google or the next Cuil? Who knows at this point but what I do know is that had they used the Live name for the brand, they would have been further down the better path.

Perhaps in future ads and videos we will learn what the Bing name actually means and why it was chosen for this new brand.

Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to Wordpress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.