Hey all, enjoy Thanksgiving Day (even if your country doesn’t) and eat lots of turkey with no regard for your health. Or tofurkey, or whatever floats your boat. Just have fun today.
I’m watching the parade on NBC with the wife, and I’m shocked at how much Al Roker keeps mispronouncing everything. He was talking with Christopher Meloni, and asked him about his show, Law and Order: SUV. Oy.
Anyway, here’s Google’s Thanksgiving logo for 2007:
I think it’s a lot more festive than last year’s:
Yahoo’s doing an animated Flash logo again:
If you don’t have Flash, they show this image version:
Yahoo’s logo is the same one they ran last year, as far as I can tell.
Ask.com’s doing a full page image again, showing off this giant tasty turkey:
You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much market share that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month. This time, Hitwise is reporting that Google now has 64% of the search engine market, up from 61% market share a year ago and up a point from last month. Live Search and Yahoo declined both from last month and last year, while Ask.com was up slightly.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Oct.-07
Sept.-07
Oct.-06
www.google.com
64.49%
63.55%
60.94%
search.yahoo.com
21.65%
22.55%
22.34%
search.msn.com
7.42%*
7.83%*
10.72%*
www.ask.com
4.76%
4.32%
4.34%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending Oct. 27, 2007, Sept. 29, 2007, Oct. 28, 2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
There are a bunch of search engines and other websites running special logos today for Halloween, and here they are:
YouTube’s is simple and very effective, a pumpkin replacing half the logo:
It’s the sort of logo Google used to do, before they started treating this thing as art half the time. Don’t know what I mean? Just look at the complexity of Google’s Halloween Doodle:
Spooky, but it also looks like a lot of work. Remember the days where it was obvious the most important tool for creating a Google logo was cutting and pasting?
Yahoo is running this cute little thing, another one of their animated Flash logos:
If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see this simpler static image:
Even AOL’s getting into it, with their own animated Flash logo:
(reload the page to see any of the animations from the beginning)
There’s also Technorati (it works better on a green background:
And Ask.com, they’ve gone full page with another of their huge exciting designs, using this:
Which came out liks this:
And don’t forget Dogpile:
Finally, Search Engine Roundtable has an animated logo, which you’ll have to go there to see. Here’s a screenshot of it, courtesy of Barry:
Yahoo has announced it is shutting down Yahoo 360, its never-popular social networking service. 360, which launched on March 29, 2005 (apparently the last time I was ever hopeful about Yahoo), never caught on the way Microsoft’s Spaces did, having a less-appealing interface, and bad decision to start as invite-only, and a lack of promotion and integration from its host company.
Yahoo will be folding 360 into a “more integrated” Yahoo profile experience while concentrating more on Mash, which it isn’t promoting any better. While you consider the likelihood of them screwing this up, again, lets reminisce:
Hitwise’s search market share stats for September, released last week, reveal that Google’s share slipped just slightly last month, falling from 63.98% to 63.55%. Yahoo slipped just about the same, MSN slipped about half of that, but Ask.com gained over eight-tenths of a percentage point, an over 20% jump for them.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Yahoo finally had a decent quarter, releasing third quarter earnings that didn’t immediately inspire panic among investors. Yahoo’s earnings, with $1.77 billion in revenue, $150 million in operating income, $1.02 billion in gross profit, sent shares up 7-8% most of this morning. While shares are well down from where they were a few years ago, or even from the first half of this year, they have been rebounding lately, up 25% in the last seven weeks.
Compete released a study on search quality, determining that Google users click on a search result 65% of the time, while Yahoo users click 75% of the time and Microsoft users click 59% of the time. Now, there are multiple reasons why a user will click, good and bad, so this doesn’t mean that Yahoo users get better results, but the stats do show siginificant differences between the engines.
Good reasons you don’t click a search result:
Universal Search/Ask3D type results give you the information right there on the page, eliminating the need to click elsewhere to get the information. Smart Answers will also do that. Yahoo has the least amount of this useful info, which could explain their high score.
Good search results and snippets - if an engine has the information right there in the snippet, again, users will not click a result, since they already have the answer.
Bad reason you don’t click:
Irrelevant results - Users get pissed off and give up, stop searching, or try a different search engine.
Secondary searches - Users refine their queries, or run second searches when the first one doesn’t have the specific information they’re looking for.
The latest search engine market share numbers for China show Baidu building a devastating lead in the most populous country on the planet, claiming almost 70% of the users in the country. While other search engines are fading away into nothingness, Google is at least holding its own, adding around 7% in the last six months to settle at 23%. Yahoo lost well over half of its little slice, now having just 2.3% of the market.
Google didn’t run any special logos for today, which (obviously!) was Talk Like A Pirate Day, but other people did, including Yahoo’s Flickr. Barry at SER talks about all the logos, so check ‘em out.
JMP Securities analyst William Morrison looks at ComScore data, and shows that YouTube is now commanding 35% of Google’s users, and a full 28% of all minutes spent on Google properties. Considering that streaming video uses up more of Google resources than, say, a search results page, but YouTube is monetized at an extremely smaller rate than Google search, it’s safe to say that if Google doesn’t find a way to monetize more of YouTube, and fast, it’s going to become a major drain on the company.
He also notes that Google has enjoyed healthy growth over the last year, with 20% growth in worldwide users, 18% in U.S. users (22% of the total), 113% in time spent on site, and 56% in page views. A real shocker: Google Maps has surged 98% to 682 million pageviews, much more than Yahoo’s 397 million. Is MapQuest still number one? I wonder.
(via Blogging Stocks)
ComScore’s latest numbers on the top websites in the United States are out, and Fox Interactive’s websites, including MySpace, still hold the top spot in pageviews, while Yahoo’s sites rule in unique visitors. Google fell to #4 in pageviews, falling behind Microsoft, which had larger gains in August, while Google is closing in on Yahoo in the unique visitor category and holding strongly onto its #2 ranking.
Yahoo has signed a deal to provide ads to a social network. Nope, not MySpace (that’s Google territory). Try again? Not Facebook either (Microsoft got that one). Yeah, it’s Bebo (and I’ll understand if you’ve never heard of them), a site with 11.6 million monthly users, very popular in the U.K. and Ireland.
Google has improved the way it tells time. Yes, a minor detail, but they did a neat job improving here. As you can see above, searching google for “time [name of place]” will give you a nice little clock, along with a full description of the time, time zone, and place in question. Ionut Alex has a screenshot of the old implementation, which looked more like an advertisement than a smart answer.
It’s cool that the clock pictured actually shows the current time, as opposed to just being a picture of a clock. The image address is http://www.google.com/chart?chs=40x30&chc=localtime&cht=cf&chd=s:KY&sig=1bhjpAjoJ38HTORPS6ob5rJe240 and is pictured here:
Would anyone like to try figuring out the URL and whether it can be used in some sort of hack?
Ask.com and Yahoo, but not Windows Live, also show you the time when you ask. Yahoo’s approach is similar to Google’s old one, easily overlooked, while Ask’s is large, bold, and actually is a live clock that updates as you are looking at it. Ask’s also appears on searches for any city or place name, not just searches specifically for the time.
All sorts of search syntax will work, including entering the name of a city, country or region, and pretty much any query with the word “time” will do, including long ones like “what time is it in New York?“
Google announced a deal to be the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertising on CNN.com. The agreement will last multiple years, though it’s not clear how many. Clint Boulton notes a few other recent web ad exclusives, including Google getting a multi-year for ads and search with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive last month and Yahoo picking up Philly.com earlier this month.
Yahoo Mail now has a feature that allows you to send instant messages from your email to mobile phones. The free text messages can be sent to mobiles in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. They’ve also added tabbed instant messaging to Yahoo Mail, letting you open a Y!Messenger tab and start chatting away with an IM user, all within the email interface. There are also six customizable themes that have been added.
The changes: basically everyone reports to Decker now. Greg Coleman is gone as head of global sales. Hilary Schneider, a favorite of Decker according to Swisher, takes over his responsibilities. Jeff Weiner takes over many of Schneider’s groups, including Yahoo Shopping, Travel, Autos, Real Estate and Local. Schneider heads up a new division, called Global Partner Solutions, which takes over:
all ad formats, including search, display, video, mobile, listings, etc.
all online marketing objectives, including brand, performance, promotional, and
all customer types and sizes, including large enterprises, small online businesses, and local brick and mortar companies
…
Global Sales, the Online Channel, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, Corporate Partnerships and Hot Jobs
Apparently, former Yahoo “Hollywood” exec Lloyd Braun is raiding the company, stealing two of his former lieutenants (Mike Weetman, CFO of the Network division, and Geraldine Martin-Coppola, who worked on original content) recently from Yahoo to his new production company, BermanBraun. Also, Yahoo still has no CTO.
Also, Cammie Dunaway, Chief Market Officer, now reports directly to Decker, as does her Customer Experience group. That puts under Decker’s control:
Hilary Schneider — EVP of Global Partner Solutions
Jeff Weiner - EVP of the Yahoo! Network Division
Marco Boerries - EVP, Connected Life
Toby Coppel - Head of Yahoo! Europe
Keith Nilsson - Head of Emerging Markets
Rose Tsou - Head of the Asia Region
a soon to be hired EVP — Marketing Products Division
Cammie Dunaway — CMO
Jeff McCombs - Decker’s Chief of Staff and VP, Business Management
Greg Coleman, until he leaves in February
Sue Decker is in charge now. This is her company to save or sink at this point, and while no one’s sure if they’re on the right path, or if they know what path to switch to, I think most people are rooting for Yahoo. Even if you want Google to be number one, it isn’t healthy for the industry to lose such a big company or for that many jobs to be in jeopardy.
You can see how Google gains over five points, Yahoo loses 1.3 percentage points Microsoft loses one, Ask loses a third of a point and Time Warner gains a third. The new system counts the top five search sites, the top fifty sites with search technology (like MySpace), major search verticals (like eBay and Amazon), partner search sites, search tabs (Google News, Google Images), local search (maps), and searches on international portals.
A little under 1/6 of Google’s searches come from YouTube and other Google sites. Mapquest gets more searches than AOL Search. MySpace search counts for about 2.5% of the entire market, and should be counted under Google, since Google powers it. Craigslist and Amazon are just under 1% apiece.
Here are a few Google Doodle holiday logos that ran recently:
Google China ran this Doodle in recognition of the one-year countdown to the Beijing 2008 Olympics:
Zorgloob points out the the “366″ in the logo originally read “365″, until someone reminded logo designer Dennis Hwang that 2008 is a leap year, and the one-year countdown is 366 days. Zorgloob has a screenshot of the logo that appeared on Google.cn for a mere short period of time.
Google didn’t run any special logos for today, which (obviously!) was Talk Like A Pirate Day, but other people did, including Yahoo’s Flickr. Barry at SER talks about all the logos, 
Ask.com and Yahoo, but not Windows Live, also show you the time when you ask. 
