What Does the BingHoo Merger Mean For Your Tiny Business?
Russ Henneberry | Sep 28, 2009 | Comments 0
As we hurdle headlong into the year 2010 there are big things happening in Search Marketing.
If you are not aware there has been an important merger between the #2 and #3 search engines — Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will soon be “powering” Yahoo’s search results.
This leaves two major search engines for you to be concerned with — Bing and Google.
Is The Big G Nervous?
It appears that Google has weathered the initial storm of the launch of Bing as they still retain about 70% of the market share in search. However, I have noticed (and maybe it is just a coincidence) that Google has been changing slowly but surely over the past couple of months.
There is no question that the recent merger agreement between Google’s top two adversaries has spurred the Big G to make some changes… although officially they say that this is not a reaction but just business as usual at Google.
What Will Change?: Universal Search
Bing has been marketing itself as a “decision engine” instead of a search engine. They are trying to redefine the market and I think that there will be some very interesting updates to Bing as they continue to roll it out.
The most interesting will be in Universal Search. Bing and Google are both racing to provide what is called Universal or “blended” search results. Things like:
- Images
- Video
- Maps (Local Results)
- Products
- News
- etc
The Take Away: It is becoming more important that your tiny business is included in Google, Yahoo and Bing Local, that you are creating video and uploading it to YouTube (and the others), that you are including your products in product feeds, and making it easy for sites like Google News to pick up your feed.
What Will Change?: Real Time Search
Google and BingHoo also have their eye on Twitter.
The reason — Twitter has become the sort of central nervous system of the Internet. Example — the moment I heard Michael Jackson had died, I headed over to Twitter. Twitter was crammed to the gills with “tweets” about the king of pop and the announcement was only made minutes before.
Real time search today is not available but if anyone is poised to deliver it — it would be Twitter. Google and BingHoo are not yet equipped to deal with the enormous amount of information that is being updated into blogs, forums, and social networks in real time. It is just too much data.
Expect things to change in this area and change quickly. There is a huge demand for a service that will be able to return real time information that is trustworthy and relevant.
The Take Away: I have heard all of the complaining that Twitter is a waste of time and you don’t want to hear when someone is having a cup of coffee or what TV show they are watching. Your tiny business should have a Twitter account and you should be (at the very least) using something like Twitterfeed to update your status and grow a following. Although in the end Twitter may not be a lasting Internet Marketing factor, there will be some form of real time updating communication tool with us forever.
I am excited about the merger… I think it will improve the search experience for end users… and, in my opinion, a little competition will be good for Google.
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