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may 2009 search engine news
What's New in Search - May 2009
Microsoft Overhauls Search
After Yahoo! declined Microsoft's buy-out offer, the company made a decision to redesign its own Live Search. The new search engine, named Bing, will focus on assisting users in making purchases, planning travel details and finding credible health information. Search pages will also contain a menu down the left-hand side of the page providing users with the capability to easily refine their searches or email or post links on Facebook. Although Microsoft's goal is to position itself ahead of Yahoo! Search and become a direct competitor of the Google search engine, experts say this is unlikely. While MSN has a chance of outranking Yahoo! as the #2 search engine in the long-term (due much in part to its $100 million advertising budget for Bing), Google's placement as a "go-to" search engine in the average consumer's mind will be hard to break.
Time Warner to Spin Off AOL at Year's End
After merging with AOL in 2001 and enduring countless setbacks and drops in overall stock, Time Warner has decided to spin off AOL into its own publicly-traded company by the end of this year. Although both Time Warner and AOL were of the opinion that merging into a single media conglomerate would strengthen their positions in the search and search advertising market, the merge has had negative impacts on both companies. Executives hope that by separating AOL from Time Warner, the search engine (which currently gives away a large part of its offered services in an attempt to drive traffic to its advertiser sites), will gain momentum in its search strategy and regain its once strong competitive position against MSN, Yahoo! and Google.
Google Announces "Search Options" Panel
Google has recently announced its new improvements to the existing Google Search, most noticeably "Search Options." The new panel now allows users to refine search results by type/format or time. For example, if a user types in any given query, the "Search Options" panel on the left-hand side of the page allows him or her to filter results to show only videos, forums, reviews, etc. or to filter by time frame (i.e. recent results, past 24 hours, past week, past year, etc.). Google executives hope that this new feature allows users not only to find the information they want faster, but also to improve the quality of those results, improving the overall search experience.
Yahoo! Search Analytics Now Available for Search and Display Advertisers
After the much-publicized success of Google's Google Analytics, Yahoo! has now released its own website analytics program. Yahoo! claims that its new analytics program, which, like Google's program, is also free to search advertisers, is superior to Google Analytics and provides analysis of a website's performance not just on Yahoo! but on other search engines as well. Yahoo! Web Analytics also provides analysis for display and email marketing campaigns, demographic targeting options, suggestions for improving conversions, and more. A Yahoo! spokesperson has said that the program is best for large companies, although the engine does provide the option of Full Analytics or Conversion Only Analytics for websites that don't require the more complex program.
Ask Expands Coverage of Domain Navigation Product
Ask has been gradually rolling out its Domain Navigation product in phases since its positive beta-testing results in 2008. Domain Navigation, which improves a user's search experience concerning the top result for a given search query, now contains a list of up to nine links under the top search result. Each of these links points to commonly visited pages within that top site. For example, someone searching for a major bookstore might see a list of common genres or store locations listed beneath the regular search result. Ask designed this feature to get the user to his or her intended destination faster than if the user were to navigate a large or complicated site on his or her own. Ask executives have said there are further improvements to be revealed in the future.
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