Was just chatting the other day with a close friend and her tag line said, “When in doubt Google”.  I gave this a decent thought and came to the conclusion that Google actually runs our life. We query Google for every small thing, from finding information on a travel destination to looking for that perfect recipe which will make your dinner a class apart.

Surprisingly though, Google always finds a way to give the right results. You can also make an argument that we believe Google is right because we follow it and do not turn to other search engines like Yahoo, Live, Netscape (yes, they do exist) to cross check the results thrown in by Google.

This gave me a thought and I was curious to know how much of the world market does Google dominate. Not surprisingly, I “Googled” for this too. Anyways here are some results as per the Market Share stats

Google is making a killing with almost 78% of the market share (was shocked to know this).  Yahoo is second with 12.21% and MSN is third with just 3.27%.

If this trend continues then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have to be soon re-coined as Google Optimization or may be as one of my colleague puts it – Googlization. Think about it???

With Microsoft announcing that it no longer wishes to persue the acquisition of Yahoo, what promised to be the year’s most talked about blockbuster deal may have ended in a little more than a whimper. But… has it really ended or is it a ploy by Microsoft to wait till the Yahoo stock plunges and then rebid at a lower price?

If major newswires are to be believed, at Yahoo, Jerry Yang is most likely to face several angry share holders who believed that he should have accepted Microsoft’s offer. On his part, Jerry Yang has been quoted as saying, “with the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history”. I wonder what that transition is?

From a paid search advertising perspective one only hopes that they improve their own offering instead of selling out to Google’s Adwords program. If they do decide to tie up with Google, then Google Adwords will have a virtual monopoly in the paid search advertising space and that would be quite sad.

Whatever it is that ultimately happens… the future promises to be interesting!!! 

Google announced its first quarter results a few minutes back and the results were better than street expectations. Google’s Q1 EPS was $4.84 and the revenue was $3.7 billion. Amid fears that the economic slowdown would have a negative result on Google’s paid ads program, adwords, Google announced that paid clicks were up 20% in the first quarter.

So I guess the paid search marketing world has nothing to worry about and atleast Google is continuing to see an increase in revenue from it’s pay per click ads.

Google launched a free hosted service on Thursday that helps Web site publishers manage advertising slots on their site.
Ad Manager, like similar paid management services, can target ads at specific users. It can deliver ads depending on a user’s domain, Web browser, the PC’s operating system and bandwidth.
A site not using Google’s Adsense ads can also use the Ad manager. The Ad manager can be configured to fill in the unsold slots with Adsense ads if the site owner wants.
Overall, a useful tool. Let’s see how successful it is and how Google plans to make money from it. My gut feeling is that the next step will be a “friendly” message asking users to share their data anonymously if they want to use advanced features (remember the message on Google Analytics!).

There’s a been a buzz since months now, but Microsoft finally officially announced an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. The $31-a-share bid of cash or Microsoft stock is 62 percent more than Yahoo’s closing price yesterday, reports bloomberg.

So how does this change the search equation?

Google, based in Mountain View, California, captured 56 percent of U.S. Web queries in December, almost double the combined share for Yahoo and Microsoft, which attracted 18 percent and 13 percent. Searches will account for 37 percent of the $27.5 billion U.S. online advertising market in 2008, estimates research firm EMarketer Inc.

Both Yahoo and MSN have been continually losing market share to Google in the search space (both paid and organic). This can be confirmed by looking at Yahoo’s quarterly balance sheet, which shows 8 straight quarters of declining profits. Now, the combined force of Yahoo & MSN, may just be able to start regaining market share that they’ve lost to Google. However, today Google’s search engine is far superior to both Yahoo’s and MSN and they need to be able to offer a compelling reason for users to switch over.

Going back a few years in history, when Altavista and then Yahoo dominated search. In came Google with its cleaner interface, faster search query processing and more accurate results. Today, I see no reason for Google users to switch to any other search engine  simply because there is no value addition that any other search engine can provide. And this is something that Microsoft needs to address if they manage to take over Yahoo… otherwise it may just end up being another hotmail, which only lost marketshare and became one of the more marginal players in the email space after the Microsoft takeover.

Google has always maintained that for a site to appear in “pages from that country” results (i.e. - pages from India or Pages from UK), it needs to be hosted in that country. This meant that for a site to appear in the search results of Google.co.in with the “Pages from India” option selected, it needed to be hosted in India.
A few months back, this criterion was diluted and sites that were either hosted in India or had a country specific domain (.co.in, .in) would both show up in the country specific results.

Since the last few days, we’ve noticed another change. Sites which are neither hosted in India nor have a country specific TLD are now showing up in the Google “pages from India” results if their WHOIS data shows that the registrant is from India. This just shows that Google is not only reviewing but also giving much more importance to the WHOIS data.

So what happens if one uses an identity protector and does not reveal his/her name in the WHOIS? Also what happens to a TLD with a foreign registration address (i.e. - Suppose I own a .co.in domain but my registrant address shows I stay in the US)? There will be a lot of people who must’ve noticed the recent Google changes and must be working out ways to use these factors to improve their site’s search engine placement… The future sure looks interesting!!!

Google has just launched a Google Blog Search Pinging Service. According to the Google Blogsearch FAQs - This service is a way to inform Google Blog Search of weblog updates. These updates are then published and shared with other search engines to allow them to discover changes to your weblogs. The FAQs also mention that Google currently monitors other pinging services and will continue to do that. However pinging Google directly will potentially reduce latency when crawling your blogs.

The Google Blog search service should ideally be pinged each time your blog changes or is updated. This can be done manually at http://blogsearch.google.com/ping or automatically using their API. Google also mentions that a lot of commercial blogging providers may already be pinging Google Blog Search.

Lastly they have re-assured the blogging community that they will continue to monitor other pinging services like before.