From the horse's mouth...

I am really really hoping that a) this is genuine and b) it's continued for a while, because this is consumer insight gold.  And even if a+b turn out not to be true my morning has been improved no end by finding this Tweetfeed  highlighting the things this guy's Dad is using Google for:  I recommend clicking over and scrolling a while. I love the honesty.

2010 in search, tweets, apps & trends

Google just released their search trend year in review video (note the not very subtle plugs for many of their services along the way) It is worth watching but be warned it's not going to leave you bouncing with joy about 2010.  It seems like it's been a lousy year for many people. Bring on 2011.  They also published the top searches per category. I'm sure Robert Pattinson will be delighted to have scraped in at #10 of the most searched for people, with Justin Bieber taking the #1 slot. 



Meanwhile, Twitter reported that the world sent 25 billion tweets this year (so far),and on average 95 million tweets are sent everyday.  Twitter also published charts of top topics tweeted about in 2010:  Unsurprisingly there's a strong correlation between the Google search rankings and the Tweet charts: iPad dominates in technology and yet again Justin Bieber tops the people charts. (Click here to read how they compiled the charts).

Apple also recently published their top apps of the year. You can check who is downloading what (music, films, podcasts apps) & where (by market) on iTunes charts. Well worth a play, if only for curiosity.

For 2010, Facebook dominates the free download charts and Angry Birds (game) the paid chart.

Crazy but true, this bonkers addictive game tops the paid app charts in UK, US, France, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal & Sweden and is in the top 5 in a further 7 countries: Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Ireland and Germany. In Greece it's number 6, and the only place it doesn't make the Top10 from the published charts is Japan.

 
You can bet that the Angry Birds soft toys that Rovio are releasing in January will give a welcome boost to the usually quiet January toy market too.

And whilst I'm having a round-up morning, here's the ever brilliant Contagious round up of top trends of 2010.

Finding what you want to watch online now even easier

Fledgling video-specific search engine Clicker have just got a new round of funding.  Great!

Whilst you can find videos via video search tabs in Google or Bing, or of course search directly in YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion et al, it's quite interesting to have an aggregated medium-specific search engine as a destination.  Have a play, you can search from a variety of angles including "made for the web" which is interesting in itself.  My TV Production buddies should take note!!

Winter Olympics - get your round up here....

The Winter Olympics are currently upon us, starting in Vancouver on the 12th Feb, and somehow, despite the appetite for all things snow related amongst the huge number of avid winter sports fans I know, it just doesn't seem to get the same level of buzz and coverage as the Summer Olympics.

On the subject of which, only 898 days to go says the BT Tower out of my office window today - they've had a daily countdown showing for weeks now but it took me a while to figure out what the random number was, 'til I twigged they were a sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics).

Doh, where's the paid search on that activity??  Joined up thinking people???

However,  back to the Winter Olympics, and those ever helpful folks at Google have kindly pulled together a handy Winter Olympics 2010 quick reference guide where you can check out the medals table, get links to event coverage, see the buzz around events via a link to real time search and even check out the slopes in Street View (clearly they should have called that Piste view but never mind!).

Worth a look.

It does a nice in-one-place showcase of the many things Google brings you, that lesser geeks than I may not have realised.

But nice as that is, I still like the daily pictures on Bing. They make me smile. And therefore divide my search love :-)

 Utterly gratuitous but here's some very cool camels from yesterday

Google start selling display advertising too.

PPC, display, search, email, RSS, blogging, location, docs, diary... I could go on.

Google the one-stop shop for all your marketing and consumer needs?  Is it a good or a bad thing?  Tricky one.

Interesting article on the topic from the Media Guardian here.....

Search stats update

In July 2009 there were 113 billion searches globally says Comscore

Google snaffled 76.7 billion of them (giving them a 67% share of the market)

32% of all searches originated in Europe, with searchers on average looking up 116 things in a month. APAC accounted for 31% and North America just 22%.

I've decided that Bing's changing photos every day is like an advent calendar (the proper ones before it was just an excuse for a daily dose of rubbish chocolate!). It's become a daily habit to just swing by in the morning and check. I've also noticed that I am more likely to use Bing for searches throughout the day if I particularly like the picture that day.

Wolfram Alpha's been busy...

It's August. Silly season in the press. The one time of year you can get a seat on the train in the morning without a fight. But whilst some are enjoying hard earned breaks for others the work continues, and the development team at "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha have been busy busy according to a recent blog post from Stephen Wolfram. Well worth a read.

Wolfram Alpha might not yet have ironed out all the wrinkles but it definitely sounds like they are making process, and I do like the way it presents results if I'm looking for certain types of answers. Google won't teach me how to play chords.Nor play the audio file too so I know what they should sound like.

Sure, WA hasn't made the impact Bing has on the overall search market but it was always going to be slightly more niche because of it's scientfic skew, and it hasn't had the might of Microsoft and some big OEM deals behind it either.

It deserves to retain a place on the search radar.

Take a search engine challenge

Do you default to Google? Or has my banging on about Bing enticed you to play?

Some research I read recently suggested that there's a huge amount of blind faith in Google to come up with the right results. In fact, in tests, any other search engine results displayed with the Google logo on the top get more votes than if displayed with the accurate search engine logo on top. That's branding for you. Brilliant!

Try a blind search-engine test yourself and see what happens. This site will give you results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and not reveal who the search engine was until after you've voted for which one you liked best.

Entertainingly, preliminary results suggest that the results would be Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%, which is entertaining given the Bing-oo! merge and Google's 70%+ market share domination of the search market.

Stunning Sydney and Bingles

The Bing summer photo competition winner has been announced and the winner was this stunning photo of the Sydney skyline / Centrepoint Tower lit up during a storm.


9400 photos were submitted which is pretty respectable for a relatively small scale initiative that I only saw publicised within the Facebook environment. And if I was Jeremy Somers (the winner) I'd be pretty chuffed that sometime soon I was going to log in to Bing and see my picture there for a day. I'd also be suspecting that he'll be telling his friends not only of his win but also to keep checking back to Bing to see when his photo is posted.

Involvement and WOM propogation. Nice.

And I'm a bit behind the program but Bing were also involving the video-creating communities via a another competition:

"Since everyone is having fun with the name, we thought it would be interesting to see what you can do with it, put to a little music! Got a fun jingle, or as we like to say in the halls around here “Bingle” you want to share?"

$500 as the prize was hardly going to break the marketing budget, but I reckon the views of the videos submitted where worth far far more than that, not to mention the involvement of those that bothered to take part. Worth a snuffle around YouTube (oh the irony, owned by arch-rival Google!) - there's some super cheesy versions like this one and some which have clearly been thought about quite a lot! This was the winner:

Bing-oo!

Just in case the search news of the week had passed you by, Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a 10 year deal whereby Yahoo search will be powered by Bing and ad sales will be handled/ consolidated via Yahoo.

Consolidation in such a competitive market place, and one dominated by as powerful player as Google makes an awful lots of sense, albeit 10 years as a deal term is a very very long time in digital terms. Bing already have circa 15% of the search market, which is not to be sniffed at in ad revenue terms, and certainly means it is worth ensuring your site is optimised for Bing as well as Google at the very least.

Banging on about Bing...

I know, I know, I've talked about search and Bing a LOT recently but it's important. Competition in the market is healthy.

I have a Gmail account, I use the Google reader for RSS feeds, this blog is written on a Google owned platform, I upload to YouTube (owned by Google), and I am enormously excited about the scope and potential of the Google Wave (a new communication and collaboration platform/approach coming soon) so I'm far from entirely disloyal. But it's important to share my love too.

I am enjoying playing with Bing not just for the way it processes queries and displays results, but for the small moment of happiness I get from the stunning pictures they have on the homepage everyday. Yesterday it was Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the day before a stunning image of a turtle which made me think about a great holiday in the Whitsunday's last year. I engage with it. I play guessing games with myself as a result of the image I see. And clearly I am not alone and Bing have twigged that too as in the last week they've taken to adding clues under the image.

This morning I logged in and spent a few moments trying to work out where I recognised that skyline from. After a quick memory scan, and even before I looked at the clues, I realised it was the Yarra river and Melbourne, a city I love but haven't been back to for a few years now. But the fact that I go back to see the picture every day and I've been telling lots of my colleagues to do the same too, suggests they've got something right.

In an earlier post I talked about how smart it was for Bing to have launched a homepage photocontest via Facebook. I logged into Facebook this morning to find a status feed item reminding me that voting for the photocompetition closes on August 3rd, and encouraging me to go a vote (which I duly did). I'd encourage you to do the same. Why not? It's easy to do and easy on the eye. Well done, Bing, I think you are doing a good job. You are demonstrating that you are understanding your consumer and what is motivating (some) of them to use your decision making engine, and, how social media spaces can work hard for you: you don't have to drag people out of an environment that they are in anyway to make them consider and engage with your brand.
It will take a long time to shift people's behaviour from using Google as default, as there's many more of us using search than the was when the big shift from Yahoo search to Google happened in the late 1990's, but I feel compelled to encourage people to explore the search options available too us. There's more to search than the big G.

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.

Google this, Bing that, Search Me

It's been a busier than average few weeks in the world of search engines.

With over 80% of web journeys starting with a search engine (according to some recent EIAA stats) , it's little wonder that in the last round of IAB/PWC figures that PPC / paid for search accounted for circa 60% of digital media spend in 2008. Success in search whether it's natural search rankings of paid for listings, is all about being at the top. Page position is everything.

Search is an interesting marketplace. Google has become a verb. But B.G (before Google), we all happily used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, and before that those of us who've been navigating the interweb for over a decade can probably recall using AltaVista. Search wars are nothing new. They've just got a bit more interesting recently, as people try and challenge the dominance of the almighty G.

A few weeks back we saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha a "computational knowledge engine" that process queries and returns results in a very different way to Google. A simple search for "London Weather" in Wolfram Alpha gives me current weather across a range of metrics (pressure, dewpoint, temperature), details about the weather station used, graphed trends over time, whereas Google gives me a snapshot for the next few days and text links to the BBC and Met Office. WA has been called the search engine of choice for scientists and techies. I like it. For certain searches I will almost certainly use it over Google because I get a more holistic view of related information and answers in easy to process format. Try it.

Last week saw the much discussed launch of Bing, the latest incarnation of search offering from Microsoft. Although they are positioning it as a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. It's visually arresting without question, with big beautiful pictures that change everyday, and the reason we're all supposed to love it is because it's taking a "vertical" approach to search so that we get actual results relating to our searches (e.g integrated price comparison results) that we can interact with without leaving the search results page. Full functionality on this level hasn't hit the UK yet but most of the reviews I've read seem quite positive, and I do rather like the fact that video search results auto-play in the results page when you hover over them, which plays nicely into that notion of content snacking and removes the frustration of you ending up on a click-chase to find the content you were actually looking for.

But the fact remains that in the time-stretched world we live in, we're creatures of habit and it's going to take a lot of motivation and perceived benefit to convince the masses to shift from the habitual Google search to trying something new and getting used to processing the results in different ways. I hope the media buzz does succeed in convincing people to try it though. It's healthy to have a competitive marketplace.

For me search-wars don't stop there either. Visual search is going to play a big part of the future. Younger generations process information in increasingly visual ways rather than the text-based world I grew up in. So why wouldn't they want search results presented in the same way? More and more kids start their information searches with YouTube, not Google.

I increasingly play with Search Me, I like the interface and the way it presents results. Like Bing, I can get an at-a-glance view of results that enable me to judge much more quickly whether a suggestion is what I am looking for or not.

Mobile search is going to get bigger and bigger as penetration of smartphone continues to grow rapidly and the networks facilitate mobile web use via sensible data packages that remove the barrier of un-predictable pain in the wallet. Image recognition based search apps like Kooaba and SnapTell might still be relatively fledgeling but the potential of this for consumers and marketers alike fills me with excitement.

But search engines still only reach the consumer actively seeking information, and there are times when brands need to interrupt people to get their message across, so getting overly-obsessed with search engine marketing would be potentially missing the chance to talk to lots of potentially valuable prospects, via paid for advertising or deeper consumer connections created in a myriad of ways.

So challenge yourself, go play, there's much more to search than Google if you can be bothered to try.