Bing-Yahoo Search Alliance Gains U.S. Market Share

Microsoft launched its search engine Bing back in 2009. Since then it has been pumping cash into its online search division in the hopes that it may be able to snatch some market share from Google and tap into the lucrative search business.

Web search and advertising account for the majority of Google’s stock that we estimate is worth an intrinsic value of about $192 billion, and so it is little surprise that Microsoft wants to get a piece of the search action as well. Moreover its deal with Yahoo is bearing fruit as ComScore data suggests that Bing now powers nearly a third of all U.S. searches once you combine Yahoo and Bing together.

We have a $28 price estimate for Microsoft and estimate that Bing accounts for around 5% of its value. Our price estimate is about 10% ahead of the market price.

Bing-Yahoo Alliance Gaining

Bing has been growing at a steady pace in the U.S. market. ComScore released some figures this week that suggests that while Bing’s market share remained relatively flat at 14.4%, Yahoo’s market share increased by 0.2% to 16%. Google’s market share decreased from 65.5% to 65.1%. [1]

Since Yahoo’s search engine is powered by Bing, this brings Bing’s total U.S. marketshare to 30.5%, which is almost half of Google’s market share.

While it’s making inroads in the U.S. search market, it hasn’t been able to make much of a dent in the global search market. It still serves only around 4% of the global search market compared to Google that can brag about its 80% share. Bing did score a major victory in its deal to power the English search results for Baidu – the popular Chinese search engine.



Is it Worth it?

While Bing’s efforts have been quite successful, have they been worth it?

Microsoft incurred losses of $2.6 billion in the online division in the fiscal year ended June 30th and lost $728 million last quarter alone. It has been bleeding cash for almost 22 consecutive quarters now, with no signs that it will ever improve. Despite spending so much, data suggests that Bing hasn’t gained market share from Google but instead from other players like Yahoo, Ask and AOL.

The Guru Guide to Keyword Research

Here is my guide to Keyword Research. If you’ve been hanging around the internet-marketing space for any length of time, you probably understand the importance of keyword research already. The topic has been written about frequently in the the past, however, much of the information that’s available is not very in-depth or too vague to take any real action on.
SEO booksIn this post, I want to break down the process of creating an initial keyword list, the specific criteria I use to evaluate a keyword, and provide some basic tools to get started with your research. Ready? Let’s go.

Getting Started
Whenever you’re about to get started with keyword research you’ll want to open up an Excel spreadsheet to help analyze the data. You don’t need to create anything fancy. Just add the following column titles into your spreadsheet:
Keyword / Search / Volume / Competition / Searcher / Intent
The information you enter into the above for columns will serve as an aid to help evaluate keywords later. Next step, time to starting looking for keywords.

How to find Keywords
Typically, I use three techniques to start researching keywords:
1. Industry: Start typing a big list of the keywords you think would be relevant to the niche your getting into. This includes technical phrases, jargon, or branded keywords that people might use to discover website about your topic.

2. Competitors: Make a list of 4 – 5 websites that sell similar products or services to you. Reviewing the title tags of competitors websites is a great way to quickly learn what keywords other businesses are targeting and profiting from. A great tool called SEMRush can also be used to speed up the competitive research process.

3. Tools: There are about a thousand different keyword research tools online, but the ones I use the most frequently are the Keyword Tool in Google Adwords and Wordtracker.
Don’t forget to copy and paste all the keywords you’ve found into the Keyword column of your spreadsheet.

How to Evaluate Keywords
There are three metrics I always evaluate to help determine whether or not I want to go after a particular keyword phrase. They are….
1. Volume: Are there enough people actually searching for the particular product or service you’re trying to sell? If not, it might be wise to re-evaluate the market you’re planning to enter. But how do you know when there is enough volume?
This number will depend on who you ask of course. However, I like to use affiliate marketing master Andrew Hansen’s advice to go after keywords with at least 1,000 exact match searches per month according to Google’s Keyword Tool. In my opinion, this is a really solid base line.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t still need to develop content that targets the long tail as well, however, you should set the goal of targeting high-volume, high-conversion search phrases as a longterm goal.

2. Searcher Intent: Are you able to provide a solution to the searchers exact query at the precise time they need it? If so, does this keyword suggest any sort of commercial intent?
A deep understanding of the searcher intent behind each of your keywords is critical. Sometimes searcher intent is straight forward. However, it can also become more complex when keywords have multiple meanings.

For example, consider the thousands of variations of searcher intent that include the keyword “insurance.” Potential searcher intent could include insurance for home owners, life, cars, boats, motorcycles, trucks, discount, or free quote related phrases just to name a few.
Bottom line: Get to know what searchers want when entering a website through your keyword. Even if it is more than one thing.

3. Competitiveness: No matter how great of an SEO or internet marketer you are, there are just some keywords that are too competitive to even consider entering the fray. These types of keywords are dominated by large companies with substantial advertising budgets and resources that you probably don’t have.
One quick way find out whether or not your keywords are too competitive is to check the backlink profile of the top five ranking websites in Google for keyword(s) you’re considering. If the websites listed at the top of the SERPs are on domains with thousands of unique linking domains this is cause for concern. Consider going after longtail search phrases first or consider a less competitive market.

Tools of the Trade
When you’re conducting keyword research knowing the tools of the trade helps. Fortunately, most of the keyword research tools I use are free or have free limited access versions.
Here are a handful of tools that can come in handy in the discovery and evaluation of a keyword for your website:
* Google Adwords Keyword Tool: In my opinion this is the best and most accurate keyword tool available in your keyword research toolbelt. Nobody has got more data than Google and best of all the tool is totally free.

* OpenSiteExplorer.org: This is the industry standard back-link analysis tool. This tool can help you identify how many inbound links you’ll need to develop to compete with top domains in your market. You’ll also find the anchor text competitors are using to build back links

* SEMRush: Looking at the organic and paid search keywords of your competition allows you to gain insight into potentially lucrative keywords. This tool let’s you examine keywords being targeted on the organic and paid side within the same tool.

* Wordtracker: This is my second favorite keyword research tool.

* Excel Spreadsheet: It’s tough to do good keyword research and analysis without the old reliable spreadsheet.

Wrapping it all up…. So there you have it. How to find and evaluate keywords, along with the tools you’ll need to get it done. Any other questions? I’ll be happy to respond in the comments.

Internet Explorer is best at protecting against drive-by downloads

Microsoft's browser thoroughly outclassed all of its competitors in NSS Labs' tests

Internet Explorer is better at defending against drive-by downloads than competitors' browsers and the contest isn't even close, according to a worldwide test of browsers by security research firm NSS Labs.

Internet Explorer scored a 99.2 percent protection score in the firm's most recent test of socially engineered malware distribution, with Google Chrome coming in a distant second with 13.2 percent.

[ The Web browser is your portal to the world -- as well as the conduit that lets in many security threats. InfoWorld's expert contributors show you how to secure your Web browsers in this "Web Browser Security Deep Dive" PDF guide. ]

Trailing behind it were Safari and Firefox tying with 7.6 percent each, and Opera pulling up last with 6.1 percent.

THREAT: Social networking security threats taken too lightly

NSS tried to access URLs known to download malware to computers used by site visitors and kept track of whether browser protections warned or blocked against these sites using in-the-cloud databases of known malicious sites.

The report, "Web Browser Security, Socially Engineered Malware Protection," credits Microsoft's SmartScreen URL and Application Reputation features with landing the big score.

NSS tested Internet Explorer 9, Chrome 12, Opera 11, Firefox 4, and Safari 5 during 14 days, May 27 through June 10.

The test included 1,188 URLs that NSS had verified contained malware, and an average of 86 new ones were added each day.

Chrome's score represents a big improvement over its performance in last year's test when it scored just 3 percent. Firefox lost ground against last year's test when its score was 19 percent.

As soon as NSS discovered new malicious URLs, they were added to the test, then NSS measured how long it took the browsers to recognize them as such, only recording the calculation if the browser actually recognized a URL as malicious. If it never recognized a given malicious site, it wasn't used in the calculation.

Internet Explorer blocked sites on average within .56 hours. Safari was second with 4.9 hours, then Firefox (6.07 hours), Chrome (17.64 hours) and Opera (18.39 hours).

Chrome, Firefox and Safari all use the same data feed of malicious URLs -- Google's Safe Browsing, which explains why their overall protection ratings are similar, the report says. Supporting this notion is that results for the three browsers rose and fell in unison over time.

The testers noted that Opera would detect a malicious site sometimes, but later would miss it. That could be attributed to the fact that in some cases the warning that a site was malicious would pop up after the malware had already downloaded or even downloaded and executed, the report says.

In general, users are four times more likely to be socially engineered into downloading malware than they are to fall victim to a software exploit.

Current Twitter Limits

The current technical limits for accounts are:

* Direct Messages: 250 per day.
* Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
* Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
* Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. You can find detailed page describing following limits and prohibited behavior on the Follow Limits and Best Practices Page. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.
* Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information.

These limits include actions from all devices including web, mobile, phone, API, etc. API requests from all third-party applications are tracked against the hourly API limit. People who use multiple third-party applications with their account will therefore reach the API limit more quickly. For more information on this topic, please see our API Rate Limiting Page.

These limits may be temporarily reduced during periods of heavy site usage. In such cases, we will post an update at the Twitter Status blog.
What happens if I hit a limit?

If you do reach a limit, we'll let you know with an error message telling you which limit you've hit. For limits that are time-based (like the DM Messages, Update, Changes to Account Email, and API Requests Limits), you'll be able to try again after the time has elapsed.

The Update Limit of 1,000 updates per day is further broken down into semi-hourly intervals. If you hit your account update limit, please try again in a few hours after the limit-period has elapsed.
Having Trouble?

Twitter Adds Favourite, Retweet and Activity Tab

Today, we’re rolling out two new features on Twitter.com that help you discover more on Twitter. You can now see when someone favorites or retweets one of your Tweets. You can also learn which Tweets are most interesting and inspiring to the people you follow.

The first new feature offers a simple way to see what's happening on Twitter in relation to you. Just click on the new tab with your @username, and you’ll be able to see which of your Tweets are Favorites, plus the latest Retweets (of your Tweets), Tweets directed to you, and your new Followers.

The other new feature is the Activity tab. It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place. It’s easier than ever to explore Twitter, connect with people, and discover what’s happening around the world.