Copyright © 2010 I-COM International 2010-07-30T07:38:47+0100 2010-07-30T07:38:47+0100 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net I-COM International I-COM International en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/yahoo-microsoft-merger-how-does-it-affect-ppc-223/ It has been widely reported in the industry news over the last few days that Yahoo and Microsoft have announced a merger. For those of you who have miraculously escaped this news, the basis is that Yahoo will be adopting Microsoft's Bing search engine technology and the PPC marketing will be powered by Microsoft's Bing AdCenter platform. Microsoft has issued an official press release should you want to read more information. But how will this affect your PPC strategy?The main obvious impact for PPC campaigns will be the fact that advertisers will soon have two decent sized platforms from which to advertise. Until now, Google Adwords has always been the major player, holding the majority share of the market, and Yahoo and Microsoft have only had minimal shares individually.This inevitably in the past has caused advertisers to allocate their main focus and budgets to Google, and either dismiss the other search engines entirely or only allocate comparably smaller budgets due to their lower market share and opportunity to generate conversions.The merger of Yahoo and Bing will allow PPC advertisers to test a larger, combined audience of the two search engines in the hope that this will provide a better chance of conversion due to a higher potential user base.  I am keen to test whether conversion rates will actually improve because it will very according to each client and their target audience.The change is expected to take place in early 2010 and I am excited to see how this is going to make an impact on search. According to Comscore (June 2009) Google still retains the major market share of 65% and following the merger the combined market share for Bing is expected to be 28%. It's clear that there is still a long way to go before Bing can really make a dent in Google's reign of the search industry. Search Engine Marketing 2009-08-03 10:34:28 http://www.i-com.net/blog/yahoo-microsoft-merger-how-does-it-affect-ppc-223/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/6-degrees-of-celebrity-bing-xrank-and-related-searches-205/ We've been playing with xRank today, a tool from Bing that allows you to search for celebrities and brings up related results such as biographies, videos, images, shopping, popularity trends and any other range of available information. I was impressed by its ability to actually map relationships between seemingly unrelated things. For searches for minor celebrities, the results are rather intriguing as xRank seems to be able to map some rather insightful connections. For example, a search for the lead singer of American indie-folksters The Decemberists brought up the following: View in a new window Colin Meloy isn't famous enough to have results (neither is Nick Cave, for that matter, so maybe they're working out the kinks still), but xRank is clever enough to bring up an list of related people that don't necessarily seem that connected at the outset: Carson Ellis - an artist who has designed all of the sleeves for The Decemberists' music, is also Meloy's girlfriend Kevin Canty - an author who teaches at the University of Montana, the state where Meloy grew up K Ross Toole - a American historian specialising in local Montana history Elliot Smith - a singer/musician with a similar fanbase to The Decemberists Slim Moon - the founder of Kill Rock Stars, the indie label that first signed The Decemberists While it might be easy enough to connect Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy or Slim Moon and Colin Meloy through online biographies, neither of these people are particularly considered celebrities. Yet somehow xRank has drawn a strong enough connection and identified them as important enough to list in related searches with the idea that people searching for Colin Meloy might also be interested in those results. Kevin Canty and K Ross Toole are more interesting results probably included because of the Montana connection but if xRank has been clever enough to understand through analysis of documents mentioning Colin Meloy that his songwriting gets connected to storytelling and historical references (if you count songs about Victorian chimney sweeps and sailors as historical references) and that he's written a book, then it's an even cleverer comparison. A search for Kim Deal, indie music goddess, and bassist for The Pixies, brings up the following: View in another window Kristin Hersh - lead singer of Providence, RI, band Throwing Muses and sister to Tanya Donnelly, an original member of Deal's band The Breeders. Throwing Muses not only recently played at the Deal-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival,  and is on the same record label as Deal. Joey Santiago - Lead guitarist in The Pixies Juliana Hatfield - an indie music cult figure from around the same time that The Pixies first emerged, part of the same local Boston music scene Ivo Watts Russell - Founder of 4AD, Deal's record label for The Pixies, The Breeders and The Amps Clearly, these results are related, often quite closely, but in less obvious ways than a search for "Kim Deal" and a search for "Kim Deal photos" might be related or even less obvious than a search for "iPod" and "Macbook" might be related. When you do a search for Kurt Cobain, however, you get: View in a new window While a couple of results clearly relate to his time in Nirvana, the theme is actually information and pictures of his death, which leads to the question of - are these related searches based around what people who search for the person also search for? Is a person who searches for Kurt Cobain these days more likely to be looking for information surrounding his death and the various conspiracy theories than for his music? And is somebody searching for "Colin Meloy" subsequently likely to also search for "K Ross Toole" and "Bruce Springsteen" rather than "Decemberists tickets" or "Decemberists album"? By far my favourite result out of everything we looked at though has to be the result for "Oasis": View in a new window Apparently xRank can't actually distinguish between Oasis the band and Oasis the shop - or they think  that Oasis fans tend to shop at Warehouse, River Island and Topshop. Either way, these results suggest something fairly advanced at work to either gauge searcher intent or draw semantic comparisons (or both) and it will certainly be worth watching as Bing develops to see how this reflects in the overall search results. Internet 2009-06-17 15:55:00 http://www.i-com.net/blog/6-degrees-of-celebrity-bing-xrank-and-related-searches-205/