First, sorry for the lapses between blog posts. The unfortunate reality is that the blog does take something of a backseat versus servicing clients, business development and doing all of the interesting things that are going on with the De Ward Group right now.
Is it just me, or has Google really stepped up their efforts over the last few weeks and months? They've made many changes to their services, from minor UI tweaks, experimenting with different ad formats and organic listing formats, right up to introducing entirely new products such as FastFlip in the Google Labs.
Granted that Google has always been experimental, but one has to wonder if perhaps they are pushing things a bit harder now to counter the fact that Microsoft's search solution - now known as Bing - has crossed 10% market share for the first time in as far back as anyone cares to remember. These Nielsen ratings only came out the other day, but it was obvious that Bing had been gaining some traction. And knowing that Microsoft may very well soon accrue a on of traffic from Yahoo - assuming the deal gets regulatory approval - can only be increasing the pressure on Google.
These are very interesting times for us here in the world of search engines. I very nearly fully exited the SEM industry back in 2003 when sold the SEOChat.com company. Even though I did make a conscious decision to become a less public figure, I'm very glad that I chose to stay within the industry. We've got one hell of a roller coaster ride ahead of us in the coming 2 years, and I would hate to miss it.
Bing still have a long way to go. But as much as I love Google, I have to hope that Bing can step up to the challenge and give Google a run for their money, because competition is good for you, me and everybody.
Rick DeJarnette posted on the Bing blog on Friday that we should expect to see an increasing number of visits from msnbot/2.0b, a second (or third?) generation of the crawler used to power Bing.
This really isn't all that helpful to us Webmasters. In all reality, if they didn't tell us that they were testing a new crawler and didn't change the UA string (1.1. to 2.0b), we probably wouldn't have ever noticed.
Why do they still call is msnbot though? Shouldn't it be BingBot? I wonder if Microsoft has an identity crisis.
Danny Sullivan for Search Engine Land runs though some search engine usage numbers, looking at how traffic is going for Bing in these early stages.
It's tough looking at these early numbers because it's very difficult to determine any potential long .term changes when you look a short-term numbers. comScore sees and increase in usage for Bing, but that doesn't seem to be reflected by compete.com's numbers. Danny does a great job of going through the numbers are explaining what's really being measured.
Getting people to change their habits is hard, and I'm still not sure how I feel about Google... What do you think? Is it great or not? No doubt some people will want to use it more than Google just out of principle. Why? Because It's Not Google!
Oh, another Microsoft thing that I thought was funny today was that they are insulting some browsers as part of an Australia promotion called "Ten Grand Is Buried Here". See tarnished Chrome, boring Safari and old Firefox.