2009 brought with it a flurry of activity to the search landscape.  With the release of Google Caffeine, the launch of Bing, the announcement of a Bing/Yahoo! merger, and the ubiquitous nature of Twitter, search changed tremendously in 2009.  As for 2010, it should prove to be when the integration of multiple content sources will finally come together for a greater search experience.  Below are the top trends to be aware of in 2010.

Google Caffeine
Google wants to show more content in a shorter amount of time.  For site owners, this means that sites must load faster, providing the content sooner.  This will have implications on the creative elements delivered on a page.  Site owners will need to consider the creative elements and how this affects the site’s load time while still capturing the end user.

Live Search
Google’s Live Search is real-time news, Tweets, blog posts, and status updates fed through the search engines.  Live Search is supposed to create a “buzz” around search topics, thus turning search results into instantaneous news outlets.  This will put more emphasis on the collaboration between search and social.
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Google, Yahoo!, and Bing each have “deeper links”, which are also known as “sitelinks” or “anchor links”, appearing within their respective search engine results. Deeper links appear under the main search result and show popular pages or top level navigation elements. The goal of the deeper links is to provide the end user with quicker search results.

Google has been using these deeper links, which they call sitelinks, for some time. The format of the sitelinks in the past has been anchor text or navigation driven. More recent results, however, have shown Google is serving content around their deeper links versus the anchor text. The additional content will help lead users to a better search decision.

Bing’s deeper links are similar to Google’s but appear to be more related to top level navigational elements. Once again, the goal is helping users find the information they need quickly. Yahoo! serves up almost identical deeper links as Bing. (more…)

Google announced in August they were releasing a new version of their industry-leading search engine. The new release is called “Caffeine”, and it is Google’s biggest infrastructure change since the “Big Daddy” version released in 2005-2006.

Google has three areas they are concentrating on with the release of Caffeine: speed, relevancy, and accuracy. With these changes, the volume of search results displayed will increase dramatically. The ultimate goal is delivering a search engine’s results quicker and meeting the needs of the end search user better.

Unlike Bing, which changed the search engine user interface as well as its own infrastructure, the user interface will not change with the new Google release. In fact, most end users will not see a significant change in the way they receive search results, other than being provided more results in a shorter amount of time.
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It appears that the search and online advertising merger between MSN/Bing and Yahoo will finally happen. According to a report from All Things Digital, the announcement could come within the next couple of weeks.

MSN initially tried to acquire Yahoo in February 2008, but talks faded. At the time, Yahoo was taking search and advertising dollars from MSN. MSN announced in November that they would not seek a merger with Yahoo but they were still open to an online search collaboration.

Since that time, MSN has launched Bing – the new “decision engine” that replaced Live – which went live in the beginning of June. MSN has an approximately $80 million ad budget behind the launch of the Bing, and it appears to be providing some initial dividends.

According to comScore, Microsoft increased its search engine share by 0.4% in the month of June to increase their total share of search engine to 8.4%. Google maintains a 65% search engine share while Yahoo was second at 19.6%. Google and Yahoo both saw search engine traffic drop 2% and 4% respectively. MSN search results, however, increased 3%.

A merger between MSN/Bing and Yahoo, therefore, would give the joint venture 28% of the total search engine market share – approximately a third of Google search. The merger would also help improve the advertising efficiencies between the two. MSN demographics skew toward the older audience segment, while Yahoo skews toward the younger audience segment. As an advertising medium, that could help the pairing capitalize on being able to provide both demographics to advertisers.

As the merger looks closer and closer to becoming final, our only question is what will they call the new venture – Bingo?

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has been live for several weeks and has already made an impact among the search engine community. comScore reported in May that Microsoft had a 8.2% share of search engine volume. Bing’s share of search during the week of June 8-12, however, rose to 12.1%—an increase of 3.9%.

The increase in Bing’s share of search has prompted many in the search engine optimization industry to take a hard look at Bing and how it delivers its search results. In particular, researchers have looked at the primary differences between Bing and Google.

Domain age, for example, is a factor that appears over and over in the research as a main determinate for search in Bing. Bing gives more weight to sites that have a domain that has been registered a longer period of time. (more…)