Net-times: My Perspective

Last week, Search Engine Land posted current results for December’s search market share as released by comScore.  It looks like things are moving in the expected direction with Google continuing to climb and maintain the dominant position while Bing edges up a bit.  Yahoo, Ask and AOL all dipped with AOL hitting a record low point.

However, it’s important to note that mobile data is not included.  I actually read this article while taking a break from a blog post about my fishing website yearly analytics review.  This is going to be a yearly post where I briefly outline performance over the past 12 months relative to previous years.

Bing Organic Search for Mobile
When I returned to my analysis, I decided to look at the mobile traffic associated with organic search for this particular website.  Now, it’s important to note that this is a low traffic, niche website with only about 32,000 visits per year.  However, after looking at the data, it was clear that Google drove almost 100% of the mobile search traffic to this particular website.  In fact, I was only able to register a single mobile visit from Bing.  I immediately went to Bing with my Droid X (great phone, btw) to see if I had difficulty navigating to this website via Bing mobile search.  My queries produced good results for the terms my website usually performs well.

Perplexed, I checked various other higher traffic websites that I have access to analytics.  The result:  none showed much organic search traffic from Bing at all.  This tells me that between Android and iPhone, people are using the native Google search and not bothering using Bing.  Would they use Bing if it was the default?  Is search a commodity when compared between Google and Bing?  Is this less a brand game than one of distribution?

And didn’t Microsoft get into a bit of trouble bundling their browser with Windows?  There are similarities to an Android OS and Google search pre-installed, no?

What are your experiences with Bing organic search traffic?

Kevin

(This post is a little bit of self promotion about Twing.com, the product I currently GM)

So, Google is now allowing users to search across forums outside the Google Groups platform. When we started to build the vision of Twing back in late 2006, one of the questions that arose during the business validation and competitive analysis processes was “If Google entered the market, what would happen to Twing?”. Of course, when you consider an 800 lb. gorilla like Google entering your space, there is always pause.

However, while your business could be greatly damaged by such a situation, there is also opportunity. One of the challenges we faced at Twing was mainstream awareness of “cross forum search”. Yes, it is true that more than 25% of the U.S. internet population uses online discussion forums. However, mainstream awareness about the benefits of this content is limited. Users tend to not understand the differences between different collection types.

In our case the comparison is simply between standard web results and discussion content found in forums. Online forum content is also very different from blogs (in their current mainstream form). We refer to forums as places where many to many discussions take place, or groups speaking amongst themselves. Blogs are usually individuals or entities that post broadcasts to other users. Blog comments can be referred to as discussions of sorts, but they are not the same as forums, in general.

Back to the point. Since awareness about our benefits was always a challenge, we viewed an entry from a major player (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask) as an opportunity to generate awareness. For example, if they implemented functionality that replicated ours, they would drive mainstream users to the product. Those (now converted believers in forum content) are possible users of Twing.

Oh, and there is one other reason it’s not all bad Google is getting into our space. It helps justify our belief that this is a growing opportunity, not something of the past.

Now that you have a little insight into our positive way of thinking at Twing, I need to get back to figuring out how to battle the fully armed cruiser on my tail doing 40 knots! (Thanks for the analogy Scott)

Anyway, since you read all the way through this blog post (thank you), have a look at Twing if you are interested in searching forums and online discussions. We think we have done a pretty good job.

Kevin Shea