Highlights brought to you by Search Lately @SMGSearchUK this week include: Bing + Facebook = Better Social Search? Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance Starts in UK and France
Google Provides Real-Time Stock Prices
Microsoft Advertising adCenter: Location Targeting Improvements Browse last week’s Search Lately for more details and initial reaction from industry experts on recent hot topics.
Bing & Facebook = Better Social Search – 23rd Feb 2012 Just weeks ago Google launched the highly controversial Search plus Your World, Bing have this week announced a similar service in collaboration with Facebook. The new feature launched in Beta this week called Linked Pages, will require users to login to their Facebook accounts and grant Bing permission to enable this service.
Essentially this allows the user to link their Facebook profile to specific links on the internet, which can be the user’s personal Twitter or LinkedIn page or a favourite blog that the user visits. If Facebook friends are logged into Bing, which can now be done using their Facebook ID, the service will enable
friends to see your linked pages ahead of other pages associated with your name online. This update provides users with a more personalised search in a slightly different way to the Google plus Your World approach. For the general user there may be many benefits including the ability to customise your own presence within a search listing only visible to your friends. It will be interesting to see how Bing or Facebook market this release and with the extensive depth of active users on Facebook there could be great potential for brands. While Facebook is much larger than Google Plus currently, Bing is considerably smaller than Google. Could this help them to bridge that gap and pull the vast numbers on Facebook over to Bing? Could peer pressure play a part in helping Bing increase market share? Brands could use this to provide user content and tailored search pages for Facebook friends, whether this is direct marketing or associated news articles for the Brand. If this extends to Brand pages on Facebook then it will potentially allow brands to customise and tailor their own brand Bing search results. Could this also push brands to focus more on social campaigns to build even greater brand loyalty through social search? – Kevin Ting More details: searchengineland.com/bing-linked-pages-better-people-search-results112501 onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/hh706156.aspx seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/2017567693_bing_and_faceb ook_team_up_for_linked_pages_social.html
Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance Starts in UK and France – 22nd Feb 2012 Microsoft and Yahoo! have completed the transition of organic searches globally, which means that any user performing a search on Yahoo! from a PC or a mobile is provided with Bing-powered results. The transition of Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts to Microsoft Advertising adCenter is starting today, on the 22nd of February. The paid search transition is expected to complete before the end of April for the UK, France and Ireland. – Blair Liu More details: community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2012/02/22/
microsoft-and-yahoo-search-alliance-the-migration-starts-today-in-uk-andfrance.aspx
Google Provides Real-Time Stock Prices – 22nd Feb 2012 In order to improve its finance service Google has signed a deal with the London Stock Exchange to display real-time share prices. It is the first free service to do so without a 15 minute time delay. The news signifies yet another area in which Google has surpassed its competitors as Yahoo! Finance was at one point what set Yahoo! apart. However, this is the first deal of its kind to happen with the LSE and it is possible that Google’s competitors will be able to enter in to a similar agreement. A source from Thomson Reuters points out that the information is not accurate enough to be of use to traders as it displays only the last price traded on a share, rather than tradable prices which is provided by their own paid for service. Does this news symbolise yet another nail in Yahoos coffin? Or will they be able to strike a similar lucrative deal with the LSE? – Hannah Struve More details: www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google-logs-into-live-shareprices-with-the-lse-7280790.html
Microsoft Advertising adCenter: Location Targeting Improvements – 20th Feb 2012 In Microsoft Advertising adCenter, the “market” (distribution channel) is being removed as a targeting option and replaced by the industry standard “language” and “target location” as individual targeting inputs. This change will make the adCenter targeting function much like the one featured in Google Adwords. With this change, you can receive more relevant volume from your target location without additional work, you will also be able to target users that are physically located in your target location areas, and/or have intent to do business in your target location areas. Location options include all countries that speak the selected language, bundles of certain countries, a single country, a single state or territory, or a single city. If you’re in the US, UK or France, you will start seeing the feature soon; roll out has already started and will continue for a few months until complete. Your existing campaigns will automatically be migrated to use the new settings for each campaign and ad group, so be sure to confirm that the targeting is how you want it.
– Blair Liu More details: community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2012/02/20/l ocation-targeting-changes-coming-soon-to-microsoft-advertisingadcenter.aspx searchenginewatch.com/article/2145297/Google-Users-Dislike-PersonalizedSearch-Results-Survey