Online Marketing News Archive

Google continues to dominate the search engine market in the US, and managed to increase its share by another percentage point in June, meaning it now has an almost 70% share of searches.
While Google’s share has been increasing, that of its rivals has decreased, especially when you look at the year on year figures.
According to … Read full article>

The search advertising partnership between rival search engines Google and Yahoo, announced recently, is to be investigated by the US Department of Justice due to concerns about competition.
The two companies account for more than 75% of searches worldwide between them, and US officials are worried that the link up would give them too much control … Read full article>

Yahoo seems to have finally rejected a takeover by Microsoft by signing a joint search and advertising deal with Google.
While the deal doesn’t stop Microsoft coming back with another bid, a $250m termination fee would be incurred if Yahoo is acquired by another company within the next two years, so the prospect of a takeover … Read full article>

Wikia Search, the search engine launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has rolled out some new features this week.
With these changes, if users aren’t satisfied with the results they get for a particular search term, they can edit the results themselves. These edited results can then be viewed by everyone who uses the search engine.
The … Read full article>

Search engines are becoming more and more important for online retailers, with the percentage of traffic from shopper’s search queries rising in 2007, with more finding a site via Google or Yahoo than going direct to an e-commerce site.
According to stats from web measurement firm Hitwise, the top 500 retailers received more traffic from search … Read full article>

Google’s $3.1bn acquisition of online advertising group DoubleClick has finally gone through, having been approved by the European Union.
The deal was first announced in April 2007, but it has now taken almost a year for the merger to pass the scrutiny of the regulatory bodies.
The US Federal Trade Commission approved the deal three months ago, … Read full article>

Google has announced that it will start taking page load times into account when it assesses Quality Score.
Quality score is used by the search engine which influences a particular ad’s position on the Google network, as well as minimum bids for keywords.
Other factors already taken into account are keyword relevance, the historical clickthrough rates of … Read full article>

Yahoo is launching a new programme that will allow website owners to build plug-ins for Yahoo Search that will enhance their listings in the search results pages.
Users of Yahoo Search will then have the option of switching on these enhanced listings, and will see these results when the publisher’s site comes up on a search.
These … Read full article>

January’s search engine market share figures have just been released by comScore, and Google remains the clear market leader in the US.
Overall, 10.5bn searches were conducted on the major search engines in January, an increase of 8.9% compared with December.
Google remains the clear leader, with users conducting 6.1bn searches with the company, while its search … Read full article>

Google has expanded its online video advertising program beyond YouTube, with the AdSense video ads now available in beta across all of the company’s content network sites.
The video version of AdSense allows advertisers to buy text ads which run along the bottom 20% of the screen when videos are playing. This is supposed to be … Read full article>