Bing’s $4.47 Investment in Google AdWords

As you may have heard, our very good friends at Microsoft are spending $100 million to promote Bing.com, a new search engine.

The search engine is designed not to much to “compete with Google,” Microsoft officials swear, but to build a business around a search experience that enables consumer decisions in travel, shopping, health and local stuff.

Yeah, whatever.

In any case, it turns out that some of that $100 million promotional spend by Microsoft is going directly to… Brother Google.

Do a Google Search on “search engine.” Now, take a look at the right-hand column!

See the third item down?

Search Engine

Get More Info With Less Digging. A
Decision Engine Makes Search Easy!
www.Bing.com

Yes, it’s true. Microsoft’s advertising department has determined that the way to build traffic to Bing.com is to advertise on Google. Hey, fish where the fish are, as they say.

Using Google’s handy AdWords Keyword tool, I was able to determine that Microsoft’s “cost per click” for the phrase “search engine” is $4.47.

Which is to say, any time someone does a Google search using the phrase “search engine” and clicks on the Bing ad, our friends in Redmond pay our friends in Mountain View enough to cover a Google mid-level project manager’s Venti Mocha Cappuccino.  

[I will leave it to your conscience to determine what you want to do with this piece of information. The part about how Microsoft has to pay Google $4.47 every time some web surfer clicks into Bing. com, I mean. That piece of information. Do what you want with it.]

Meantime, I did click on that Bing.com Google ad, purely in the name of research. It took me directly to a Bing search engine results page for the same search.

Here’s what I saw at the Bing results for the “search engine” search.

Well, the “organic” search result at the top is a video all about. . .Bing, a better way to search! Well, what are the chances?

Meantime, you’ll notice that in the right hand sidebar, there is no ad from our very good friends at Google.

They are probably at the Starbucks on 580 N Rengstorff Ave. in Mountain View, enjoying that Venti Mocha Cappuccino.

I do not see sweat on their brows.

SEO, Twitter and the Road to Hell

Why  didn’t I see this one coming?

The moment Twitter content became searchable, the seeds of its ruination were planted, watered and topped with Miracle Gro.

This is due to the unbending truth of the First Law of CyberDynamics: That which is searchable will be optimized for said search.

Regrettable corollary 1: Optimized content becomes visible without regard to its quality.

Regrettable corollary 2: Unworthy content becomes the lowest-hanging fruit in the InfoOrchard, unwittingly gobbled up by hundreds of millions of undiscriminating users daily.

[Note: Ungainly botanical metaphor ends here.]

Which is to say: Add to the current list of lifeforce-draining Twitter phenomena–childish follower-hoarding, strategic lurkery, tactical “messaging” and [this is now literal] prostitution–the Tweet designed to show up high on Google [and presumably other Twitter search tool] search results.

I learned this recently after I read an article on Twitter SEO on the website Mashable. I Tweeted thusly:

And so it has come to this: Writing Tweets for SEO. Mommy, make it stop. http://bit.ly/adRQO4:41 PM Jun 26th from TweetDeck

Within moments my e-mail box showed that two SEO profiles were now following me on Twitter.

Not because I had said anything insightful about the art of search engine optimization, mind you, but just because I’d used the word. The e-mails arrived too fast for them to reflect human cognition.

And so I Tweeted again:

Hoot! My last Tweet included the term “SEO” and I was immediately autofollowed by two SEO trolls. SEO SEO SEO Come on, guys, you wanna *go*?4:55 PM Jun 26th from TweetDeck

And of course my e-mail box was quickly beetling with several new messages telling me that other SEO trolls had emerged from their funkholes to follow me.

It should come as no surprise that SEOers are sniffing for keywords in Tweets. As Twitter becomes a firmly established marketing tool, more companies are monitoring what’s being said there about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public.

Disclosure: I know this because, among my many professional services is…helping people use Twitter to monitor what’s being said about their products, people and clients. And participating so their wares and ideas will reach the public. Ahem.

It is a common early adopter vanity to declare that what was once pure and authentic has been wrecked by the know-nothing vulgarian masses and their money-grubbing exploiters.

I’ve always tried resisted this facile snobbery. I remember the knuckleheads who whined that the Mosaic browser ruined everything because it made the Internet accessible to people who hadn’t paid their dues with ftp, Gopher and a soldering iron.

When I began writing this entry about 40 minutes ago, I sent out this Tweet:

I need cheap dietary supplements, online gambling and low-cost life insurance [Note: This Tweet is autofollow-bait to expose perpetrators]38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

As I am about to hit “Publish,” I have received no e-mails from autofollowers who’ve lapped up that chum.

A relief? For me, yes. Or a sense of temporary reprieve from the inevitable.

For others: An opportunity.

Have at it, folks.

============

update: 8:33 p.m., first dietary supplements autofollow reports for duty.

Bing.com on D-Day: A Difficult Landing

Bing, the new search engine–er, “decision engine”–from our very good friends in Redmond, Washington, performed well on the 65th anniversary on D-Day. Alas, the landing was not without casualties.

Every day Bing surrounds it search box with a different gorgeous photo that fills the screen. These are not seen-’em stock photos. I visit Bing daily now just to see them.

Each photo embeds invisible interactive cliclets in various spots. Mouse over them and they Flash bits of information; click and you’ll be led to a curated search page that shows Bing in action.

On D-Day, the photo was an aerial shot of the D-Day beaches at Normandy as they appear today.

I’m a D-Day geek but was still struck by the power and beauty of the image.

I found and clicked on the prompt “It’s hard to look at this beautiful beach today and imagine the violence of the D-Day invasion: See where it all happened >>“.

Here’s what I saw.

Great interactive map, based of course on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform. The blue markers point to results at left.

But these search results are a mad hash of content, an inexplicable mix of items related to D-Day history, vacation rentals in Normandy, and a few things that my merdre-y college French couldn’t penetrate. But it looks like one of them was a fund raising thing where 550 of an 850-euro goal had been pledged for something or other.

And thus the strength and weakness of Bing: An eclectic, visually appealing search engine of unique design and potential utility–but insistent on making commercial offers a big part of its value proposition, almost without regard to the nature of the search.

It feels like if I don’t want to buy something, or contribute something, or make a travel plan, that Bing isn’t for me. Which, often, it therefore will not be. Except to visit those gorgeous daily photos.

So: For Bing, a valiant landing on a perilous beach. The real fight is ahead.

Google Blog Search, Re-Booted but Good

Not long after I proclaim a cool new tool to search for blog content–Nielsen’s BlogPulse–Google comes along and turbocharges its blog search. It’s a big improvement in a space Google has not, so far, been dominant.

For those of us who continue to rail quixotically against Mountain View hegemony, the upgrade is not good news.

Here’s a search I did using BlogPulse for the Honda Fit, a bitchin’ hot, fuel-efficient, high-style economy car. [If that sounds like an uncharacteristic rave, I should reveal I just happened to have purchased one--revealing myself as either the last confident consumer in America or a damn fool.]

BlogPulse

BlogPulse’s output: 8,600 results, with the top one gibberish, the next one off-point, the next two non-English. Argh.

Google Blog Search

Brother Google’s output: 70,306 results, much better than BlogPulse’s. Note the top box. The first two listings are for an excellent Fit blog and a Fit forum. [While there's non-English stuff in that top box, it's in Japanese, which is at least logical and potentially useful.] And note how the individual results are more on-point–more relevant–than BlogPulse’s.

Once again, it appears Brother Google’s maddeningly dominating knack for the algorithm pays off.

To be fair, BlogPulse offers analytical tools well beyond the good Brother’s range.

As a product of Nielsen, the blog search function is just part of a suite of products designed to help people monitor all kinds of consumer-generated content on the social web. If you’re serious about monitoring the social web on behalf of your company or a particular topic or niche, BlogPulse is far more powerful.

For instance, check out this graphic that illustrates levels of blog activity about the Fit.

Still, if you’re a regular old web user looking for chatter about the Honda Fit. . .Google scores again.

I hate it when that happens.

A New View for Viewzi

My favorite “alternative” search engine, Viewzi, has debuted a new feature that merits another visit.

By my tastes, Viewzi is the best tool on the market to combine search and data visualization–two of the most important functionalities on the web. When you conduct a search using Viewzi, you can choose among 18 [!] different ways to view your search, from a visual “album gallery” of sites to the surprising, and surprisingly functional, Google Timeline view, shows results lined up in the order Brother Google first discovered them.

Viewzi tends to be more impressive as a technology platform, a sort of innovation farm for dataviz geeks.   But its new view, Power Grid, takes an important step toward usability, if not quite practicality. It lets you choose either to “see” or “read” results, and includes a handy bookmarking feature. Read more

Coinage: Rohit Bhargava and “Egocommunication”

Web 2.0racle Rohit Bhargava, author of the Influential Marketing blog and SVP at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, has visited upon us a brilliant coinage: egocommunication.

Here’s how he describes it:

Egommunication is a form of communication where you can share a message or piece of content with someone based on their own consistent habit of checking mentions of themselves and their content online … in other words, relying on their ego as a channel for your message to get through. It is a tacit form of communication. In effect, you take advantage of the fact that just about everyone in social media is self-googling on a frequent basis.

So I can communicate with anyone who is socially aware enough to Google their name often [or, more likely, have a Google Alert set in their own name] simply by mentioning them.

This is the phenomenon I wrote about not long ago in an entry describing how Dave Garr, founder of a site called Usertesting.com, discovered a negative comment I’d made about his site on Twitter. I had no name to describe the phenomenon I was then writing about [or doing]. I did a shout-out to Garr in the post and, sure enough, he saw it and sent a greeting back in a comment.

Fascinating stuff.

So: Hi again, Dave! Hi again, Rohit!

Rohit was moderator of a panel I was on at the recent Digital Media Conference, hosted by Ned Sherman of Potomac TechWire.  [Hi Ned! Look forward to working together again!]

And Rohit will also speak at a coming conference–a huge one called InterAct08, at which an array of digital high-flyers [Google's Marissa Mayer, 2.0 bodhisattva Ted Leonsis, among others] will appear in D.C. The CEO of InterAct08 is Stephen Mealy, whose InterAct08 blog describes the event in greater detail.

[Hi Stephen! Thanks for the note. I'll be in touch soon.]

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