Bing announced today it is changing the search game. As discussed in my best selling book Socialnomics (2009) the ultimate winner between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple may hing on which company figures out social search.

Social Search: The New Frontier

Microsoft and Bing are going all in on social search and why not? Google has already defeated them on the traditional search front. As an investor in Facebook, Microsoft can do what Google cannot, integrate deeply with Facebook. I’ve been harsh on Facebook in their inability or even lack of desire to improve their search functionality. Facebook could own this new market of social search, but perhaps, behind closed doors they have been working with Microsoft to partner on developing the social search market. Social Search will eventually replace search as we know it. Will it also cause the replacement of Google?

The New Bing

“The New Bing”, includes a sidebar to better understand what your friends like and don’t like. View the video below or on www.bing.com/explore/new to see how this works.

Social Search

If you’d like to be a beta user of “The New Bing” then you need to go to http://www.bing.com/new and submit your e-mail and they will send you an invitation when it is ready in the coming days.

The new experience will consist of three parts:

The New Bing is transforming search through integration with industry leading companies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora to bring in the best information from across the web and social networks, and present it in a way that makes sense. The new Bing will be comprised of three distinct columns:

· Core Web Results: Relevant, Comprehensive, Trustworthy

Bing will continue to deliver relevant, comprehensive and trustworthy results. Core web results on Bing make it easy to focus on the links you need to get things done, without the clutter of social updates.

Bing hopes to change the search game with it's New Bing which will focus on Social Search.

· Snapshot: Get It Done Faster

Bing is helping you take action and complete tasks faster with the new snapshot pane. Located between the web results on the left and the new sidebar on the right, snapshot brings relevant information and services to your search, including maps, restaurant reservations and reviews. Through partnerships with industry leading companies such as Yelp, Open Table and Fansnap, Bing is helping you do more and get things done faster.

· Sidebar: Social Search Done Right

Bing believes that connecting you with people who can help you with your task is a natural step in the evolution of search – one that simplifies actions you take today like asking friends for recommendations – while unlocking useful knowledge from your social networks. With sidebar, Bing is bringing together the best of the web and letting you share, discover and interact with friends like you do in real life.

o Ask Friends: As you search, you can post questions to get help from your Facebook friends. You can also “tag” friends Bing suggests might know more about the topic.

o Friends Who Might Know: Bing suggests friends on Facebook who might know about the topic so you can go quickly from searching to doing. Suggestions are based on what they “like”, their Facebook profile information, or photos they have shared, allowing you to easily ask them about relevant experiences and opinions.

o People Who Know: The new Bing also identifies top experts and enthusiasts from leading networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn Google Plus and Blogger, so you can do more.

o Activity Feed: In the sidebar activity feed, you can see real-time posts and queries, answer friends’ questions and “like” interesting posts. Since these activities show up in both Bing (activity feed) and Facebook, you can comment on them from either place.

o Always present, never intrusive: The sidebar, located on the right, will appear as part of ever query, allowing searchers to decide when/how to interact with it.

In the coming days we will beginning rolling out the new experience in the United States. To be among the first to preview the new feature, visit http://www.bing.com/new.

Social Search: Bing's new social search (New Bing) is its most innovative endeavor since it's launch 3 years ago

Twitter Founder Biz Stone at Aspen Ideas Festival announced that Twitter now has over 800 million search queries per day.

Twitter's monthly searches now surpass Yahoo and Bing combined

This is up 33% from April, where at Twitter’s Chirp conference Stone said Twitter was serving 600 million search queries per day. This roughly equates to 24 billion searches per month which is more than Bing (4.1) and Yahoo (9.4) combined.

We have indicated all along that Twitter & Facebook would be bigger search competition for Google than Yahoo and Bing. The fact that this is coming to fruition so soon is astounding. Social search and social commerce are becoming reality and it’s a great thing to see. Keep in mind we haven’t even mention YouTube and its social search activity.

Niall over at SimplyZesty asked Alastair McDermott of WebDoctor and I to write-up some thoughts on SEO versus Social Media in 2010.   Here’s the take I supplied:

There will be a blending of search and social. We are already seeing this with Twitter being incorporated into the Google organic results. Consumers we will be privy to a) sponsored listings b) organic listings c) social graph listings. During a purchase decision we will utilize all three of these data points – however I would strongly argue that item c – what our friends and peers think – will be “weighted” the most. We are seeing “word of mouth” transforming into “world of mouth.”

If I have my first baby and need to purchase a child seat for the car and I can see via social/search tools that 30 of my friends have purchased a child seat in the past 18 months. And, of those 30, 23 have purchased the exact same model and all have had a great experience, well then I’m going to be fairly confident in that purchase decision and I may not even look at the sponsored or organic listings.

SEO is still a vital part of any product/companies health (especially in the here and now), but as we look down the road, the simple fact is that I trust more what my friends and peers think than an algorithm. So good companies are starting to listen to what is being said in the “social sphere” and adjusting their products/services accordingly.

The full article at SimpleZesty is here:  “The Looming Battle Between SEO and Search”

A big thanks to Niall for reaching out to me as this stuff is fun!

Or why wouldn’t I search on Facebook to figure out what my friends purchased and their ratings of the products?  Yes, Facebook and Twitter are happy to see Google have to turn their attention to the resurgent Microsoft.

I thought the below post from my Search Engine Watch column from 1.5 years ago when Microsoft and Yahoo first started dating would be of interest to some:

March 6, 2008 SEW Article:  Has Yahoo Lost It’s Yodel?

It seems like only yesterday that Yahoo was the darling of the Web.

The Yahoo Way or the Highway?

The irony of this proposed relationship is palpable. In the early years, Yahoo cautiously and adroitly avoided confrontation with Microsoft. But one thing was clear in Sunnyvale: there was a Yahoo way of doing things, and often that way was the exact opposite of how Microsoft conducted business.

That is why this particular partnership is peculiar. It would be difficult to watch an iconoclastic brand like Yahoo slowly dissolve into nothing — just like many of us lamented the Cingular brand being absorbed by AT&T. Losing such a spirited brand as Yahoo would be a sad day.

We often joked when I was at Yahoo (less than 2,000 employees at the time) that you could slap the Yahoo logo on an old shoe and people would clamor for it. Yes, the brand was that powerful (credit Karen Edwards, John Costello, Murray Gaylord, et al.).

Have we heard the last of Yahooooooo!? Funny enough, a few years back, we all recall when Yahoo accidentally let lapse the royalty contract for this famous Yahoo yodel sound bite. What originally cost them $30 cost them millions in royalty fees to renew. At stake now is much more than dollars. At stake is one of the “brand souls” of the original Internet boom. Is it worth it?

Vulcan Mind Meld

The task of melding the culture of 14,000 Yahoo employees and 80,000 Microsoft employees would be daunting. It could take at least one to two years to properly get things aligned. And, while resources and energy are being spent on merging rather than innovating, Google will neither have the stiff competition nor incentive to evolve search results. As I pointed out in part two of my column, “Why Search Is Still Prehistoric,” Google sorely needs innovation. Is MSN buying Yahoo analogous to the second- and third-place runners in a sprint tying their legs together in a hope to catch the leader?

Instead, Google can focus more attention on other things, like its mobile strategy, which is becoming exceedingly important. Many non-U.S. citizens only access the Internet via their mobile device. They’ll be the most likely to connect with a Google Android.

The U.S., once a laggard in this realm, is rapidly catching up. Case in point: I’m typing this on my mobile device in the Toronto airport.

Google Morphs into Microsoft

It’s astounding to think Google has almost morphed into the next Microsoft. How else could one explain Facebook and Yahoo aligning with Microsoft? It’s a classic NIMBY strategy to keep Google at bay. Google is a much better fit for both Yahoo and Facebook culturally and demographically (Mountain View is in the back yard of Palo Alto and Sunnyvale).

Speaking of Facebook, wouldn’t Microsoft be better served to focus its efforts on cultivating this relatively new relationship? Even though Facebook has only 400 employees, they add 250,000 new users each day. That’s an astounding growth rate considering that they already have 64 million users. Of those 64 million, 50 percent visit Facebook every day.

Assuming Facebook is the next big thing, why wouldn’t Microsoft leap ahead with them rather than play catch-up with Yahoo? Or should they purchase a smaller player like Bebo? In South America, they didn’t invest in building landlines where they hadn’t previously been laid; rather, they went straight to building cellular towers. Hence, countries that were lagging behind suddenly jumped to the technological forefront. (It doesn’t always pay to be the first mover).

The Next Frontier

The same argument could be made here. Does it make sense for Microsoft to build up an arsenal with weapons that would potentially be less relevant (e-mail, portals, search, etc.) if the next battleground is social networking, mobility, and beyond?

One thing Yahoo and Microsoft could do in the short term is leverage Internet Explorer’s virtual ubiquity (90 percent browser penetration). Federal regulators and the EU willing, they could combine their impressive marketing power to inform the general Internet population there’s no need to go to a search engine to perform searches.

Instead users could type in their search query directly into the IE browser’s URL address field. (I realize toolbars perform this function, but many of the “Internet unenlightened” — think mom and dad — are unaware toolbars even exist.)

MSN/Y! would take you directly to the most relevant page with a list of other search results below (in case the page they took you to wasn’t relevant). This would save the users two steps:

1. Typing in www.google.com
2. Clicking on one of the results.

Of course this assumes MSN/Y! search results are fairly relevant. That’s the $40 billion dollar question isn’t it?

Image searches for Kesha Nichols skyrocket after NBA star Richard Jefferson left her at the alter

may be the best for her career.  Nichols is a former New Jersey Nets dancer who until this week lived in obscurity.  Searches for “Richard Jefferson Wedding” surged 5,867% after Jefferson failed to tell many not to show up at the New York Mandarin Oriental.  Jefferson had broken up with fiancee and called off the wedding (estimated cost $2 million) a few days before.

Not all was lost for those that showed up – Jefferson had given a friend his black Amex card and told him to show everyone a good time.  With all the NBA players on Twitter couldn’t he have at least tweeted that the wedding was off?

We have seen similar things happen when iPhone applications get banned – the negative news causes a surge in purchases.  Some speculate smart marketers of applications should go out of there way to get banned by Apple.  Getting dumped at the alter is not fun, but on the upside it does cause your popularity to rise and it just may be possible to turn a negative into a positive.

Organic clicks are 75% of all search clicks

There have been several search studies that have indicated 70% of all clicks in search occur within organic listings.  One of the more notable is a 2004 iProspect study.  Fortunate to have a vast amount of various company data available to me, I wanted to dig into whether this was really true – since I spout this number out of my mouth all the time! 

In my wanderings I came across a 2009 study from Penn State University performed by researchers  Bernard Jansen and Amanda Spink: “Investigating click through behavior with integrated sponsored and nonsponsored results”  The study of more than 7  million search logs concluded that only 15% of the clicks were paid listings.  The study also indicated that 80% of the queries were informational in nature, 10% transactional and 10% navigational.  Digging into the data I had available across various companies.  I looked at brand terms that were ranking first organically and also first in the paid sponsorship listings.  The table to the left shows a fair sampling of what occurred. 

You see in the table when the brand term was ranked #1 in both sponsored and organic listings that roughly 75% of the clicks were organic .  75% falls between the general notion of 70% and the PSU study of 85%.  I then looked at several non-brand terms that were in the top position both organically and sponsored.  Here I saw that roughly 60% of the clicks were organic.  Somewhat in line with rational thinking since the user of a brand knows specifically where they want to go, whereas a general search they are trying to determine who can meet their needs and the paid copy may be slightly more call to action oriented than the organic listing.  I also looked at some generic terms that fell below the #1 ranking organically, but was #1 in the sponsored.  Here roughly only 25% of the clicks came from organic.  These positions were generally between 3-10.  Hence it really highlighted another known maxim – that organically it is imperative that you rank in the top positions.  My conclusions is that we should all be fairly safe indicating that in general organic search results are roughly 60-75% of all clicks.

The PSU study concluded that the difference between the top postitions and bottom positions (position 1 and position 10) organically is 20-30%.  I would argue that the delta is in fact MUCHgreater than 20-30% from position 1 and 10.  I base this on on my recent findings as well as when I worked at Yahoo, we generally saw a snowball effect where it dropped 10% in click-thru-rate for every position you dropped - it is quite a slippery slope.  This Inhouse Adventures Study showed the top organic spot would get 57% of the clicks where as the 10th position would only garner 2%.  Other interesting items I came across are that women are more likely than men to trust and click on sponsored listings (43% vs. 34% respectively Source: 2004 iProspect Study).  Also that even if you don’t get a click, if you are in the top half of the page that your brand shows a lift in brand awareness of roughly 30%.  Which is a good thing, because other studies show that 35% of all search queries don’t result in a click.  Which also tells us one thing we all know – search result results have significant room for improvement.