Nielsen//NetRatings found that in June and July of this year the major search engines enjoyed high user retention but also high audience overlap, suggesting that audiences are actively using two and three engines. Search engines saw the highest user retention of the three categories that Nielsen compared and examined (search, travel, jobs).

According to the release:

Among the categories, search providers had the highest visitor retention rates, with an average of 71 percent of June visitors at home returning in July among the three leading search players. Google Search led with a retention rate of 79 percent, followed by Yahoo! Search at 69 percent and MSN/Windows Live Search with 65 percent (see Table 1). Visitor retention rates were slightly higher among the work audience, with an average of 76 percent among the three leading search providers.

Notably though, a substantial portion of visitors went to more than one of these three search sites in July. MSN/Windows Live Search had the highest audience overlap, with 84 percent of its unique visitors also going to Google Search, Yahoo! Search, or both. Yahoo! Search had a 78 percent audience overlap with Google and/or MSN, while Google Search had a 63 percent audience overlap with one or both of its two primary competitors.

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Microsoft and Nokia team up to offer Windows Live on S60 devices from LiveSide Blog reports Microsoft and Nokia, in a new agreement, will begin to allow S60 device owners to use Windows Live suite on their devices.

The rollout will be across 11 different countries and you can find in the Windows Live suite, Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, Contacts and Spaces. S60 users have already had the ability to use Windows Live Search on their devices, in an agreement back in September 2006.

With all the speculation around Google Mobile phones, you bet Microsoft is pushing to capture a larger share of the mobile market.

In yesterdays Keynote with Marrisa Mayer of Google, Danny asked about Google’s mobile initiatives.

Why Mayer did not go as far to deny that Google is working on their own mobile device, she did say Google is very interested in partnering with device manufacturers on creating applications and widgets for their mobile devices. She did add that devices like the Apple iPhone are great examples of devices they are interested in partnering with.

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Google Inc. reportedly plans to acquire one or two Chinese companies and invest in up to five more over the next year as part of efforts to gain ground on rival Baidu.com Inc. in China.

“Over the next year, Google will acquire one or two companies in China, and invest in four to five companies,” said Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google China, quoted in a report (in Chinese) carried on several Web sites. The report did not say what companies or technologies Google is interested in.

A Google China spokeswoman did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages seeking confirmation of Lee’s reported comments.

Unlike the U.S. where Google dominates the Internet search market, the company trails behind market leader Baidu.com in China. But Google executives insist they will eventually overtake their Chinese rival, saying the company’s offerings in China are competitive.

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Following the Harris and BusinessWeek/Interbrand brand surveys, which put Coca-Cola at the top of the list, JupiterResearch asked Internet users about their favorite brands and dissected the audiences.

The brand ranking was as follows:

Google
Yahoo
Amazon
eBay
MySpace
Microsoft (including MSN)
AOL
Apple
Others

Segmented by age, MySpace rose in popularity to near parity with Google and Yahoo among younger adults. Interestingly, those 55 and older expressed a stronger preference for Google vs. Yahoo. Men preferred Google, while women preferred Yahoo. There were other gender differences as well. Interestingly, “Google was quite popular with Apple fans, as was Amazon, but fared its worst with users of MySpace and AOL.”

As one might expect, the strongest brand affinity and loyalty was among Apple fans. According to Jupiter, “An astonishing 51 percent described themselves as brand advocates.”

One of the reasons brand is important is because it drives usage and correlates with market share. Despite the often heard remark, “our competition is just a click away,” brand loyalty and habitual behavior makes that statement factually less true than it seems logically or in the abstract.

Via SEL

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land Here’s a quick test for you. Don’t worry, it’s only one question. True or false: Today’s SEO techniques could be tomorrow’s search engine spam with one turn of the algo crank.

What do you think? Is what you do to optimize your site going to be considered search engine spam one day because of a change in the search engines’ magic formula?

Search engine spam takes many forms

If you answered “true,” you may need to seriously examine your SEO practices. Good, professional SEO that puts users first while keeping search engines in mind would never be considered spam by any stretch of a search engineer’s imagination. Search engine spam takes a concerted effort and is done in an attempt to misrepresent any given page of your website. It can take the form of showing one thing to the engines and something else to the typical website user, i.e., cloaking or hidden text. But that’s not the only thing that might be considered spam.

Search engine spam can be perfectly visible to the typical user as well. Keyword stuffing in all its forms—be it the copy, the title tags, within image alt attributes, or in anchor text—is search engine spam, as it’s only there to try to increase rankings. Which is why those “techniques” rarely work for very long.

You can’t OVER optimize anything

You may have heard some people talk about an “over-optimization” penalty. They say this can happen to a page that has too much optimization. Huh? How can a page be over-optimized? That’s like being “a little bit pregnant”! By its very nature the word “optimize” means “to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible” (according to Dictionary.com).

Over-optimization isn’t optimization at all; it’s search engine spam, clear and simple. Just because your spam increased your rankings for awhile doesn’t mean that it wasn’t spam. And that’s what confuses people.

Search engine spam does work

It certainly is frustrating to review many top-ranking websites only to find them using all sorts of deceptive techniques that go unnoticed but are seemingly rewarded by the search engines. This in turn makes people assume that’s what you’re supposed to do on your website in order to get high rankings. They believe what they saw others doing must be a legitimate SEO technique. As far as I know, “everyone else is doing it” is not a legitimate defense in the courtroom, nor is it to the search engines when they decide to change their algorithm.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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