NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

All eyes in the UK will still be on Google

Nice! Ive been published in Computer Weekly ! the only downer is that 350 words just does not do the subject justice, so I thought I’d a little more to it.

My main assertion is that in the UK, the Microsoft/Yahoo deal probably won’t matter all that much…Ive speculated that were looking at 18 month before any real action.

The article on BingHoo is here : Opinion: Will the Microsoft Yahoo deal change your online marketing?

On the PPC side, I’m fortunate to work with a really clever PPC guy (Kemley Sellars) and last week we had been discussing how this will affect him.

His view is that Microsoft have lifted their game as far as making it easier for PPC managers to upload accounts and manage them. Its now almost a simple porting across and if you ask nicely … they will even build the account for you. Of course you could say its desperation but then I prefer to thing it’s helpfulness.

But share is declining and traffic talks. So its a small side show until something bigger rolls in.

On SEO it’s a case of a spammed and an Algo that just is not as mature as Google’s (this tool will give you some idea: http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/ ) And with the Yahoo deal an arms race has escalated with the prospect of a commercially viable amount of traffic in the US (about 21% market share on BingHoo) to go and spam to get ranked and thus make revenue from.  And yes spamming is cold hard big money making.

So of course Bing is going to have to up its game, but can it? Remember there is a stream of patents churning from the big Tec companies and Google is a major source of patentable technology (Bill Slawski’s SEO by the sea have a ton of stuff on Google Patents) So for every innovation that gets nailed by a patent is obviously a technology competitor won’t get to use unless they pay a massive price.

My feeling is that Microsoft will not be able to catch Google on search software. Same on Hardware to power this massive infrastructure – Google is genius ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform and if they can run a server for 30% less than anyone else, that means more servers and lower running costs.

More servers means >  more computational resource for their data infrastructure >  for the right money > and that means a more sophisticated algo, to get you better search results.

And then there is a sense of mission and shared identity within Google and Microsoft. I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of Googlers and Microsoft people and whilst they are all very nice, the Googlers stand out as having a real shared sense of mission. Theirs is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Everys single one of them I had met seemed to have this enshrined in their makeup as a mission. Microsoft? I don’t know what it is. Do you? Try a search and see of you can find anything here

So weaker technology, probably less effective hardware and a lack of a clear virtuous mission spells a road to failure.