Why do you use one search engine over another? Is it by chance, by choice or do you change on a regular basis?

In 2008, Google reported a turnover of £2 billion generated purely from clicks on Adwords adverts, but what about Bing and Yahoo?

The graph below is fascinating. It shows search engine usage according to how technologically advanced the user is. There’s no surprise that Google wins the ‘Middle Majority’ with a greater overall percentage, but Bing and Yahoo are also leaders amongst certain other demographics.

So when you are developing your online advertising strategy it’s important to understand your audience; how and where they search. Different searchers (and therefore search engines) have different characteristics that will benefit some brands more than others.

Every search engine displays different results, some more relevant than others, but all with the goal of satisfying consumer needs. If it achieves this than that search engine has a greater appeal to that particular customer, leading to a longer relationship. Some search engines will do this better than others depending on what they are looking for.

It’s pretty easy to look at the impact of this on your bottom line too. Looking at your web analytics, you can see whether traffic from certain search engines actually converts at a better rate than others. For example, a client of ours receives only 1% of web traffic from Bing and Yahoo, but the conversion rate from these is 42%, a whole 131% better than the site’s average conversion rate. What does this tell us about users of Bing and Yahoo? Are people that use these search engines more likely to buy from our client?

So before committing online spend, it is worth spending some time properly understanding your prospects in order to spend your money wisely. If you want a bit of a helping hand, get in touch with the guys at dotSEO who will be happy to assist!

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been making the headlines himself recently by revealing plans to de-index his news websites from Google, when they start charging for access to online content.

This follows a long running spat between media publishers and the world’s leading search engine. On the one hand, Google drives substantial traffic to news websites. However, publishers are frustrated by the editorial power that Google is able to wield through its Google News service – power that traditionally resided with publisher/newspaper. They also claim that Google is in breach of copyright by publishing news from their websites in its index.

The counter-argument has always been that if newspaper sites are so annoyed by Google’s actions, then they should just block the search engine from indexing the site. Murdoch seems to finally be putting his money (or traffic) where his mouth is.

The Belgian ruling

Back in 2007, a group of Belgian newspapers successfully sued Google for copyright infringements. And now, Murdoch is hoping to get one over on Google by taking back the power in the battle for online news.

Recent reports have suggested that after removing news from Google, Murdoch will seek to secure a deal with new Microsoft search engine Bing. So how would this affect the balance of power in the search engine war?

How do we search for news?

If we imagine a situation where Bing managed to achieve exclusive access to most of the world’s major news feeds, it’s interesting to consider how that would affect the way we search for news and the way we use search engines in general.

We are used to being able to access anything from any search engine, so would closing off content reduce our reliance on Google et al as the fount of all knowledge?

Even if this did happen (and I think it would be hard for Bing to get ubiquitous control of the news space), Google has such a stranglehold on our online searching that, even if they lost the news battle, they would still be used for our everyday searching needs.

That said, we could see a split in the search market, where if you wanted to search for news, then Bing would be the engine of choice, whereas for everyday surfing needs, Google would still retain its dominance.

It’s safe to say that this battle is only just beginning; it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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