A couple of months ago we talked about the ‘Real time’ battle being played out by Google and Microsoft. The emergence of Twitter has a search engine that can tell you what people are discussing right now, made both Google and Microsoft to develop their own angle on ‘real time’

Whilst Microsoft’s Bing opted to include Tweets from prominent Twitters within their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), Google decided to rapidly index and promote blog posts and other recently added online content.

Both major players have now elected to try and beat each other at the Real Time game by… doing exactly the same thing. A couple of week’s ago they announced that they would feature live Tweets from the full Twitter index.

This is how Paul Yiu from Bing put it: “Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous… Working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with.” The service is currently only available in the US.

And on the same day, this is what Marissa Mayer from Google had to say “We have reached an agreement with Twitter to include its updates in our search results. We believe our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

Bing is already starting to include Twitter results in the US. In the UK we have to wait; and everyone has got to wait a while for Google,

Seeing as they have decided to do exactly the same thing, the winner will probably the search engine that chooses the most effective integration. Twitter produces a lot of ‘noise’ – irrelevant or irreverent Tweets that people may well not find useful to see in the SERPs.

As for what it means to website builders and your social media strategy, this means that is going to be more important than ever to make sure you are effectively using Twitter to communicate with your website visitors about your website. If you use Twitter as a customer service and communication tool, more people than ever will witness your customer care. As we discussed previously, the SERPs for your brand searches influence a lot of potential visitors to your website. More than ever they need to see that yours is a website that they want to interact with.

In our ‘Google the innovator‘ series earlier this year, we showcased the new search options that Google was in the process of rolling out. This included a side panel that lets you filter your search results to those from specific types of websites (such as reviews sites), or even results added in a specific time frame.

You can reach this side panel by clicking ’show options’ just above the search results.

This is what it looks like:

Google have now added many more ways for you to refine your search results. These include:

• past hour

• specific date range

• more / fewer shopping sites

• visited / not visited pages

• blogs

• news

The past hour and specific date ranges can be very useful to find the latest information posted on a particular subject. This is all part of the search engines’ battle to deliver the best ‘real time’ results.

The shopping sites option lets you show additional pages from shopping sites, and display prices from those pages on the actual search results. This is going to save lots of time when hunting for a bargain online. Alternatively, if you’re just researching a topic and aren’t in the buying frame of mind, you can exclude shopping sites from the results.

The visited pages option usefully allows you to identify sites you’ve been on before, which you may be trying to find again. To use this option you need to be signed in to your Google Account and also have ‘Web History’ enabled.

Have a go with the new options and let us know what you find!

Did you know that there are 1.6 billion people in the world connected to the Internet? And did you also know that there are more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute?

If you’re a lover of these sorts of Internet facts and statistics then today is a happy day.

I seem to spend half my day hunting round for some stats to back up what I’m trying to say. And the other half trying to remember and find the Internet facts that I read about last week.

Thanks once again to Google, all these facts and statistics can now be found in one place. They’ve launched a microsite that brings together all the Internet stats and insights for the UK.

The statistics are collected from a load of other third party research organisations. They cover lots of different areas, but are strongest in broad brush economic trends and media insights. They also look at consumer behaviour and the influence of technology, and how that changes over time.

Here some interesting snippets that we’ve grabbed:

“Over 60% of online businesses are confident about the future.” (NMA, March 2009)

“In the UK, searches for “discount vouchers” grew by 94% between November and December 2008” (Google Insights for Search)

“By election day, fully 25% of people who pulled the lever for Obama were already connected to his campaign electronically.” (New York Magazine, January 2009)

“More than 1 in 5 adults in the UK, FR, IT, & US with Internet access had watched longer videos such as feature films or full-length TV shows online.” (Ofcom, December 2008)

“In May 2009, Google had over 4.0 billion search page views in the UK.” (Nielsen Netview, May 2009)

Have a look at the site and let us know which fact you found most interesting.

According to Accredited Supplier (a B2B research firm), more than 1 in 10 small businesses in the UK intend to stop using Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and Outlook. They’re looking to make the switch to ‘cloud computing’ versions such as Google Docs and Gmail.

Accredited Supplier polled 1,400 Microsoft customers and found that 13% plan to swap to Google Apps within the next 12 months, and another 22% are undecided. Just 36% say that they are definitely staying with Microsoft.

Following Google’s recent ‘Go Google’ campaign that targeted small business, Google say that around 1.75m businesses are using its applications. That of course is just a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of millions using Microsoft Office.

The main difference between traditional Microsoft office and Google Docs are that whilst you need to install MS Office onto every PC in your company, Google Docs can be accessed by any computer connected to the Internet.

Why Cloud Computing and Google Docs are good

It brings lots of benefits. To start with there is the cost. Whilst Office can cost up to £200 per PC, Google Docs are free.

Second, Google Docs allow more than one user to work on a document at any one time – no more emailing a single version backwards and forwards between you and a colleague.

The third main benefit is safety and security. Since all your documents are stored in Google’s DataCentre, you don’t need to worry about your PC crashing before you can save vital files. Google automatically backs up and stores any Google doc you have.

Why Cloud Computing and Google Docs ain’t perfect

Cloud computing isn’t all good news. To start with, it means that you can only access your documents when you are connected to the Internet. That’s fine if you work in an office, but if you ever take a laptop out and about, reliance on wireless hotspots and 3G dongles mean your connection is at best patchy.

Second, whilst Google Docs are good, there’s no doubt that you do lose some of the functionality of an excel spreadsheet. They’re just not quite as good.

And the third thing is in the nature of the system. Even the mighty Google has downtime occasionally, and this means that there will be occasions that you can’t get at and work on your files.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to Google docs is that they require you and your team to learn a whole new way of doing things. No more storing documents on your PC or local server. And when people are learning, they often make mistakes.

But the in the end Microsoft may well win this battle. The next version of office out next year is rumoured to be ‘cloud compatible’, which may well mean that users get all the benefits of a collaborative, secure online solution, with the ease of use of having the software on a local machine. It sounds similar to Microsoft’s email system ‘Hosted Exchange’ where your local emails are mirrored in the cloud.

Have any of you made the switch from Microsoft to Google Docs or another ‘cloud computing’ solution? Would you prefer to stick with the tried and tested Office software? Leave us a comment below.

Another day, another statistic about how big and popular Google is. This time its ComScore, who have just released the research that total internet searches are up by a colossal 41%.

And you’ve guessed it: Google is the search engine that has driven most of that growth.

What’s amazing about this statistic however is that the change is so huge in what is considered to be a fairly mature market.

Its one thing to grow massively in your early stages, when any change represents a big percentage. But when you’re already very big, which search engines are (using search engines is by far the most popular online activity), then even significant absolute growth is usually just a few percentage points.

Here are the specifics: Global searches went up from 80 billion to 114 billion between July 2008 and July 2009. And Google grew from 49 billion searches to 77 billion. That means Google has hovered up 67% of the global search market.

Elsewhere, Yahoo grew just 2% with searches rising from 8.7 billion to 8.9 billion. That gives it 7.8% of the global search market. Chinese search engine Baidu went up 8% from 7.4 billion to just under 8 billion. Even though Baidu draws it user base from just one country, that still means it has 7% of the global market.

Microsoft, by contrast, saw very healthy growth of 41%, but this was from a fairly modest base of 2.35 billion searches.

In terms of a global break down, most searches happen in Europe, which produced 32% of searches. This was followed by Asia Pacific (31%), North America (22%) and Latin America (9%).

Where will it all end? Is this just the tip of the iceberg, or the top of the hill? No wonder new entrants want to grab a piece of this market. Leave us a comment below.

Although most of us only have eyes for Google, there’s a new search engine that launches almost every month. The recent high profile launches were WolframAlpha – not strictly a search engine but a ‘knowledge engine’ – and of course Microsoft’s ‘Bing’.

Most of these search engines come and go. And that’s not because they aren’t always good; but because it’s not easy to convert people from their tried and tested brands (Google). It takes not just a good product, but a much better product. And a lot of marketing money too.

So it was with some excitement that last July the market greeted ‘Cuil’. Here was a new search engine built by some ex-Google employees that had all the promise of a giant killer. It had a cool, leftfield name, the right backers, and the kind of buzz that only Silicon Valley can produce.

So it was disappointing to find that Cuil went off with more of a whimper than a bang. Despite the huge level publicity, a year later search traffic has fallen to just 90,000 unique users.

But now Cuil is now back, and trumpeting a real-time search feature that it hopes will help to catapult it into the search big-league. As we discussed recently, real time is becoming a major battle ground for search engines. And with the acquisition of FriendFeed, even Facebook is muscling in on the act.

On Cuil, when you search for keywords that also have real time results, Cuil automatically creates a mini-toolbar that shows how many real time results it has found.

You can then expand the toolbar to show just a sample of results both blogs and news websites, which gives an indication of how ‘hot’ that topic is.

As a user, you can then choose to open the toolbar in a pop up, which allows you to monitor the topic on an ongoing basis.

What not take a look at Cuil and let us know what you think. Can Cuil’s Real Time features save it from the search engine scrap heap? Has the real-time SERPs been over-hyped? Leave us a comment below

When you think ’search engine’ what brand springs to mind? For almost all of us it’s Google. This is especially so in the UK, where Google powers around 90% of all Internet searches. Some of you may still think ‘Yahoo’. And a few pioneers might think ‘Bing’.

But according to the ComScore monthly search report, its Facebook that is experiencing the fastest growth as a search engine. Search volumes on Facebook grew by a massive 35% in July alone.

Other brands experiencing strong growth in search were Craigslist (8%), eBay and Bing (5%), Flickr and Delicious (4%) and YouTube (1%).

The growth in these brands not normally associated with search queries was very much at the cost of the traditional search engines. Google fell 2%, AskJeeves 4%, and Yahoo and AOL dropped 5% each.

In terms of absolute numbers, the traditional search engines still rule the roost. In July there were 12.9 billion searches on Google; 2.8 billion on Yahoo; and Microsoft sites accumulated 1.3 billion searches.

Google of course is fiercely protecting its users’ ‘eye-time’. They have recognised the huge revenue potential of social networking, by adding lots of sticky and social features to their web properties. The most recent defensive move was their shift to feature ‘real time‘ entries in the search engine results page. But if Facebook search continues to grow at this rate, it might be that Google will have to start to defend its pure search homeland.

And it seems that Facebook has real ambition when it comes to search. Facebook recently bought FriendFeed and also expanded its own services, which has boosted its ability to provide real-time search.

A few weeks ago Facebook unveiled a new search service that allows members to search for status updates, links, photos and videos. Whilst previously users could find entries for other users’ profiles, the new Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) serve them in categories depending on the search query.

Have you tried searching on Facebook? Do you think that Facebook could be a serious rival to Google when it comes to search? Do you think Facebook will be able to monetise their new services? Leave us a comment below.

Lots of the time on this blog we go on about Google. We’ve extolled its virtues as a search engine, and waxed lyrical about its rate of innovation. And when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, the advice we give you is how to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page for Google, and not Yahoo or Bing.

All this of course is because Google is the most popular search engine. In the US 65% of web users prefer Google. In the UK it’s closer to 90%.

But how do you know that you prefer Google? Oh sure, at some point in the past you tried it, liked it, and found the results the most accurate search could offer. You made the psychological decision to stick with it and be loyal. If you have tried another search engine since, such as Bing, how many of you had already decided to give it a go in the full knowledge that you’d still stick to Google no matter how good the results?

And that’s typical of how, as consumers, we choose one brand over another. The first time you try similar products from different companies, it’s difficult to make up your mind. But once the mind is made up, most of us tend to keep to that decision. Apart from requiring no further effort, it constantly reaffirms to each of us that we made the right choice.

And that’s where blind search testing comes in. The website http://blindsearch.fejus.com allows you to compare the results for Google, Yahoo and Bing. The results are stripped bare of any branding, design, or clues to which search engine is delivering which result. Users can than vote for the result that they think is most relevant to their search query

And the interesting thing is that once all that branding is stripped away, we can make an honest decision about which SERP is most relevant to our search query. Once again we can evaluate the quality of the results without any preconceptions of that search engine’s brand.

Here’s the surprising bit. After around a month of testing, this blind search tool found that users preferred Google 41% of the time, Bing 31% and Yahoo 28%. That’s a huge discrepancy each search engine’s actual market share.

Aside from showing that we’re making the decision to stick with Google for reasons other than its accurate results, it also shows what an uphill battle the other search engines have. Even if they make their product much, much better than Google, in all likelihood people are going to be reluctant to switch.

Have a go on the blind search tool and let us know which result you prefer best.

Google has just made available a new version of its search engine. With a project name of Caffeine, the new platform boasts quicker, more relevant and more comprehensive results.

Described as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search”, Caffeine has been in development for most of this year.

A Google spokesman has said that this is just the first phase of a process that will “push the envelope” in terms of the search engine’s size, accuracy, comprehensiveness, indexing speed, and (bizarrely) “other dimensions”.

You can test Caffeine yourself and give Google feedback before the full public release.

Google have said that most users won’t notice much difference in the search results. The changes have been made at a deep level within the search architecture, and affect the building blocks on which all the search algorithm is based.

Since Google always lets you know how quick the search has been, if you give it a quick test you will notice that the results come back a few fractions of a second faster. There are also thousands more results that the main search engine.

I for one have never had a problem with the speed of results from Google – there already seems to be a small enough gap after I press ’search’.

All this means that if you have a Search Engine Optimisation programme in place, you will have to take account of a new set of rules. As to what exactly those rules are, we’ll make sure you are kept up to date.

Rather than a reaction to the launch of Bing, Google said it has been working on Caffeine for months. This evolution of Google is designed to keep it one step ahead of any threat from Microsoft, so is unlikely as simply a market reaction to the launch of Microsoft’s Bing.

Check out Caffeine now and let us know if you see anything interesting.

Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.

This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.

As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.

One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.

Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).

Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.

The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).

Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.

So what does ‘brand’ mean?

The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.

So how do you improve your brand’s value?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.

The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can. When it comes to building a website, that means getting as much traffic as possible to your website.

The first obvious was to do this is to work on your Search Engine Optimisation so that you can boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Secondly, you need to make use of the Social Networking features available within WebEden to start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.

Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.