A shift that should have measured 10.0 on the Richter Scale produced barely a tremor.
Last week, Yahoo Search disappeared. While not the first search engine, Yahoo was the granddaddy to almost every major innovation in search. Yahoo was fast and nimble. They were experimental and innovative. And perennially underappreciated.
A long time ago, I worked at Inktomi, a former high-flier in the search space (before the crash in 2000). Yahoo was the major competition. There was Yahoo, and everyone else. Yahoo acquired Inktomi in 2002 and incorporated the best parts of the Inktomi algorithm and technology into Yahoo. So I feel like I owned part of Yahoo’s backbone. And truly, I am sad to see Yahoo’s search engine disappear. But it is being replaced by an equally innovative, laser-focused search engine, Bing.
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The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has begun to pick up steam for real, and naturally, search marketers have many questions. They’re concerned about changes to the practical day-to-day aspects of bid management, and they’re curious about how (and how significantly) performance will be impacted once Bing’s results are fully integrated into Yahoo! over the next two months.
Before any impact can be assessed, however, it’s good to know where we’re starting from, so let’s take a moment to assess the status quo. Just who are marketers already reaching via the three big search engines? Is the Bing searcher the same as the Yahoo! searcher, and the same as the Google searcher too? Not exactly. comScore data for July reveals some notable demographic differences in age, income and household size.
Bing Skews Older, Fits Well With Yahoo!
While Bing has made modest gains against Google in the overall share of searches since its launch, it isn’t capturing as many younger searchers. One-quarter of Bing’s searchers (26%) are under age 24, while the comparable share for Google is one-third. The good news for the integration of Yahoo! and Bing is that the two have very similar age demographics overall, with most segments within one percentage point of each other. Of the three engines, Bing has the absolute largest share of the 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ age brackets. So while Bing is no doubt serious about taking search share from Google in the long run, it probably won’t be able to do so without a concerted effort to grab more of the younger segments.
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Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.
Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.
It’s all SEARCH.
Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.
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