Greenlight's Search Blog

Google's "Brand" Update - Part 1

This week many webmasters have noticed the effects of a relatively large Google algorithm update. In fact, many of our clients that have a presence in the US will already be familiar with this. Rolled out in the US in January, "Vince" (so called because "Vince" is the name of the Google Engineer mainly responsible for the update) was jumped upon by the SEO community as a Google algorithm update that explicitly favoured large household brands. Vince has now been live in the States for almost 6 months; Google has had plenty of time to iron out any problems caused by the update there, so it's safe to assume that now they've chosen to roll it out to the UK as well the change is here to stay.

It took some quiet analysis and a comment from Matt Cutts to establish that the update was not, in fact, centred explicitly around brands, but was a major adjustment to the algorithm that placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "trust".

Here in the UK we seem to be going through the same furore again. In the first of a series of blog posts attempting to demystify exactly what "trust" is, and how the Brand Update works, we first discuss "TrustRank".

What is TrustRank?

Originally described in a joint paper between Yahoo and Stanford University (PDF download), TrustRank is a link analysis algorithm that takes as its central premise the idea that a small set of hand selected websites can be said to be the source of all "trust" on the Internet. It’s similar in nature to the more widely known PageRank. Like PageRank, TrustRank incrementally falls the further one moves away from the source of the trust. But whereas PageRank originates and flows from all pages on the web that have been discovered by a given search engine, TrustRank originates and flows from a small, select group of "seed" pages that are hand chosen as being trustworthy sources of link citations. In this model a site that is not linked directly or indirectly from any trusted site receives no TrustRank.

You may have read about Google having "well over a hundred" factors that make up its algorithm; TrustRank, or something similar, is one of these.

In the Vince update, Google seems to have placed much more emphasis on TrustRank as a component of its algorithm in its continuing quest to eliminate web spam from its search results.

Why would TrustRank only affect big brands?

There are two answers to this. In part, it doesn’t; closer to the truth is that it affects a number of sites including big brands, but that it’s big brands that most commentators notice and/or fixate on. Undoubtedly however the sites that have gained most from the algorithm update tend to be household names. This makes sense when you consider how TrustRank works; well known brands, by virtue of their very size and reputation, are linked to by trusted websites more frequently than smaller outfits.

Take the BBC for example. It maintains a stable of stock websites for each topic area that are included with relevant stories in the right hand panel under the heading "related internet links" (no other external links are included in BBC news stories). These related internet links are carefully vetted by BBC editors and typically comprise big brands, government agencies and the like. In addition, when a news story features a particular company, it gets a link from the story. And which companies are most often written about in the news? That’s right; big brands.

This doesn’t apply to just the BBC, of course. All sites, regardless of their TrustRank, tend to link to big brands or other well known sites more frequently than small sites. By the law of averages, it follows that big brands will also receive more of a share of the available TrustRank on the web. PR begets links, which begets PR. Thus a well known brand will tend to have its trust continually reinforced by more and more links from trusted sources.

What are the sources of TrustRank?

We don’t know if the BBC is actually an original source of TrustRank, although as bets go this is a fairly safe one. Even if it’s not, it’s likely to have a lot of TrustRank because it is linked to so widely from other sites. Unfortunately there is no published, publicly accessible list of seed sites for any search engines implementation of TrustRank. While there are some obvious candidates (e.g. the BBC) and some possible ones (I would speculate that Wikipedia might be one despite the presence of nofollow on all external links), inevitably there will be many we’ll never know about.

What's clear is that Google's search results have suffered at the hands of cheap, low quality links for years. Numerous attempts to devalue this approach to SEO have been and gone without notable success. Now Google seems to have taken a different tack; by improving the importance of high quality links, the relative importance of low quality links has been diminished.

The Assisted Conversion

In many sports the role of the ‘assist’ has become increasingly important in the analysis of player performance. What can online marketers learn from this?

What is an assist?
An assist is a contribution by a player in a ball game that helps another player score a goal. Normally an assist can be awarded to the player who gave the last pass to the goal scorer. FIFA goes one step further and says an assist can also be awarded to the last-but-two holder of the ball, provided his or her action had decisive importance for the goal.

Since the 1994 World Cup it has become common practice to keep records of assists. This has partly been done for the benefit of US fans whose avid stats-taking is a major contributor to their enjoyment of most sports.

The United States Major League Soccer began awarding their MLS Scoring Champion Award based on attributing points to players – two points for a goal and one for an assist. The French League, Ligue 1, awards a Trophee de Meiller Passeur (‘best passer trophy’) to the leader in assists at the end of every season. While closer to home, PA Sport has incorporated assists into its Actim Index of Premier League player performance in the UK.

The assist in online marketing
Most online marketers work with methodologies and technologies that attribute a sale to the immediate source that referred the user. This source could be a paid search ad, a natural search listing, a banner ad, an email or a direct visit via the URL. This immediately-referring source is the equivalent to the goal scorer in our ball game analogy. Now consider the research:

• Less than 15% of sales come as a result of only one session.¹
• 45% of sales complete in a different medium to that in which they started.²
• In one study 25% of customers who first interacted via a display banner ended up booking via paid search marketing, and 12% via an affiliate network.³

Essentially, ‘last click’ attribution means various activities, affiliates and mediums often get sole credit for a sale. But as we’ve outlined with performance-scoring methods in sport, giving all the value to the direct referrer fails to acknowledge, remunerate and nurture those elements providing the ‘assists’. It leaves out the key individual who put the ball in front of the goal scorer.
Most marketers acknowledge, at least in principle, how integrated the sales pipe has become and how a variety of consumer interactions typically contribute to the eventual sale. However, few do anything about it.

Okay, I get it. Now what?
There are two key things you should be doing in response to this assist-and-goal-scorer dynamic.
Firstly, use your web analytics intelligently to identify how users are interacting with your brand, as well as coming and going from your site. Just because a user clicks on a branded PPC ad doesn’t mean they didn’t find you the day before via natural search or see your messaging in a banner ad. Run tests, including stopping and starting activities in various combinations to identify and confirm correlations. Never cull line items of marketing spend without measuring both their goal-scoring performance and their assist rates.

Be particularly wary of the sales your systems tell you were referred to you from Google using your brand terms, as many of those conversions will have been influenced by another activity before Google was used to navigate to you. Did they see your ad on TV before searching for you or read a blog post or news story? In those cases you should maintain your presence in Google for your brand terms (you never sack the goal scorer, even if he goal hangs!) but you need to understand what created that demand to begin with – and maintain and nurture those contributors. Or to put it another way retain and invest in those that ‘assist’.

Secondly, look to reward those that make the assists or invest in activities that are demonstrably part of the consumer journey. We’ve seen some progressive thinking among some marketers and affiliate managers who reward by attributing a percentage, say 6%, to the ‘goal scorer’, and 3% to the last ‘assist’. This also makes certain merchants more attractive to affiliates, which adds considerable merit to this approach. Explore ways of extending this philosophy across the rest of your marketing channels and activities.

Food for thought
Returning to the ball game analogy, consider how FIFA also looks two players away for a ‘decisive assist’ before attributing the assist to a player. If marketers had a method, supported by a methodology and technology, to determine what constitutes a decisive assist this would herald a new era in attributing value within a highly integrated marketing process. You could remunerate several parties at different rates and attribute credit to multiple interconnected activities. You’d also be able to better understand the contribution of other media, such as social networks, news sources, online PR campaigns, and even specific bloggers and commentators, too.

1 Source: InternetRetailing.net 2008,  The last click wins — unravelling the customer journey
2 Source: InternetRetailing.net 2008  The last click wins — unravelling the customer journey
3 Source: Econsultancy.com 2008, RIP last click wins

Top stories June 2009

Microsoft launches Bing supported by $100m advertising drive
The big news this month is that Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing, on 28 May, its fourth new engine in five years and a replacement for last year’s Live Search.

The company described it as ‘specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines’ but said it would begin to move beyond this experience with ‘a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions.’

Microsoft has also unveiled its intentions of setting up a high-profile UK agency and advertiser roadshow, in a clear bid to persuade UK brands to invest in Bing.

Senior Bing champions will attend the company’s annual search summit in London on 18 June 2009, and begin the process of convincing its clients that Bing can be a serious contender for Google. The Microsoft Advertiser Roadshow will go out to agencies and advertisers in June and July.

Figures from internet monitor, Hitwise, show that Microsoft’s share of UK search traffic fell from 8.55% in April 2006 to 3.51% in April 2009, while Google’s rose from 69.36% to 86.94%. So the question on everyone’s lips is: will Bing regain some of this market share for Microsoft?

To achieve this huge numbers of people will need to be persuaded to kick the Google habit, a fact all too obvious to Microsoft, who has committed $100m to its Bing advertising campaign in the US.

Greenlight is holding The Greenlight Bing Challenge agency-wide from Monday 8 June 2009. Employees are competing to see who can forgo Google and use Bing the longest. To follow their progress and contribute comments and details of your own Bing experiences, go to the Facebook fan page.

Wolfram Alpha: not trying to beat Google
Wolfram Alpha’s launch hit the headlines back in May 2009 and has continued to fill column inches ever since, not least for debate over its potential to usurp Google (see our April newsletter for initial coverage). 
Founder, Stephen Wolfram, calls his creation a ‘computational knowledge engine’ rather than a traditional search engine. What’s more, he’s made no claims to ‘kill’ rival, Google, and goes so far as to not rule out working with the search giant in the future.

Wolfram says, ‘We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense. Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have.’

The engine provides users with direct answers to queries by searching its internal knowledge databases instead of the web. Answers are accompanied by graphs and tables, placing the engine somewhere between Google and Wikipedia, and making it a useful resource for a minority.

Greenlight COO, Andreas Pouros, calls it ‘a useful experiment in information retrieval’, but says it has a long way to go before becoming useful.

‘Semantic search will make this something that can be easily replicated, and will mean other search engines can emulate Wolfram’s approach.’

Google Squared launches
Google launched its Google Squared application on 3 June. An advanced function, it provides search results in the form of a spreadsheet-like grid or Google Square.

Ideal for making comparisons between potential purchases, Google Squared significantly reduces the time spent working out users’ best options, for example for a type of mobile phone or holiday, by organising the searches into a comparison table format.

At its 12 May Searchology conference in California, Google previewed a number of other innovative search products, which all created customisable search results.

Results can now be edited to include only the most recent (as much as up to 24 hours before), which has been called an attempt to capitalise on the growing demand for so called real-time results generated by Twitter.  

From 13 May onwards Google started displaying a ‘Show Options’ tab for every search conducted. This allows users to customise their queries to include more videos, images, forum results, reviews or a timeline. A further feature allows search results to link up and display on users’ mobile phones when they log on to the website from their handset.

Yahoo!  brings new search functionality to the mix
Yahoo! announced plans to revolutionise search and the standard text-heavy results page at its press event in late May.

The search engine’s idea for creating a more engaging user experience is to view the internet as a series of objects rather than pages. It claims users are looking for relevancy over pages of results.

Say you were searching for a restaurant. Instead of just returning links to the main website, followed by a collection of other algorithmically decided results, Yahoo! envisages a capsule of relevant information, including reviews, opening hours and photographs.

The new initiative forms part of Yahoo!’s year-old Search Monkey project, which allows companies to send the data they want included in their search results to the search engine. As many as 70m enhanced results are viewed by users daily.

Less Twitter, more Twoogle?
Never far from the headlines, Twitter has now announced plans to begin fine-tuning its search function by indexing the links included in tweets.

The move will effectively create a real-time mini Google, with the search function returning links to millions of web pages. It will incorporate a reputation-ranking system too, also reminiscent of the search engine giant.

Google co-founder, Larry Page, has admitted his company has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web users’ demand for real-time information. Google Chairman and Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, goes so far as hinting Google could become Twitter’s partner, however he dismisses Google would want to buy Twitter. 

‘There is a presumption that you cannot  have multiple solutions that co-exist. We can talk to them...there is all sorts of stuff we can do. We do not have to buy everybody to work with them.’

Google changes trademark policy. Again.
Google announced a further change to its trademark policy on 15 May, which allows the limited use of trademarks in ad copy, even if the trademark owner objects.

Taking effect in the US from 15 June this year, the policy change will reduce the number of generic ads on Google’s US network and benefit both users and advertisers, the search behemoth claims.

Greenlight’s PPC Director, Hannah Kimuyu, says, however, ‘Some advertisers will do all they can to be visible, even if that means abusing the power Google has bestowed upon them.’

The revised policy follows on from last year’s May 2008 changes, which saw Google allow keyword bidding on previously trademarked terms across the UK and Europe. 

Kimuyu adds that after May 2008 many large brands were taken advantage of by their competitors, who almost abused the use of other brands in some cases, which resulted in a significant loss in brand visibility and ownership.

A further problem, she says, is counterfeiters, who will be able to pose as the genuine product in their ads.

‘I expect this to be rolled out in the UK before long. Our advice would be to get some brand protection in place. That way, when the trademark policy does change you’ll know exactly who is targeting you and can apply the appropriate strategy.’

Google updates its US ad text trademark policy

On Friday 15 May Google announced a change to its US ad text trademark policy. In effect, this new policy will allow advertisers to use trademarks in ad copy and will take effect from the 15 June.

According to Google the change will benefit both users and advertisers by reducing the number of generic ads on their US network. Google state that advertisers will be able to produce more targeted ads that will offer users more relevant information whilst respecting the interests of trademark owners.

Offering users more relevant information is all well and good but will trademarks really be safe in the hands of advertisers? After the initial move on the trademark policy back in May 2008, the evidence suggests that many large brands saw their competitors taking advantage of the relaxed policy - almost abusing the use of other brands in some cases. - a significant loss in brand visibility and ownership.

The problem is that advertisers will do all they can to be visible and if that means abusing the power that Google has bestowed upon them, then so be it. I predict that advertisers will begin using competitor brand names negatively in their ad copy as already seen. Furthermore, Google is not well enough regulated to stop this from happening and therefore allowing others to incorporate competitor brands into their ad copy will in fact become confusing and frustrating for the consumer.

One other major and possibly legal problem with this new policy involves counterfeiters, who will be able to pose as the genuine product in their ads. This isn’t good for consumers and most definitely harmful to brands. At present Google struggles to control the counterfeiters even without the use of the brand name in the ad copy.

I expect this change to be rolled out to the UK before long, so we too will be facing the implications of this latest adjustment. At this stage our advice would be to get some brand protection/monitoring in place so when the trademark policy does change, you know exactly who is targeting you and can apply the appropriate strategy.

Search wars - Round 2?

Is Microsoft’s launch strategy for its new search engine ‘Bing’ going to allow it to encroach on Google’s market share? That’s the big question. Rumour has it that Microsoft has $100m for its marketing campaign, but Comscore stats for the last 6 months in the US, show market share as being largely static with Google being considerably ahead, and Microsoft significantly behind, so there will be a long way to go to catch up. They might need a bigger boat.

 

 

The above graph shows the uplift in search activity on Google for the term ‘ask jeeves’ in April which coincides with the re-launch and the bringing back of jeeves the butler, so advertising does work in terms of raising awareness of a search engine, but whether that growth is sustainable after the advertising stops remains to be seen.

 

‘Build a better search engine’ as a strategy is unlikely to work, even if it is heavily and well communicated to the user. Much of the proposed re-launch and marketing is likely to focus on new features, but if Microsoft thinks it can win audiences back based on features and better results it might be disappointed. Users respond poorly to flashy options and creative interfaces and just want relevance and simplicity and Google has that in spades. I think their marketing strategy will need to go beyond pragmatism. They need to break people’s habits, so it will be interesting if they can encourage that to happen.

 

Even if they do start to be successful, it’s unlikely that other search engines like Google will allow their lunch to be eaten, and if it’s just a case of ad dollars, then Google has deep pockets. They’ll no doubt fork out to defend their turf. Whether that will be an unscheduled expenditure which dents their earnings or not, I’m not sure, but I expect they have a war chest contingency for Microsoft’s inevitable confrontation.

 

Microsoft has its eye on Ad revenue, but needs to secure market share of search to have a viable offering for advertisers and its low reach means that it’s a poor choice for marketers looking to buy significant search advertising inventory.

 

Microsoft gaining market share will also be welcome news for agencies and advertisers who feel somewhat beholden to Google in an industry that needs competition. Marketers like to be able to allocate their budgets across multiple options to spread risk, and feel that media owners want their ad spend. This is something they don’t always get form Google. I think some serious competition will encourage new features, options and incentives for advertisers. Google pulled its Best practise funding programme at the beginning of the year, ending an era of agency buying discounts. An act based largely on maximising revenues and not needing to compete for ad spend.

 

Search engine ad inventory is not infinite, and there’s only so much of it. Especially in a recession with many commercial categories finding fewer people actively searching. If Microsoft were to win a significant amount of market share, this would have an impact on Google’s revenues, as it fought on 3 fronts declining adspend, the need to potentially offer advertiser incentives, and losing adspend to Microsoft.

 

Agencies and advertisers may also benefit from increased ad spend possibilities with Microsoft as it still offers discounts to agencies, so an increase in its ability to be a useful and volumous media owner will allow advertisers and agencies to generate more revenues.

My thoughts on Wolfram Alpha

Whilst I can see what Wolfram Alpha is trying to achieve, (both enviable and interesting), it isn’t really that impressive when the search mechanism is restricted to selected databases and feeds.

The general approach is sound – using structured data from vetted sources to build a searchable knowledge base with a computational edge. However, semantic search will make this something that can be very easily replicated and therefore will mean that other search engines can emulate and surpass Wolfram’s approach without even having to build the functionality beyond processing semantic tags.

To be fair, Wolfram Alpha isn’t claiming to rival Google. So, not a ‘Google killer’ as has been reported, but a useful experiment in information retrieval. If you search for ‘expenses scandal’ Wolfram returns no results, whereas Google returns 4 million. When people search they want answers, but often the answers can’t be found in vetted sources, so semantic mark-up across all web documents is critical.

A Google killer would need to embrace the semantic web and be instrumental in creating it. It would need to be something that finds a way to factor in reader sentiment and social media, spider the web and also have a marketing budget in multiple millions, with an even bigger tech infrastructure budget. Wolfram has none of these things.

Also worth noting is that Google already has an answer of sorts to Wolfram Alpha in Google Squared, which tries to compile data in a more factual, tabulated format for comparison rather than in the usual text snippet approach, but does it automatically without requiring armies of staff like Wolfram. Wolfram clearly has a long way to go to become useful.

Greenlight scoops another IDM award!

I’m very proud to announce that Greenlight’s paid search expertise and creativity have been recognised nationally for our work with Radisson Edwardian! Last Thursday I attended the IDM gala dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington and was delighted to receive our award in the digital category for best use of Search Engine Marketing from the lovely Sally Gunnell OBE.

This is the third year in a row that Greenlight has won an IDM award and it’s all down to the hard work of the entire team who pulled together to make this happen. Radisson Edwardian has also been a joy to work with, which always helps produce great results. With our intensive paid search campaign, we managed to generate a £44 return for every £1 invested.

This year we have actively continued to work with Radisson and have extended our remit to include targeting worldwide markets, raising awareness of individual hotel restaurants within the chain and continuing to improve ROI by reducing the CPC (cost per click) across the entire account.

It really is a wonderful achievement to be recognised by such a well respected industry body as the IDM. This campaign is a great example of how paid search can help businesses reach and exceed their goals, so well done and thanks to all those involved.

'No follow' Links are PageRank “Black Holes” – Maybe

Update: Subsequent to this post being written Matt Cutts has confirmed that the change to the handling of nofollow described below is real, and that in fact it has been treated this way for over a year.

This week is awash with bloggable news, but within SEO circles the most “buzzy” has been Google’s apparent shift in its treatment of nofollow, a story originally broken on Search Engine Land.  In this post I want to demystify what nofollow actually is and what the implications of the change really are. I’ll caveat that  by saying that I’ll deal strictly with the theoretical assigning of PageRank or, more generically, “link equity”, to pages within a site based on linking relationships between those pages. 

“Nofollow”, for the uninitiated, is a value of the HTML rel attribute that can be applied to a link preventing search engines from crawling the target of that link.

Before nofollow existed, pages simply passed a diluted version of their own PageRank (donatable PageRank) equally to each page they linked to.  Page A passes a third of its donatable PageRank to pages X, Y and Z;

With the advent of widespread search engine support for nofollow (first announced by Google in January 2005) , websites could use the tag to theoretically block the flow of PageRank to pages they deemed less important, thus increasing the relative value of other links that were followable. A bit like damming up parts of a river to force more flow down other channels. This practice became known as “PageRank sculpting”.

The link to page X has been nofollowed (let’s assume it’s a terms and conditions page, a typical target for PageRank sculpting), so pages Y and Z receive more PageRank from page A;

After the recent announcement, links that are nofollowed neither pass PageRank or improve the relative value of other links on the page.  Instead, they “absorb” the PageRank that would have been passed through them. It’s this behaviour that makes them akin to black holes.  The link to page X is nofollowed, but pages Y and Z still receive the same amount of PageRank as they would if the link wasn’t nofollowed;

 

Theoretically, therefore, in a heads up competition between using nofollow and not using it, you’re better off not using it at all.  That way at least a small part of the PageRank passed through the link you would have nofollowed will find its way back to important pages, rather than being lost entirely to the nofollow black hole.  The nofollow tag has been removed from the link to page X.  Some PageRank is spent on the page but at least it can subsequently pass a portion of this to page Y;

Remember that if the prospect of page X being accessed by search engines is particularly terrible, you can use the robots directive noindex, follow in the robots meta tag to let PageRank flow through the page without the page itself being indexed.

As with any sudden changes and announcements made by the search engines though, sound advice for now is to sit back and see what effect this actually has.  For all we know, these effects may already have manifested, or they may be too miniscule to detect or be concerned about anyway. 

Will this move kill the notion of PageRank sculpting? I doubt it. The nofollow tag was never the only way to go about optimizing your PageRank distribution, it was merely a tool introduced by Google to nullify link spam that didn't really have the desired effect and just played into the hands of some SEO's who tried to use it to their advantage in funneling PageRank around their sites.

What this does do though is take away an easy and inconsequential to use technique, whereby you could avoid answering difficult questions about site structure and fixing the underlying structural problems a site has, and happily plaster nofollow all over your site and call it a day. This move by Google may just force a slight return to more “Thoughtful” SEO, where knowing how to design an information architecture and internal linking schema actually matters.

Farecast could be Bing's best point of leverage

I've always liked the Farecast interface. It gives that feeling of true flexibility of refining your choices without you having to keep going back and endlessly redo your searches.

It is one of those few great examples of professional and expert power, put in the hands of the consumer by new web technologies.

The fact that it also lets you compare your results with other agent sites like Expedia is a boon too, because the consumer always wants to know what they could be getting elsewhere, and showing them, which no doubt will lead to a commission should they take that route, works out for everyone involved.

Integrating it into Bing's search results is a very nice touch, too, and puts it squarely ahead of Google on travel integration, and makes the Google SERPS seem almost vanilla by comparison.

This will increase the reach of these powerful, yet underused services dramatically, and if Bing captures serious market share then I think larger travel sites on the agent and direct side who have historically abhorred these services, will have to fall in and integrate with them to maintain their slice of the action.

One thing which has cheesed me off already though, is the lack of customisation for geography.

Prices in dollars, deals from US departure points are not going to help a UK consumer, and is likely to make those tempted to experiment early, nervous that 'here's another big global American company thinking the world = The United States'.

Clearly it's a gap in the Farecast offering, and hopefully it will be bridged soon either by expanding it (as loosley touted by Micorosft in a very non committal kind of way) or maybe by a tie up with someone like Kayak or Travelsupermarket who would be best able to satisfy the core functions. Such a deal would certainly help the likes of Kayak, who despite being an impressive first mover and industry consolidator have achieved relatively poor growth.

Either way, Bing needs to sort it. Google has their geo strategy worked down to a fine art, and if you're going to go head to head in search, on a global stage, then you should have the global thing worked out or cut out where needs be.

So which should they do? Well a tie up may well be better. If I were Microsoft, my biggest problem is that I've got pots of cash but no search audience.

I can't buy one because there isn't one, (at least not one that's for sale, or of any magnitude to make a difference).

But maybe... I can buy a vertical search audience, of which there are more, and which are of decent size, and perhaps are more willing as sellers. I could buy that, giving me the asset I'm after, and hope I can cross leverage that to grow loyalty in Bing as a search destination.

Or of course if history is anything to go by, they could just spend alot of time and money launching a nice but not so well known travel site, into nice but not so well known or used UK search engine.

Just take a look at Google trends for searches for Kayak, TS, Farecast etc. Why would you even bother if you had MS's pockets.

Google is weak in vertical search. Trying to hit it head on where its most dug in and fortified, even if you are an 800lb well armoured cash rich gorilla is going to end in tears, and will just prompt them to get their 800lb gorilla out of its box too.

Go round the flanks Bing!

If it looks like Google, it must be Google, and therefore we're ok with it!

Fascinating and slightly intimidating research reported in Adage this week about internal research at Google, which suggests that as long as you badge it Google, user perception and preference on search results goes up, even if it's not Google's results.

The research which took search results from other search engines and then re-badged them and retreated them with the Google styling, found that people still preferred them to the results of other engines.

Its a damning insight that puts the ky-bosh on the 'build a better mousetrap' scenarios that have pre-occupied every search engine for years in trying to win market share from Google. It also illustrates very clearly the power of the brand, suggesting that only a major drawn out brand building offensive is likely to have any impact for Microsoft, in its war to acquire decent search distribution.

Whilst the search battleground is littered with expensive campaigns that failed miserably, like the Ask Jeeves one, the "I'm a PC campaign" seems to be holding its own very well on Mac front, so this shows that maybe it is possible to win the consumer with a clever brand building message. Although that 6 year old girl and her up-linked digital camera continues to make me feel technically inferior.

Historically Apple has also been a far closer to the bone threat than Google,and thus the offensive seems quite in place and justified. Maybe MS has finally decided Google is as equal a threat as Apple, and has decided to open up a war on another front.

Lets hope there aren't any Russian winters lurking out there for them.