The UK now has it very own version of Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft.

The latest version of the search engine was launched last Friday. It allows users to search for UK specific results.

Microsoft’s UK head of consumer and online, Ashley Highfield said:

‘This is a serious, long-term commitment from Microsoft to put a differentiated search product in to the market place. We have not just used the US version of Bing. We’ve had a UK team focusing on what will work particularly well over here.’

‘Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the internet proving very popular.’

‘This is by no means the end of our development. We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant. Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines.’

In the states Bing launched in May and they have managed to gain an increase of 7% of the search market between September and October.

The initial signs are that Bing is doing well. It is still no competition for Google but it is making a tiny mark. Its nearest rival is Yahoo who has 3.27% of the search market in the UK. Bing has 2.75% and Google has 92.06% so there is still some way to go.

It would have been Michael Jachson’s 51st birthday on 29th August and Google created a new logo to commemorate it. This pleased many fans. For Google, Michael Jackson fever helps to increase their coiffures as thousands flood onto YouTube to watch the controversial icon’s online videos.

The point is that online video is big business and there has been no bigger business than Michael Jackson at the moment over the last few months.

YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. It is now part of our social landscape, particularly amongst the young and is used by individuals as well as businesses to share information and entertainment. It was bought by Google in November 2006 and is now run by one of its subsiduaries.

YouTube sells advertising space on its pages and will be making a lot of revenue from the high viewing figures that Michael Jackson attracts:

Thriller – 75,230,680 views
Beat It – 55,694,580 views
Billie Jean – 48,607,244 views
Smooth Criminal – 45,874,905 views

How can you benefit?
As a business you can use YouTube in a couple of ways:

Place your own videos
Publish your own videos to promote your business.  This increases awareness of your brand and encourages people to find out more about you.

Advertise
Advertising can be paid for by the number of clicks to your site that come from YouTube pages. The more views a video has the more chance that your site will receive more visitors from people who visit YouTube.

An important point to mention is that online video is becoming more and more important. According to a survey from comScore, Video Metrix nearly 9 million Google site videos, 99% of them from YouTube, were viewed in July. That has will have produced a lot of revenue.

It’s a win-win situation as the Michael Jackson example shows. Everyone gets more business: the advertiser, YouTube and the Michael Jackson music producers.

Good, well targeted keywords are big business and can generate significant amounts of convertible traffic within a well structured internet marketing campaign. But how open a market should it be and is it important for businesses to have preferential treatment when it comes to bidding on their own trademarked terms?

On Tuesday the European Court of Justice heard an appeal from Google after they were ordered to pay Louis Vuitton $250,000 in 2005 over a dispute concerning the use of their trademarked words as keywords by other companies. Louis Vuitton sell high-end luxury goods such as jewellery, luggage and handbags which they sell in traditional retail outlets rather than via the internet. Other companies were bidding on keywords such at ‘vuitton’ and then using the traffic generated by search engines to sell rival products and even counterfeit goods that resembled original Loius Vuitton styles.

Louis Vuitton’ lawyer Patrice de Cande, told the court on Tuesday that ‘Google’s advertisement activities have given companies which sell fake products unprecedented visibility beyond their wildest dreams.’

A spokesperson for Google said, ‘AdWords helps users find the information they are looking for and provides advertisers with an efficient way to reach their audiences. Google believes that it has not infringed the claimants’ trademark rights and we look forward to the outcome of the cases.’

This practise has been around in the US since 2004 but Google has only been used in the UK and Ireland since May last year. The important question for Google must be this: Google claims to be user led. The idea being that searchers are looking for something and the closer a company can get to giving the consumer what it wants (and then some) the higher a sites ranking. The higher the ranking the more visitors a site is rewarded with. And so on, in a never ending cycle of supply and demand. However, if a consumer is looking for Louis Vuitton and finds a rival company, is the consumer being best served? If they are not looking for luxury bags or fake Louis Vuitton then what is the purpose of Google allowing these sites to rank well? In theory, if they are not throwing up what the consumer wants then these sites will not rank well.

In June last year, a French court ordered auction site eBay to pay 40m Euros to LVMH for allowing online auctions of fake copies of its goods. LVMH had said eBay’s French site had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeit bags and perfumes, under brands including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy.

There is also the question of morality? To what extent, if any, should Google be the arbitrator of morals within ecommerce? Something does not feel quite ethical about a company using a rival’s trademarked term to sell its own goods. Should Google be concerned about this? Google sometimes does take a stand, for example in June 2007 it banned Adwords adverts for student essay writing services which was very much welcomed by the Universities. Also, some terms related to gambling and hacking are not allowed either.

The outcome of the appeal is not expected to be announced until next year. We will be watching the outcome with interest.

The latest figures from Hitwise show that 76% of people in the UK are using www.google.co.uk as their search engine, followed by 14.32% using the US Google.  This leaves only 9.68% of searches that are being performed on other web-browsers.   These figures highlight how important it is for UK business owners to target Google for their searches.

The figures highlight Google’s success.  But why are they successful?  One of the reasons is that it Google gives users a better experience, it provides you with more of what you are looking for.  For a business this means that more customers who are looking for services like yours are being given the opportunity to see what you are all about.

Google achieves this high level of satisfaction because it uses more sophisticated algorithms than other search engines and therefore gets better results.  Algorithms enable sites to be checked for content and functionality and websites that conform to the highest standards are more likely to receive a high page ranking and be therefore be clicked on first by impatient web users. Google are also constantly monitoring and adapting their methods to make sure they are in line with customer needs.

It would be very unwise to ignore Google when developing a website or building an internet marketing campaign.  Google should be your friend and paying attention to its needs and working with them will be very beneficial to the success of your business.

Making sure that your site conforms to the needs of the search engines is crucial and the same applies when you are  optimising a site for the web browsers.  Google launched a new web browser, Chrome last year.  Some statistics show that already around 1%-3% of people are using Chrome as their browser.  This is a very high rate considering that it is still in its infancy.  Most people use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but people are turning away from this for many reasons including the recent security problems it had.  Google is an internationally trusted name and wants Chrome to help move web browsers forward.  It remains to be seen how much of the market they can commandeer.

What is important now if you are developing a new site or creating a web campaign is to remember that Google can help you to make your business a success by making sure that it delivers customers to your virtual door.