Thirty Helens Agree - Headlines are not the story

The New York Post, one of America’s least reliable sources for news, has a great story today - Fear Grips Google!

The basic point of the article is that Google is so afraid of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine that…

…

…

Sorry, I had to catch my breath from laughing so hard…  Okay…

…that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google - along with Larry Page (pictured to the left) - has assembled a team of engineers to determine how Bing works.  Of course, Competitive Intelligence is important, and I’m sure that Google tries to reverse-engineer each of the competiting search engines.  But “Fear gripping Google” over Bing?  Seriously doubtful…

And, even better, in a different article, the Post bashes Bing over the head because it’s too easy to find porn with it.  Come to think of it, Microsoft should use that to promote the ‘Decision Engine’…  “Bing:  More porn than Google”.

Bing… Bang… THUD!

So, what does $80-$100 million in marketing buy you?  Well, if you’re Microsoft, that’s enough to bring about twice the amount of traffic to their new Bing search engine than their old, MSN Live search engine.  The good news - that’s enough to take Bing passed Yahoo as the 2nd most popular search engine around!

The bad news - that’s still about 40x less traffic than Google.

The badder news - All that traffic went back to Yahoo after 1 week.

The baddest news - The Bing search engine still sucks.

Microsoft’s entire strategy here is backwards…  training-their-fire at Yahoo makes about as much sense as Apple ignoring Microsoft Windows dominance and marketing Macs to Commodore 64 users…

Yahoo has, about, 5% of the search engine market, Microsoft - about half that at 2.5%…  Google?  87.62% market-share for all search engine traffic.  Yahoo is, essentually, dying…  the days of Yahoo making waves in search are long-gone.  MS would be better off shooting for Google and  just forget about Yahoo.

This just in - MySpace to get pwn3d by Google

A couple of days ago, I made some Fearless Predictions about the future of social networking, including the observation that MySpace was becoming the new AltaVista… and today, we have news that MySpace and Google are negotiating a new deal for how MySpace will display Google advertising.  A few years ago, when MySpace was hot-as-the-sun, Google ended up paying $900m, or about $300m/year.  These days, MySpace is losing users and traffic, at a clip of about 20% per year, and now MySpace needs Google much more than Google needs MySpace…

Sources say that while Google has gotten plenty of advertising impressions (MySpace uses any excuse to put Google search results and Google ads in front of users), those ads don’t convert well. Add to that the dramatic shrinking of MySpace page views and the predictive modeling gets ugly.

Google knows MySpace is shrinking by about 20% a year. And unlike the last time they negotiated with News Corp., they now have nearly three years of actual operating history with the company. They’ve got real data to value the deal.

Unless Microsoft or perhaps Yahoo comes in and bids very aggressively, MySpace is going to get slaughtered in the negotiations.

Like I said, MySpace = AltaVista…  doomed.

Don’t be evil! Oh, wait…

For years, Google’s corporate motto was, interestingly enough, “Don’t be evil”.  Interesting in that Google hasn’t been exactly angelic…  they allow pretty much anyone to infringe on trademarks, unless that trademark happens to be owned by Google.  Recently, researcher Ben Edelman discovered a pattern of Google inflating performance metrics for its AdWords advertising platform, and in such a way that - conveniently - allows Google to bill clients for traffic, Edelman claims, that the advertiser should have received free.  Now, it appears that Google is turning their mathematical algorithms to determine…  wait for it…  which of their existing employees are likely to quit and go to a different employer.

I guess it’s a good thing that Google has, quietly, dropped “Don’t Be Evil” as their motto…