Bing and Google have both announced that they will incorporate tweets into their search results.  Bing made the announcement yesterday, and Google today.  The purpose of these deals is to bring real time search capabilities to the two search engines.  This will benefit people looking for updates on breaking news, reviews on just-released products, and any other situation in which information quickly grows stale.

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Google Will Be Going Through A Major Algorithm Change

Google Caffeine has a lot of chatter, but some folks may still want to know what it is all about.

Their labeling the project as “Caffeine”.  Google Caffeine is said to be more accurate, faster and relevant search engine results.  BING has just been in the works with many contracts and has become a major competitor (or sales challenge) for Google with all the attention it has been receiving.

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Microsoft and Yahoo recently announced a deal on search engine marketing. According to the terms of the deal, Microsoft is essentially acquiring Yahoo’s search business. Yahoo’s search advertisers will use Microsoft’s adCenter platform, and searches performed on Yahoo and its properties will serve up results from Bing.

Timeline
This deal will not affect advertisers or searchers for quite some time. The deal first has to gain regulatory approval, which it might fail to do given the denial last year of Yahoo’s proposed deal with Google. If the deal is approved, the issues surrounding such a massive integration likely mean that the deal will not go live before 2010.

Effect On The Market
According to the latest data from Compete, Google dominates the search market with a 73.9% share, compared with 16.6% for Yahoo and 6.5% for Microsoft. That represents an increase of 9.5 percentage points for Google over the past year, and a corresponding fall for Yahoo and Microsoft. It is very possible that this deal will slow or even reverse that trend. Yahoo gets incredible traffic to its various properties, and Bing’s search results have been competitive with Google’s in my testing so far, aside from a few hiccups in its first week. If consumers on Yahoo’s properties learn that searches done from those properties will match or exceed what they would get from Google, then Microsoft/Yahoo could definitely increase share.

What Does This Mean For Advertisers?
Until this deal is approved and put into place, nothing. If it happens, however, it will affect advertisers in a number of ways. First, advertisers will see Microsoft/Yahoo as a more viable alternative to Google, leading more of them to advertise on Microsoft/Yahoo. This extra demand might push up the cost-per-click currently seen on Yahoo & Bing, but probably not by much. Second, Microsoft’s adCenter offers better fine-tuning of PPC campaigns than Yahoo Panama, so search engine marketing experts will be able to create more effective campaigns than those currently appearing on Yahoo.
The most important effect, however, depends on how Bing evolves. As I noted in my last blog, Bing has effectively reduced available impressions by serving limited numbers of ads to searchers who tend not to click on them. This has reduced traffic for some of our clients, and we know that other SEM companies have seen this trend, too. If Microsoft doesn’t change Bing before the deal goes into effect, this impression reduction would change from an annoyance into a major problem. Path Interactive will continue to consult with Microsoft in order to prevent this from happening.

On Our 2009 Watch List: New Generic Domain Names

Earlier this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN)  announced a plan to allow new generic level domain names (gTLDs) in addition to current ones like .com, .org, .edu, etc.  Under the plan, gTLDs would be virtually unlimited.  For instance, Ford could be not only ford.com, but also ford.cars, ford.auto, ford.road, ford.ford, etc.

ICANN states that “the expansion will allow for more innovation, choice and change to the Internet’s addressing system, now constrained by only 21 generic top-level domain names,” and considers this program to be especially important to its efforts to make domain names available that could contain non-ASCII characters or letters (for instance, Arabic or Chinese).

Generic Domain Name’s Don’t sit Well with Goverments and Large Corporations

There is significant opposition to the plan, especially from corporations and governments.  The opposing arguments mostly center around two issues: the potentially enormous additional cost to companies that wish to defend their trademarks and brand names, and the possibility that adding hundreds or thousands of new gTLDs could undermine the stability and security of the Domain Name System (DNS).

The Effect On Large Companies Can Cost

Large companies already have to buy thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of domain names to protect their brands – buying not only their trademarked names, but also common misspellings across all 21 current gTLDs.  For instance, Google owns not just google.com, but also g00gle.com and google.biz.   Depending on the number of new domain names, the price companies pay to control domain names could definitely skyrocket.

So, How Many New gTLDs Will There Be?

No one can predict how many new domain names will pop up because it won’t be cheap to register a new gTLD.  Companies wishing to register new gTLDs will need to pay $185,000 to submit the application and $60,000 each year to run the domain.  In addition, if a company is not already a registry, it will have to pay $50,000 to be evaluated.  In other words, a company will need to be sure that there will be a lot of customers in order to apply for a generic domain.  That said, the way to make a fortune is to see opportunity where others don’t, so don’t be surprised if some surprises pop up like .crafts, .florist, or .pizza.

Next week: the proposal’s possible effects on search engine marketing.

James Connell is Search Director at Path Interactive, a NYC-based interactive marketing firm.