Microsoft Bing's official logo

Bing’s increased market share means increased opportunities for paid search advertisers as the company continues to take users from competitor and future partner, Yahoo. Thus far, DemandResults’ early forays into Bing PPC advertising have been fruitful in terms of conversion rates, although the advertising administrative interface lacks the flexibility of Google AdWords and is at least a generation behind.

There is still no evidence that Bing is taking market share from Google. That could change quickly if rumors that would make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone and other Apple products materialize.

Yount’s advice started making the rounds on Twitter, and the post was later edited – perhaps due to objections from Bing execs – to read as follows:

“Okay, the original post didn’t work out so well. While the ideas were sound, they were, apparently, a little too specific [sic]. On that note, if you are looking for link building ideas, I suggest reading our blog posts which may provide you with some ideas for developing links”

It’s clear that the advice wasn’t too specific for Web publishers and search marketers – any facts regarding how Bing generates search rankings is welcome. Unfortunately, his comment was too specific for Bing itself, which could be a sign that the company plans to be more cryptic about what Web publishers can do to participate in Bing’s rankings than even Google.  In the past, Google’s Matt Cutts has gone on the record about specific directories and news aggregation sites that meet with the search giant’s approval without censorship from Google execs.

The comment may also shed light on Bing’s treatment of nofollow markup. In 2009 it was widely observed that Bing, like Yahoo, did not seem to observe nofollow. At that time, Yount commented on Bing Community that it was a “known issue that we are working quickly to resolve.”

But if Yount’s comments about indexing links from Yahoo Buzz are correct, then perhaps Bing has rethought the issue. Yahoo Buzz contains nofollow on seemingly every outbound links. This begs the question: do Twitter links count? Do Delicious links count? Since Bing’s policy will affect how Web publishers handle their content, including outbound links, it seems only fair to state definitively what the company’s stance will be.

Bing– Just when Apple’s brilliant and searing marketing schemes had convinced the world that there was nothing less sexy than Microsoft product, the software giant launched Bing – a bodacious, complex and visually stimulating search engine that users seem to like. The latest ComScore stats reveal Bing continuing to gain market share, at 10.3%. Bing continues to roll out a motherload of innoviative, addictive features such as Map Apps and Visual Search, and the Bing API. The company is also gradually releasing guidelines and information for Web publishers.

Google Personalized Search – After experimenting with Personalized Search for four years, the company made personalized search an opt-out service. Apart from the few who will opt-out of personalized search, no two people are experiencing Google Search in quite the same way. It remains to be seen how much this will change SEO strategies.

Real-Time Search – Rather than face the prospect of Twitter emerging as a major search engine competitor, Bing and Microsoft struck separate deals with the service to serve up real-time search results. In addition, both services struck a deal with Facebook to index portions of its service, prompting a surge of Facebook users adjusting their personal privacy settings.

Google PageRank Goes In-House – PageRank has long been at the core of Google’s complex ranking algorithm. The company went so far as to display PageRank scores for Web sites and display them prominently in its Google Tool Bar. Suddenly last year, the company changed course. It began telling Web publishers not to worry about PageRank, then made it impossible for Web publishers to use nofollow to determine how PageRank would be distributed. Finally the company stopped publishing PageRank in most of its toolbars altogether. Given the company’s push toward personalized search, it will be interesting to see whether the building blocks of PageRank stay intact behind the curtain.

News Industry Backlash – Both the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch turned their back on Google this year, citing loopholes that allowed users to access paid content through the search engine and index content while contributing nothing in return. Murdoch is reportedly in negotiations for an exclusive deal with Bing. Exclusive content deals with the world’s major news industries might give Bing the advantage it needs to cut into Google’s market share.

Cross-Domain Canonical Tags – Canonical tags were developed as a way to for Web publishers to control which versions of content should be seen as the “original” version. This helped Google to determine which version to display prominently in search results. Now the tags have been modified to allow publishers with a single piece of content on multiple domains to use the tag as well. In some cases, Google is promoting use of the tags as a replacement for 301 redirects.

Death of the Traditional Search Engine – For years, Yahoo remained reasonably competitive with its aging keyword-based search engine, even as it watched Bay Area rival Google ratchet up both revenues and the complexity of its search algorithm. Even if Microsoft hadn’t acquired Yahoo this year – Bing is set to replace Yahoo’s back end in 2010 – the company has been bleeding market share all year. Given Yahoo Search’s lame-duck image, it will be interesting to see how long Bing waits to replace the front end as well.

StatCounter recently announced that August was Bing’s slowest month in terms of growth since its launch, and the combined market share of Bing and Yahoo fell from 20.36% to 20.14%. Despite this grim review on the waning influence of Bing and Yahoo in North America, the global search engine industry is booming.

According to Juan Carlos Perez, all major search engines managed to accrue positive growth margins since last year:

•    Google: 76.7 billion queries, up 58%
•    Yahoo: 8.9 billion queries, up 2%
•    Baidu: 8 billion queries, up 8%
•    Bing: 3.3 billion queries, up 41%
[source: comScore.com]

Google’s continued dominance is remarkable considering Bing’s summer marketing blitz.

But it’s not just the top American players enjoying an increased market share. As worldwide queries increased 41%, the Russian search engine Yandex enjoyed a 94% growth rate and Latin Americans beat out the Europeans for the most searches per capita.

So what contributed to the growth of the search engine industry as a whole? For one thing, our reliance on search engines for anything and everything ranging from product research to news is greater than ever. Secondly, previously underserved markets are coming online as the Internet becomes more readily available. The latter explains why localized search engines, such as China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex, are booming. In fact, China and Russia are among the few countries where the use of local search engines overshadows Google. The search giants had better increase their local and geo-targeting capabilities if they have any hope of keeping up.

Say what?

The continuation of this nonsense from Yahoo is bound to confuse even many in the industry. Here is what we know as of today:

* Yahoo and Bing are Still Separate Entities – the planned merger will probably not take place until 2010.

* Yahoo Search users will Really Use Bing – Even if the “front-end” is branded Yahoo!, users will really be using Bing. Any “competition” that Yahoo may be planning is purely over window dressing.

* Bing will Power Yahoo Search Marketing – Bing will take over Yahoo’s Search Marketing, replacing it with Microsoft Ad Center, and give Yahoo a cut of the revenue. This is what makes statements of continued competition even more ludicrous.

* Congress May Need to Approve the Deal – Others in the search landscape may wish to force Congress to review the proposed deal on grounds that it might violate anti-trust regulations.

Those are the basics as of now. Stay tuned.