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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Mar. 9, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of March 6, 2006

1124 - March 8, 2006 - 3.27 PM EST

BenQ to equip its phones with Google software

BenQ Mobile continues its product offensive designed to show it has shrugged off some of its problems inherited from Siemens, the owner of the mobile phone business until last summer.

BenQ displayed six new multimedia handsets, taking its number of new models this year so far to twelve and said it had done a deal to sell phones from April with preinstalled Google software for local information searches.

BenQ Mobile, a unit of Taiwanese technology group BenQ, also said at the CeBIT technology fair it would start selling handsets in April that could download software upgrades over the air, eliminating the need for customers to connect to the Internet or take their phone into a shop for updates.

BenQ took over the failing mobile phone business from German conglomerate Siemens last summer. It is now the world's sixth-biggest maker of mobile handsets.

Posted on Businessblog™

1123 - March 8, 2006 - 11.31 AM EST

Vertical search engines are back!

Well in fact, they never left! Rapid Intelligence is testing a variety of new topic based vertical search engines. Rapid Intelligence is based in Sydney, Australia. Their special expertise is in the fields of computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and evolving algorithms.

Factbites performs your search on the basis of your whole topic area, not just your keyword. In this way it can return relevant results on your topic that don’t necessarily mention the word you searched for.

On their web site, Rapid Intelligence calls Factbites a search engine/encyclopedia hybrid. Unlike a regular search engine, the search results are presented as a summary of each web page, which you can read from beginning to end.

The summaries contain real sentences, not just keywords or excerpts. This way you get a clear picture of what each destination site is about.

Posted on Businessblog™

1122 - March 8, 2006 - 10.29 AM EST

Microsoft launches its new Windows Live Search

Microsoft launches its beta version of Windows Live Search, which uses the same technology as MSN Search but will become the company's main search offering.

"In the future there will be just one search experience, when we come out of beta with Windows Live Search, which won't be years" from now, said Adam Sohn, director of MSN global sales.

Sohn was making a reference to Google, whose products often stay in beta for years.

Microsoft merged MSN with Windows last summer and announced plans in November to offer Web-based services under the Windows Live name.

Windows Live will combine e-mail, blogging, instant messaging and other services. MSN, meanwhile, will focus on content and media, Sohn said.

"This is the second major chapter in our overall effort to drive innovation in search," Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of MSN information services, said in an interview Monday.

Posted on Businessblog™

1121 - March 7, 2006 - 3.46 PM EST

Paid search ad spending to hit $10 billion in 3 years

eCommerce industry analyst firm eMarketer predicts that paid search advertising spending will hit $10 billion in three years from now. For 2006, the company expects US paid search ad spending in the US will increase by 26 percent, up seven percentage points less than last year's 33 percent gain.

After triple-figure growth rates earlier in 2001 and 2002, slower growth rates will prevail through the rest of the decade, eMarketer said.

"Clearly our growth rates are slowing," said Google's chief financial officer, George Reyes, on February 28, 2006, noting that the company's revenue growth is decelerating because of the "law of large numbers." In other words, hyper-growth can't be sustained forever. And as Google goes, so goes the search marketing industry.

eMarketer's David Hallerman, Senior Analyst and author of the new report Search Marketing I: Spending and Metrics, finds the slowing growth rate expected.

"As this market matures, the search engines will need to refine and improve their products, which will create greater opportunities for search marketers to unearth more effective niches," says Mr. Hallerman.

"Such maturity will include more vertical search for better targeting, and a sharp rise in local search, as both users and advertisers increasingly realize that the Internet is the best place to make contact with any kind or size of business."

Posted on Businessblog™

1120 - March 6, 2006 - 5.22 PM EST

Google growing faster than Yahoo and MSN

Headcount numbers for the three largest search engines prove that Google is growing faster than Yahoo and MSN.

The three search engines have been growing at a fast rate since the year they started.

It is surprising to see that Microsoft is more than six times larger than Yahoo and eleven times as big as Google, at least in terms of employees.

Microsoft has been around for many years and consumes much of the statistics. Here are the latest numbers:

Google is growing much faster than Yahoo. Over the last two years, Google's average employee growth rate has been about 100 percent, while Yahoo's was at 34 percent, and Microsoft's was pegged at 10 percent.

If the current growth rates continued, Google would surpass Yahoo's headcount in 2007, and Google would be bigger than Microsoft in 2010.

This seems a little too optimistic to be true. It will likely become harder and harder for Google to double its headcount every year.

Microsoft grew 80 percent on average in the 1980s (49 percent if you don't consider 1981, when the company more than tripled in size). For the 1990s, its average yearly headcount growth dropped to 24 percent.

Posted on Businessblog™

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