You may not have known this but the Microsoft Maps experience in the UK was totally different than in the US. The former was based on multiMap, a company Microsoft acquired in 2007. Here’s what the UK experience looks like with multiMap:

Here’s what a Bing Maps version of London looks like:

The Bing version is quite a bit cleaner and more pleasing in my view. Many of the Bing Maps capabilities, such as “Birds Eye” aerial imagery, had been available through multiMap prior to this however.

Now Bing Maps proper will be available in the UK. The Bing Community blog details the changes to the mapping interface and features, including new navigation and mapping layers that can be turned on or off. Many of these improvements parallel recent upgrades made in the US to the Bing Maps interface and features.

There’s a report from Reuters this morning that Microsoft and Yahoo are considering expanding the scope of their search deal “outside the United States”:

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday the company could look to extend its search engine partnership with Yahoo outside the United States, if it gets regulatory approval.

Wasn’t that already the intention? I thought it was a global deal already. European regulators wouldn’t be considering it if it didn’t apply to their markets; they wouldn’t have jurisdiction. So I guess I’m a bit confused I guess.

Regardless, if either the EU or US Department of Justice disapproves the deal it will kill the whole thing globally in all likelihood. I would expect approval although it’s also possible that limitations and conditions could be attached by regulators.

Reportedly Barry Diller, CEO of IAC Corp., wants to sell Ask — perhaps feeling he’s ridden the wave as far as he can (with some disappointment). If so, the most likely buyer would be Microsoft according to widespread speculation. It would allow Microsoft to grab some incremental but meaningful share of the market. The question would be at what price?

Timing is huge here. If Ying/MicroHoo were to gain approval from regulators, or the appearance of forthcoming approval were strong, the value of Ask to Microsoft is less than if the Yahoo deal were not to go through. In the latter case Diller could exact a higher price than in the former. There could be other buyers out there for Ask (e.g., News Corp., Comcast?) but Microsoft is the one with more to gain from adding scale.

According to comScore, Ask maintains a small but meaningful core following:

That respresents 718 million queries in September, according to the metrics firm. However iCrossing recently said it has seen referrals to its clients’ sites from Ask drop “precipitously.”

Postscript: The following was a clarification that I received in email from a Microsoft spokesperson:

[T]he Microsoft-Yahoo! agreement does apply outside the United States. As it’s written, it must be approved by regulators in the U.S. and Europe in order to go into effect. As soon as those regulators give approval, the agreement goes into effect worldwide, although implementation in a specific country is postponed if regulatory approval is required there and it is not yet obtained. But that will not postpone implementation in other places.

This morning Yahoo announced that it was acquiring Maktoob.com, “the leading online community in the Arab world.” According to Yahoo the site has an audience of 16.5 million people. The purchase price has been estimated at between $75 and $100 million and was apparently in the works before the search deal with Microsoft was announced last month. Yahoo said the acquisition is part of a larger strategy to grow its audience in emerging markets and become the “destination of choice” in those locations.

Yahoo described its Maktoob rollout strategy in in a blog post:

Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.

Unless I’m mistaken regarding the scope of the MicroHoo search deal it appears that Microsoft, without spending a dime, gets to piggyback onto the search aspect of the Maktoob acquisition. Accordingly Bing gets the potential reach that the deal provides in the Arab world.

Google has sites for most arabic-speaking countries. The following is a chart (via AdAge) that reflects Google’s market share in a selected group of markets outside the US. It’s dominant in Turkey, the one muslim-world country reflected on the chart:

PaidContent raises the potential issue of media and speech censorship in the Arab world and likens it to China and the problems and criticism that Yahoo has encountered from its cooperation in Chinese government crackdowns.

Yesterday Microsoft and French advertising holding company Publicis Groupe announced that the latter was buying agency Razorfish. Razorfish came to Microsoft as part of the $6 billion aQuantive deal, the largest acquisition in Redmond’s history.

As part of the deal Publicis will give Microsoft 6.5 million shares, amounting to a roughly 3 percent stake in the holding company. The total value of the deal is estimated at $530 million. Just over half of that will be in cash. According to a statement by Publicis CEO Maurice Levy, “Once this acquisition is complete, about a quarter of our revenue will come from digital communication…”

In an earlier, parallel move, Publicis also bought Performics from Google almost exactly a year ago. Performics was part of the DoubleClick transaction.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

As part of the pact, Publicis has entered a “strategic alliance” with Microsoft, which includes a five-year media-buying relationship. In return for buying a certain amount of display and search advertising on Microsoft properties, Publicis will receive better ad rates.

Publicis also has similar sounding deal with Google, though there don’t appear to be any ad-buying quotas or favorable pricing as part of that relationship.

The Microsoft-Publicis deal includes paid search. One question is: how will this deal affect Yahoo’s role selling “premium search” on behalf of both Microsoft and itself? Publicis’ advertisers are all the kind that fall into the “premium” category.

Virtual Earth, which has been somewhat in the shadow of Google Maps and Earth released a large volume of new images for Live Search Maps for a range of countries and cities around the globe.

The imagery allows you to get in very close, so you can see how far your hotel is exactly from the beach in Cannes, for example:

Live Search Maps has not received as much attention as Google Maps but the site has improved greatly over time in terms of usability and accuracy. It’s also much faster than before.

Both Google and Microsoft offer satellite imagery, which is often not that useful to ordinary people in practical situations. Google has StreetView, which can be extremely useful in a range of cases. But Google has nothing between the overhead satellite view and StreetView. Microsoft, despite rumors, doesn’t have a street-level offering (it will over the long term, perhaps through an acquisition) but it does offer a “Birds Eye” view, which as you see in the bottom two images above is much more helpful than satellite imagery.

A month ago, I wrote about my meet up with Google Israel, from my trip to Israel about two months ago. This week, I am back in Israel on a sponsored Blogger Delegation to meet with Israelis and see their way of business and life.

Today, I had free time and used it to meet up with some of the larger search marketing agencies in Israel. The meet up took place at Compucall, one of the largest SEM companies in Israel. Several of those that attended have been in the SEO/SEM space for about ten years and have extensive experience both running an SEM company and performing SEM services. Gilad Sasson (aka Algoholic), Ophir Cohen, Itai Levitan and Olivier Amar are names some of you would know, if you have been in the industry for a while. So, getting a chance to sit down with them and just chat was valuable, to say the least.

Before the Compucall meeting, I went to lunch with Mayer Reich from RankAbove.com and then we went to meet Ophir, the CEO of Compucall. Ophir felt it would be a good idea to have Simon Gelfand of Bukisa and ArticlesBase.com talk about his product offering. That lead into discussion about what search marketers in Israel want. Truth be told, it is extremely similar to what any SEM wants.

In my meet up with Google Israel piece, I wrote about how Google’s presence in Tel Aviv has helped expand the awareness and budgets for SEM services of Israeli-based companies. Itai Levitan expressed to me that he would love to see Yahoo and Microsoft set up offices in Israel as well. I know Microsoft has a very small user base in Israel relative to their US share. But in terms of Yahoo, even setting up a single office with one or two representatives that can help educate, as Google has done, would help agencies sell Yahoo search ads tremendously in the Middle East region. The bottom line is that Israel SEM agencies feel that it would be a win-win for Yahoo and Microsoft to set up offices here.

But what SEMs really want is for Yahoo to fix their search marketing platform. Itai told me that it is almost unusable. Olivier said that pulling reports is almost impossible. Gilad feels that Yahoo should go back to the Overture backend and dump the Panama interface. This is often what I hear from SEMs all over the world, and it is the same issue here in Israel. The word “upsetting” does not do justice to my feelings on Panama. All that time, money and resources put into that product — what a shame.

We also talked about analytics and how SEM companies should sell that as a service to their clients. Yes, Google Analytics is free, but most site owners don’t use it fully. Ophir and Itai’s companies are both Google Analytics certified resellers and they are able to sell these services as a value add. They add value by tagging marketing campaigns properly, using Google Website Optimizer to squeeze out every conversion metric possible and use these tools to make for the most efficient and streamlined marketing campaigns. Ophir explained that SEO was once a free way of gaining traffic to your site, but then agencies evolved and began selling SEO consulting services. Same here with analytics, Ophir said — the industry around analytics is growing and selling the services side of the software is both valuable and credible.

The last question I asked was how does SEO and paid search differ between Hebrew and English languages. Itai told me the main difference for him is that there are less publishers placing AdSense ads on their Hebrew online publications or blogs. You can find AdSense on tons of English content sites, but it has not grown that quickly on Hebrew sites. Since there is less inventory on the Google content network for Hebrew sites, that changes the strategy they deploy for Hebrew campaigns. Ophir said that savvy Israeli companies will show Hebrew AdSense ads for Israeli IPs on sites like TechCrunch. This way, they can advertise their products and services in Hebrew to Israeli users. Here is a picture of TechCrunch showing Hebrew ads on my computer:

Olivier told me that, on the SEO side, Google.co.il is lagging behind Google.com’s organic ranking and algorithms. Shortcuts and tricks that still work on Google.co.il do not work on Google.com.

I did not have a chance to meet all the local SEM/SEOs here in Israel, but hopefully in future visits we can meet up.

Over the past couple of years Microsoft and Google have become increasingly intense (maybe even bitter) rivals. Most recently the two companies used Yahoo as something of a pawn their game. It may be somewhat unfair to all involved to characterize Yahoo as a “pawn.” But Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo primarily as a way to better compete against Google in search and online advertising. And Google offered Yahoo a paid search deal in part to help Yahoo develop a credible alternative to Microsoft’s offer and keep the property away from Redmond.

When the Microsoft offer/acquisition failed, it successfully moved to thwart Google’s efforts to extend its paid search reach to Yahoo and convince the government that Google was a search monopoly. Take that!

Now Google says it’s joining the EU anti-trust case against Microsoft tied to the IE browser:

[W]e believe that we can contribute to this debate. We learned a lot from launching our own Google Chrome browser last year and are hoping that Google’s perspective will be useful as the European Commission evaluates remedies to improve the user experience and offer consumers real choices. Of course creating a remedy that helps solve one problem without creating other unintended consequences isn’t easy – but the more voices there are in the conversation the greater the chances of success.

We don’t know how the Commission’s proceeding will evolve. But we are confident that more competition in this space will mean greater innovation on the web and a better user experience for people everywhere.

Interestingly, the author of the Google blog post is Sundar Pichai, Vice President Product Management, one of the team leads for Chrome. Google’s move to some degree reflects how important it considers Chrome and its adoption to be in the long term for the company. It’s also something of a “poke in the eye” to Microsoft.

The move is likely to add fuel to the fire in the contest between the two companies. Perhaps President Obama should appoint a special peace envoy to address the Google-Microsoft conflict?

India is something of a parallel universe in terms of search and internet activity. It’s a massive and incredibly dynamic market but distinct from the US and Europe in important ways. All the major engines are competing there and it’s also often a testing ground for new products. For example Yahoo’s “Glue Pages” were released and tried there before coming to the US. Now Yahoo has bought a 30 percent stake in a local information database and directory assistance provider in the market: Info Network Management Company, which runs the Call Ezee service. Seen as a way to secure local data and provide a “voice search” (mobile) capability in the Indian market it makes sense.

Separately, Microsoft has chosen Nokia-owned NAVTEQ to provide the underlying data for its Live Seach Maps offering in India.

Microsoft also works with NAVTEQ in the US and Europe. Yahoo also gets its mapping data from NAVTEQ. Google, for its part, is now only working with TomTom-owned TeleAtlas.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed on a common set of principles governing how they intend to do business in countries that restrict free speech and human rights. All three companies have been criticized by rights groups and the US Congress in the past for putting profit over principles and human rights, in China in particular.

According to the article:

Under the new principles, which were crafted over two years, the technology titans promise to protect the personal information of their users wherever they do business and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy,” according to the code. They also commit to scrutinizing a country’s track record of jeopardizing personal information and freedom of expression before launching new businesses in a country and to discussing the risks widely with their executives and board members.

Other Internet giants (e.g., eBay) were not involved in the formulation of these guidelines but may adopt them. Presumably the idea would be to gain as many adherents as possible, not just in the US but internationally. While interpretation and implementation of these principles might prove complicated “on the ground,” they appear to represent a considerable advance over the ad hoc corporate behavior of the past. Still the Journal cites critics who believe that the agreement isn’t far-reaching enough:

“More serious questions have to be asked about these company’s legal obligations,” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA. For instance, he said he would have liked the document to address whether Internet companies are violating U.S. or international laws by complying with requests from certain governments.

US or EU companies doing business in countries that have very different legal and political systems creates a very complex set of issues that span politics, morality and culture. However there need to be core principles and rules that Western companies won’t violate for the sake of making money. Hopefully these guidelines embody them.

Microsoft successfully bid to acquire Greenfield Online for approximately $486 million. But Microsoft isn’t really interested in Greenfield, it was after the company’s subsidiary Ciao GmbH.

Founded in 1999 and acquired by Greenfield in 2005, Ciao is an Munich-based EU comparison shopping site with user reviews.

According to the press release out this morning:

The acquisition signals a further milestone investment for Microsoft in Europe and will see Microsoft increase its European commercial search capabilities as part of its intent to make Microsoft Live Search the premier destination for consumers looking to research and purchase goods and services online, as well as enable merchants to drive greater online sales.

By contrast Microsoft also said in the release that it has “found a buyer” (unnamed) for Greenfield Online’s Internet survey division. Microsoft cites comScore data, saying that Ciao the shopping engine has more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month across several European sites.

Microsoft beat out private equity firm Quadrangle for the deal. There’s a hint of irony here: Yahoo’s former COO Dan Rosensweig is one of Quadrangle’s partners. Quadrangle had been mentioned as a “white knight” potentially during the MicroHoo episode (Rosensweig had even been mentioned as a possible Jerry Yang successor at one point). And, as PaidContent reports, Yahoo has been looking to sell its EU comparison engine Kelkoo, which Microsoft apparently considered buying but passed on.

There’s more discussion at Techmeme.