Search activity around the world jumped 41 percent between July 2008 and July 2009, and Google remains the most popular search engine with 67.5% global market share. Those are some of the stats that comScore shared today about the global search market.

According to comScore, Google is not only No. 1 around the world, but it also continues to gain market share — rising 58% between July 2008 and July 2009. Yahoo is second in overall market share, but its growth is stagnant at just 2% in the same period. Chinese search engine Baidu is third overall, but Microsoft/Bing may eventually surpass it; the latter has seen a 41% increase in searches, while Baidu only grew by 8%.

It’s interesting to see that Ask Network saw almost as much growth (39%) as Microsoft sites. Among the top ten search properties worldwide, comScore says none is growing faster than Russia’s Yandex, which saw a 94% gain in searches over the past year.

The comScore release also includes some interesting stats comparing different world regions. comScore says Europe as a whole does the most searching, with 32.1% of all worldwide search activity. Asia Pacific is second with 30.8% and North America third with only 22.1% of all searches.

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that “Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users.” What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google. TechCrunch offers a bit more detail and speculation about why this might be (i.e., “the law of large numbers”). According to Chikita, the respective click rates are:

• Google: .97 percent
• Yahoo: 1.24 percent
• Bing: 1.5 percent

Bing appears has made some incremental gains in search market share since its launch at the end of May. The two most recent roundups of the numbers are here and here. Even though Bing has been well received and has some momentum it doesn’t appear that will quickly translate into significant market share advances. For that reason Microsoft still needs Yahoo’s reach.

Turning to the seemingly perpetual subject of a search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, AdAge is reporting that a deal, previously described as “imminent,” could be announced this week. The article says the payment structure was a sticking point and will be a revenue share rather than an upfront payment and revenue guarantees, which Yahoo had reportedly wanted:

Execs in Redmond never conceived of the deal as an upfront purchase of Yahoo’s search traffic but as a deal in which Yahoo would be compensated from a share of revenue from the sale of search ads. Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure.

The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media. The deal won’t make it a bigger seller of online advertising but it would allow it to eliminate a search-technology competitor in Yahoo and consolidate roughly 30% of the search marketplace on its own platform — a large enough share, CEO Steve Ballmer seems to believe, to dent Google’s dominance.

If the article is correct then Yahoo would retain the ability to sell search and display to its advertisers, but probably not through an integrated platform. Currently Yahoo sells search via Panama and display advertising through APT; however there was always discussion of integrating the platforms in the near term.

We’ll have to wait to see whether there’s a deal and what the terms are. Any such deal would have to pass muster with regulators before it could be implemented.

On that front, the NY Times ran an article this weekend describing internal conflict within the Obama administration about how aggressive to get with anti-trust policy and prosecutions. The US Department of Justice anti-trust chief Christine Varney, who has described Google previously as “a monopoly,” is apparently facing push-back in her quest to reign in some US corporations. How this internal debate plays out will affect scrutiny of potential deals such as Yahoo-Microsoft.

Lost in the shuffle of yesterday’s report about Bing’s impact on the search industry was some interesting and, for Microsoft, potentially valuable feedback on its new search engine.

The J.P. Morgan report (available to the company’s clients at mm.jpmorgan.com) is based on a survey of 763 U.S. adults and their search behavior during June — Bing’s first month online after replacing Live Search.

When Bing launched, much was made of its new design, showing topics, related searches, and other information in the left-side column. The decision to organize search results into categories earned Bing a lot of buzz, too, along with the web page previews that appear to the right of some results.

But for all the talk and promotion of Bing’s new design, the J.P. Morgan study suggests it’s the relevancy that matters.

When asked to name Bing’s greatest strength, relevance of results was a clear No. 1, well ahead of “variety of results.” In fact, design-related choices like “user interface” and “organization of the results page” tied for fourth with less than 10% each.

On one hand, this is good news for Microsoft that so many people are saying relevance is the best thing Bing has going for it. On the other hand, it also validates Google’s approach all along: relevant results first and foremost, even at the expense of frills and design. And as long as searchers believe Google has the most relevant results, all the new design ideas in the world may not make a difference.

At the Rimm-Kaufman Group, we’ve spent a good bit of time over the last year studying the impact of multi-channel marketing on PPC advertising. By studying all traffic to our client’s sites we can determine how often multi-channel interactions happen, how the different channels behave, how they’re involved in multi-touch interactions and tendencies to be first rather than last. Armed with this data, we can then see how different allocation schemes impact perceptions of each marketing program.

Previously, we tried to put the “PPC Buying Cycle“—touches on multiple PPC ads—into its proper perspective. Turns out it’s a pretty small effect. Unfortunately, many agencies continue to hype the effect as they seem solely interested in having their clients spend more rather than spend wisely. Is the same true with the “Cross-Channel Buying Cycle?” Yes and no.

As we look at the data across a number of multi-channel retailers we’ve found that marked differences in the way consumers use each channel mean that cross-channel interactions have profound impact on some channels and not much on others.

Likelihood of multiple touches

Channels that have the greatest likelihood of multiple touches have the most potential to be impacted by changing allocation from last touch to something more advanced. Our data suggests that the channels most likely to involve multiple touches are affiliates, comparison shopping engines and email.

Consumers who buy after clicking a competitive (non brand) paid search ad are the least likely to have been to the site previously through a different channel. In our research, only 10 to 20% of buyers who touched a PPC ad last came through any other channel previously. Compare this to affiliate traffic, where 60 – 75% of buyers came through another channel first.

This means shifting from last touch to shared credit to first touch allocation only impacts 10 to 20% of PPC orders, while the same shift has a much larger impact on the perceived value of affiliates, comparison shopping engines and email.

Initiators versus followers

If channels were all equally likely to be first as last in multichannel interactions we might find that the net effect of changing allocation schemes is zero. That turns out not to be the case. Some channels are far more likely than others to be the first touch when more than one channel is used.

Competitive PPC is much more likely to be the first touch when there are multiple touches involved. This means that moving credit from last touch towards earlier touches does tend to “help” PPC. Natural search benefits from this same phenomena.

In contrast affiliates are almost always the last touch in multi-touch interactions, meaning shifts away from last touch credit have a decidedly negative impact on the perceived value of affiliate programs. Comparison shopping engines and email tend to suffer as well.

The net effect

What we’ve found is that these two factors together mean that yes, in fact, the perception of PPC benefits from crediting earlier touches in the cycle. However, because fewer PPC orders are in play than other channels—that first effect—the change is smaller than many folks seem to think. Indeed, in our research moving credit from 100% to the last touch to 100% to the first touch, competitive PPC only picks up 5 to 10%. Less dramatic allocation shifts take those numbers down even further.

Shop.org is organizing a group to define standards for credit allocation. I’m going to throw my name in the hat to join said group, but I fear that some of the folks in the group may be more interested in trumpeting the effect than measuring it. We shall see.

In the meantime, I’ll post more of our findings over on RKGBlog.

The only thing Google has to fear is fear itself. The immortal words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt sum up the findings of a J.P. Morgan report published today and shared with Search Engine Land, “Understanding the Impact of Bing on the Search Industry.” (It’s available to the company’s clients at mm.jpmorgan.com.) The bottom line: Of 763 people (ages 18 and up) surveyed, roughly 98% will not be making Bing their primary search engine.

Microsoft budgeted $80 million to promote Bing — some of which seemed to be money well-spent, and some not so well-spent. The J.P. Morgan study shows that Microsoft’s publicity blitz worked to some degree: 59% of respondents had heard of Bing. But out of that group, only 42% had tried it — that represents only 25% of the overall survey respondents. It suggests that Microsoft’s ad campaign reached people, but didn’t convince many to give Bing a try. In fact, it seems there was a lot of “tasting” going on: Of the people who tried Bing, 61% used it five times or less during June.

Further, the study showed that searchers who gave Bing a try during weren’t switching from Google (nor from Yahoo, to a lesser degree) — they mainly came from AOL and Ask.

According to the report, Microsoft’s biggest barrier is that most searchers are happy these days. Some 63% of respondents said they see no weaknesses in their current search experience. J.P. Morgan estimates that Bing will only see a 2.3% growth in overall market share going forward. It’s not unlike the recent findings from a small focus group in New York that suggested searchers liked Bing, but those using Google wouldn’t switch. Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have been right when he went on TV and said Bing can’t buy search share, they’ll have to earn it.

The study was done between July 3rd and July 6th — about a month after Bing launched. The 763 people who replied were remarkably representative of the Internet population as a whole: 62% said Google was their primary search engine, 23% said it was Yahoo, and 7% said it was Bing. Those figures are right in line with the regular statistics published by companies like Hitwise, comScore, and Nielsen.

Ultimately, while the study offers a strong peak into searcher behavior, it’s important to remember that Bing is only a month old and habits are hard to break. As Danny Sullivan wrote yesterday, we’re still in “too early to say” territory, and any conclusions about Bing’s future are probably premature.

Our love affair with celebrity continues, as evidenced by news today from Yahoo that it served about five million streams of the Michael Jackson Memorial ceremony. That makes it the most streamed event in Yahoo’s history, surpassing the inauguration of President Obama in January, when Yahoo served 1.8 million streams.

While watching the event online, many viewers were also searching for information about the people involved. People not watching a live stream were looking for videos of what they missed. Yahoo says it saw spikes in searches for

• Elvis Presley’s funeral
• the casket company that made Michael Jackson’s casket
• Jackson’s daughter, Paris, and video of her speaking
• Brooke Shields and video of her eulogy
• names such as Pastor Luscious Smith, Reverend Al Sharpton, and Shaheen Jafargholi, along with other Jackson family members and friends

Most of the searches listed on Google Trends are also Jackson-related, and many mirror the types of queries Yahoo reported. A Google News spokesperson says search activity today was “significant, but not to the same extent we experienced the day he passed.”

Meanwhile, a Facebook spokesperson says there was plenty of interest in the Jackson ceremony there, too, but not as much as during the Obama inauguration. There were about 800,000 status updates related to the live coverage of today’s memorial, far less than the 1.8 million status updates on inauguration day with the word “Obama.” Facebook points out, though, that the inauguration was widely publicized for months – much longer than the Michael Jackson ceremony today.

Search and display. One often hears how they work together, but there’s still plenty of skepticism out there, especially in the SEM community, about the value of display advertising. Indeed, during the recession search has prospered (relatively speaking) while display has suffered. But a new study from the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and comScore argues that display ads can have a major impact on search and consumer engagement. The study, called “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online” (pdf), compares the behaviors of consumers exposed to online display advertising vs. those in a control group.

According to the press release and supporting materials, the study “assessed 80 of the biggest branding campaigns across 200 of the most trafficked sites over a month’s time analyzing consumer behaviors of those Internet users who were exposed to display advertising . . . and measured three consumer actions: 1) searches conducted related to the advertisers’ brands; 2) site visitation, the traffic driven to the advertisers’ site and 3) consumer spending, the e-commerce transactions related to the advertisers’ brands.” The top-level findings were as follows:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

Standard CTRs for banners and other display ads range from .06% to .17% according to DoubleClick data presented in the OPA slides.

Among the interesting things about the study, the OPA is arguing that clicks are essentially a false metric for other than DR advertisers. Previously Tacoda did research released early in 2008 on online click behavior and found that the “heavy clickers” were not necessarily a desirable audience:

Called “Natural Born Clickers,” the study reveals that a very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior.

Consistent with this earlier data, according to the Silent Click report:

• 16% of [the] internet population represents 80% of ad clicks
• Clickers are predominately younger (24-44 age range) and lower income (under $40K)

The vast majority of those exposed to display advertising in the study did not click on ads but later performed activities, such as (trademark and brand) searches and site visits, that indicated they had in fact been influenced by the display ads:

Those exposed to the display ads were also considerably more engaged than those in the control group:

These data are further segmented by site content category (news, sports, business news, entertainment) and other variables such as user income. The bottom line is that a CTR is not a good measure of consumer intent, engagement or value as a metric for display advertising. The data also affirm what many other studies have also shown: display and search can work together and display provides a significant lift to search.

Beyond proving the value of display the OPA has spearheaded the development and now launch of new, more creatively engaging ad units making their debut around the internet today. Among the new ad units is the “push down” (below). These larger units provide more opportunities for interesting creative and consumer engagement. Here’s one for Bing on the NY Times website:

In the end, then, one of the potential substitute metrics (beyond CTRs) to evaluate the success of an online display/branding campaign is search volumes on branded keywords.

An extraordinary day of breaking news on Thursday led to record-breaking traffic spikes as people searched online for information about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and, especially, Michael Jackson. And just like their counterparts in traditional media, the news divisions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing responded with sometimes extraordinary measures to ensure they were giving searchers the most accurate and current news available.

Below, a look not only at the extreme traffic spikes that took place, but also an insider’s look at what happened as each search engine — and Wikipedia — grappled with the demands of a nearly unprecedented surge of interest in the day’s breaking news.

Google: “An all-hands-on-deck moment”

“Thursday was a pretty out-of-the-ordinary day.” That’s how spokesperson Gabriel Stricker describes the scene at Google’s headquarters while millions of people were online trying to find out what happened to Michael Jackson. Google has written about what it calls an “outpouring of searches” about Jackson. Stricker says Google saw a wide range of queries — like “michael jackson died” and “michael jackson hoax” — that peaked at about 3:00 pm PST.

The rush of traffic was so severe that Google initially thought it was under attack.

“That was an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Stricker says, “until we were able to determine that the original assessment was wrong, that it wasn’t an attack.” The massive spike in searches “tricked” Google News into showing an interstitial error page for about 25 minutes.

Google says the mistaken attack was its only hiccup yesterday, and that they saw no need to manually adjust results so that searchers got the right information. “The spike in traffic is an indication that we accomplished what we set out to do,” Stricker says. “People came to Google looking for an answer to a specific — and in this case, rather sad — question, and they got it quickly.”

Google hasn’t said yet how Thursday’s traffic compares to other important news events. Their blog post does say that Google “saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” And Google Trends labeled Thursday’s searches for “michael jackson died” as “volcanic.”

Yahoo: “This demanded that we take our coverage to the next level”

Thursday was a record-breaking day for Yahoo. Their story, “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital,” received 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, making it their highest-clicking story ever.

Yahoo also revealed that Yahoo News set an all-time record with 16.4 million visitors, beating the old record of 15.1 million set last election day. The four million visitors between 3-4 pm PDT set an hourly record.

Things were no less busy inside Yahoo headquarters. Richard Vega, Editor of Yahoo News, also described it as an all-hands-on-deck situation, going so far as to bring in staff on their days off. “After we saw initial reports that Michael Jackson had died, we immediately devoted all resources to the story and called staffers at home to help,” Vega says.

As a content destination and a news organization with writers and editorial staff, Yahoo took a more hands-on approach to packaging information for its users — even sending staff out to report live from Los Angeles. Says Vega: “We made sure to include the main stories and sidebars from AP and Time magazine. We had video clips from ABC News. We created slideshows. Since Michael Jackson had died in L.A., we sent out two editors to the UCLA Medical Center to interview and take photos of the fans who were gathering outside the hospital. In addition, one editor sent Twitter updates from the scene. This was a unique moment in history, which demanded that we take our coverage to the next level.”

Yahoo News recorded 175 million page views on Thursday, its fourth-highest total (after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike). A blog post in Yahoo Music has received more than 21,500 comments as I write this. And Yahoo says Flickr has seen more than 4,000 Michael Jackson-related photo uploads in the past day. One poignant Flickr photo shows Times Square at a standstill as the offline world reacted the same way we did online.

Bing: “We rolled out a ‘news go big’ experience”

Like its competitors, the Bing search team was paying close attention to Thursday’s news as it unfolded, and doing its best to make sure searchers got the information they wanted. Jamil Valliani, a senior program manager for Bing, and Todd Schwartz, group product manager for Bing, said their effort included “the extended search team, including engineering, product management and marketing.”

They say Bing “definitely saw a spike” in traffic on Thursday, but they don’t have any data to share at the moment. “We get more feedback and see more engagement from consumers for bigger news stories, so we do have to spend more time than average reviewing this feedback and taking it into consideration.”

Some of the feedback for Bing’s Jackson-related search results wasn’t good. On Search Engine Journal, for example, Loren Baker pointed out that Bing’s search results led off with Michael Jackson photos, while news links were at the bottom of the search results page:

Valliani and Schwartz describe what happened: “In general, our rule is not to interfere with the normal algorithmic operation and to note any interesting or unexpected behaviors to be addressed in future upgrades of the product. The only exception to this is for major news events where we see unusual volume, and the results are clearly not being ranked in a relevant way. In these cases we can respond more quickly to how we perform the ranking. This was the case yesterday with Michael Jackson in particular, where we quickly rolled out what we call a ‘news go big’ experience to make sure we were providing appropriate coverage for this significant and sad event.”

Search experiences on other sites

The extraordinary online search for information about Thursday’s news wasn’t limited just to the major search engines. The Wikipedia page about Michael Jackson saw an enormous jump in pageviews on Thursday, and even more on Friday according to Grok.se, an unofficial Wikipedia traffic stats site.

Since Wikipedia pages are open to community editing, Wikipedia took unusual steps to deal with the situation as rumors spread Thursday afternoon.

“The Jackson page was temporarily ‘protected’ to prevent any editing as soon as the rumors started,’ according to Wikipedia administrator Jonathan Hochman. “There was a community discussion about how to handle that. The idea was to prevent the article from going back and forth, or being the subject of a hoax, until the story was verified.”

Twitter was a hotbed of Jackson-related searching and conversation. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times that there were nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke. This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”

Likewise, Facebook reported a tripling of the number of status updates in the aftermath of Jackson’s death.

The final word about this extraordinary day belongs to AOL, whose AIM messaging service was knocked offline for 40 minutes Thursday. Their statement begins like this: “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

Postscript: See Google Thinks Michael Jackson Died At Age 65 In 2007 for how Google’s currently listing the “wrong” Michael Jackson in response to searches for “michael jackson died.”

Mobile search engine Taptu has just launched a free iPhone app (”alternative search machine”). It’s the first iPhone-specific search engine but Taptu has been doing mobile search for some time. According to the company the engine crawls the web and indexes “iPhone friendly pages” that are optimized for the device. The index is much smaller than a conventional search engine but “growing every day” according to Taptu.

It offers “preview cards” that create a very Palm Pre-like experience. You flick or horizontally scroll through preview pages (showing mostly real-time images of the sites) and then touch/click to go to the source page. There are no links in search results accordingly. Here’s a video showing how it works:

There’s also a cascading menu that allows for related searches or refinement by content source with a single touch.

In a related bit of news comScore and AdMob put out data today from a survey that involved roughly 7,300 US consumers (ages 13 and older) on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The study revealed demographic differences between the groups, but the most important and striking finding released showed that a substantial minority of the survey respondents (40+ percent) are going online with their mobile devices more often than through a PC.

While this group arguably represents the “bleeding edge” (to use the cliche) of the mobile market, this behavior can’t be ignored by advertisers. As we argued during the SMX Advanced panel on mobile PPC, you’ve got to experiment with mobile today to understand it — because there may be a day when there are more searches on mobile devices than on the PC.

That’s already true in selected developing nations according to Yahoo. I’ve got a little more on the AdMob data on LocalMobileSearch.

Satya Nadella, SVP of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, gave the morning keynote at the Microsoft Search Summit. It was an introduction to and tour of Bing and adCenter upgrades and improvements. Nadella began with a review of the search market and its growth. He was initially apologetic to the audience about Microsoft’s market share. He proceeded to outline the problems with the current state of search that Bing tries to address.

Nadella said “only 1 in 4 queries deliver successful results.” This is based on Microsoft’s observation of search user behavior from historical Live Search logs and its toolbar installs (where they get visibility on search behavior on other engines). Repeat queries or refinements and abandonments indicate current dissatisfaction or deficiencies of the current state of search.

“In the quest to find the perfect search engine, we still have a lot of room.”

Nadella explains that people engage in long search sessions. Almost 50% of time spent searching is spent during sessions longer than 30 minutes. But those sessions, according to Microsoft, represent only 5% of search sessions overall. He also showed the following consumer data focused on Microsoft’s four strategic verticals.

The slide shows 66% of people are using search more frequently as a decision-making tool; and in their strategic verticals:

• 75% product purchases
• 62% Local activity
• 45% Flight or hotel
• 43% Healthcare

Nadella explains Bing’s “task orientation” and begins a hands-on walk-through of the site. He shows the homepage and discusses its strong “emotional appeal.”  He says that among consumers it’s one of the most liked features of the site. Then he takes us on a tour of the site and concretely points out the features (e.g., Best Match, Instant Answers) that are designed to minimize clicks and respond to typical user behaviors.

He shows a local search “San Diego Events” and points out a range of information about events but also about San Diego more broadly. He discusses health search and authoritative answers, with health-related content and articles that can be read on the SERP. Nadella goes on to discuss shopping and the range of information that can be obtained on the SERP without having to click away. In general, what these and other examples collectively show is the deeper integration of verticals and related vertical content into the search result (to avoid too many clicks and the back button).

In local Nadella pointed to “one-click directions” from the SERP (showing directions from multiple starting points) as a differentiator.

Overall Nadella gave an impressive presentation. Although I don’t discuss these things, he also spoke about the forthcoming Bing marketing campaign (radio, online, TV). He showed the “Hawaii” commercial, which I thought was funny and effective. He also spoke at some length about adCenter improvements. Those changes will be addressed on this site in coming weeks and months. Nadella ended by soliciting honest feedback.

At the end of the session there were a number of questions, many dealt with social media and Twitter and how Bing was going to address that phenomenon.

Nadella said that he felt passionate about the need to incorporate the social graph with the web graph. He said that Microsoft has a lot of work to do in this area.  He discusses potential re-ranking of results based on one’s social graph. But he also says that many searchers are looking for more comprehensive information than what one’s friends have to say. He argues that the social graph works better in some categories than others (e.g., Local as opposed to Health).

In response to a question about neutrality regarding working with non-Microsoft products, Nadella says that Bing will absolutely have to work with all browsers and platforms. He says that MSN, Bing and Windows Live are three brands that have distinct objectives (presumably Bing will be the neutral or “agnostic” one).