Yahoo Japan switches to Google

Yahoo has used Bing.com’s search results for some time, but this is about to change in at least one country. Yahoo Japan announced today that it has signed a deal to use Google instead of Bing.

Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Japan operations, stated:

Yahoo Japan will use Google search results and Google’s technology for supplying the accompanying search ads. With such partnerships, revenue from the search ads is shared between the Web site and the company that supplies the ads, in this case Yahoo Japan and Google, respectively.

I guess Bing just wasn’t cutting it for Yahoo.

Bing market share up by 7%

According to a report by Experian Hitwise, the market share of Microsoft’s Bing search engine increased by 7% in June. Meanwhile, Google saw a drop in market share of -1%.

Bing’s May market share was 9.23%. With the 7% increase, its new market share for June was 9.85%. Google’s market share only decreased from 72.17% to 71.65%. While Bing’s growth sounds enormous, it really isn’t considering how small of a market share the search engine had to begin with.

Most of Bing’s growth is the result of a large number of visitors performing automotive, health, shopping and travel searches. The market shares of Yahoo Search and Ask.com stayed about the same.

Photo | guitargoa

Microsoft wins Bing domain names

Corporate giant Microsoft won a complaint it filed with the National Arbitration Forum over seven domains: bingcamera.com,bingfinancing.com,directorybing.com,drugstorebing.com,girlsbing.com,marketingbing.com and mediabing.com.

The company claimed that the domains were confusingly similar to its Bing search engine trademark. The registrant, Yaoxin Liu, did not contest Microsoft’s claims.

Personally, I don’t see why Liu registered the names in the first place. What do drug stores, girls, and financing have to do with a search engine? This is just another case of a foolish domainer thinking that just because a domain contains the name of a valuable product it is valuable.

Source | Domain News
Photo | Flickr

Microsoft wins dispute over bingnews.org

Tech giant Microsoft won a dispute filed with the National Arbitration Forum over the domain bingnews.org this week. The company alleged that the name, which was registered by Prabhjot Singh, violated the trademark of its Bing search engine.

Microsoft won the case because of its trademark on “Bing” and because the registrant did not respond, but was this domain really worth going after? It is true that companies must pursue violations in order to keep their marks, but is going after each and every one necessary? In this instance, Singh didn’t appear to be using the name in bad faith. The domain itself isn’t very good, either. I doubt either party could profit from it.

Use Bing to determine how crowded a host is

Shared web hosts are notorious for overcrowding their servers. To save money, they are known to put thousands of customers on a single machine. The problem is, this may not be immediately apparent upon signing up and you may not run into problems for several months– after it is too late to get a refund.

Thankfully, there’s a clever trick you can use to find out just how crowded a host is using Microsoft’s Bing search engine. First, you will need the website address of a site using the host. You can always use your own if you’re already signed up. Next, ping the domain and take note of the IP it resolves to.

Here’s where Bing comes in. Go to Bing.com and search ip:x.x.x.x. Replace the x’s with whatever IP you are looking up. This will show you how many sites are being placed on an IP, which may not reveal all the sites on a single server, but should give some sort of indication.

You can also use this trick to spy on competitors hosting multiple websites on a dedicated server. If you know one of your competition’s sites and would like to see if he has others, just run the domain’s IP through Bing as described.

Source | Search Engine Watch