In todays' world where online Ecommerce is sometimes preferred more than shopping in stores, the top online retailers are missing out significantly in online search engine optimization. With over 88,000 keywords listed of top selling products and services listed in search engines only 33% of those companies "highest-priced keywords appeared in the top 50 natural search engine query results" according to the article. The companies lack of seo also was contributed to the limited amount of content they provided to be search, allowing for too few or many words to be searched and find the company. The same was found true for companies on the Fortune 500 list. However, a little less than half now plan on spending more on SEO finally realizing the benefits of dominated the first page of search engines.

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Site speed has now been added into Google's algorithm as a new ranking factor for websites. Google's algorithm is made up of around 200 factors, and quality of the site should still remain the first concern. Site owners should not compromise quality in order to gain page speed.

This site speed factor was added after "strong lobbying" inside Google because evidence showed that site speed impacts business metrics and also that users prefer fast pages. Google proved this point by purposely slowing down their own search results to determine what the impact would be on the search behavior, and what they saw was less engagement. Google measures the page speeds of sites based on how the page responds to Googlebot and the load time of the page.


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Facebook's search function which provides web results inside of the Facebook application has now outpaced AOL for a greater share of the search market and is close behind Ask.com. This presents both a threat and an opportunity to Microsoft's Bing search product as Facebook (of which Microsoft has a 240M stake)could overtake Bing in it's overall share of the search market. If Microsoft capitalizes on it's investment and strikes a deal to serve Facebook search results, it could be a huge although expensive win against Google.

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Apple is reportedly en route to team up with Microsoft in using their search engine, Bing, as the primary search engine for iPhones. Although this sounds contradictory to most of the ads we're used to seeing with Macs vs. PC computers, it's ultimately Google that Apple sees as their main competitor for the future.
Since the introduction of the Android, and Google's support of this smartphone, Apple has began viewing Google as the top competitor with their new technologies. The main reason for Apple's strong dislike for Google stems from the controversial Eric Shmidt who is Google's current CEO and an ex-board of director for Apple.
Smartphones seem to be stirring up a lot of attention and changing the dynamics of competition dramatically. I'm very curious to see what new commercials may come about from Apple to help promote Bing as a search engine over Google.
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In the month of September, Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has stopped growing. Bing currently holds an 8.96% share of the search engine market while Yahoo stands steady at second with 16.38% and Google holds a dominating lead on the market with a share of 71.08%. Microsoft has poured lots and lots of money into Bing in hopes of consuming a large percentage of Google users with its promises of a "decision" engine but has largely failed. If Microsoft and Yahoo go through with their deal of a Microsoft purchase of Yahoo, Microsoft would eventually raise their stake to 25%.