SnapHawk Blog

Think how your behavior has changed. Looking up a telephone number... Yellow Pages, online search, or mobile phone? The Yellow Pages hard copy is significantly smaller than it was even 2 years ago. Need information about a customer or a competitor. Where do you go? Shopping for a product or service. Where do you go?

The shift has happened from offline marketing to online marketing. Newspapers, television, radio and magazines have lost substantial segments of their audiences. Consumers and businesses have shifted their behavior from traditional offline to online and this shift will continue at a rapid pace...

In February 2010. the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission approved the partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo! announced in July 2009 to consolidate their search engines into a single powerhouse that will potentially rival Google.  According to the agreement, Microsoft’s Bing will now serve as the search engine on every Yahoo! site.  Additionally, Microsoft will take charge of all paid ads while Yahoo! will regulate sales support for high volume advertisers.  So what does this mean to those in the search engine marketing business?

Essentially, if this partnership means Microsoft and Yahoo! can better compete with Google, then it will ideally mean lower prices for online advertisers across the Web.  Considering Google currently receives 65% of search engine queries, compared to Microsoft’s 17% and Yahoo’s 11%, this new partnership could start to chip away at Google’s overwhelming dominance.  If that starts to happen, Google will inevitably have to lower their paid-ad prices, making the clients of search-engine marketing agencies around the world ecstatic.