Yesterday brought BIG news in the search industry as Yahoo’s CEO and cofounder, Jerry Yang made his intention to step down known. Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost covered the announcement and quoted Yang’s reasoning:

“Having set Yahoo on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation.”

So Yang will not be leading any more deals with Microsoft or Google, but will remain a well known face at the company. As for who will fill his shoes… well, we’ll have to wait and see, but it sounds like they’re considering both internal and external candidates for the position. No matter who finally gets this spot, they’ll have to have some years of industry success to get Yahoo back on the right track. We’ll keep hoping!

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO

So the dust finally settled from the AdTech show, our bodies have healed from the exhaustion, we have caught up on our emails and follow-up has begun! We can safely say that this has been the busiest AdTech we have ever attended and we enjoyed every minute of it.  With the way business is these days, you can become the closest of business partners without ever physically seeing each other: it gets the job done, but at the same time something is missing…is it not being able to see their facial expression when you hit them with a funny joke?  Perhaps… but business was founded on an institution of face to face and hand to hand communication, which is why we look forward to these shows so much.  There really is something to be said for finally meeting that client you’ve been working with for 2 years or meeting a future business partner for the first time.  You give your fingers a rest and do what comes natural; talk.

Thank you to all who came by to visit us at the show to talk business or just to enter for the iPhone.  A big congrats to Jason Conquest from Idearc Media for winning the iPhone in our business card drawing!

Here are some pics of our crew hard at work at the show…

Of course we do our best to give everyone our attention at the booth, but if things got a little too busy at the show, please reach out to us directly and we’ll be glad to connect with you: 800.710.7009 or info@abcsearch.com.

-The ABCSearch Team

Noah Mallin’s recent post on Search views caught our attention. Did you see it? In SEO: The Peanut Butter Cup Principle - Where’s the Love for SEO in a PPC World?, he weighs in on which vehicle is better, PPC or SEO. The piece notes the huge difference in spending: $9.1 billion on paid search versus $1.3 billion on SEO.

In the Halloween spirit, Mallin puts forth his Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Theory that “adding the delicious chocolate of paid search to the yummy peanut buttery goodness of SEO yields exponentially greater results.”

Taking that a step further, we’d like to point out the necessity of not only putting money toward PPC, but of diversifying across multiple PPC channels. These include the obvious “tier 1″ engines such as Google and Yahoo. Then marketers would be wise to look into “tier 2″ engines, smaller players (present company included) that nonetheless deliver quality traffic.

Let us know about your success with “tier 2″ PPC campaigns, we’d love to hear.

-The ABCSearch Team

September 24.  Some would call this the third day of fall.  Others would say it leaves us with only 92 days until Christmas!  Besides preparing to be in line at the mall at 4:30 a.m., what else can you do to make sure the holiday season is a successful one?

Well, for starters, all our beloved PPC advertisers can make sure their campaigns are ready for the holiday onslaught as consumers begin scouring the Web for gift ideas.  Tina Kelleher, a media specialist at Microsoft, came up with six different tips to make the most out of your online advertising this year.  Check them out here.

Thanks for sharing, Tina!

-The ABCSearch Team

Well we had another successful show at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.  It was a pleasure to see the growing attendance and that our rattling magnets are as hot as ever.

Congrats to Lauren Usui from Google who won our Mazda3 grand prize giveaway!  From over two thousand entries she got the car, now that’s luck!  She was very surprised to win the car!

And another congrats to Emma Cockburn from Avenuea-Razorfish for winning our iPhone drawing!  Enjoy!

The ABCSearch team had some fun of our own as we attended the annual Google Dance on their campus.  We’ve heard rumors about them cutting back on the free food, but that must’ve started after the party, because there was food-o-plenty that night!  Everyone had a great time dancing, eating, drinking and participating in some really great activities like the human Google Doodle, check out the pic!

Thank you to all of our partners and advertisers who came by to say hello! It is always great to see the people we work with closely in person. See you at Ad:Tech in November!

- The ABCSearch Team

Summer is rolling right along and it’s that time of year again… time to gear up for the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose (August 18-21).  Since this year marks 10 years for the industry event, I’m expecting it to be an exciting few days with the usual search giants present as well as a mix of some new and interesting players. You never know quite what is going to emerge from this show. We might get some new updates on Yahoo rumors, or hear the latest on what Google has up their sleeve, and we’ll definitely learn about some new technology that has launched for search. Never a dull moment.

I’ll be talking about the latest here at ABC Search as well as sharing details on the fantastic launch of our new social search engine Scour.com at our booth (#215). So please give us a shout or swing by if you’d like to chat. We always like to hear your questions and feedback and look forward to meeting with you!

-Dan Yomtobian, CEO

In another move to pull itself out of the Google swamp of search domination, Microsoft announced the acquisition of the semantic search engine Powerset, a newcomer to the search arena with a unique contextual search technology.

While Google has dismissed the idea of contextual search as the next wave in search technology, Microsoft is clearly impressed with what the Powerset team has come up with, including a glowing blog post around the Powerset employees in its announcement about the acquisition. Apparently Microsoft gambles that a search engine that can understand the meanings and semantics of the words and phrases it searches will take the search market “to the next level”.

Whether or not the Powerset team and technology can keep the Microsoft search business afloat remains to seen. In the meantime, the move is yet another attempt to bolster the Microsoft offering by bringing in outside help.

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO

Marketing Sherpa’s annual survey of marketers is out, and the results indicate that paid search continues to be a major focus in the marketing community. Not only that, the survey reveals that ROI for PPC marketing programs has increased significantly, with 42 percent of respondents noting that their PPC programs demonstrate good ROI. Check out the results in the chart below, and read all about the full survey results here.

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO

Is it possible to be hooked on your search engine? What if you were challenged to give up your regular search engine for a week, and try something new. Could you do it? What would motivate you to make the change? If you were promised better results, an easier to use format, compensation to use the search engine, the opportunity to share results with friends and connect with the rest of the search community, would that inspire you? Even if you felt that your new engine was better, what do you suppose the odds are that you would return to your Googling ways after the week was up?

In a really interesting series on online habits, “Search Insider” Gord Hotchkiss examines the attachment online searchers have to Google, and how the addiction could (possibly?) be broken.

I think this is a fascinating topic, because the quality is not necessarily the motivating factor behind change. So many other factors (convenience, placement, appeal, ease of use, visual presentation) play into the choice we’ve made for our searching, and we take the choice very seriously, even becoming irritated with those who don’t search the way we do. Check out the article… and feel free to comment… do you think Google will continue to dominate, or can another kind of search sneak in to steal the show?

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO

There is no end to the hype around social search. As far back as four or five years ago, buzz in the search community around social search was high, with predictions of game-changing search methods that overrule the algorithmic search of the tier one players, replacing it with user-generated rankings that ensure quality of results and downplay companies’ ability to game the system.

Even with all the buzz around major social search engines like Eurekster, Prefound, iRazoo, Wikia and probably most notably (or notoriously) Mahalo, the social search market share is infinitesimally small. And while leaders in the space like Danny Sullivan start talking about Search 4.0 and bringing a social aspect back into the world of search, the cold hard truth is that it just hasn’t caught on yet. But why?

Some engines (Prefound for example) were way ahead of the game, and tried to launch social search before things really started getting “social” online. Others, like Eurekster, encountered problems with adoption because they only supported a narrow vertical market, which in Eurekster’s case involved providing a service to search individual sites, not an engine that could accomplish internet search on the broader scale. You have engines like iRazoo that provide user-generated recommendations for sites, coupled with monetary incentive to search, trying to use the draw of prizes to gain market share. Then you have engines like Wikia, that rely heavily on generating a user-base before search results will start to have any quality at all. Finally, you have engines like Mahalo that suffer seriously from scalability issues, forcing them to literally hire search editors to provide rankings of sites in order to deliver results, thereby defeating the social aspect (what would you say if Facebook was generating fake profiles to fill its ranks until some real friends came along?!)

All in all, social search has been through some rough times. Despite this fact, the major three engines still talk about social search as part of their vision for the future, and Calacanis continues to champion the social search space despite his need for 460 editors on call 24 hours a day to make the “user-generated” site work. So where is social search heading? What do we need to make a truly scalable, user-friendly, reliable social search engine with the capacity to break into the mainstream market? The answer, we believe, lies in a combination of many of the things engines have tried along the way, coupled with a successful integration with results from the top three engines as well and the adoption of other social components that are already successfully in use today. Some of these components include:

-Voting on relevancy of search results fashioned to match the voting process at the already-popular Digg site.

-Comments fields similar to those already in use on sites like Facebook and YouTube, enabling users to comment on results as easily as they add comments to pictures and videos.

-Integration of friend community to the search world, enabling users to share search results quickly and easily, recommend sites they find while searching, and share recent searches with the community.

-Adoption of incentive programs that are easy to use, and are based on community members and referrals/invitations, providing added impetus for searches to bring friends and family into the fold.

These ideas represent just a few of the ways the idea of community will begin to move into the search world. Will a Google-killer arrive on the scene imminently and take major market share away from the search giants? Unlikely. But that doesn’t mean that social search isn’t the future. It simply means that new ideas and new ways of using the social components already in use must be integrated in such a way as to spur greater adoption and provide added incentive to break the Google habit.

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO