In the not so distant future, there will be a new search engine out there for you to try simply called Bing (www.bing.com).  It’s the “next big thing” in search engine technology brought to you by Microsoft.  With Bing, Microsoft will once again try to take a bite out of Google’s search market share, but will it succeed where others failed?  I have my doubts of Bing’s success and it has nothing to do with its technology, or its performance.  In my opinion, Google simply owns search like no other business in the world.  When your very company name becomes a common verb in the English language, you have reached rarified air in gaining mindshare with your users.  C’mon, you have never asked someone (or told someone) to “just Google it” to find an answer online?  Will people one day say, “just Bing it”?  If they do, and I have my reservations about this, then yes, Microsoft through its Bing search engine will be successful.

According to the slick video currently displayed on Bing.com – well the video is actually hosted on www.decisionengine.com, but you get to the video from the Find Out More button on the Bing homepage - Bing is more than a search engine, it’s a “decision engine”.  Instead of sorting the search results based on popularity (is that a dig at Google), the Bing search engine sorts them by ‘logical categories”.  Well, who decides what is logical?  Anyway, I am not here to beat up the technology behind Bing, it was created and developed by people much smarter than myself.  And it has some excellent features built in like Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price.  But will people actually use this “decision engine”?

According to the open letter on www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html from the Bing Team, Microsoft, “So far in 2009, there are four and a half websites created EVERY SECOND as the web continues to expand.  While more searchable information is cool, nearly half of all searches don’t result in the answer that people are seeking… We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.”

That sounds great and I will give it a try, but then again I am in the search marketing industry and it is in my best interest to give it a full test drive.  But will the average person, sitting at home on their pc or laptop go to Bing instead of Google?  I am sure Microsoft is going to pour millions into an aggressive marketing campaign…but will that message get through in the long run?  It’s an interesting question and I will be following all of the hoopla.  I remember a day when I would go to Yahoo.com to look something up.  I don’t remember when I switched to Google for all my searches (but it happened) and now I don’t remember the last time I used a search engine other than Google (outside of work, of course)!

Beginning February 24th, Google officially updated its display url AdWords policy regarding multiple urls in each ad group. Previously, multiple display urls were allowed in a single ad group. Now, only one display url is permitted in each ad group. This amendment applies to all advertisers, regardless of any previous exceptions.

According to The Official Google Blog, the change was made in an effort to provide more relevant search results for Google users. By having the same high level domain name for each ad group, users search experiences will be enhanced.

This update only applies to top-level domains. For example, if you have a domain www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/shoes in the same ad group, both would be permitted. On the other hand, if you have the display urls, www.shoes.com and www.freeshoes.com, they would not be permitted as they do not have the same root domain.

Google recommends separating ad groups with multiple domains into separate and unique ad groups. By doing so, you will not only comply with the policy modifications; you can also track the performance of your domains in a more efficient manner.

The display url and the destination url should still match. The other requirements regarding urls will remain unchanged. For more information on Google’s display url policies, you can visit the AdWords Help center.

Just as injuries are a part of sports, click fraud is an unfortunate part of the PPC game. You can take all the precautions to eliminate the issue, but click fraud happens. The question is – how bad is the issue? There has been some press about this lately, and I believe there is some overreaction.

According to Click Forensics, a company that specializes in monitoring and preventing internet crime, click fraud rates are at a two-year high. The industry click fraud rate for the last quarter of 2008 was 17.1% versus 16.6% a year earlier. At first glance, these numbers do seem alarming. What isnt factored into that 17.1% are the invalid clicks that are discounted by most search engines.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have safeguards in place to indentify and filter out invalid clicks, and have recently stepped up their efforts to control click fraud. For instance with Google, in most cases these fraudulent clicks are filtered out before they are even reported in the AdWords interface to advertisers. Google utilizes 4 layers of click fraud filters, and claims that their click fraud rate is on average less than 2%. Yahoo has stated that on average between 12-15% of clicks are filtered out due to being fraudulent or invalid.

Bottom line: It’s important to be aware that click fraud is a reality, but as advertisers you can feel confident that the search engines are taking the issue seriously and doing a good job identifying and filtering out these invalid clicks.