You may have heard hyperventilation to wit: Bing overtakes Yahoo! That turns out to be a gross overstatement, and a marvelous example of why it’s dangerous to extrapolate from small sample sets.

Here’s what we’ve seen so far in terms of PPC ads, the financial engine that drives the engines.

Remembering that Bing went live at the very end of May, beginning of June there are a couple of really interesting trends that leap off the page.

1. Totally unrelated to the Bing launch: Check out the weekend effect! Again, this is a percentage of totals, not a measure of absolute volume. It suggests that MSN gets a materially larger share of traffic during the work week than it does on the weekend. Does this mean people use MSN more frequently at work because it’s the default search engine for IE? Left to their own devises on the weekends, they choose Google/Yahoo even more often? Fascinating!
2. The Percentage of Total PPC Sales from the Big three coming through Bing increased substantially over MSN live, much more so than did costs, clicks or impressions. This could indicate better targeting logic, or that the folks giving Bing a test drive are decidedly higher quality prospects.

If we look more carefully into who’s losing the share of sales that Bing appears to have gained the answer is clearly not Yahoo. In fact Yahoo and MSN both seem to have benefited from MSN’s PR campaign. Not surprisingly the engine of choice for ‘early adopters’ — Google — is the one seeing its user base sniff out the competition.

With respect to Bing, the initial uptick in the quality of traffic is quite encouraging. Higher Sales per Click will lead to higher bids and more monetary share for MSN. The fact that despite the media blitz surrounding the launch, the impression share and click traffic share hardly moved is somewhat more concerning. If consumers are truly happier buying through Bing it could give MSN some momentum, but they can’t just rely on the early adopters and search geeks. They need to pull in and keep the average Joe as well.

As Lance Loveday points out, Bing has a steep hill to climb and it’s not clear that the media approach they’ve taken is going to do the job.

We’ll keep an eye on the trends. MSN has finally given us something to write about!

A follow up post, eliminating trademark search and controlling for a couple other factors paints a very different picture.

Technorati Tags: Bing Launch, Bing Market share, Bing Yahoo Market share, Google

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My review: I like it.

Chrome Pros

• The “one-box” address bar is excellent. One single box for URLs, for searching, and for history. I found myself typing fewer URLs today. Very handy. (Browser autocompletion crushes the search funnel and, imho, works in favor of online retailers — more on that in a subsequent post.)
• Chrome seems to runs Javascript apps faster. For example, CustomInk has a neat tshirt layout designer . Their drag-and-drop app is smoother under Chrome.
• The UI is pretty and intuitive. Pulling tabs off the browser onto the desktop, and dropping them back — very slick.
• Chrome starts up quicker than IE.
• Chrome feels like it renders pages quicker than FFox and IE.

Chrome Neutrals or Minor cons

• Some websites had minor rendering bugs. For example, the text in the buttons on CustomInk’s app mentioned above were sliced off vertically. The splash image on my wife’s lab site didn’t appear at all.

  
• A small number of websites — PetSmart.com and ComputerWorld for example– rendered glacially slowly in Chrome, repeatably taking over several minutes. I wager it was some sort of redirect or ad serving issue. No speed problems for the same pages on FFox or IE.
• Password manager shows cached passwords in plain text. This is a security hole — if you leave your browser open and unattended, anyone could grab your bank or email passwords, if you let Chrome save them.

  

• Multiple sites are reporting Chrome is a memory hog; I personally did not notice memory usage patterns between IE, Chrome, and FFox. The memory use order depended on the specific pages and tabs.

  

• The rendering engine has minor spacing differences (image below).

  

Chrome Significant Cons

• Plugins. Currently, Chrome lacks plugins. Plugins are what make Ffox so great. For me, for example, Firebug is a must-have.
• The default font is too small. Smaller than Ffox or IE. Made me squint. The small font could make Chrome harder to use for older folks, but Google could easily bump this up. Yes, I know about “control +”; I’m speaking generally.

  

Predictions

I predict Chrome will steadily eat share from Ffox.

I predict Google will soon cut deals with computer manufacturers to make Chrome and Google Docs a productivity suite option (“Save $200 — Google Docs vs. MS Office”). These deals will materially eat into IE browser share.

The browser wars are back!

Chrome download link

Update: Google is now advertising Chrome on the Google homepage.

That is extremely dear real estate — Google counts characters on that page — so “cluttering” the homepage with Chrome Beta on the day after launch indicates just how seriously Google intends to push this browser.

Microsoft, watch your back.

Technorati Tags: Business, Code, Microsoft, Reviews

• Google AdSense is much easier for the beginner than AdWords. A few clicks, here’s your HTML snippet, bang, you’re a publisher.
• The AdSense interface is simpler than AdWords. Fewer options, fewer choices.
• AdSense does a great job asking for the minimum information at each step. For example, Google didn’t request tax info and address verification until after the account had earned a few dollars. We’ve written about the power of keeping forms short (“drip irrigation”, or “dating before marriage“). AdSense executes this best-practice extremely well.
• AdSense has solid FAQs. I combed through many of them with my advertiser glasses on, hyper-vigilant for anything potentially offensive. Found nothing along the lines of “As a publisher, do anything and everything you can to get visitors to click on your ads!” — all advice offered to publishers was advertiser-appropriate.
• What I am most curious about (and what we’ll never learn from Google): is our page generating traffic for the advertisers which converts?

With no optimization, our test page is currently generating $1 per day. (We’ll donate ten-fold our AdSense riches to charity after the experiment.) Over the next few weeks we’ll play with section targeting, keyword stuffing, cramming on additional ad units, custom search, and maybe some javascript tricks to see how those affect earnings. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Google, Reviews, SEM

Background: I’m a voracious reader. I like playing with technology. I am not usually an early-adopter when it comes to gadgets. I’m involved in a good deal of website usability work at RKG, so I’m highly attuned to user interface design.

My review: two thumbs up.

The Kindle works simply, and it simply works. That is high praise from a UI geek.

Spolsky says, “Something is usable when it behaves exactly as expected.” A high bar, and even higher when applied to a new category of device where user conventions aren’t established. The Kindle easily beats it.

So what have I been reading? Yesterday I picked up Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres (even though I already own the hardback!) and Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar by Gary Erickson.

I read into the evening and am halfway through Raising the Bar. (Excellent book — recommended.) That’s roughly 150 conventional pages. No problems with eye strain, no problems with learning or using the UI.

Arthur C. Clarke observed that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke was right, but here’s Alan’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law: we’ve become so anesthetized by the rapid pace of technological evolution that

Clarke’s “magic” fades to commonplace in 5 minutes.

Really. The Kindle is an absolutely incredible technological feat on many levels. The display is really good. It is mind blowing to think about the breadth of its library.

I showed the device to about a dozen people yesterday. Most had never heard of the Kindle until I handed it to them. All have found the Kindle amazing, remarkable, even magical.

And after each person played with it for several minutes, by the end of that short interval, each fully accepted the whole idea — that is, an electronic reading device with sharp digital ink with wireless access and one-click shopping and 200 on-board books — to be utterly normal and commonplace. Within minutes. Wow.

Here are my impressions of the device, in no particular order.

Kindle Elements Which Work Really Well

• The screen and the digital ink — quality, resolution
• The UI makes sense — no learning curve
• Highlighting and adding notes — very elegant to set, review, search, and unset
• The ergonomics of the physical device, placement of buttons
• On-Kindle search: any phrase across all texts on device
• It holds your page in each book — when you return, you’re right where you left it
• You can “turn down” or “dog-ear” the corners of pages
• The little keyboard is decent
• The fact it connects like a cell phone, and you don’t have to mess with WiFi and USB cables
• Battery life seems strong
• Kindle Store: integration with Amazon reviews and ratings, and the ease of purchase (dangerously easy — online retailers take careful note! Seriously)
• The speed at which a purchased book arrives
• The pretty screen saver pictures
• Hyperlinks work, bringing up the web page on the Kindle browser
• The leather case
• The silver digital ink in the long right scroll bar
• The animations used in the long right scroll bar
• The packaging and out-of-the-box experience

Kindle Rough Edges

• The “black flash” on each page turn
• At the smallest font setting, the letters aren’t sharp enough
• If not using the smallest font setting, a fast reader needs to flip pages really frequently
• Pictures are fuzzy and low quality
• Not sure how to zoom in on an image
• Connecting to Kindle Store is slow
• Searching Kindle Store is slow
• Sometimes images on search results are delayed
• On pages the text rises and falls below baseline (see Raising the Bar, location 876-881, “…but as we cycled we noticed lots of small roads…”)
• If the connection to the store or web is slow, and you use the time to go back to reading, each “still trying to connect” interrupt yanks you away from your reading back to the main menu
• Only black-and-white, no color
• The “Amazon has gagged us and so we can’t answer questions about the Kindle” email responses I got from customer support at NowNow. Dumb.

This review is after having the device for less than 24 hours. I’ll try to make a note to come back and give my impressions in a few weeks — will I find the Kindle has become indispensable, or just an occasional-use gadget? Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: Books, Business, Reviews, Web Effectiveness

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