To my dear readers, sorry about being out for a while. Really, I’m sorry.

We had tons of news over this time. Tiger Woods became a prime time mess, a marketing disaster of major proportions and a big comics’ tool. There was a so called bombing attempt on Xmas in the US and flying has become every travelers’ biggest nightmare. Oprah is retiring… in a couple of years and to her own channel (is it really retiring?). The Sci Fi channel became Sy-Fy and even though everyone blasted their marketing department for that, the Sy-Fy channel has reported and claimed success… interesting stuff.

In the online marketing world we’ve had even more news than that. Google applied for a license to buy and sell energy, launched the first “superphone” the Google Nexus One, changed the URL display guidelines and got some feathers ruffled with some over the moon charges for canceling the Nexus One contract with T-Mobile. China has become an international mess with Google and things keep getting worse (now after Google apparently got hacked by Chinese hackers). Bing still lags in functionality and even Chris Brogan has begun a quest to try Bing or die in 30 days.

I have tried Bing, I still give it a chance every now and then, but frankly, even though it has some nice features, the results (the main reason for a search engine to exist) are at best, buggy. Most of Bing’s results are either obvious or completely off the mark. Chris Brogan, a well known blogger, social media expert and internet marketer found out that when typing his name in the search, Chris Brown (you know who) showed up. THAT is buggy as a simple comparison of word by word should give the crawler the obvious results, everything related to the people with the same name. The same test with my name yields equally disappointing results. Now, getting indexed by Bing (regular business sites or any kind of site) is quite the adventure. There is an extremely long and useless thread in Bing about this particular issue.

Anywho, getting back to the original subject, there have been many news and many changes. I kept myself off the predictions bus but here are my two cents:

• The world will continue the great migration online
• Cellphones (smartphones, superphones) will be much more important
• Big growth in mobile marketing or mobile-friendly marketing
• The world economies will continue to be a mess, but will probably get better
• Bing will continue to struggle until everybody realizes its just Live with a different name and more images
• Google will continue its path towards world domination
• China and Google will continue on bad terms
• Brasil will be a dominant team in the world cup (if they don’t win it again)
• Canada will be big on the Winter Olympics (specially the hockey teams)
• Yahoo will continue in its nice quiet little place… or maybe not?

That is as far as my crystal ball (or Liquid Crystal Display screen) allows me to see. There is something very certain about it, that no matter what, I’ll continue to write about it all and probably, hopefully, just maybe, someone will care and eventually read my stuff and find it at least entertaining.

On a side note, Search Engine Optimization is going to get much more complicated with all the changes Google and Bing are implementing. The content will continue to be king and writers will continue to prosper in this online jungle, or as I like to call it, this Online Wild West. Has anyone checked out the Tweets on Google searches? Pretty cool right?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

The search engine battle is still pretty much at a standstill. Google, as everyone knows, is still number one. Yahoo is still trailing in second and Bing… well, let’s just say its not aLive.

Since Microsoft’s big launch of Bing, many people gave it a chance, but, as many frustrated users and webmasters can testify, it still has a lot of bugs to fix. For sure it gives good results for very important and known information, but beyond that, it has serious crawling issues as it is not indexing sites properly (or as far as most webmasters can tell by following Bing’s own instructions).

The so called “decision engine” has a lot of decisions to make if it wants to get some notice in the search engine game.

Here the graphs:

Is it me, or there is a slight breeze coming from the gap between Bing and the other search engines?

This was the scene before Live.com became Bing.com... this is when MS execs began banging their heads against the wall.

Things are still all good and well with Google, so much that Matt Cutts (if you don’t know this guy, check out his blog for details) released an article inviting ONLY Yahoo search engineers to work at Google. As you read the article, notice the lack of invitation for Bing engineers.The article is here.

Do let me know what you think here below at the comments or email me. If you have any question, subject suggestion or else, comment or email.
Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.