So, what happens next? What scope is there for expansion in Bing’s market share? Microsoft appear to be taking opportunities where they’re available – helped of course by a healthy amount of investment – and have been targeting mobile web users. With 23 million mobile web users accessing Bing (and 4.3 million downloads of Bing’s iPhone app) it seems to be paying off.

According to Erik Jorgensen, senior vice-president for mobile at Microsoft : “People drive themselves crazy trying to type on these mobile devices so the more we can understand what they are trying to do and provide an easier way to get to it through visual, voice and touch is a key insight into how mobile search is going to evolve.”

How much bigger can Bing grow before they hit the brick wall that is Google’s market dominance? Or could Bing be the legendary Google-killer? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

We’ve been working with Complete Driveway Designs – a Bury based pattern imprinted concrete driveway company – for a couple of years now. And in that time our services have had a definite, measurable impact on the effectiveness of their web presence; thanks to our Web Analytics supported SEO and PPC work, they’re now getting conversions and qualified leads for approximately 10% of what they were paying before we got involved.

In the time we’ve been working for Complete Driveway Designs, we’ve built up an excellent understanding of their work, their business, and their goals. This is something we do with every one of our clients; it’s the only way to achieve sustainable results.

The longer we’ve worked with Complete Driveway Designs, the more we’ve come to identify with the skills they use when they’re installing pattern imprinted concrete driveways. Like, for example:

• A professional attention to detail.
• An excellent understanding of the capabilities of different specialised tools.
• An appreciation of client’s needs.
• A willingness to put the effort in.
• Pride in the end result.

Despite the differences in the services we offer, at a core level we’re very similar.

We’d be interested to hear what values other agencies and freelancers feel they share with their clients: leave a comment and let us know.

The policy change is currently just for the google.co.uk search engine not the Content Network and the ads will only display to searchers who have disabled the Safe Search filter, via the search options page.

UK companies who wish to make use of this new policy change will need to be registered with the Gambling Commission, those companies who are based outside the UK and within the EEA must be licensed to advertise in their respective countries.

To find out more about this policy change please contact our team on +44 (0)161 427 9304

Google PageRank tool gathers rank from what Google feel is the most important page of a website, the quality and number of inbound links. This has been challenged by a number of SEO techniques including, paying for inbound links, reciprocal links with other websites and continues spamming of forums and blog comments, which Google have tried to include in the algorithm to still give property to actual strong websites.

Microsoft’s new Browserank tool works in a different way, it looks at the amount of time users spend browsing a page. Highlighting ‘linking’ flaws in Google’s Page rank tool such as link farms and other methods which can help push a website to the top of the listings Microsoft insist that their Browserank tool gathers the important characters of a website which makes more people want to browse, buy or leave. According to Cnet, Microsoft argues that by monitoring the actual behaviour of users on websites by browse time gives a more accurate understanding of users needs and this can be represented in their listings by using this algorithm.

What makes all these tools elementary is that none of them provide 100% accurate results of the popularity of a website, link farms can skew Google’s results, and now cloaking and open connections will be used to change the listings within Microsoft.

Even more important if there tool is used correctly what is to say that a particular website actually offers good content. A visitor on a particular ecommerce site may leave them on there for hours because of poor navigation or as simple as a user’s homepage could change listings and favour other websites and considering most UK homepages are set to BBC or Google, then Microsoft are still favouring the competition.

So if the Organic listings of the search engines can change by unethical Search Engine Optimisation techniques will this drive more traffic to the paid listings, which in the end is more money in the pockets of those search engines.

So the Live market share has increased but why? Primarily the reasons for the increased market share are IE7 and Vista, as more and more people upgrade their systems and software they will be finding that Microsoft have integrated their Live search platform into Vista and IE7 in a manner that makes the search engine very easy to use, especially by computer users who are perhaps less savvy with regards to the technology.

The big question now is will the increase continue throughout the year to show a positive trend for Live?

The updated mobile MSN has a newly designed interface giving users access to their email, messaging and search, mobile MSN also now offers information on news, sports, entertainment.

Initially Microsoft will not display advertising on the new look MSN, however a Microsoft spokesperson has stated banner or text advertising will probably be used before the year’s end.

If the a deal were to go ahead (at an approximate cost to Microsoft of in excess of $50 billion) this would mean that a combined Yahoo and Microsoft would be a formidable force for Google to contend with.

Will a merger deal ever happen? We have our doubts.

Google is now firmly showing a growing interest in online social community and social search with ‘my community’ area of the new iGoogle, where Google users can stay in contact with one another via their individual Google accounts.

To set up a Google personalised home page navigate your way to www.google.co.uk and click the iGoogle link in the top right of the page.

Enter your own theories to the using the form below.

It has been reported that Google want a tailored advertising approach, targeting the advertisement types to the specific target audience (as they currently do with keyword searches).

Will the search giants soon be the overall advertising giant?