Google can expect to see a rise in paid search advertising revenues from China, despite its public falling out with the government, according to US research firm Covario.

The company said in spite of the fracas which has led to the search giant re-routing Google.cn searches through Hong Kong, the firm will see its PPC takings from high-tech and consumer electronics companies rise by 43 per cent from quarter one.

However, PPC spend with Baidu, Google’s rival in China, is expected to rise by 210 per cent during the second financial quarter of 2010, compared with Q1.

In a post, Covario said: “Overall strong growth aside, it appears that the prognostications of massive defections from Google are unfounded — the spending on the network in China remains robust.

“However, this strategy by Google clearly is a boon to Baidu — whose spend is up markedly.”

Worldwide, Covario estimates Q2 spending on paid search in the high-tech and consumer electronics sector will be up 24.9 per cent on Q1.

According to the firm, Google will lead the way, benefitting from a 24.9 per cent increase in spending while Yahoo will experience an 11.3 per cent boost. Covario believes Bing will lose out with spending down 13.3 per cent on Q1.

By Richard Morris

News home

Microsoft’s search engine Bing is now appearing as part of airings of ‘The Simpsons’ on Channel 4.

The three-month deal to air the clips at the start and end of the show, and before and after its commercial break is thought to have cost more than £500,000.

As part of a bid to drive Bing’s share of the search engine market Bing will sponsor ‘The Simpsons’ show on Channel 4 week nights and Channel 4+1.

The programme segments, known as ‘idents’ are the first time Microsoft has used sponsorship TV and coincide with ‘The Simpsons’ 20th anniversary.

They include Bing sponsorship credits before and after the episodes, as well as during ad breaks.

The Bing sponsorship idents aim to be a humorous take on a family using Bing to solve problems.

The accompanying ad campaignquestions the need for the “information overload”, which rival search engines provide. Instead it will promote Bing’s ability to provide clear and concise results.

Bing launched in November 2009 as an attempt by Microsoft to challenge Google and Yahoo! in the search engine market.

Microsoft has a four per cent share of UK searches, the same as Yahoo!, but both are dwarfed by Google’s 86 per cent, according to Nielsen Online statistics for January.

Current timescales suggest that both companies want to complete the transition by the summer, but this could slip if its implementation puts in jeopardy revenues for this traditionally busy period.

Nearly 114 billion searches were performed on the internet during July 2009, according to digital analysts at ComScore.

Web searches increased by 41 per cent over the past year, with Google enjoying the most significant growth of the main engines.

Global search queries increased from 80.5 billion to 113.7 billion between July 2008 and July 2009, with Google searches up by 55 per cent from 48.7 billion to 76.7 billion, giving it 67 per cent of the global market.

The figures aren’t such good news for Yahoo! however, as its number of searches over the 12 months rose by just 2 per cent, giving it a 7.8 per cent share of search traffic, even taking into account its high-profile launch of Bing, its collaboration with Microsoft. It is actually being caught by Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, which saw just under eight billion searches, or seven per cent of the total market.

Microsoft itself saw 41 per cent growth, although this was from a much lower base of 2.35bn searches to 3.31bn.

The European market had the highest number of queries, totaling 36.45bn in July or 32.1 per cent of the global market. Asia Pacific was second, with 35bn searches (30.8%), followed by North America with 25.10bn (22.1%) and Latin America with 10.52bn (9.3%).

It is in this last area where the greatest number of searches per person is carried out, with the average person using a search engine for 13 days in the month, during July, and each one of these people clocking up an average of 130 searches. The next most inquisitive are Europeans, making an average of 117 searches per internet user during the month.

Source: Businessweek.com