The planned Microsoft-Yahoo online search tie-up has promise but must overcome people’s fierce loyalty to market king Google, industry tracker comScore said on Friday.
“The recently announced search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo certainly makes the combined entity a more formidable competitor to Google in the US search marketplace,” comScore search evangelist Eli Goodman said. “While they are still looking up at Google in terms of market share, they have a real opportunity to make headway given that nearly three-quarters of all searchers conduct at least one search on these engines every month.”
The challenge for Microsoft and Yahoo will be to make their joint search offering compelling enough to convert occasional users into habitual visitors, Goodman said.
With their partnership announced late last month, software giant Microsoft and Internet portal Yahoo are hoping to steal market share — and advertising dollars — from the company that has come to define Web search.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s freshly launched Bing search engine will handle queries at Yahoo Web sites.
A comScore analysis released on Friday said that Google had the highest loyalty rate among US Internet users, with people trusting the bulk of their online searches to the California firm.
In June, Google had a 65 percent share of the core search market, compared to 28 percent for Yahoo and Microsoft combined, comScore said.
“Separately, Yahoo and Bing are unable to efficiently meet the inventory needs of advertisers which are attainable through Google,” said Craig Macdonald, a senior vice president at analysis firm Covario. “The combination of the two platforms, however, gives advertisers the ability to reach about 30 percent of the search market in a more efficient manner.”
A search market share of 30 percent represents a “critical threshold” for many marketers when it comes to justifying spending national advertising dollars, Macdonald said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day