This debate has been all-the-rage in the tech community as of late: who will win the online streaming video wars, Adobe’s Flash or the new HTML5-based video codecs such as h.264 or WebM. Both platforms have their own benefits and weaknesses depending on your opinion, including open/closed platforms, whether the format is secure or not and most importantly the performance of the technology. With the explosion of mobile computing devices we’ve seen in the past couple of years via smartphones, and now considering the success of tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad, a fierce debate has been waged over whether Flash is stable or streamlined enough to function on these devices. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs posted a public letter on the company’s website in which he lambasted Flash for being buggy, insecure and a resource hog. On the other hand, Google has shown confidence in Flash evidenced by their decision to support it in the latest version of the Android operating system. So who’s right?

Open or Closed
Probably the most significant trend in the tech industry right now is the push towards open platforms. HTML5 is leading the way on that front, as it is an open standard, meaning it is controlled by a standards committee rather than one single company or entity. HTML5 has also been backed by some big players in the space including both Apple and Google among many others. The webkit-based browsers, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari, as well as countless mobile browsers such as those found on Android, Apple, Nokia, Palm and soon RIM (BlackBerry) smartphones all support HTML5.

Flash on the other hand is controlled solely by Adobe. If you want to watch a Flash video or develop Flash software you have to look to Adobe to provide the solution. That being said what it lacks in openness it makes up for in market dominance - Adobe Flash makes up fully 75% of the streaming video online. Not only that, a huge gaming industry has been cultivated using Flash, most notably by developers like Zynga who are currently raking in an estimated $300 million in annual revenue.

Security
The next issue is security. Flash has had several zero-day exploits and vulnerabilities that have taken varying amounts of time to fix. With that said, as I alluded to earlier, it’s also the dominant player in the internet video space. If HTML5-based codecs were to take off and gain a significant market share it’s possible that it might turn out to be just as bad security wise, or worse. The hope is that because HTML5 is an open standard and is therefore more accessible than Flash, holes would be plugged in a more timely fashion.

How Do They Perform
Finally we come to the most significant part of the debate - performance. As I stated in the opening paragraph there’s a huge push in the tech industry to move towards mobile computing despite the risk of lesser battery life and more modest technical specs. If one platform can significantly outperform the other and help to squeeze the most out of these small devices it would have a huge advantage moving forward. So then, rather than simply prognosticate on the benefits of Adobe’s Flash Player or HTML5 video I went ahead and put them to the test.

I’m currently running an iMac with OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” In order to test the impact both video formats had on my system’s resources I installed an application called iStat Menus which monitors CPU usage as well as many other hardware statistics. My test was simple - first I took a baseline capture when my system was for all intents and purposes idling, then I took another capture while watching a flash video on YouTube, then finally took a 3rd capture of that same video running in HTML5. Here are the results:

System Baseline

Flash Video

HTML5 Video

As you can see Flash is much more taxing on my CPU than HTML5. At its peak Flash whittled my CPU down to 58% of its full potential whereas HTML5 left me with 93% to work with. Personally, if only based on this test, I’m sold on HTML5 as a future web standard. That’s not to say that I think Adobe’s Flash should be abandoned or couldn’t be improved, but as of right now, especially considering the amount of support HTML5 has already received, I don’t mind going without Flash in its current form.

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Yesterday I wrote a post about day one of Google’s I/O conference, an annual event held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and we here at Protocol 80 somewhat lamented the fact that there weren’t many show-stopping announcements. Fortunately Google unveiled a second wave of product demos today, and this time the two hour event bore some hotly-anticipated fruit.

First and foremost for anyone using an Android-based phone was a sneak peak of version 2.2 of their mobile operating system. Codenamed “Froyo,” 2.2 will offer a slew of new enhancements and features including:

• A 2x to 5x application speed increase
• New features for enterprise customers including Microsoft Exchange integration and Device Admin APIs
• Cloud-to-Device APIs which can send information (driving directions, for example) straight to your phone from the web
• Support for device tethering and the ability to use your phone as a mobile wifi hotspot
• A new web browser with a javascript engine based on Google’s Chrome web browser

That last item I’m going to touch on in a little more detail because the latest version of Google’s mobile browser has seen a lot of updates. I’ve already mentioned that it has been built off of elements from the Google Chrome browser, but it’s also seeing some other cool enhancements such as the ability to accept inputs from a phone’s various hardware components. With Froyo you won’t be limited to using your location, accelerometer or camera-based services in software applications, they now work right in the web browser as well. This sort of power gives web application developers a huge suite of tools to work with in future projects.

Additionally the browser in 2.2 will see some new tricks with voice integration. In the demo, Vic Gundotra showed examples of producing highly-targeted search results simply by entering voice queries via the browser. In another stunning demo, Google’s Translate service was able to translate spoken English into French text, and then Froyo uses text-to-speech to play the French statement back.

Finally, Google has made some extensive updates to the way users can find, purchase and interact with their applications and data. One benefit that many Android-based phones have over competitors like the iPhone is removable storage, such as SD cards. Now you can backup your apps directly to an SD card, or even run them straight from the card itself without having to use up space on your device. Another key feature to the Android marketplace is the ability to automatically update all of the apps on your phone in one fell swoop. They’ve also implemented a system for application error reporting, so developers can quickly fix problems with their applications and provide the best possible user experience to their customers. The last and possibly most-significant enhancement to the marketplace is a new web client which will give users access to their Android devices and automatically sync new apps to them over-the-air. This functionality isn’t limited to the Android Marketplace, however - you’ll even be able to sync all local music to your phone. Pretty cool!

Phew, that was a lot, and those were only the Android 2.2 announcements! It’s clear that there has never been a better time to be an Android OS phone owner, and we’re looking forward to the release of Android 2.2 Froyo later this year.

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Google held their I/O 2010 keynote this afternoon amidst whirling speculation of various new products or refinements on tools and services they had already debuted. Might we see a new version of Google’s Buzz, Wave or Chrome? Perhaps a demo of the Android OS version 2.2, codenamed “FroYo?” Maybe we would even see the latest features of Chrome OS?

Well, not quite. Still, there were some important announcements for the record-breaking audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to make note of.

Let’s start with my favorite announcement from the 2 hour event, HTML5 and the move to a much richer application experience on the web. During the keynote multiple projects were demonstrated for the audience, some of which you can test drive today. The first example was Mugtug.com’s Darkroom image editing application which has an excellent user interface and can even work without an internet connection. Second was Clicker.tv, an interactive video guide for the internet which allows you to quickly and easily find video online via a host of streaming services. Looking for something in particular? There’s no need to hunt for a search box, just visit the site and start typing - the website automatically picks up your keystrokes and away you go.

In concert with the refined web application experiences HTML5 provides, Google has also made an interesting play when it comes to video streaming codecs. They had already dipped their toes in the space when they acquired On2 Technologies’ VP8 codec, but today they re-released VP8 as an open source initiative already backed by some heavy hitters in the web space (Mozilla, Opera, and of course Google themselves). The name of their new open source codec is WebM and it may prove to be a crushing blow to Adobe’s Flash Player and the H.264 codec which have been the standard-bearer in streaming video for some time.

Finally, Google announced a new application store called the Chrome Web Store. The idea behind the Chrome Web Store is to do for web applications what the Android Market has done for mobile apps. The store, which launches later this year, will give users the opportunity to discover and browse a broad range of web apps with the hope that application developers can reach brand new audiences. Developers will also be able to monetize their software, and can even track analytics to see how their web application is performing in the store.

If you were underwhelmed by the keynote because your most-anticipated new Google product wasn’t announced, don’t fret - Google I/O 2010 will continue on May 20, 2010 so there may be more announcements to come.

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I find this quite interesting and somewhat amusing. This was pointed out by Amit Singhal of Google, in a post called “This Stuff is Tough”.

What does Bing have to say?

And let’s go out on a limb here…Alta Vista?

I find it quite interesting that the most popular search engine only ranks in the top 3 in Alta Vista. I guess this proves that popularity only gets you so far in the world of SEO. No offense Google, I still love you.

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In today’s busy world, not everyone can check their analytics on a daily basis to ensure all is going well on the site. If your site is down…hopefully one of your loyal visitors will notify you, but that is not always the case. To help you monitor your website traffic to ensure nothing fishy is going on, Google has released Intelligence in Beta form within Google Analytics. Intelligence allows you to create custom alerts on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For example, if you want an alert when your site receives no visits on any particular day, you can create an alert that will send you an email notifying you of the situation. This will give you a slight jump on contacting your hosting provider before you lose too much traffic.

Google has also provided several alert templates that are very easy to copy/modify in your alert list. Some of these alert templates include:

• Total visits decreases by more than 50%
• Unique visitors decreases by more than 50%
• Average bounce rate increases by more than 50%
• Goal conversion rate decreases by more than 50%

In less drastic cases as mentioned in my previous example, many of these pre-made templates can be very useful. For example if you see a drastic change in a specific goal day-over-day, there may be something wrong with your checkout process, email sign-up sheet, etc. depending on your conversions. To make things even easier, Google has created automatic alerts that will send you alerts if atypical traffic patterns arise as long as you opt-in to receive these alerts.

This is a great free tool to use as an aid in monitoring your everyday web traffic and site usage. I have incurred any problems with intelligence, but remember it is still in Beta and should not be an excuse to completely ignore your metrics.

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A deal between the #2 and #3 search engines was announced today. Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed to a 10 year deal, hoping to compete with search giant, Google. Some of the details about of the deal are:

• Shortly after the deal is finalized in early 2010, Yahoo! results will show ‘Powered by Bing’
• Yahoo! will continue to receive 88% of the search-generated ad revenue for the initial 5 years
• The deal will allow Yahoo to focus on other areas such as display, the mobile web, and audience properties
• Bing should be able to improve search results, as they will be able to gather information from the newly acquired Yahoo! users
• Everyone at Ask is very happy [RT @dannysullivan over at ask.com, they're prepping the "we're #3" banners]
• Danny Sullivan also provided a great chart at Search Engine Land detailing more changes.

My Question is Obviously…What Will This Do for Search?

At this point much of this is up in the air, but I do have some guesses. It’s a given that focus on Yahoo! optimization will move to Bing. Because they will providing the Y! organic results, optimization should be the same. I also assume that there will be overall changes in Bing optimization practices as the technologies of the 2 engines will apparently be blended. As technologies change, search professionals must adjust. As far as market share goes, I still doubt much will be taken from Google, but I do think that the general public will see this as a positive given the general idea that 2 heads are better than 1. I predict that some people will try switching away from Google simply because of the merger, which may stick given the new Bing look.

As for PPC, I am unsure. According to the Search Engine Land chart (which will be continually updated throughout the day), advertisers may have to purchase ads at both Yahoo! and Bing although Yahoo! will be targeting ‘premium’ users. For the most part, I don’t see a huge problem with this, as it really isn’t a change. There will still be users at both engines, so if you want to reach them through paid advertisements, it’s a necessity. I don’t foresee much of a change in CPCs, at least in the near future. '

What About Google?

Google is not the type to just sit back and let this all happen without some sort of fight. I assume they will have changes or ‘news’ to release in the near future. They do not want their users to have the perception that Bing results will be better because they are now combining technologies with Yahoo!. As I stated before, I don’t expect them to lose much, if any market share because of this deal. I assume that our potential clients will still come to us saying ‘I want my site to be found on Google’ not, ‘I want my site to be listed on the top search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask’. Only time will tell, but Google always has something up their sleeve…even if it is not evil.

What else?

Well the first thing that comes to my head…Is Yahoo! really ready for this?

Honestly, I don’t think anyone can really be ready for that. But, we at protocol 80 hope the best for Bing and Yahoo!

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I thought everyone should end their Friday with a chuckle..

Ok...well you probably only found this amusing if your are a search nerd or tech geek, but I thought it was worth sharing. Thank you to Adam Ostrow at Mashable.com for bringing it to my attention.

Prior to the announcement of Google's Chrome OS, Italian artist Federico Fieni shared this cartoon. Who would have thought it would be so relevant only months later? Google's Chrome OS which is set to be released late in 2010 will be geared mostly towards netbooks and is said to be able to startup in seconds. Much of the OS is web based, meaning many features will be launched via the internet allowing the limited netbooks to run at a faster rate. It has been speculated for quite a long time now that Google would release an OS of their own, but with the growing popularity of netbooks, there is no better time than now.

What will this mean for Microsoft, users, and even Google? I can't answer that accurately, but don't be surprised if the Chrome OS grows in popularity as quickly as the Chrome browser did. When not using SEO plugins on Firefox, Chrome is my go-to browser. As people begin to use the Chrome OS, which no doubt will be used optimally with the Chrome browser, expect the browser to gain even more browser market share. Users...hopefully you like other Google products because I am sure it will be similar.

I wonder if ads will show up on the desktop?

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I am sure at this point many people have already developed their own opinions of bing and how it compares to Google. But, how do bing and Google compare in terms of search? I how found many differences so far and also talked to other people in the search industry who have shared their opinions.

First, the verticals. Bing considers themselves a 'decision making' engine more than just a search engine. They are focused on helping users make easier decisions in 4 verticals: shopping, travel, health and local. In my opinion people in these verticals will benefit from bing. Not necessarily because they will show you better results...but because as bing catches on and people learn more about the engine, more people will use it. I am not saying they are going to catch up on market share, just that people will try it out...and they may just like it. For instance, these are the results that show in both engines when I searched "chicken pox":

In this case I like bing better for a few reasons. Please note these are my personal opinions. First, when I am searching for health issues I would not want to be inundated with advertisements...I just want to know about the issue. Bing shows only 1 ad, while Google shows about 10. Yes...I know Google has more advertisers, but I have done several related searches and have not yet felt overwhelmed with ads on bing. Second, I really like the related searches on the left. I have found these to be extremely relevant when searching for health or travel related terms...which in turn I do think can help me make a decision. Third, I like the categories bing provides when searching for a specific ailment. Every time I searched a specific 'issue' it has offered me the category choices such as articles, symptoms, virus, etc. As far as the organic results themselves, I found both Google and bing to be relevant. Therefore, I can see traffic picking up, at least in these areas.

I did find this quite interesting...

I searched "PA SEO". I found that in this search, Google understood user intent better. (I cleared my cache and cookies and made sure I was not logged into either account before searching). Google understood that I was searching for something related to 'SEO' versus 'Paseo'. Why would bing combine the words? I assume because they are somewhat focused on travel, they thought I meant a place. Whatever the reason, they were wrong.

What are other 'search' people saying?

I have heard various opinions...but at a small conference last week, one person stated that bing was 'The most search friendly engine I have seen.' She went onto explain why and gave several examples of certain terms that her clients rank so-so in Google, but rank 1,2 or 3 in bing. In comparing our clients ranks between Google and bing, I found it very hit and miss. Sometimes the term would show in the same position, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. I could not find a concise pattern whatsoever. Hopefully we (or someone else) can find a pattern between the two in the near future.

As far as optimizing for bing...I have always said that we should NOT focus on just one engine because even though you may generate the most traffic from Google, any of the other engines could convert at a higher rate. Optimizing only for certain engines may make you lose out on sales. But, with Google still dominating the market, a lot of focus is geared that way. So I guess the short answer would be...optimize for bing as long as it doesn't harm your Google ranks (unless of course you find you are converting more in bing).

What about Paid Search?

As far as paid search goes I cannot give you an accurate answer as to which is better. Reason being, ROI is all that matters for paid. You are going to see different results based on your industry and your strategy. It was the same with Live...some clients achieve a high ROI in Google, but very low (or negative) in Live and vise versa. Paid search requires an adjustment to strategies based on performance. If you are not currently participating in bing paid search, try it out and you may just be surprised at the results.

So?

Overall I think bing is an improvement over Live, but I doubt it will be true competition for Google. I actually like the appearance of bing better. There would be many benefits to having competition as far as search engines go. CPC's would hopefully lower, it would force the engines to continuously improve, and it will just give people actual options...which is always a positive. Please share your thoughts about bing!

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Which search engine do you use?  Raise your hand if you didn’t say Google.  I’d be surprised if more than 5% of you raised your hands.  Even with the default engine in Internet Explorer being Live, many people change it to Google.  Microsoft has been hard at work trying to outdo the search giant and recently launched Bing.com.  I truthfully haven’t used it at all since it’s launch, but came across a website that will let me test out whether or not I should consider switching:

   www.Bing-vs-Google.com

The split screen view allows you to compare speed (visually), and results.  It also allows you to make the split screen vertical or horizontal.  The horizontal split screen isn’t as effective as the vertical because you have a natural tendency to only read the top results.

My Initial Impressions of Bing

So far, I am pleasantly surprised by some of the features in Bing.  For instance, the mouse-over feature on the right that gives you a little more information about a specific search result (shown below) is very nice:

The Search History (on left, above) is nice, but I can see how some people might get in trouble with this one.  What if you share a computer/login with your spouse or children and happen to be searching around for the best price on a gift for them?  Or, what if you are not a fan of your boss and are looking for a way to oust him from his position?  Then, while researching something for him, he walks in your office and sees the history?  There are several other inappropriate examples that I could highlight, but I’ll leave that to your imagination…

On the plus side of the history, it’s nice to be able to quickly re-search a topic.  For parents, it’s a great way to see what your child is researching online.

The Look of Bing

Microsoft is no stranger to “borrowing” functionality/features that work well.  They clearly went with a more Google-esque look for their results, which I think was a good idea, simply because so many people are comfortable with it.

What’s To Come?

Who knows?!?!  When you pit two giants against each other, there’s bound to be progress made on both sides, which ultimately benefits all of us.

Blog Post Invite

I would like to extend an invitation to Josh Curcio, our Director of Client Marketing to provide some feedback on Bing with respect to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.

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Google has recently updated their user interface for Adwords users. If you are looking for a quick answer, I like it so far. I have also talked to a few other SEM professionals and the general consensus has been, "Well, it seems to be an improvement. But no matter how you look at it, the Adwords UI is still better than anything Yahoo! or MSN has to offer!" I think we can all agree there.

First, efficiency has greatly improved. It is easier to access everything without traveling to separate pages. For example, I can easily edit bids, keywords, and ads for campaign A and with a click of a button I can move to campaign Z. Another nice feature is being able to access all keywords and ads by campaign, instead of only by ad group.  Also, the ability to change campaign settings is easily accessible from the campaign view without venturing too far from everything else you were doing. I have also found some new reporting features, additions to campaign settings, easier access to Analytics, and couple more things here and there. Overall, usability and efficiency gets an A in my book.

One thing I don't like is the automatic selection of ad serving to mobile devices. If you upload your campaign through Adwords Editor, it automatically chooses to show your ads to iPhones and other mobile devices. You have to go in the the UI to remove this selection. I never run campaigns to mobile devices unless they are optimized for mobile devices. You will see much better performance if you create a campaign which includes keywords, ads, and landing pages that cater to these devices. Google did include the option to duplicate campaign settings if you start your new campaign through the UI, another nice feature which can alleviate this problem for the most part.

You will have to try the new UI out for yourself to come up with your own opinion. You can also check out some of the material directly from Google for more information. Again, overall I am pleased. It may not be the prettiest thing out there, but if it makes my job more efficient I am happy!

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