Bing has experienced a 22% growth rate in August, 2009 according to reports from Nielsen.com.

The search engine still has some ground to make up after falling 600 million searches short of third-place search engine Yahoo!, but if trends (Bing growing by an average of 22% and Yahoo! continuing to fall) continue, Microsoft’s search engine could make it’s way into the top three by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Google has an absolute stranglehold at number one with close to 7 billion searches. To give you an idea of how dominant that is: if you added the searches conducted by every other search engine in August together, Yahoo+Bing/MSN Live+AOL+Ask.com+My web search+Comcast+Yellow Pages+Nextag+Local.com, you would get a grand total of about 3.5 billion searches, which is half of Google alone.

Also unveiled earlier this week, thanks to cnet.com, was an independent study that shows Google was preferred by 1100 software developers who conducted a survey. Google ranked number one for highest overall accuracy, best real-time relevance, and fastest page load speed, with most survey participants possessing an average of 3-5 years of experience in the field.

Here are the top three Web Marketing stories of the Summer of 2009:

3. Bing emerges as a major player in the search engine game (or do they?)

Earlier this year, if you mentioned a Microsoft search engine as having the potential to overtake Google or Yahoo! you’d likely have been laughed out of the room. However, ever since Microsoft unveiled their newly-branded search engine, Bing, in May of 2009, the new search engine has been taking the search engine market by storm.

However, the question remains: Does Bing have staying power? Does it really offer search engine results and features that will convince users to make the switch from Google, or is it all just hype generated by Microsoft?

Bing does offer Cashback, a service where they’ve partnered with some of the top online retailers to offer shoppers certain percentages of cash back in exchange for shopping and purchasing on their websites. This has become extremely popular in a less-than-thriving economy where everyone is looking to save a buck. But other than the Cashback feature and claims by independent researchers who claim that study proves that users prefer Bing’s results more than Google’s, it seems as if it’s too early to dub the search engine as a major threat to Google’s steadily-growing success.

However, a certain deal that was worked out of the summer may be enough to take them to the next level:

2. Bing and Yahoo Join Forces

On July 29th 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced a deal that would see Bing power Yahoo! search results.

In June 2009, according to Wikipedia and Complete.com, the search engine market-share was as follows:

Google- 74%

Yahoo!- 17%

Bing- 7%

Yahoo! and Bing’s decision to combine forces and allow Bing to take over Yahoo!’s search engine results may be big news to some, but again, it is still to early to say that Google should be looking in their rear-view mirrors.

Organically, from our research, over 85% of our clients’ traffic (200+ attorneys from all over the country) comes from Google organic search. Bing has been slowly rising the ranks of sources of traffic for our clients (right now it is top 10 for most clients), and is something to keep an eye on, but we still advise our clients that Google is still the top search engine for the foreseeable future.

On the Pay-per-click side, yes, Bing’s paid search has increased over the summer, but it would still be safe to say that Google’s Adwords is  the preferred pay-per-click advertising resource across the board.

So, the conclusion: Bing and Yahoo are trying to catch up and have made up some ground over the summer, but let’s wait and see what develops over the next few months.

So, you would think that Google is just sitting on their hands and waiting to see if the others catch up, right?

Wrong.

1. Google’s response to Bing and real-time search with Google Caffeine

Google seems to have responded to the hype surrounding Bing and the emergence of real-time search with the announcement of Google caffeine, Google’s new search engine.

The news shook up the search engine and web marketing world and has caused many webmasters and search engine marketing professionals to wonder if they’ll need to change their ways to optimize their websites for Google’s new algorithm.

Google’s announcement stated that the new search engine is “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

But does this mean that they’ll start to value certain optimization factors more than others now? Should everyone freak out and start figuring out how to get ready for Google’s new search engine (which is still in Beta phases and has yet to be implemented into their main search engine)?

Probably not, but here’s what we can tell you:

If you don’t have a way to add content to your website, and if you’re not adding content on a regular (daily/bi-daily) basis, you’re going to have a hard time catching up when Google Caffeine becomes the norm.

Searchenginewatch.com conducted a case study comparing search engine results between the old Google algorithm and the new Google Caffeine algorithm.

The conclusion? Google was, indeed, correct in their announcement that pages will be indexed faster. No more waiting a few weeks to break out of the Google sandbox, and no more hoping that visitors use the Google Blogsearch to find your blog posts. Trusted and high-authority websites with fresh and relative content might even begin appearing in search engine results the same day as the content is published if Google Caffeine accomplishes what Google hopes it will.

This new Google search feature gives them a leg-up on Bing and Yahoo!, and also allows Google to battle Facebook and Twitter in the real-time search competition. Before, Twitter (and, later, Facebook) could convince users that those looking for real-time search results should sue their sites vs traditional search engines because of SE’s long indexing times.

Attorneys and law firms with content management systems that allow attorneys, bloggers and writers employed by the law firm, and other website/blog contributors to log in and post content within the matter of minutes will definitely have the upper hand with Google caffeine and other real-time search engines emerging as preferred search engines.

Our recommendation? If you have a good writer, keep them and give them a raise. If you don’t? Find one and hold on to them, you’ll need them.

Content is king, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

There is our recap of the Top 5 Web Marketing News Stories of the Summer. Here are some questions that we hope will be answered by 2010:

• Will Bing actually continue to grow, or fade away after the hype settles?
• Will Twitter users continue to maintain their profiles, or will spammers scare everyone away?
• Who will emerge as the next big thing in social media/social networking?
• How will Google decide what sites are displayed in real-time search engine results?

We welcome your predictions, feel free to post a comment with what you think the answers to any of these questions will be.

It was a busy summer in the world of Internet marketing, and the dust is only beginning to settle. It seems like, just yesterday, Twitter was this new social networking phenomenon that everyone was afraid to use, Microsoft was slowly dwindling away as search engine-nobodies, and Google was on top of the world and didn’t have to worry about anyone else.

Well, some of this has changed (to an extent) with some developing stories in world of Internet marketing. So, without further ado, here are the top five stories of the summer and why you should pay attention to them.

5. Twitter emerges as leader in real-time search

While many continue to question Twitter’s staying power and hacking vulnerabilities, the social networking site continued to grow in both size and popularity over the summer as many news outlets, companies, and organizations are currently using the site as a main source of syndication.

While it does seem true (based on retention numbers) that many only visit Twitter sporadically (as opposed to Facebook and other social networking sites which are typically checked daily by users), this is likely caused by the number of spam accounts that are created because of the level of ease involved with creating a Twitter account (Facebook is a little more involved and requires a lot more effort to create a profile) and finding followers to spam.

I mean, what does a spammer really have to do other than upload a picture, fill in a bio, launch a few tweets and go searching for suckers?

Twitter has publicly said that they are doing everything they can to limit spam accounts, and a recent ESPN E:60 documentary on the lack of authenticity of some athlete-intimidating profiles on Twitter with a high number of followers created with the sole purpose of misleading those followers (one person apparently approached Shaq about something that an impostor tweeted, sparking a confrontation) concluded that the need for verified accounts is necessary in certain instances.

Nonetheless, despite Twitter’s growing pains, it has emerged as a major player in the new era of search: real-time.

Real-time search is becoming more an more popular with both searchers and search-ees (aka those who know how to effectively manage their Twitter profiles from a business perspective).

From the searcher’s point of view: no more only finding sites and blog entries that are already a few weeks/months old because that’s how long it takes Google and Yahoo! to index, no more finding companies that you know nothing about and have to question their reliability and transparency, and no more annoying sponsored ads.

From the search-ees’s point of view: no more waiting that long for your site or blog to appear in search results, and a very easy way to post content, announce blog posts and press releases, and reach out to potential clients from the grassroots level.

Now If someone could just come up with a tool where you could see who views your Twitter profile, we’d be in business.

So you would think that, with all of Twitter’s problems: accounts being hacked, users not logging in regularly, spam accounts running ramped, that the other players in the search engine/social networking world would ignore the little blue bird and assume that they would eventually fall off, right?

Nope, just the opposite.

4. Facebook tries (really hard) to be more like Twitter

One of the best quotes I’ve heard so far in response to Facebook’s extensive efforts to be more like Twitter:

“If you can’t innovate, imitate.”

And that’s exactly what Facebook has done over the past few months and, it would appear, will continue to do.

First came the home page design

In case your forgot what the old Facebook home page looked like, here it is (screenshot courtesy of PCMag)

Remember the days when a status message was sacred? You might have posted something once a week if you got around to it, and it was like this personal statement that told EVERYONE what you were doing or how you were feeling?

I don’t know about you, but since the Facebook redesign where the main call to action is

I can’t get my friends to shut up!

Everyone’s sharing links to blog posts and movies, giving opinions on news events and political happenings, and I’m seeing status messages for some friends 20 and 30 times a day it seems like.

Sound familiar?

Next up: Facebook’s announcement that they have recently launched a real-time search feature.

Shocker.

The layout even looks similar to a Twitter search.

Twitter:

Facebook:

And last but not least, Facebook also recently announced that they are launching a Facebook Lite, and judging by the screen shots, I see some similarities.

Some features that I wouldn’t be surprised to see integrated into Facebook or Facebook Lite:

• A character limit for status messages
• A buzzword for status messages
• Trends

It will also be interesting to see if Twitter offers Facebook-like features such as paid ads, on-site video and photo sharing (as opposed to external links), and recommended followers. Either way, it was interesting to watch this summer as each site made significant changes (Twitter also redesigned their home page, added the trending topics feature, and added some “paid definition” feature which I’m not sure anyone pays attention to) and will likely continue to do so in the battle of social networking sites.

That’s the end of part one of the Top 5 Web Marketing News Stories of the Summer that you should be paying attention to. In part two we plan on touching on the emergence of Bing, Bing’s purchase of Yahoo!, and Google’s response to everything that has happened this summer.