From York to New York - out with the old, in with the new

According to GoogleCache 96.6% of Wikipedia pages Rank in Google’s Top 10:

Although I don’t believe their methodology is particularly sound, it got my brain juices flowing. Wikipedia is a growing authority on brands…so how do brands fare, what’s the coverage?

I’ve answers, I picked Business Week’s list of Top 100 brand names and subjected them to the Wiki test, the results are pretty conclusive.
Google is in bed with Wikipedia, Yahoo! is a WikiFlirt^TM and Live is confused as always:

I could not observe any particular instances whereby Wikipedia was out-ranking the brand sites, asides from Live whose ranking algorithm is proving rather brittle.
Google and Yahoo are amongst the only Top 100 brands without a WikiPedia listing in their Top 10 results (the irony).

MSN/Live ranked Wikipedia over these brands (in the event it could actually rank the brand site altogether, you guys NEED SEO!)

• Duracell
• Hennessy
• Hermes
• LG
• Marlboro
• Porsche
• Prada

This really goes to show that brand marketers need to get hands on with Wikipedia!

All of us in the SEO industry have discovered the benefit of eye tracking studies to inform and dispel the mysteries around how users interact with media and search engine results (Golden Triangle) but as this video will show you, it is a dangerous social weapon!

Over a decade of dot com M&A from the big guns of search have produced some insightful collections of web properties. Google’s latest 10-K filings is a good time to do a quick summary of who owns what in the world of search.

Google - See Google’s full portfolio of subsidiaries
GGLs list of acquisitions exhibit an impressive grass roots approach, their buy-outs have often contributed to eventual product releases in one form or another.

• JotSpot and Writely have contributed to the launch of Google Apps for Domains and the Google Docs and Spreadsheets products.
• SketchUp, now re-branded as Google SketchUp - a 3D authoring environment.
• ZipDash - provides traffic maps, recently incorporated into Google Maps.
• Urchin which is now Google Analytics.
• Keyhole Corp - now Google Earth.
• Applied Semantics which no doubt contributed to the Adwords/Adsense platforms.
• The list continues with heavy weights like YouTube, Orkut, and host of Payment transaction holdings to support Google Checkout.

Clearly Google are masters in acquiring enlightened technology companies at their early stages, fostering them and later bringing them to market as rich, comprehensive products.
Yahoo - See Yahoo’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

Yahoo’s story is quite different, their holdings feature a great deal of search engines which Y! had to acquire to build up the search engine technology intellect base to compete with Google and move away from their original strong editorial model. More recent acquisitions are highly successful and promising enterprises such as Hotjobs, Kelkoo and Delicious.
You might remember Compuserve, once the only ISP available in Belgium which soon became a bottom-less pit for my pocket-money!

Microsoft - See Microsoft’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

The folks at Redmond have apparently favored an in-house approach with few M&A deals in the search sector.

Ask (IAC) - See IAC’s full portfolio of subsidiaries.

IAC holds a truly diversified and exciting set of subsidiaries:

• TicketMaster
• A multitude of online dating sites like Match.com
• Parts of Excite
• CollegeHumor.com
• and countless more…

In summary, the strategies at play here are very different. IAC is excelling at diversifying into disparate fields, Google is holding and capitalising on smart investment moves, Yahoo is striving to get back into the game and, alas Microsoft is caught sleeping as usual!