Last week at  Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi,  the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course,  caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.

For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise.  For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of  generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.

Everyone believed  that Yahoo tried to play a catchup unsuccessfully a few years ago.  Now it looks like  the long tail fell into Bing’s blindside too.  This is interesting if you consider that as far back as in 2006 Google search mandarins had let out that every year they had seen one out of four queries coming straight out of the blue.  Mehdi bumped this up to 33%!

Clearly this immense diversity in search has been growing at a phenomenal pace and customers using search engines have been literally shouting at the top of their voices. Apparently not everyone was listening!

Long tail keywords work in interesting manner. They do not help as much in discovering new content as  assisting in discovering information in new and different ways.  This nature of the long tail has been a boon to  advertisers in optimizing  their paid search very effectively, enabling them to generate lead volume at manageable cost of acquisition (check out our white paper Flick of the Long Tail)

The Long tail went out of focus after a brief period of limelight when Chris Anderson analyzed data from AOL web site hits. Last year Avinash redrew attention to its charms through his excellent blog post.

A little noticed development (maybe because it slide under the radar) was Google’s attempt to limit use of long tail keywords for bidding. The Help on Adword Search Center states (emphasis are mine)

“A keyword can have low search volume for a variety of reasons, including a lack of relevance to users’ searches because of keyword obscurity, specificity, or a significant misspelling of the intended keyword.”  Google attributes this changes  to “… helps AdWords serve ads more efficiently and reduces the volume of keywords on our system” (overstrained infrastructure?). They go on to say… “It takes very little search traffic for a keyword to be unsuspended, and for business practice reasons we don’t disclose our keyword traffic thresholds.”

Maybe forcing most advertisers to bid on high impression and highly competitive keywords is one such business practice?

So after establishing their supremacy in long tail keywords, is Google current move to suppress long tail a move to strengthen the search giants bottom line…the proverbial Chinese Long March or will turn out to be the Long Walk of Navajos!

Question: With Google ceding  the territory and Bing not focused on this segment, who will step in?

Perhaps this is an opportunity for Tier II search engines who have been waiting in the wings  or for an entirely new kid on the block!