Tag: Property Portals

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Bing taking market share from Google

A recent article in The Australian Newspaper commented on the sucess of Bing and Yahoo in taking market share from Google. Now in Australia that isn’t going to be hard initially, as Google has around 90% of all search engine traffic. Making a significant dint will be much harder however.

You can see the full article here.

There is no doubt Bing is a good search engine – far far better than Live and a real potential threat to Google. In a recent interview by Tech Crunch with Steve Ballmer, Ballmer commented that they have over 5000 people working on search. A pretty extraordinary number but it shows how serious Microsoft is about competing with Google.

You can see the full interview with Ballmer here.

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Myhome.com.au shutting down!

It was reported on the weekend that myhome.com.au us planning to shut down. You can see the full Fin Review article here: My Home Article

Many people will speculate why myhome.com.au failed. It seemed to having everything a portal needs, serious backers, serious money and serious people – or at least people with experience in the sector.

So why did it fail? Very simple in my view. They simply just did not offer anything different to the existing major players – www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au, and it could be argued that what they offered was actually inferior.

My previous blog on the new portal www.onthehouse.com.au really said it all – to be competitive as a new portal you need to offer the consumer something more, something different to acquire customer share and loyalty. Without it, the portal will just be a money pit – like www.myhome.com.au.

So why did it fail? Extremely poor strategic design of the site and supporting services. They just quite frankly got it wrong from the start.