In an attempt to improve the unbalanced juncture for Yahoo in the past years, the company decided to team up with Microsoft’s Bing hoping this move would help Yahoo regain its top position. Yet, according to the latest reports,  no one can compete with Google, although the latter is also facing a bad image due to quarrels with Facebook and other stakeholders on changing search algorithms.

In coming years, Google will likely maintain its leading position in the US market for advertisements related to web searches, the company having increased its share of the $15 billion U.S. search-ad market to more than 75% from 71.4% last year.  Microsoft’s share will also increase, but only slightly, to 10.8%, up from 10.2% in 2010.   Yahoo’s search-ad share will continue its steady decline, reaching 8.1% this year, down from 10.4% last year. Google has recently introduced its real-time bidding (RTB), a service that should account for 12.6% of the U.S. display-ad market by the end of the year, or $1.3 billion, up from 9.6% last year. The RTB service involves and automatic bid activated each time someone access a page featuring ads from Google’s ad exchange.

On the younger side of search methodology and monetization, we have giant Facebook that is expected to boost its share of the $10.1 billion U.S. display-ad market to 21.6% from 13.6% in 2010, as more big brands begin marketing on such sites. Bing is trying to catch at Facebook’s success in the advertising business and teams up with the latter, noting potential in social media environments.  Bing added a Like button for search results as an ‘emblem’ for its strategic plans of approaching social media despite privacy issues related to this partnership.

The next step that will be taken by search ads is to dominate the mobile sector. Location-based searches are prime targets for advertisements, as the latter will also tie in the local market more effectively. Considering you are a local business that wants to advertise its products/services, the simplest way to gain attention from prospective customers is by targeting you ads as much as possible; gaining local traction via web search engines might be fatuous since search engines are too expensive and lack localized and personal context.

Facebook already has a competitive advantage by taking a social approach to search and advertising, which could translate well in the mobile space.  At the moment Facebook centralized a massive social community, and will surely profit from personal data it has gathered from its users, in addition to location info from its 100 million mobile users. In fact, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all looking to monetize the mobile space. Google has surely found the recipe for success with its Google Adwords taking on a local appeal, and Microsoft has just rolled out Ad SDK for ad enabled mobile gaming apps.