You can learn quite a bit of information from public companies who must disclose just about every thing that could have an implication on the value of the company. Because of this, it’s a smart idea to follow the filings of various domain companies so you can read up on company filings, rather than rely on blogs and other news outlets who may or may not report on certain events/filings.

Some publicly traded companies that are required to make public filings that are related to the domain industry include the following (please let me know if I missed any company):

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Marchex
Top Level Domain Holdings
Tucows
Dark Blue Sea
Verisign
Banks.com

In order to follow these companies, I set up a stock portfolio in Yahoo specifically with domain industry related stocks. This allows me to see where they are trading as well as news reports and SEC (or other) filings. Don’t simply rely on others’ interpretations of news – and don’t get delayed news reports that fly under the radar (domain sales for example).

Follow these and other related companies and be more informed as a result.

The Yahoo and Microsoft on-again off-again partnership/buyout discussions have been all over the financial and Internet news for a while, so I don’t need to chronicle those here. Yesterday afternoon, news broke that Yahoo and Microsoft were not only talking once again, but a deal was imminent. This morning it was announced that a deal between the two companies had been completed – finally.

According to Reuters, the upshot of the deal is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will handle search duties on all Yahoo-owned websites, and Yahoo will be responsible for selling the premium search ads. This means that Bing will now be the search engine for nearly 30% of all searches, up from 8% in June according to a report from Comscore. This is big news for owners of generic domain names.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article stating that Microsoft’s Bing search engine seems to love developed generic domain names. I listed a small sample of search results for generic domain names on Google and on Bing, and they clearly ranked much better on Bing. While I was doing my small sample, noted domain investor Edwin Hayward was doing the same comparison with similar results, and the white paper he wrote shares his results.I didn’t report Yahoo’s search results, but they were somewhere between Bing and Google for the most part.

This is very good news for domain investors, because it means if a company has a generic domain name, it should rank higher for almost 30% of web searches rather than just 8%, making these domain names more desired and valuable. I won’t speculate about what will happen with PPC payouts because domain parking is a very small % of 1% of my total revenue, so I will let other experts provide commentary on that side of things.

I believe this is good news for owners of generic domain names.

I love Bing. Not only do my developed generic domain names rank well in Bing, as I mentioned in a post last week, but today Bing has an image of my apartment building on its homepage, directly under the magnifying glass. The love must be mutual – thanks Bing!

Want to see a side-by-side comparison of how your developed websites rank in Bing and Google? It’s as simple as visiting Bing-vs-Google.com. This new website shows the results from both search engines directly next to each other, allowing you to easily see how your sites rank and the description and title for each page. Sure, you can just go to Bing and Google independently, but why not search both at once?

From my point of view, the most interesting aspect of this is the domain name.  It would seem to be a risky endeavor to use both trademarks in a single domain name, especially because Microsoft is known to vigorously defend its marks. I don’t see any monetization of the website, so I don’t know about the legal issues.

The New York Times has an article in today’s paper, where they cite this website, so I am sure if it wasn’t on either company’s radar before, it is now. Ironically, the domain name without the dashes (BingvsGoogle.com) is also registered but is undeveloped. That page has the default Godaddy landing page, which is monetized with PPC links, potentially causing problems for that owner.

I’ve been reading many articles about Microsoft’s $80-$100 million marketing campaign and about how Bing’s search market share continues to grow. If this trend continues even when the marketing campaign ends, this could be very good news for generic .com domain investors.

Based on a small sampling of searches I tested, it seems that Bing gives generic domain names higher rankings than Google or Yahoo. It’s the case with my websites, Burbank.com, Lowell.com, Newburyport.com, and Torah.com. It’s also the case with a number of other generic .com domain names that I checked in both search engines.

Bing’s market share is still very low, so the impact is minor. In fact, I highly, highly doubt Bing will overtake Google in the near future. However, if Bing does grow and eats into Google’s share, and/or if Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search business and the generic domain name rankings of Bing transfers to Yahoo, we could see more companies valuing generic domain names for their SERP value.

Here’s a comparison of the rankings of a small number of websites with generic domain names in Google and Bing:

Casino.com: – Google: 6 – Bing: 1 for Casino
Burbank.com: – Google: 5 – Bing: 2 for Burbank
Lowell.com: – Google: 10 – Bing: 2 for Lowell
Newburyport.com: – Google: 8 – Bing: 2 for Newburyport
Mortgage.com: – Google: 9 – Bing: 1 for Mortgage
Soccer.com: – Google: 1 – Bing: 1 for Soccer
DogSupplies.com: – Google: 3 – Bing: 1 for Dog Supplies
Airfare.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 1 for Airfare
Fly.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 2 for Fly
Chairs.com: – Google: NR – Bing: 3 for Chairs
Torah.com: – Google: 20 – Bing: 8 for Torah
HomeFashions.com: – Google: 7 – Bing: 2 for Home Fashions

One thing that is especially good is that most of the websites above wouldn’t be recognized by consumers as the brand leader. In the Lowell market for example, most people would probably consider the Sun newspaper to be the market leader. Likewise, in the pet marketplace, people would probably choose Pet Smart or Pet Co as the market leader.