• John Battelle's Searchblog , Tuesday, January 6, 2009 12:30 PM

Search guru John Battelle weighs in with his annual predictions for the Web media industry for 2009. He says the industry will be hard hit by the economic recession in the first half of the year, but by year's end, it will have sufficiently recovered. "The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money."

Battelle thinks Google will see its search share decline "significantly" for the first time ever this year. He also believes the Web juggernaut will struggle to find an answer as to how it will diversify its revenue. Google would benefit by becoming more of a media company, but that would also mean playing the brand game, something the company will fail at "for many cultural reasons," Battelle says. Even so, he thinks the company's stock will rebound in Q3 and Q4 mainly because search demand will pick up.

As for Microsoft, Battelle thinks the software giant will gain five points of search share on Google, and perhaps as much as 10--and this could happen without acquiring Yahoo's search business. Microsoft will finally start investing real money in search, Battelle says, and will probably buy Yahoo's search business after Yahoo and AOL merge in the second half of the year.

Read the whole story at John Battelle's Searchblog »