Saturday, November 13, 2010

Google could have bought Baidu

BusinessWeek has published a terrific and lengthy article on Chinese search engine Baidu, how it “won” China and its global aspirations. The following is the CliffsNotes version.
Baidu holds a 73 percent market share in China, the world’s largest internet market. The company is worth $38 billion and is 57 percent larger than Yahoo. Its shares have doubled in value since Google “withdrew” from China to Hong Kong earlier this year.
Baidu CEO Robin Li (41) got a masters at SUNY Buffalo. He once worked at Infoseek and is now the second richest man in China.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Spanish lawsuit faced by Google

Data protection officials in Spain have filed a lawsuit over Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data earlier this year as part of its Street View product.
The Spanish Agency for Data Protection says it has evidence of five violations of Spanish law involving Google’s collection of SSID and MAC addresses from unencrypted Wi-Fi routers. Two of the violations are categorized as serious and the other three as very serious; Google could face fines that range from $84,000 to $840,000 for each offense, if convicted. You can download the agency’s two-page announcement (84k PDF, Spanish).
A Google spokesperson has reiterated to PC World that the data collection was an accident and says Google is “profoundly sorry” for what happened. Google also told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that the “data was not used in any form or in any Google product and the company has never intended to use it in that way.”

Friday, October 8, 2010

Bit.ly keeps the track of the site

Do you use bit.ly to shorten a URL, you can then take that shortened URL and gather some quick and potentially useful metrics from it. Try the following steps:

1 - Visit bit.ly.

2 - In the box, enter the URL you are interested in discovering information about (such as an article from a competitor’s Web site or an article you wrote last month), then press “Enter” or click “Shorten.”

3 - Copy your freshly-shortened link (it will look similar to “Example A” below), paste it into the address bar of your browser (the place where you would manually enter a URL to visit), then add a + (that’s a plus sign) onto the end of it (to make it look like “Example B” below) and hit enter.


Read More : http://www.zdnet.com/blog/seo/pro-tip-use-bitly-to-view-your-competition-8217s-twitter-and-facebook-reach/794

Thursday, October 7, 2010

1 Billion Queries per day on Twitter

If Twitter were like an old-style McDonald’s, the sign outside would have changed to “1 Billion Queries Served” today. And to keep serving up those queries to humans and machines alike, Twitter is now using a new underlying search technology.
The news was announced in a post on Twitter’s Engineering blog today. Let’s take the technical change first, then get into the fun numbers.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Google instant gets hit by Blue arrow

Did you notice the blue arrow that’s showing next to the first result in Google’s listings? It’s part of the new keyboard navigation system that rolled out for Google Instant this week.
A reader contacted us about the arrow that he started seeing, and that caused me to see them for the first time myself. Maybe they’ve been there for me since Google’s announcement earlier this week, and I didn’t notice. Maybe it’s part of a wider rollout (I’m checking). But here’s a closer look.
Notice how in a search below, there’s a blue arrow next to the first listing:

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Extended search deal b/w Google & Apple

WPP Group’s CEO Sir Martin Sorrell was the one who coined the term “froe” to describe Google. He said in 2008 that Google had gone from being a “frenemy” to a “froe” of the agency holding company. Presumably “froe” is a more direct competitor than a “frenemy”– at least that’s the implication.

Google and Apple started out as genuine friends, with overlapping board seats, and then seemed to gradually turn into sniping “froes.” But it now appears that they’re more like “frenemies” after all.

The two companies have apparently renewed their search deal regarding the iPhone, which was assumed to be in doubt as the “froe-mentum” built over the last year.

It kind of “crested” and broke when Apple announced that iPhone 4 would have Bing as a search option but not that Bing would be the “default” provider on the iPhone, as some had anticipated.

In a new Charlie Rose interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, appearing in BusinessWeek, Schmidt casually mentions that Google and Apple have “extended their deal”:
 
Apple is a company we both partner and compete with. We do a search deal with them, recently extended, and we’re doing all sorts of things in maps and things like that. So the sum of all this is that two large corporations, both of which are important, both of which I care a lot about, will [remain] pretty close. Emphasis added.
Source url : http://searchengineland.com/google-apple-extend-search-deal-emerge-as-frenemies-not-froes-51603


Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Google switching over to new keyword tool

Google announced to drop the old adwords keyword tool permanently and switch over to the new one by end of this month. The “new” keyword tool has been in beta since September 2009 and we ultimately knew Google would phase out the old keyword tool in exchange for this new one. Now we know when.

Google said the old keyword tool, which is currently accessible, will be available throughout the end of this month. September 1, 2010, the old keyword tool will begin redirecting to the new keyword tool. Google promises to update us when the switch over happens and also promises to drop the “beta” label from the existing tool.
Source : http://searchengineland.com/google-to-drop-old-keyword-tools-by-end-of-month-48500

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Google wave shutdown

Last May Google announced a new wave of forum communications and the cockpit fan e-mail and instant messaging. It was also effective, real-time collaboration tool. It's more than that.

Perhaps it was a problem, it also offers many opportunities. Besides, people do not necessarily see the need to use wave, even though it was a productive and efficient than traditional tools.

This is what Google said that when the wave started by:
 
"Wave" is a part of the discussion and the document, in which people can communicate and work with rich formatted text, images, videos, maps and more.

Google has now closed wave:
 
But despite these successes, and many loyal fans, the wave has not seen the introduction we expected. We do not intend to further develop the wave as a separate product, but we will keep the site at least the end of the technology and will continue to use other Google projects.

Source url : http://searchengineland.com/google-wave-crashes-48086