The study carried out in the first half of January 2010 found that keywords related to homosexuality had been filtered out in both the Arabic and English versions. When Arabic keywords like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘porn’ or ‘homosexuality’ were queried, a pop-up message appeared saying, “Your country or region requires a strict Bing Safe Search setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

In the English version, use of these keywords is censored for Image searches, but Web searches for gay and lesbian sites are allowed.

Bing searches for ‘gay’ censored in Middle East

Unfortunately, this censorship also blocks out searches related to sex education and gay equality rights.

Bing does not offer users the option to turn off the Safe Search setting in the Middle East.

It was, however, found that if users who are physically present in an Arabic country change their country setting to a version of Bing that is offered in another region, such as North America or Europe, then the censorship does not occur, and users can thus gain access to all the searches that are banned on the Arabic version.

Another way users could initially bypass the censorship was by using another non-filtered keyword along with the filtered keyword. For example, the keyword ‘lesbian’ is filtered but ‘lesbian rights’ was not filtered. This, however, seems to be fixed, and both queries are now being censored.

Surprisingly, OpenNet did not find any censorship relating to other sensitive topics such as politics, terrorism, religious rights or minority issues and gender equality.

As of now, it is unclear whether Microsoft has imposed this censorship upon itself, or is working under instructions from the local authorities.

According to Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal, the new search service will run on set-top boxes and will allow users to search for TV shows and Web content, including YouTube videos.

Dish Network, which is currently the second largest satellite TV provider in the U.S., will allow Google to offer TV searches of a very high quality to its viewers. In return, Google will be able to drive more advertising revenues as subscribers are bound to see its display ads while conducting searches.

The service will make use of some features from Google’s Android Operating System. New set-top boxes will have to be loaded with Google software and Dish Network subscribers will be able to search content and even create their own show line up or playlist using a keyboard.

The service is already being tested by families of Google employees.

Studies have shown that more and more users are interested in viewing online content on their large-screen TV sets. Some companies like Apple, Yahoo! and Microsoft already offer similar services.

One hurdle that Google will have to overcome is that users will need new set-top boxes, and they may not want to spend money on them. Google will have to devise some enticing offers to encourage users to get a new set-top boxes.

www.searchalliance.com

According to the official press release from Yahoo! and Microsoft, this alliance will enable their business users to connect with a larger audience of potential customers, thus saving them valuable time and money.

Users will now be able to search ad inventory from both the sites simultaneously, by using the Microsoft search engine, Bing, which presently has a combined audience of about 577 million users worldwide.

Advertisers will be able to use Microsoft adCenter to advertise to the combined client base of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The alliance will obviously help both the companies concerned to improve monetisation for their partners, eventually helping the companies to generate more revenue for themselves.

Though both companies will continue to have different consumer search experiences, Microsoft will manage the technology for both of them through Bing. Yahoo! will support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies and resellers and their clients. Microsoft on the other hand will support self service advertisers. All ads will go through the Microsoft ad-Center.

This alliance will be implemented across the U.S. Canada, U.K. and France. Elsewhere in Europe, Latin America and Asia, Microsoft is already a partner of Yahoo!

At present, ads will continue to show up on Bing search results, just as before, and advertisers will be informed about the alliance once it actually begins. They aim to be able to implement the new setup before the 2010 holiday season, but may delay it to early 2011 if needed.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

During the week ending on 26th December 2009 social networks and forums took a lead over the search engines, in terms of number of visit, for the first time ever.

This peak over the Christmas holidays was followed by a dip in social networking, but the sector has already recovered and social networks and forums are once again showing a definite upward trend.

During the week ending on 16th January 2010, visits to social networks in Australia were only 0.4% behind search engines.

Another trend, which has been visible over the last three months, is that social networking shows a significant rise during the weekends, especially on Sundays. This was first seen by Hitwise on Sunday the 15th of November 2009 and then again on Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd of November 2009.

One remarkable finding pointed out by Hitwise was that while social networking reached its highest point for 2009 on Christmas day at 14.8% share of Internet visits, search engines reached their annual peak on 10th January 2009 at 14.5% share of Internet visits.

Facebook and YouTube both had their highest number of visits on Christmas day with 8.0% and 2.2% of the market respectively.

Search engines still dominate the market in the U.K. and U.S.A. However, if the trend in Australia is an indicator of the future, social media marketing might be set to increase in importance a whole lot more.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has made it clear during an interview with CNBC & Bloomberg that Microsoft plans to continue working in China, and they will toe the line as is expected of them.

Following a meeting with President Obama at the White House, he told Bloomberg, “There are cyber attacks on all companies, of any size, from all parts of the world, not just China, at all times, so it’s hard for me to understand how that got tied into the whole notion of doing business in China.” He further said, “China’s the second largest market in the world … [Pulling out of China] is not something we’re thinking about. That’s not part of the way for us to grow.”

Google’s announcement stated that the company had been the direct victim of highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks that had originated in China. The attack not only resulted in the loss of corporate infrastructure and intellectual property, but also targeted various human rights activists.

Microsoft, on the other hand, said that they had not been affected by any such attacks and their email system has not been breached. The ethics of bowing to the Chinese government’s cesnorship requirements don’t seem to bother Microsoft.

Microsoft’s market share in China, which is currently estimated at just 0.25%, may grow if Google quits the Chinese search market.

U.S. Government officials have clearly stated that they support Google’s decision to pull out of China. White House spokesperson, Robert Gibbs said, “Our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.” While the White House has not yet taken any action against China, Philip Crowley of the State Department said that they will issue a formal message to Beijing and ask for an explanation.

If Google is to be believed, freedom of expression on the Internet is at stake here, as is the future of several companies who wish to do business in China, which is the world’s largest Internet market. Though, that is little more than grand-standing on Google’s part.

Human rights organisations in China have asked other companies to follow Google’s lead and withdraw from China if censorship continues.

So far, however, there is no indication that other companies will withdraw, and China seems adamant on maintaining their policies, since they know that the Western world will not be able to withdraw from their country very easily.

Google has been working on the new method of indexing their search results for a while now, and many SEO professionals are well aware of the upcoming update, code named “Caffeine“. Representatives from Google have maintained that the Caffeine update wouldn’t go live before 2010.

2010 is here, now. The search engine has already been testing Caffeine in one of their data centres since last summer, and it may be rolled out very soon.

In fact, there are some bloggers who claim that they have already noticed faster search results.

As far as most users are concerned, the official launch of Caffeine will not make much difference to the search results, as Caffeine is more of a behind-the-scenes worker. There will be no visual changes in the search results.

Only the overall speed with which the search results are received is expected to change for the better. This factor will be especially useful in searches for photos and videos.

A study of Google Caffeine conducted by an SEO firm found that it will give more importance to news and social media for generic search terms, but specific keywords will show more regular websites on the subject. In general, they found that search rankings are not very likely to change, except for some websites, which may not have updated their content for a very long time. It will, therefore, be beneficial for websites to remain up-to-date and refresh their content regularly once the Caffeine update is launched.

With the help of this new feature, users can search for keywords in the Closed Captions that are available with videos. In essence, this means that Hulu viewers can now search for particular scenes in a movie or television show that comes with closed captions.

Captions Search results include a preview of the section of the video containing the keyword, which can be seen by hovering over the segment featuring the search term. One can also see that clip in full size by clicking on the search result’s text.

Hulu Captions Search is currently avalaible in Hulu Labs or through the “Captions” tab on any video that has been provided with closed captions.

Another interesting feature of Captions Search is the heat map. This feature provides a graphical representation of the viewer interest generated during various stages of the show. A large range of viewer behaviours have been assessed to generate this graph, and it appears at the top of the video. This heat map can also be used to navigate directly to a particular captioned section of the show.

The features are still in the beta phase, but are likely to go live pretty soon.

Preview of Captions Search on Hulu

The latest rumour making the rounds is that Microsoft may buy Ask.com, which has been up for sale for a long time now. Barry Diller, the Chairman of InterActive Corp, the parent company of Ask.com, has said that the search market is challenging, and he would be quite willing to part with his search engine (In exchange, for appropriate remuneration, of course.)

Under the circumstances, Microsoft would seem to be the most likely to buy over the company.

Although Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is doing quite well for itself, especially after announcing various deals with Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo!, it is still a distant third in the search engine market, with only about 9.4% market share in the USA.

Ask.com, which is ranked 4th in the search market, holds about 4% of the market share, which would help Bing gain a better foothold in the market. Also, this deal could interest Microsoft, as Ask.com earns most of its revenue from an advertising deal they have with Google.

Microsoft would also not have to deal with any regulatory concerns, as they still have a very small percent of the total market share even after their deal with Yahoo! is factored in.

Lastly, Microsoft would certainly have the resources to takeover Ask.com if they are so inclined.

With 64.9% of the U.S. market share and over 85% of the European search market still securely tucked under its belt, Google can still rest easy.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

The first feature, Malware Details, simplifies the tough task of finding out if pages on a site are distributing malware. Webmasters previously had to depend on manual testing, use the Google Safe Browsing API or rely on malware notifications in the Google SERPs to find out if pages on their site had been compromised. Now, this task should be a lot simpler, as Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of the pages, which they feel could be malicious.

Malware details will not only be helpful to webmasters who wish to eliminate malware from their sites quickly but might also help a number of webmasters, whose sites fell in ranking due to the presence of malicious code on their site, now understand why this happened.

The other feature, Fetch as Googlebot, was previously launched in Google Labs. Webmasters are often curious to know what exactly Googlebot sees when their page is accessed. The text only cache on Google SERPs and the keywords and HTML suggestions tools in Webmaster Central help site owners to understand, to some extent, what information Googlebot sees on the page and what details are extracted during the crawl and indexing phases.

Now, with the Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters will be able to get real-time feedback on what the Google search robot sees when it crawls and indexes a page. This information will be especially useful when users update their sites with new technology or find that their pages have been hacked. It might also help some understand why they have not been ranked on specific keywords.

Google Trends already shows users which topics are among the 100 most popular searches on a given day. Google has now incorporated this feature in Google Search, so that users do not need to visit another page to find out what the trending topics of the moment are.

Now, when a user Google’s a particular topic which is among the top 100 in popularity, Google will display a graph at the bottom of the search page to indicate the rate of rise of that topic and other details about it.

Google highlights trending topics within organic SERPs

Google Trends’ Hot Trends feature has also been pruned from its existing top 100 topics to only 40. However, when any of the top 100 topics are searched for it will show up on the homepage.

This move will brings Google a bit closer to imitating Twitter’s popular topics and real-time search functionality. It also allows users to not only know what are the most popular topics at the moment, but will also provide them with additional information about those topics. These Hot Trends will be updated every hour to show how the scenario is changing.

The Hot Topic being searched will not only get a number to indicate its rank in the popularity list but will also be classified with terms such as ‘On Fire’ and Volcanic’ etcetera.

This feature is officially launched only in the U.S. and Japan, but can be seen by some users in the UK at present.

While Google continues to remain the undisputed leader among search engines, HubSpot’s study shows that it is no longer a good idea to concentrate only on marketing through Google, or even through other search engines.

The survey conducted by HubSpot, across 40 of their customers in four industries, has shown that though search is responsible for a lot of the traffic, that traffic does not necessarily convert into leads or sales.

In fact, they found that social media, email and even blogs are very important sources of traffic and sales. Even links coming in from various websites and directories contribute quite significantly to the traffic and leads that a marketer receives.

Quite contrary to the findings of this study conducted by HubSpot, other recent studies have found that while social media alone now accounts for almost 20% of online ad impressions, the number of actual conversions and the influence exerted by a social media presence was substantially lower.

The study shows that the search industry has grown by 41% in July 2009, compared to what it was in July 2008.

Expectedly, Google cornered the lion’s share of the searches conducted. It had 76.7 billion searches which is 67.5% of the total number of searches carried out in July 2009.

Google’s competitors were left far behind. Yahoo! received 8.9 billion searches or 7.8% of the market share. Yahoo! was closely followed by the popular Chinese search engine, Baidu, which received 8 billion searches which is 7% of the market share.

Microsoft’s Bing, which was launched only in June 2009, registered 3.32 billion searches which is a 41% growth compared to July 2008’s volume of searches on Live Search.

Generally speaking, all the well known search engines showed a significant growth in the search volumes they received compared to the same time period last year. Most notably, the Russian search engine Yandex grew by 94%.

comScore has further revealed that the behaviour of search engine users varies markedly from region to region.

They found that Europe accounts for the maximum number of searches with 32.1%, while the Asia-Pacific region follows with 30.8% and North America has 22.1%.

On the other hand, Latin America had the largest number of searches per person. They had an average of 13 search usage days per person in a month, and each searcher conducted 130 searches on an average.

They were followed by Europe which had 117 searches per user and North America which had 12.5 usage days in the month.

The Middle East and Africa lagged behind with only 5.8% of searches conducted worldwide, 10.5 search usage days per person and 97.3 searches per person.

Some time last month, Yahoo! launched a new homepage layout. Their search team is now concentrating on unifying this homepage with the search results page. They have undertaken a lot of research with eye-tracking studies and usability experiments to achieve this. This new search results page is expected to provide which are personally more relevant to the user.

Yahoo! engineers are currently trying to align the framework of the search results page with the new homepage, in order to provide quick access to various search applications which are available in the left hand column of the three column page. The left hand column also provides direct one-click links to other pages, thus managing to retain the user on the Yahoo! page, which advertisers are bound to like.

One important new feature is a section ‘Show Results From’ which allows users to see results from the sites they are most used to and interested in.

The newly launched note-taking application, Yahoo! Search Pad’ is at the top of the left column to provide easier access to research carried out.

SearchScan and SafeSearch features are also in this column to protect against viruses and spam during the search process. The Search Assistance feature is placed directly below the search box.

New Yahoo! Search results page

Yahoo! is also looking out for new ways for users to explore the organic results through a ‘Related Concepts’ section in the left column. They are essentially trying to find easier ways to display enhanced results from a larger number of sites.

A few random users from the USA have already been selected as test subjects for the new search results page. Feedback from this test will be used to fine-tune the page before the general launch.

In light of Yahoo!’s recent search agreement with Microsoft, it remains to be seen how much Yahoo! itself will benefit from these innovations.

Google claim that this new engine has been in the works for several months now and has nothing to with the launch of Bing by Microsoft. The claim is quite believable as it would hardly be possible to put together a new search engine in a matter of weeks.

Google has now released a developer’s preview of this new search engine to get user feedback in order to fine tune the product before the final launch.

This new version has been labeled ‘Caffeine’:

Search using Google Caffeine

Google has claimed that this new version of their search engine will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive than before, even though the appearance of the search results page will continue to be the same as that of the old search results page. This improvement will be due to several technical changes which have been incorporated. The results will also be indexed in real-time, as the search engines of Twitter and Facebook are.

While they claim that the newer version is much faster than the older one, the actual difference in time will only be in fractions of a second, which will make no real difference to the average user, as he is hardly likely to actually measure whether the time taken to generate the results is 0.1 second or 0.2 seconds.

As far as accuracy and comprehensiveness are concerned, these are very subjective terms and so they may vary from search to search. While the new Google may provide better results for some searches, the older version may be better for others and indeed Bing may be better for yet others.

Whatever the changes may be, competition between search engines is certainly good for the user.

In China the local search engine, Baidu, is not only the most popular search engine, but it has even increased its market share, from 62.3% to 64.5% during the second quarter of 2009 according to Bernstein & Co., while Google may actually have lost some of its market share.

According to reports, Baidu’s revenue for the second quarter of the year has gone up by 37% to $160.7 million, and their net income has gone up by 45% to $56.1 million compared to the second quarter of 2008 when their revenue was $117 million and net income was $39 million, which is far more than observers and analysts had predicted.

To be fair, Google has also made financial gains in the region during the same period, but have not provided any details on the subject, probably in an effort to avoid having to admit that they are not the first in such a big and growing market.

It is obvious that the Chinese population has preferred their local search engine, to the international search giant, but it is also true that while Google and other sites have had trouble with the Chinese authorities for non-compliance of certain rules, Baidu gets the governments support as it complies with their requirements.

Baidu has not only reached the number one position in the Chinese market, but has managed to retain it in spite of the fact that their sales personnel went on strike for a period of two weeks which itself is quite an unbelievable concept in most other parts of the world. In fact in spite of the strike, Baidu expects to gain a further 15 to 18% in revenue in the next quarter.

According to sources, Microsoft has declined to make any upfront payment or revenue guarantee, which Yahoo! had initially asked for.

Microsoft search technology will now be used on all Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will also be able to sell search ads on its own sites as well as on Bing through the Microsoft adCenter technology.

The deal, though not quite as all encompassing as expected, gives Yahoo! the control it wanted over its advertisers and consumer data.

According to details available, the partnership for online search and advertising will be for a period of 10 years.

In a joint statement issued by the companies, the deal was forecasted to increase Yahoo’s! annual operating income by about $500 million, while also reducing their capital expenditure by$200 million.

The deal is likely to give Microsoft a larger share of the search market, thus helping it to fight rival Google. According to the latest reports from comScore, Google has about 65% of the U.S. search market, while Microsoft Bing has 8.4% and Yahoo! has 19.6%. Jointly the two companies will account for about 30% of the market share.

Research from the UK Trade and Investment government offices has found that despite favourable circumstances only 75,000 businesses in the U.K. are engaged in exporting their products and services.

Chief among the reasons for this low turn out are language and cultural barriers, apart from other factors like administrative restrictions, cross-border logistics etc.

To help businesses overcome these obstacles, Google has tied up with Applied Language Solutions, HSBC, Royal Mail, Institute of Export, U.K. Trade and Investment and Alibaba.com, to launch a new comprehensive solution called Export Adviser.

Google Export Adviser

UK-based businesses interested in export can now avail of this service.

The Export Adviser will help novices to start an export business by guiding them through various steps like identifying and evaluating target markets, judging the market demand, creating an English language keyword list, translating that list and forecasting a cost per click for those multilingual keywords.

The opportunity finder tool offers a neat tie-in between three Google tools to translate keywords, mine keyword data and predict demand in the market, as demonstrated by the simple example below, where a search for ’seo’ brings up a map showing where most opportunities lie among emerging markets, along with suggestions for related keywords and rising keywords in various languages.

Google Export Adviser’s opportunity finder tool

For those who wish to expand their export business, the Export Box, created in partnership with Applied Language Solutions offers a slightly expensive (considering the target market is SME) solution: For a price of £3,000 users will be provided with the following:

1. A translated website, built as landing pages for specific search terms
2. Keywords and Adverts specially researched and designed for the target country in the target language
3. £1,000 worth of paid advertising on Google AdWords using Multilingual PPC, plus a free Google voucher worth £200
4. A free online shop front and discounts on Gold Supplier membership for Alibaba.com to market products to over 8 million international buyers
5. £1,000 worth of language support
6. Membership to the Institute of Export and discounted international banking with HSBC.

SMEs that don’t want the full support of this £3,000 package are lured by an alternative £200 AdWords voucher, the details of which can be found from AdWords account managers.

Screenshot of Google Export Adviser website

Bing will now be used to power the new Quick Add feature on Hotmail. This essentially means that users can now search Bing from within Hotmail and add information from the search results directly into their email body.

Details about movie listings, images, videos, maps, restaurant reviews and many more info bytes can be searched and added directly into outgoing email messages, as can be seen in the example below:

The procedure to do this is actually quite simple.

The user first has to open up a new message page, by clicking on ‘New’. Then selects a category from the ‘Quick Add’ column, which can be found on the right hand side of the page. After that, users can select what sort of results they are looking for (image, video) and then search in the Bing search box. Bing returns the top 10 results within the same page. More results can be viewed in a new window. Lastly, clicking ‘Insert’ on the relevant result will add it in the message body where the cursor was placed.

One shortcoming of this facility is that it lists only a few search results. Those looking for more detailed search results, have to go over to Bing, and then it is not so easy to add the required result into the Hotmail message.

At present the Quick Add feature is available only in select locations like Australia, Canada, China, India and of course in the U.S. and U.K.

It has been learnt that they will soon be launching a new service called Google Flipper, which will have a more visual appeal, than the current Google News format, and will enable users to just ‘flip’ across the news at a glance.

Google Flipper will also allow users to look up the news by sections and also with reference to keywords and sources. The ‘most popular’ and ‘recommended’ stories will also be highlighted for the benefit of users.

The site is, however, not yet active.

A recent report on the Google Operating System blog has said that Google will launch a new micro-blogging search service, which will be capable of first sorting out the results according to their relevance and then integrating them into its own search engine, in a way similar to what is done on their Google Blog Search.

This news has not yet been confirmed by Google, but Marissa Mayer, Google’s chief of Product Search has hinted at the possibility of such a development. She said, “we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don’t have any particular plans to announce.”

If such a service is launched, it will be beneficial to users, as it would make it much easier to look up the latest stories and trends on Twitter.

Doug Coleman from ReadWriteWeb points out that if Google were to create such a service, it would be important to factor in things such as the number of followers a person has, the author’s authority in Twitter’s social graph, replies, re-tweets, posting frequency and other stats in addition to the frequency of usage of keywords or the development of current events to base the search results on.

The latest reports received from users seem to be very favorable for Bing.

The reports sent in last week, generally gave the impression that this new effort by Microsoft, was nothing great, and Microsoft would not be able to hold its own, against Google in the search engine market, no matter how hard they tried.

In fact one enterprising blogger even coined an acronym for Bing. ‘But It’s Not Google.

The more recently received comments and reviews are a complete turn around, when compared to these earlier reports.

Now people are not only appreciating Bing, and saying that it is good, some of them are even saying that it is better than good old Google and they may now switch loyalties to Bing. A few others who are not quite so effusive in their praise, still grant that Bing is as good as Google, and the only reason they will continue to stick to Google is habit.

It is not to be expected of course that Google will or should take these comments lightly, and continue to rest on past laurels. Maybe this is the wake up call they need to innovate and further improve their own search engine.

In fact a few months ago Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had even said that “mobile Search revenues will overtake those on the PC within a few years”.

Google hopes that PC and mobile searches will soon become identical, and to facilitate that they have already incorporated some new features into their search engine.

It is now possible for users to conduct searches on PC’s as well as on mobiles with improved search results, which are restricted to specific time periods such as month or year. The page summaries now available are also more detailed than they used to be and the introduction of the Wonder Wheel has further improved the result quality by providing related queries.

It is also possible to coordinate searches across various platforms like mobile phones, notebooks and set top boxes etc. with the availability of better developer tools and user interfaces.

According to a recent study carried out by Google and researchers at Stanford University, searches conducted on the latest smart phones are more akin to searches conducted on PC’s than to those on the older generation of mobile phones. The average length of a smart phone query is now nearly three words, while that on an ordinary phone is only 2.5 words.

According to Google different types of handsets require different search interfaces to operate, and that of the smart phones is now looking similar tot hat of the PC’s and users of smart phones would be able to avail of more personalized features for their search operations.

The new platform will be called Bing. It is expected to help users obtain knowledge about their query and thus make smart decisions.

Steve Ballmer first introduced Bing at the D7 Conference held in San Diego recently.

According to the Bing team, four and a half new websites are being created on the net every second, but a large portion of searches conducted still do not produce the results that users are looking for. That is to say, the results obtained do not help users in the process of decision making.

Bing will be endowed with a new set of intuitive tools, along with an excellent search service, which will combine to provide users with results which are far better organized, thus helping them to make better decisions.

Bing will also have features like cash back and Price Predictor, to help users save some money.

Bing will focus on four key areas, viz. making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

The brand name Bing will also be incorporated into some of Microsoft’s other services. For instance Virtual Maps and Farecast will henceforth be known as Bing Maps and Bing Travel respectively.

To help users learn more about Bing, Microsoft has started a new website DiscoveringBing.com. Its new Twitter account is @bing.

Whether Bing will help Microsoft to displace Google in the search market only time will tell.

Google Suggest is a drop down menu that provides a list of query suggestions when a user starts typing in a query. The feature was added to the search engine’s home page last August and is now being updated.

To begin with, links are being added to Google Suggest. If a search query appears to be navigational, that site will appear in the drop down menu itself, thus saving the users time when he conducts the search operation.

Another new feature is the addition of Sponsored Links or ads among the search suggestions. Such related ads will now appear directly in the search suggestion box. The ads will be marked ‘Sponsored Link’ and will be on a coloured background to differentiate them.

Thirdly, when a user who is on a particular results page starts another search, he will receive certain search suggestions which will be related to the previous search which he has carried out.

The last feature to be added to Google Suggest is a personalization of suggestions. This means that when a user signs in to his Google account and if his computer has ‘Web History’ on the ‘Enabled’ mode, search suggestions will be sent to him by Google, based on his past searches. Google has found that users who are signed in often repeat their searches. In fact the figure for repeat searches is as high as 25%. Users have however been provided with an option labeled ‘Remove’ which they can use if they do not want a past search to show up in future.

The final change being made on Google Suggest is the deletion of the number of searches that have been conducted for a given query, as Google feels that this data has been of no use to their users.

Marissa Mayer Google’s VP of Search and User Experience said that Google Search Options is an attempt to organize universal search results – including news, blogs, images and videos.

This options panel appears on the left hand side of the search results page. Apart from the content drilling which was possible on Google Search, this panel allows users to sort the results by their time frame. i.e. whether they have just been received, or came in the previous day, previous week etc.

Google has also introduced the Wonder Wheel, where the search topic is placed in a light blue circle and related words surround it. The results appear to the right of the wonder wheel, and the wonder wheel also contains similar Timeline features.

Although the new options panel looks very plain and simple, as it is blue letters on a white background, a lot of thought process has obviously gone into its designing to enable users to have clarity and ease of use so that they can save time and still find exactly what they are looking for.

Google undertook a lot of eye-tracking and usability studies to ensure that each term is located in such a way that the user finds it easily and feels totally at home with this new panel right from the start.

The indexing function by Twitter Search will be on a much smaller scale than Google Search, but should be very interesting, as it will be a true real-time search engine.

Twitter search is still in the process of figuring out the best way to grade or filter the search results. In other words, they want to make sure that the most reliable and authentic results get a higher ranking.

Jayaram says that tweets should be graded by a reputation ranking system, so that the more credible and informative tweets are placed at the top, as compared to the tweets that are less informative or have been sent by relatively unknown sources.

To achieve this, Twitter will have to change the credibility ranking of Twitter users, depending on the subject that is being discussed.

Follower counts of each Twitter user may be considered, but should certainly not be the only criteria for a high ranking – notching up large numbers of followers is no indication of reliability, as is evident from the fact that Ashton Kutcher obtained 1 million followers before CNN did.

Now, when a user clicks on an image, the top bar, which used to look very similar to the Google Image Search preview bar, will instead show a sleek interface on a grey background.

The new preview bar provides a much larger preview of the original image, in addition to smaller thumbnails of 7 other image search results and 5 thumbnails linking to other popular related searches, as shown below.

The old image search page only provided a thumbnail-sized image, accompanied by the name and details regarding the size of the image, in the preview pane.

A search box with search assistance is included in the new preview page, to enable users to quickly search for more images without having to go back to the search results page.

While the addition of the search box is the same as on Google’s updated image search, the image type and colour recognition functionality now provided by Google is not present on Yahoo! Image Search. The latter, however, has a nifty “Recent Images” feature that shows up on certain search terms, and does not include ads with image search results.

These changes certainly make the preview page look good and will likely prompt more searches via the presence of the search box on the preview page, it might, once again, not be quite enough for Yahoo! to score over Google in anything other than SERP aesthetics.

Where it comes to quality of image search results, when tested over a numbers of random, widely varying search queries, Yahoo! does seem to be slightly better than Google at bringing up relevant results. Though Google finds more in terms of quantity, many of Google’s image results are not relevant.

It seems likely that Google would be interested in buying Twitter, as Twitter is a very valuable asset in the emeerging field of real-time search. It can provide a great real-time database of information, as reported by over 7 million potential sources – the current estimated number of Twitter users.

Several users are now making use of Twitter to discuss various issues like brands, customer care, feedback and the news. This database of information can easily be mined to pull current news and can be monetised with ads.

While there is no official word on the price being discussed between the two companies, it is certainly expected to be well over $250 million, which was the figure arrived at during the latest valuation of Twitter.

Twitter had recently turned down an offer of half a billion dollars from Facebook. That amount was to have been paid mainly in Facebook stock, which is not publicly listed, and was deemd to be overvalued. Google, on the other hand, would pay in cash or its publicly listed stock, which is certainly a better option.

Founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams have also dealt with Google earlier, when they sold Blogger to the search engine.

It is also possible that Google may receive some competition from Microsoft, who may also show an interest in the acquisition.

According to reports from All Things Digital, however, the two companies are merely discussing potential product tie-ups, such as Google building a real-time search engine, and not a possible takeover.

The possibility of a potential acquisition is exciting, but most Twitter users might not be thrilled about Google acquiring the service, especially given Google’s recent spate of failures with services such as Dodgeball and Jaiku.

Data collected by Hitwise during the month of February 2009 shows that the maximum downstream visits from Twitter went to Google (5.20% of downstream traffic share) followed closely by visits to Facebook (5.11%). Twitpic (3.43%), MySpace (3.19%) and Twitter Search (1.98%) followed at 3rd, 4th and 5th places respectively.

Next in line were Yahoo! Mail (1.91%), YouTube (1.88%), Twitter Support (1.80%), Gmail (1.79%) and Yahoo! (1.29%) in order of downstream traffic share.

The high percentage of traffic driven to search engines could be due to users searching for details on topics of interest that they read about on Twitter. For example, when a user sees a number of Tweets about an event, the first impulse would most likely be to go to a search engine like Google to find out more about it.

Further analysis of the categories of post-Twitter visits shows that 40% of users went across to computer and internet sites such as social networks, search engines and email services.

Entertainment sites such as those related to photography and multimedia are visited by less than 20% of users, while less than 10% of users go from Twitter to lifestyle sites such as blogs, personal websites or news and media sites.

Far more users were found to go to social networks and entertainment sites from Twitter than they do from search engines, other social networks and email services.

On the other hand, fewer people go from Twitter to search engines, email services, business and finance sites and shopping and classified sites than they do from search engines, social networks and email services.

These details seem to indicate that Twitter is used like most social networks are, and while Twitter can be effectively used by content owners to distribute their content, it might not be the best channel to drive new business.

It is a well known fact that Facebook is the biggest social networking site in the world at present It already has 180 million registered users and that number is still growing. Given this fact, it is not very surprising that the site refers a lot of traffic to certain sites.

Even though Facebook has only about 50 million users in the U.S., which is only slightly more than one third the number of Google’s 149 million users in the U.S. – according to comScore – Facebook has referred more traffic to certain sites such as PerezHilton.com, Dlisted, CaféMom, Evite, Tagged.com and Twitter since the beginning of this year.

The number of people being referred to CafeMom and twitter can perhaps be explained by the fact that CafeMom has a Facebook page and Facebook and Twitter users can synchronize updates with each other.

Gossip sites like PerezHilton.com receiving so much traffic from Facebook is a little more difficult to explain. Maybe it is the simple fact that users just spend a lot of time on both social network sites like Facebook as well as on gossip sites like PerezHilton.com

This year PerezHilton has received 8.7% of its traffic from Facebook as opposed to only 7.6% from Google. On the other hand another gossip site TMZ received only 3.8% traffic from Facebook and 12.2% traffic from Google. The difference could very well be due to better optimisation, a bias in the user base or a more significant presence on Facebook.

Traffic being referred to video sites from Facebook has also gone up according to NewTeeVee. According to figures released by Hitwise, 3.3% of traffic to video sites came from Facebook last month, compared to less than 2% in the same month last year.

This just goes to prove that social networks and content sharing are becoming big business at a very fast pace.

It is possible that companies that are currently spending a lot of money to get traffic from Google may now allocate a substantial portion of their marketing budgets to social sites in the future.

Last year $12.2 billion were spent on search optimiation by various companies to get traffic directed towards themselves from Google, according to eMarketer.

Speaking to AdvertisingAge, Peter Yared CEO of marketing firm iWidgets says “Soon the spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to Social Media.

However, as one commenter points out, “Hitwise does not measure how much traffic has been referred from one site to another, it simply shows which site a user was on prior to visiting another.” The statistics could therefore merely indicate that most visitors to facebook also check out the gossip sites as part of their brwosing / socialising routine online.

A post by Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, on the Twitter blog says that ’search’ and ‘trends’ have now been placed on the signed-in homepage of a few randomly selected Twitter users. They will see how users respond to the feature before it is released for general use.

Twitter Search allows users to query events occurring and the thoughts of people with respect to those events in real time. This feature will be available only to accounts that are open for public access. However, that should not be a problem as 90% of Twitter users have gone ahead with the decision to make their accounts public.

With the emphasis that online chat and conversations are now gaining, thanks to social sites like Facebook, Orkut, blogs and Twitter, it is expected that Twitter Search will gain in popularity once it is released for general use.

How leading search engines like Google will react to this new feature, and whether they will be negatively affected by it is a subject of much speculation on the blogosphere at present.

It should be remembered that when one is conducting a detailed search on any given topic, the user is more likely to be interested in substantiated facts and figures rather than the random thoughts and opinions of lay personnel.

However, these thoughts could certainly be useful to some groups of people, such as advertisers, as it helps them find out what their audience wants, and plan and publish their campaigns accordingly.

Twitter is also likely to try and monetise this new facility. The prospect certainly appears to be very promising and exciting to their new investors who put $35 million into this project.

Americans carried out 13.5 billion searches in the month of January 2009. This figure is 7% higher than the corresponding figure just one month ago, in December 2008.

Expectedly, Google sites were the leaders in the number of searches conducted with 59% share of the market, followed by Yahoo! sites having 15% market share and Microsoft sites having 6% share of the market. AOL and the Ask Network had 3.9% and 3.7% respectively.

Of the 11.7 billion (up 5% from December 2008) searches conducted across all Google sites in January 2009, Google Search accounted for 75% while YouTube and other Google sites contributed to 25% of the volume.

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search metrics are much more heavily skewed towards their main search properties, with both contributing to 99% of their individual total volumes.

AOL and the Ask Network, on the other hand, had a much more even distribution. 58% of AOL searches coming from the search network while 42% came from MapQuest and other AOL properties. Less than half (49%) of the Ask Network’s searches came from Ask.com while 51% came from MyWebSearch and other properties.

A comparison with the same period a year ago shows that Google’s market share grew 6% points between January 2008 and January 2009, while that of Yahoo! fell 2% points and Microsoft fell 1% point.

Yahoo!, though, has actually gained market share for the fifth consecutive month now, at the expense of Microsoft and Ask.com mostly, but also at the expense of Google last month.

Doug Anmuth, who is an analyst at Barclay’s, believes that Google is re-evaluating their deal with MySpace. The current deal between the two companies requires Google to pay $900 million to MySpace over a span of three and a half years, which end only in mid 2010.

Google has not been able to reap the expected financial benefits from this deal so far and it seems very likely, given the current worldwide economic climate, that they may decide to pull out of an unsatisfactory partnership.

In fact, if one takes a closer look at some of Google’s recent financial decisions, it is quite obvious that the search giant is protecting its margins by making some not-so-subtle changes in their policy as regards distribution deals. They are being more prudent where spending money is concerned.

The past few months have seen Google let go of a potential mobile search partnership deal with Verizon Mobile to avoid competing on price and margins with Microsoft. They also did not renew their toolbar distribution deal with Dell and have allowed Microsoft to happily walk in on what was previously Google territory.

Since Google is firmly established as the search market leader, they do not really need to get distribution deals at any cost. This is probably a wise decision for now.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying very hard to increase market share in search operations. If Google disengages from the deal with MySpace, Microsoft might swoop in to take their place, even at a higher price than such a deal would be worth.

In the last few days there have been some stories doing the rounds that this deal would be revived in a round about manner. It was suggested that Microsoft would lend money to some executives and investment bankers, who would then buy out Yahoo! at the price of about $13 per share, which is just a little over the current market price, and then sell it back to Microsoft. Sources at both the companies have rubbished these stories for now.

Acquisition rumours may have been fuelled by a comment by Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said, “now is a good time for the software company to buy.”

However, in an interview with the Fox Business Network last week, Steve Ballmer told Brian Sullivan that the attempt to acquire Yahoo! was “a thing of the past”. He made it very clear that the deal would not be revived, while still keeping his options open about a partnership in any other form.

During the unveiling of the next Windows operating system, Windows 7, Steve Ballmer also admitted that the current financial crisis had affected the IT industry adversely, and it was realistic to expect that fewer people would be buying technology at the moment. While he sidestepped questions about the possibility of layoffs at Microsoft, he did acknowledge that it was important to conserve cash resources and be prudent about expenditure.

In the meantime, Yahoo! has just named Carol Bartz, who was the chairman of Autodesk, as its new CEO. This announcement has once again raised speculations that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal may go through under her leadership.

According to the terms of the agreement, Live Search will now be the default search engine for most of the new consumer and small business PCs that Dell ships globally. Considering the fact that Dell is the largest provider of PCs in the U.S. and the second largest OEM worldwide, a lot of new clients will now have the chance to use Live for their searches, without any trouble. All these new PCs will also have a Live Search-powered toolbar.

This agreement between Dell and Microsoft will be applicable across 23 countries worldwide ranging from Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, U.K. U.S.A. and many others and will come into effect from February 2009.

HP and Lenovo PCs shipped within North America already include Live Search as the default search engine.

The other interesting announcement made by Steve Ballmer is to the effect that Microsoft beat Google to acquire a five-year deal with Verizon, the second largest mobile carrier in the U.S.A. Thanks to this deal, users of Verizon Mobile in the U.S. will be able to use Live Search Mobile as their default search service.

Google is probably unhappier about the deal with Verizon, as mobile continues to be one of their top priorities for future growth and losing out to Microsoft in this relatively nascent market does not bode well.

However, no matter how many deals Microsoft can muscle in with providers and OEMs, it is the consumers who will finally decide, and far as consumers are concerned, Google is undoubtedly firmly entrenched in their hearts and minds.

productideas.appspot.com/

As the name suggests, Google Product Ideas will offer users the opportunity to provide suggestions and ideas for new products they would like to see from Google. Other users can then vote for or against any idea.

To begin with, the site is only seeking out ideas for mobile search.

Users can submit new ideas or vote on them by signing in with their Google Accounts. The ideas that receive the maximum affirmative votes will then be seriously considered by Google, and in time may actually be developed for use by cosumers. Google will, of course, not be compensating its users for the ideas they provide.

Google fans seem to be quite thrilled with this opportunity to express their needs to Google, and have already started providing ideas and voting for or against them in large numbers. The site has already recorded over 2,000 ideas and over 100,000 votes.

Among the most popular product ideas received so far, is the request to ‘Manage the Google Calendar on Google Mobile’.

Some of the other popular product ideas include:

• The ability to see the geographic locations of one’s friends on a map on the phone. This feature is already available on the Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1.
• Spoken driving directions on Google Maps.
• Showing the location, distance, prices, accepted modes of payment and opinion of other users for local stores, restaurants and hotels.
• Voice search in mobile apps to search and dial contacts.

While this is a great way for Google to judge in advance whether or not an idea will be well-received by the public, it also has the added benefit of saving them some money, as their engineers can spend more of their time on developing and fine-tuning products that have already received public approval, rather than starting from scratch and seeing whether or not a new application will be accepted.

The disadvantage, though, is that Google’s competitors and a whole lot of other mobile application developers will also be able to tap into this resource and could beat Google to the punch by delivering better solutions quicker as each of the vast number of providers worldwide might just concentrate on one product / feature.

For quite some time now, various organizations have been demanding that internet service providers cut down the amount of time for which they store user data, to protect the user’s privacy. They say the reduction of time for which such data is stored would make it difficult for hackers and other unethical people to infringe on the privacy of legitimate users.

This move by Yahoo! has obviously been welcomed by these organizations. In fact they now feel that it may even be possible for the service providers to further reduce the holding time of such data to 30 days without adversely affecting their business concerns.

Yahoo! says they have reached this decision after consulting their advertisers and a review of their data practices. These changes will be fully incorporated by 2010.

Their head of privacy, Anne Toth, says “this policy represents Yahoo!’s assessment of the minimum amount of time we need to retain data to respond to the needs of our business while deepening our trusted relationship with users.” Speaking to the FT, she also said this policy”will set a new standard for protecting consumer privacy.”

Yahoo! has however reserved the right to retain the data for 6 months in cases of fraud and litigation etc.

Earlier, Google had said they would store the data for 9 months, while Microsoft had agreed to store it for only 6 months if other service providers agreed to do the same.

They may now be forced to review their decisions.

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which deals with the protection of the privacy of citizens in the EU, is of the opinion that the search engines should delete all identifiable data of the user after 6 months, as the search engines keep tabs on what their users are searching for, or buying and from where etc.

Getting the search engines to accept this demand is not going to be easy, and it may take a long time to come to a mutually acceptable agreement.

It will not be possible for the EU to force their decision on the Search engines, as these companies run their operations worldwide, and it is not possible for them to use a different set of rules regarding privacy, for each country or region they operate in.

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party does not have the power to enforce their decisions on the search engine providers, but they are currently discussing, the length of time after which user data should be deleted. They are also discussing how effective the measures taken by the search engine providers are, to protect the privacy of the user.

While the IP address is the most reliable and efficient clue to the users location even that is not 100% accurate.

The largest Search engine in Europe, Google, (which holds almost 80% of the market share) will obviously be in a position to call the shots here. They had agreed in September to cut down their data retaining time, from 18 months to 9 months.

Yahoo had offered to cut down to 13 months.

On the other hand Microsoft, which holds only about 2% of the market share, has agreed to accept the EU demands fully provided all others agree to do so.

The reason search engines wish to hold on to user data for a long time, is that they make use of it to find their target audience for the purpose of advertising which is their main source of revenue.

It looks as though the best way to get the search engines to agree to the EU demands would be to put pressure on them through the users while continuing negotiations across the table.

Launching profiles is the first indication of the launch of the Yahoo! Open Strategy. It is an important landmark in Yahoo!’s hopes of turning into a big social network. In the beginning of the year, Yahoo! had shown some conceptual screenshots at CES in the month of January.

Apart from having a new look, the newly launched Yahoo! Profiles will have the ability to create “connections” or mutual friendships on the front end. The profile also has something new on its back end, which is a ‘vitality system’ to share updates. The vitality system will have the ability to run activity stream-like content for all future releases.

Although Yahoo! has already started rolling out the new profile, it may be a while before all users have access to it. The easiest way to get in is to find someone who can add you as a connection and you are instantly in.

This new profile will be integrated with other Yahoo! properties in the coming months. For example, if a user happens to give an answer to a question on Yahoo! Answers, this activity will be reflected in the user’s feed update. In the near future, the Yahoo! Mail front page will also be capable of showing what ones friends are doing.

Another important feature being added is that emails from friends or connections will be highlighted, so that users don’t waste time going through junk mail.

Those who already have a Yahoo account can see their profile at:

profiles.yahoo.com

Mail is just another important part of the newly forming social network. Search, which is the final part of Yahoo!’s open strategy has already been updated last April and might be the central focus or might end up being unimportant, depending on how the corporation’s future is determined in the coming weeks.

The new Blog Search homepage is very similar to Techmeme and Memeorandum. Top stories relating to a wide variety of currently popular issues ranging from politics to business and technology to entertainment are grouped together and then categorised into one of the 12 categories:

• Top Stories
• Politics
• US
• World
• Business
• Technology
• Video Games
• Science
• Entertainment
• Movies
• Television
• Sports

Memetrackers usually get breaking news stories and emerging trends on blogs much before other major sources such as newspapers, television or radio. Most memetrackers automatically monitor several news sources at the same time, identifying, pooling and analysing different blog posts and then grouping them together, thus allowing users to vote for or read about topics that are of interest to them.

Google’s new technology may help Google News identify interesting stories that run across several websites. However, it is not clear whether Google Blog Search is more efficient and informative than other memetrackers. That will ultimately depend on the frequency with which updates are conducted and the sources they will be tracking.

While Google is believed to have a wider network than other memetrackers, spam posts have already managed to enter their homepage, which is obviously not a good sign. The search giant will have to work hard if they wish to overtake the already established leader in the business, Techmeme. Last year the New York Times tried to do so, but didn’t quite succeed.

When the newly constituted Yahoo! board met for the first time, one of the major points on their agenda was to settle the matter of whether or not to proceed with discussions with Time Warner, for the possible purchase of their Internet arm, AOL, which Time Warner has wanted to get rid of for a while now.

The board has been given the go ahead to pursue the matter with Time Warner, but no negotiations have taken place yet according to sources.

The two companies had been in discussions with each other over this matter earlier, but failed to reach a settlement then.

If Yahoo! And AOL can reach an understanding, it might help to improve their position in the Internet advertising and content market, but more importantly, such a deal is likely to dissuade any future takeover attempt by Microsoft, who have also shown an interest in AOL. As things stand,

Microsoft is certainly in a better position to pay a much higher amount than Yahoo!, which would be the bottom line for Time Warner. However, a Microsoft-AOL merger would do absolutely nothing for the software giant’s search marketing business, and such a move would be nothing but a petty attempt to get back at Yahoo!
Interestingly, in an interview with CNBC last Friday, Mr. Icahn still felt that eventually Yahoo! would have to “do something” with Microsoft or Google Inc. would “kill” the company.

A similar tool was available earlier on iGoogle. The new service, called GAudi, is presently in beta and can be accessed within Google Labs.

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

Google Audio Indexing works in conjunction with YouTube. The tool will catalog all the words that are spoken in a particular audio or video clip. This data will then be entered into a database, which users can then search for the audio or video content they require, in much the same manner as they use search engines for text based material. GAudi will provide a whole list of results, based on the keyword entered.

To start with, GAudi will only index and catalogue politically-based audio and videos.
If a user is not interested in watching the whole video, after having located it through GAudi, it will be possible for to directly reach the particular portion that is of interest, by clicking on the play buttons alongside the particular search result that is of interest.

So far Google has not provided any information regarding their future plans for GAudi. That has not stopped some users from conjuring up innovative methods to use the tool,as can be seen below:

In the past, individual video results occupied the place of an antire search listing, and were  accompanied by a title, a short, one-line snippet pulled from the YouTube page for that video, the duration and average user ratings for the video, as can be seen alongside. This is still the predominant listing format for most universal search results.

However, some searches seem to now yield a single result with two videos placed side-by-side, as seen in the screenshot below. Both the videos are still pulled from YouTube, and both are accompanied by a short title, but are without any description snippet or ratings information and instead just contain information about the duration of the video.

While both videos in the screenshot above do seem equally relevant to the query, that does not seem to be the sole influencing factor for such a layout of the results, as the two videos in the first example shown above-right are also equally relevant in fact, but are still listed one below the other.

It is not clear at present how Google determines whether videos should be presented in this layout or another. It may be something to do with the currenct nature of the query or it may be that both videos score the exact same relevance points according to the Google algorithm and can therefore be clubbed together, even though they are varied in content and come from different useer accounts.

The service, which is only available to users in China, will directly challenge the illegal MP3 Search offered by Baidu. Of course, Google’s links will all be legal, and the results will be provided by ‘Top100.cn’.

Users from outside China cannot access the service, and instead see a blank page with one line of text in Chinese, that reads “Sorry, you are not in a region where Google provides this service.”

www.google.cn/music

Google will offer this new service for free, providing streaming music, downloads and lyrics. It will be funded by advertising revenues and paid caller ring back tones via China Mobile. They will provide mostly Chinese music, and most of the major domestic labels have already cleared rights for the service.

How much Google’s new service offering will affect Baidu, is to be seen. The service will definitely be better than other international ones such as We7 and Spiral Frog. Users will be able to keep the downloaded MP3 tracks indefinitely and the downloads will be DRM free, which means users will be allowed to freely transfer music onto their portable devices.

Baidu, which already has a head start on Google, accounts for about 30% of the traffic on these sites.

Google is expected to score over Baidu, as they will share revenue with all their content providers via Top100.cn. Baidu, on the other hand, has always kept all the profits for itself, except lately, when they started profit-sharing with a few of their top content providers.

It now makes good sense for all the music labels and independent artistes to join Google, as they will be assured of receiving their fair share of the revenue.

Top 100.cn, however, will have to work hard to convince all its remaining partners to start providing content to Google, failing which Google’s service will seem incomplete, and that may deter users from switching loyalties from Baidu.

Another problem that Google may have to contend with is apathy on the part of users who are already satisfied with the service provided by Baidu, even though it is illegal.

It must be remembered that other Mp3 service providers in China, have not made any difference to Baidu’s popularity. All these services are of course illegal. It also remains to be seen, if the URL, www.google.cn/music will work in Google’s favor, by creating its own brand identity, or against it as users in China are used to the term ‘MP3′ in the URL of music search engines.

Chinese authorities will now be in a better position to take some concrete steps against illegal service providers, like Baidu, as a legal alternative is now available to users. It also looks as though it will finally be possible for content providers to get even with Baidu for its misbehavior and high-handedness in the past.

Viewers will be able to find a video that is related to a particular location. YouTube’s product manager Brian Glick, made this announcement during a developer talk session, in San Bruno, California. This feature is already in being trialled in beta and is due for a general launch shortly.

During the developer talk, a demonstration of this feature was presented, using a video connected to the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas as an example.

According to the NewTeeVee blog, users who search for videos on YouTube with a location in the query string will be shown a map icon at the top of the results. Clicking on that map will produce a list of videos connected to that location. It is also possible to narrow the search further, by entering a specific place in that location, such as the name of a garden or a hotel.

About a year ago, YouTube added the geotag option to its videos, which could be specified by creators at the time of uploading, but there was no information about how the geotags were used.The geo-search functional finally makes good use of this feature.
Geo-tagging of YouTube videos is also available on Google Earth, for a few selected videos. Google Maps also shows YouTube videos. The feature will probably be used in the future to allow advertisers to target video ads on YouTube by geography.

As was the case with the comScore search ratings discussed yesterday, the Hitwise ratings show that Google continues to rule the roost with a wide margin. According to Hitwise, Google holds 87.3 percent market share in the U.K., which is only marginally lower than their share in April 2008, and the main competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft are far behind.

Similarly in the U.S.A, Google Search accounted for 68.3% of the market share, while Yahoo! received 20% and Microsoft had only 5.9% of total search traffic.

comScore, who have only released results for the month of April 2008 so far, show that Google holds a 74.4% share of the UK search market, while Yahoo! has 4.3% and Microsoft has 3.4% respectively.

While the variation in numbers between the results of different sites is understandable, as each group has different parameters to follow, what is common among all the results, is the obvious sway that Google continues to hold over the market.

Media planners, website owners and advertisers will not be particularly pleased with this discrepancy, though, as a difference of 13 percent in market share reported for Google search traffic to a site that receives 1 million visitors per month can mean a difference of 130,000 visits / ad impressions / clicks from Google. Such large discrepancies can make planning media campaigns for new sites quite difficult.

On the whole, though Google continues to make major gains in the online video, sports, business, finance, entertainment, social network and travel sectors.

Of course this is hardly news as they have always been way ahead of the competition.

As of April 2008, Google had the largest market share, accounting for about 74 percecnt of all searches conducted in the UK. The second site in line, eBay, lags far behind, with only 6 percent of total searches, followed by Yahoo! with 4.3percent and Microsoft in fourth place with just about 3.4 percent.

A detailed analysis of the subject reveals that there has been very little change in the market position of the various search engines between the months of March and April 2008. For instance, Google had a market share of 74.4 percent in March, and 74.2 percent in April.

The only new entrant in the U.K. top 10 list this year is the social media site, Facebook, at 6th place with 1.8 percent of searches conducted in April.

Among other interesting findings, is the fact that the U.K. beats all other European nations, in terms of the volume of searches carried out. 4.1 billion searches were conducted in the UK during the month. 31.2 million Britishers carried out at least one search in April, but on an average 130 searches were conducted by per person, during the month.

As is the case with all numbers released from research corporations such as comScore, these findings have also been questioned. Most agencies and webmasters in the UK report seeing more than 80 percent referrals from Google. Moreover, the inclusion of eBay, Facebook and RightMove in the same category stretches the definition of the “search” market too far for some.

The graph below charts the market share of the leading search engines based on percentage of all searches carried out:

In order to use this new Search Together format, users will have to download the Search Together plugin for Internet Explorer 7:

research.microsoft.com/searchtogether/

Once this is done, users can add their list of friends to the buddy list in Live Messenger and then use Search Together with them. The user who first creates the session, becomes the ‘team leader’ and only that person can add more members to the group.

Search Together will be handy for users who wish to collaborate on a particular task, be they students doing a research project, or a group of friends planning a vacation together. The service will be allow synchronous as well as asynchronous collaboration.

The salient features of this new program from Microsoft will include group query history, split searching, page-level rating, commenting, automatically generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing and integrated chat. Search Together will allow users to share their search results with all those who join in for a particular session, no matter at what stage they may have joined in.

A surprisingly smart feature allows members of the same Search Together group to use different search engines such as Windows Live Search, Google and Yahoo!, thereby opening up the platform to users of other search engines. This has undoubtedly been done to attract users who can’t already avail of such features on their favourite search engines, in the hope of converting them to regular Live Search users.

This program is a part of a research project on collaborative Web Search. The profile, queries and results of all users will be sent to Microsoft for research purposes.