Baidu Making Gains

Posted on Sep 19, 2011 by Taylor to General, Technology Trends

“…hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.” This search, depicted in an 800-year-old poem, is successful – and the inspiration for a relatively new China-based search engine, Baidu. “Baidu” means “hundreds of times.” It also means huge success for China in the search industry.

Baidu is trading at absurdly high prices, and Robin Li, CEO and China’s richest man, saw his substantial wealth (estimated at $3.5 billion in 2010) double when Google was forced out of China. His little search engine is doing well, too; first quarter net income rose to $164.6 million – an increase of 123 percent. First quarter revenues grew by over 88 percent to hit $372 million. Google, by comparison, saw first quarter revenues of $8.58 billion, but Baidu is no doubt up and coming.

Which stars aligned to give this search engine such incredible growth? Google is a big piece of the puzzle; after refusing to conform to Chinese governmental search restrictions, Google moved out of China, allowing the burgeoning search industry to bloom for Li’s company. There is virtually no competition.

Li says, “Search just became the most popular application for Chinese internet users, and there is still a lot of growth to expect for many years down the road.”

There are also rumors that Facebook may be moving into China and striking up a partnership with Baidu, although this is still very much in the speculative stage. Banned in China since 2009, Facebook would operate under China’s rules, which would almost certainly clamp down on political and social discussion (and criticism), which is the order of the day in the US and many other countries.

All of this has translated into more revenue, growth, and prestige in the fiercely competitive search industry for Baidu.

Tags: facebook

Blekko on the Rise

Posted on Sep 17, 2011 by Joey to General, Technology Trends

From its launch, Blekko has striven to be the outsider, the search engine that could deliver highly accurate, relevant results without the spam. This, of course, is a direct challenge to Google, which, while it is the world’s largest search engine with a 65 percent market share, is known to have a bit of a spam problem. This strategy, and some key news coverage, has worked well for the small startup engine, and they have seen a dramatic rise in visits over the first quarter of 2011.

Blekko rung in the new year with about 500,000 monthly unique visitors, which is not high by Google or Facebook standards, but it is more than respectable. A piece in the New York Times reports that by May, Blekko had increased that figure by another quarter million. Pieces like that published by the NYT help raise Blekko’s profile, as do high test alliances, like the one Blekko has with Facebook. The search engine incorporates Facebook Likes into its results. You can use Facebook Connect to create the slashtag “/likes” and your results will include sites that you and your connections have liked. If, for instance, you are looking for a hotel to book for a trip to New York, you can search the choices made by connections.

Through other initiatives, like the policy of trashing personal information after 48 hours and powering Flipboard RSS feed searchers, Blekko has stealthily moved its way into diverse corners of the search market.

Of course, Blekko’s biggest claim to fame is offering human-curated results, which help eliminate spam. The Spam Clock, for instance, is much like population counters or tickers that allow you to see the national deficit inching up dollar by dollar. It is “designed to give a representation of how quickly the Web is being littered with trash. Honestly, it’s a problem that deserves more attention than it is getting. Soon, surfing the Web will be a worse experience than email. And Spam is quickly becoming responsible for a kind of global sweatshop where people are paid little more than a nickel for creating web pages designed to do nothing but display advertising.”

The engine that “slashes the web” is also hoping to slash into Google’s piece of the market. And if the two should come to be rivals? Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta says, “That’s a problem you want to have.”

Tags: google, search engine

Could Bing Overtake Google in World Search Market?

Posted on Sep 3, 2011 by Taylor to General, Technology Trends

Over a year ago, Google left China because of its refusal to censor search results any longer. It found the Chinese government too restrictive and was not willing to filter results. It was willing, however, to leave the country with the most internet users in the world, a step that, thus far, hasn’t affected Google’s supremacy. This may change as Microsoft and Baidu, China’s largest search engine, plan a partnership to provide China with English search functionality. Could this make Bing the world’s largest search engine?

China has over 420 million internet users – making it the largest market in the world. The US, its next biggest competitor, has about 230 million by comparison. There is a growing need for English search capability, which Baidu admitted it needed help to facilitate. In the US market, Bing has been making incredible strides, and has increased its market share 75 percent in the last year. While it has 14.1 percent of the market, compared to Google’s 65.5 percent (as of May 2011), Bing is generating a tremendous amount of interest. Recent partnerships with Facebook and the launch of Bing for iPad, have helped the young search engine gain traction.

Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group, says that it is possible “that over the next few years Microsoft could, on a worldwide basis, eclipse Google in terms of reach. That would certainly hurt Google.” The key is whether or not Microsoft will be able to monetize English-language searches.

Microsoft still has to contend with China’s rigid censoring of results. Besides Google, Yahoo is well aware of the difficulties presented here. The second-place search engine was made to turn over the identity of a user who had posted material relating to the Tiananmen Square massacre anonymously online. This led to the arrest of the user, Wang Xiaoning, and his resulting torture and 10-year jail term. Bing has a tremendous opportunity – and untold challenges – ahead.

Tags: Bing, google, search engine

Blekko’s Zorro Update

Posted on Sep 1, 2011 by Taylor to General, Technology Trends

Blekko is the anti-Google. The small “alternative” search engine made its mark by being the engine that “slashes the web” to produce more targeted, relevant search results. It bills itself as being low-spam, low-malware, and low-content farm. Its recent “Zorro Update” doesn’t focus on “slashing out spam,” like the Panda Update from Google; instead it tackles aesthetic issues and auto-including up to 1000 slashtags. What will the changes on Blekko look like for users?

One change that users are likely to notice immediately is the link color. Once red, Blekko has switched over to blue – a choice that makes its links look very much like those from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Blekko has also worked on de-cluttering its display. The bar on the left is gone, and the information that would have been contained there is instead placed in a “less obtrusive” location, which is underneath the search box. Here, you can refine your searches and search by /date, /images, or /videos.

On the right side of the screen, users will see one element per page to reduce clutter. The elements are:

• “People who make this search better.” This links you to contributors or editors of the slashtags you’re using.
• Discuss on Facebook.
• Browse or create slashtags.
• Slashtag of the day.
• “Facebook connect with Blekko” option.
• Link to the Blekkogear page.

Zorro also changed some backend features. Until now, only a handful of slashtags have been auto-included in searches. Blekko expanded this to about 1000. What does this mean for users? That more of the results will be hand-picked and “known to have high quality content.” It also produces more relevant results.

According to TechCrunch, “Search for ‘pregnancy tips’ and you’ll see to slash tags, for /pregnancy and /health, and quite good results compared to Google. But on Blekko you’re not done. Click on one of those slash tags to drill down into results relevant to that tag. Answer relevance goes even higher. On Google, you’d have to visit the next page of results, or rephrase your query. Both are time-consuming.”

Blekko wants to distinguish itself from Google; it seems like Zorro has helped them do this even more effectively.

Tags: Blekko, google, search engine, Zorro

Climate Change: It’s Your Fault!

Posted on Aug 27, 2011 by Taylor to General, Technology Trends

Maybe you’ve switched to a hybrid and ditched your gas-guzzling Suburban. Maybe you’ve planted your own garden and started to ride your bike to work. Maybe you’ve searched online for ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Climate change is, and has been, a major news issue, and everything from your car to your icemaker to a field of cows has been blamed. But maybe you’re contributing to global warming right now if you arrived here via Google, Yahoo, or Bing. The Vancouver Sun reported that each search engine submission emits a whopping 1 to 10 grams of carbon dioxide, courtesy of your electricity usage.

What does that actually mean? To put it into context, each liter of gas or diesel that is burned emits about 3 kilograms of CO2, or 3000 grams. But according to the Sun, if you add up the hundreds of millions of search queries submitted every day, “you’re making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.”

The Sun doesn’t mince words. Whenever you do a Google search, you have “just helped kill the planet.” Hopefully, the Vancouver Sun did not conduct any background research via Google for this article.

Most people would assume that the internet offered a greener way to conduct business. We can dramatically cut down on paper, reduce fuel consumption by having teleconferences or using Skype, and more people can telecommute. But this has led to increased use, which has turned the internet into one of the “fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions” and consumes 2 to 3 percent of the electricity in the world. And, one more for you: if the internet were a country, it would be the world’s 5th biggest power consumer.

Mohamed Cheriet, green IT expert and professor at Ecole de Technologie Superieure in Montreal says, “The internet pollutes, but people don’t understand why it pollutes. It’s very, very power hungry, and we have to reduce its carbon footprint.” While the internet seems to run on ethereal cloud-power, it actually consumes the same coal and fossil fuels that are the major contributors to climate change.

Green IT experts suggest that governments impose carbon taxes, emissions caps, and other initiatives to drive data centers and servers to green up. The GreenStar network, based in Montreal, is an “alternative” internet powered by wind, solar, hydroelectric, and other cleaner renewable energies (which, it should be pointed out, need fossil fuels in the manufacturing and transportation processes).

In turn, climate change may also affect internet access. According to the UK’s Guardian, climate change may reduce range and reliability of signals. Warmer temperatures and more intense storms can cause problems with the infrastructure, and changes in the plants could even influence how radio waves travel.

Who wants to calculate the carbon footprint of this post?

Search Engine News: Big Three Team Up

Posted on Aug 19, 2011 by Taylor to Technology Trends

Despite rivalry and competition, the “big 3” search engines teamed up on a new initiative, called Schema.org, which will help web publishers to make content more easily understood by search engines, and it is hoped, better represented in the SERPs. Google fellow Ramanathan Guha says, “With Schema.org, site owners can enhance how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo, and potentially other search engines as well in the future.” How does it work, and why did the rival search engines come together on this project?

The move to standardize common web tags should benefit everyone from web masters to consumers to the search engines themselves. Webmasters can take any number of routes when marking up pages, or labeling content. Using a common language will make it easy to publish information and achieve greater accuracy in results. Guha says, “We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and including markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way.”

Bing, Yahoo, and Google will then be better able to crawl and index sites, which should, in turn, produce better results for users. Schema has more than 100 HTML tags for categories, including events, people, places, organizations, products, movies and books, and reviews. How might this be helpful? Say a search for “who” is conducted. By using the tags, the search engines are able to distinguish between sites that offer information on The Who, the World Health Organization, or the correct use of who vs. whom without having to guess.

Tags: Bing, google, search engine, yahoo

Google vs. Facebook: Which is More Important for Consumers?

Posted on Aug 12, 2011 by Joey to General, Technology Trends

Even if Google and Facebook felt no inherent rivalry towards each other, the world has set them at odds. Every move that one makes is seen as an advance on the other’s territory. Google’s +1 button is their counter to Facebook’s Like. Facebook is trying to take over search. Inevitably, it all comes down to money – and where consumers are likely to spend it. A new study by GLG Research finds that Facebook has had very little impact on Google as far as consumer purchases are concerned. What else did their study uncover?

One of the predictions making the rounds is that people would start to turn more to friends for product information and recommendations, rather than searching for it on their own. This hasn’t really turned out to be the case. According to GLG, only 1 percent of the people surveyed say they ask Facebook connections about products. Further, only 3 percent of Facebook users report that they use Google less because of the social networking site.

On the other hand, 17 percent say that they actually use the world’s largest search engine more because of their Facebook use. Analysts say that asking friends and connections can be unreliable because who is to say they know what they’re talking about? Say you ask whether sour cream or cream cheese is better in goat cheese cheesecake? How many of your friends have actually made, or eaten, goat cheese cheesecake? Turning to Google in this instance, and countless others, makes more sense because you can access more information and expert knowledge.

As unwilling as some are to concede this, maybe there is room in the internet world for two giants.

Tags: facebook, google

Who is Winning in Search and Social?

Posted on Jul 8, 2011 by Taylor to Social Media, Technology Trends

What’s the difference between search and social media? Increasingly, the answer is “very little.” There is no dividing line: Facebook has become more of a force in the search industry, particularly in local search and current events. But what have search engines done to venture into social territory?

One would look to the undisputed king of the search industry, Google, and expect an answer. But thus far, Google’s forays into social have been stymied. Lively, a network with a similar model of popular Second Life, failed. Buzz, which aimed to be Google’s Twitter, failed. And, have you have ever heard of Orkut? No? You’re not alone; it is virtually unknown in the US.

Bing has had some success – because they have partnered with social mecca, Facebook, to provide more personalized search results. But according to Rick Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Blekko, neither search company has been as “aggressive” as the engine that “slashes the web.” What is Blekko doing to create a social scene of its own?

That’s just it: Blekko isn’t out to reinvent the wheel. Skrenta says, “It’s interesting that they’re [Google] trying to boot up their own social experience with +1 rather than tapping into one of the existing massive social systems that are already out there.”

This is what Blekko has done; they are incorporating Facebook likes and comments to give a more customized search for users. Another reason why Skrenta believes Blekko offers a superior experience is that the focus is on spam elimination. “If you take a random Facebook user, first of all, it’s likely to be a human, and second of all, if you can restrict it to the people that are in your social circle, since people don’t generally follow spammers, the signal is much higher.” And the results more relevant and legitimate.

Google hasn’t given up on social yet; they’re hoping that people like their +1 as much as they do the thumbs up icon from Facebook.

Tags: facebook, google, Google Search

What Did You Do in High School? Student Designs Cancer Website

Posted on Jul 6, 2011 by Taylor to Copywriting, Technology Trends

More and more schools understand the need to incorporate higher level technology education into their curricula. A generation ago, students may have been learning to type on a computer or learning to save documents in Word. Today, though, web design is on the syllabus, and high school students are getting a jump on real-life experience that may be invaluable in their futures. A Bucyrus, Ohio teen was recently tapped to design a website for R&M Cancer Foundation.

High school student, Tony Beam, was given quite an extra credit project when his technology teacher handed him an assignment to design the website for R&M Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit which was established to help families deal with the financial effects of cancer. They needed an effective, efficient way to circulate information on their various fundraising activities. A website was the obvious answer.

The site is relatively simple, with a clear, easily navigable design. Beam says, “I think it went well for the experience I had at the time. Now I would try to incorporate things to make it automatically update so they don’t have to do it all the time…In a normal school, you wouldn’t get this type of experience. The web programs in high schools are basic for the most part. This is more in-depth.”

While many high schools do not offer advanced classes, like web design, more and more are offering it to their students, and Virtual High School allows these creative kids to access education remotely so even if their schools do not offer the class, they can take it online.

Programs like these allow students to get a jump on their training and gather invaluable experience that will help them beat the learning curve in college or in the job field.

Is Android Stalling?

Posted on Jun 28, 2011 by Joey to General, Technology Trends

Google’s Android platform entered a mobile world that was (is) dominated by Apple; it has managed to do a fair job at creating competition for Steve Jobs and his “Cupertino Beast.” But according to a recent developer report from Appcelerator and analyst firm IDC, Android’s forward momentum may be stalling.

This is not to say that Google is not selling phones; they are. In fact, there is little doubt among developers that Google and Apple, both, are the major players in the mobile industry. More than 9 out of 10 developers have strong interest in developing for iPhone; in contrast, interest in Android dropped to 85 percent. The interest in developing for Android’s tablets, though, fell 3 points to 71 percent. Android hasn’t managed to capitalize on the tablet trend to the extent that Apple has with its newly released iPad 2.

Only half of developers questioned indicated interest in building applications for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, one of the most popular Android tablets, while under a third have interest in developing for the HTC Flyer.

Why this gap in interest? Many developers feel that Android tablets do not offer enough to warrant the high price tags, and that these computers tend to have a more “rushed” feel than the iPad.

Android, though, is by no means faltering. It does have the gigantic strength of Google behind it, and many of the development issues identified (such as skills fragmentation) will almost certainly be worked out in time. Now, though, developers remain more interested and engaged with Apple devices, as are consumers.

Tags: google