As we all know, China’s most popular search engine isn’t Google, it’s Baidu. Baidu was created in 2000 and at the beginning of 2010 it has about two-thirds of the Chinese market. It claims to be the most advanced Chinese-language search engine.

Let’s look at some of the factors that contributed to Google’s failure in China (apart from well-known legal struggle over censorship issues)

* Chinese Media propaganda
Chinese government emphasized the fact that Google represents the Western Culture and played it strongly against it. The main Chinese tabloid (www.huanqiu.com ) editorial cited online surveys showing 80% of respondents who said they could not care less if Google withdrew from China, the world’s largest Internet market with an estimated 420 million users. There was even Baidu’s media advertising campaign, positions them as a suave Chinese native vs. the clueless foreigner (Google). The message was clear, East is the Best!

* Downloading free MP3 files
This is one of the most popular online activities in China and Baidu became the primary vehicle to locate and download free MP3 files, which generates huge amount of traffic. Choosing Baidu for average Chinese person was obvious.

Baidu vs Google- How does it reflect in statistics?

In 2009 when Google was still strongly present in Chinese’s online world, it had 20% of the search market (then rose to 31%), whilst Baidu covered almost all the rest-62%, the remaining 18% belonged to China Search Engines Directory-SearchEngineColossus.com, China Profile by the BBC- The Asian Search Engine in English and China Factbook- China information from the CIA World Factbook. However, in July 2010, Analysys International said that Baidu’s share of China’s online searches rose to 70% last quarter from 64% the previous quarter, while Google’s share fell to 24%.

So what those numbers mean? Having 70% of all online users in China means 294mln of users! Whilst in US the number of all internet users is estimated slightly under 240mln (July 2010)! All that shows that it is not only Baidu’s winning battle over Google. This battle is quickly becoming more a global one. Forget China, Baidu is now the third largest search site in the world and it’s nipping at Yahoo’s heels to become number two.

Internet Users in China

Internet Users in China 2000- 2010 Graph

(data collected from InternetWorldStats.com)

Baidu vs Google- impact on the financial market

According to Investor’s Business Daily (finance.yahoo.com/news/Baidu-Profit-Sales-Beat-ibd-3623632519.html?x=0&.v=1), in July 2010 Baidu shares were up more than 3% after hours following the results. Baidu is up 78% since Jan. 1, while Google shares are down 23%. For its second quarter, Baidu reported earnings of 35 cents a share, up from 16 cents a year ago, accounting for a 10-for-1 stock split May 12. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected 31 cents.

Will Baidu become a threat for Google on international scale? Well, I say it’s very likely causing Google some sleepless nights.

                          

Having a blog on Posterous (for about a year now) and being an exceptional fan of WordPress at the same time, i decided to write a very short comparison, or actually pros and cons of using both of them.

WordPress has been an amazing tool for many years and its developers make a great job making it even better from update to update, however recently the new platform Posterous started becoming enormously popular. We can find official blogs of Microsoft Store and Chevrolet on Posterous already! So what is this Posterous and what it has that WordPress doesn’t(and vice versa)?

WordPress is definitely the most popular blogging platform ever done. The study made by Royal.Pindom.com (in Jan 2009) shows that WordPress is the most-used platform among self-hosted blogs, however it is not as popular as Typed re the free blogging services.* and this is where Posterous found its niche, its opportunity…

Both WordPress and Posterous platforms, are free, however running a free Posterous blog you can fully customise it and make it look like really yours by using your own domain and your theme (what is still not available on WordPress based on wordpress.com). It’s also much easier and straightforward to use. Posterous is a first platform, which introduced posting via email. You can very easily add attachment to your email incl. photos and videos. If more photos are added, a nice gallery is created. You can also autopost your post to Flickr, Facebook or tweet about it, you can also sent videos to YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

When this email posting feature has been added, it enormously increased Posterous popularity. As a reply, WordPress started working on the same tool. Despite implementing it just a few months after its competitor did, the tool is not working as well as Posterous’s one and from usability point of view, it’s Posterous which wins this battle.

Just a few weeks after that, Posterous started a  direct attack on WordPress with its “Wordpress import” addition allowing you to import your WordPress blog to Posterous platform for free along with an autopost to WordPress option. This alternative made even more people switch to Posterous. Therefore, in an effort to remind that WordPress can be just as flexible and e-mail-friendly as its rival, the company has released a Posterous importer for users who want to “graduate” from the mini-blogging site to “a full blog with the features, flexibility and reliability of WordPress.com” (as WordPress organisation wanted Posterous to be seen). However, in many people’s eyes, Posterous has already become not only a micro-blogging platform, as it started being used as groups products, email lists,  photo streams,  video channels, and much more.

To sum up, I absolutely like both platforms. In my opinion WordPress has been created for those, who want a professional blog/ website that can highly compete on Google SERP. Therefore, if choosing a platform for a company blog, I would definitely use WordPress (and self-hosted!)

Posterous however is a perfect solution for those, who are not very much focused on technical aspects of having a blog. It is ideal for non-corporate individuals who are focused on the content (what actually Google Loooves!). SEO limitations are still present on Posterous, so in this sense the countless plugins are a huge advantage of WordPress. After all, when (on purpose I didn’t use “if”) Posterous start working on SEO features, WordPress might have serious problems. Are we talking at a case of student surpassing the master here?

*(by blogging services I mean  a free blog on subdomain based on these blog platforms so WordPress based on WordPress.com or Typead on Movable Type etc.)

                          

I cam across this picture on barnorama.com website- simple and funny:)

                          

Should the amount of time it takes for a page to load in a browser influence search engine rankings for pages? According to Google it should. Matt Cutts  announced last year (in November 2010) that the company had indicated that their search algorithms would be  changed again as the search engine will factor in how quickly a web page loads to how well a site ranks in Google.  Speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but now everything has changed…

What about WordPress SEO? Will this have an influence on bloggers as well? Unfortunately yes! Thankfully, there is a three-step solution!

To improve your WordPress Page Load Speed:

1. Test your WordPress Page Load Speed with Firebug. Firebug is a Firefox extension, that helps  determine which files are taking the most time to load, but not only that! It will show you exactly what actions are needed ( i.e. optimizing caching and browser rendering and minimising round trip times, request overhead or payload size) to improve that. It is a very powerful tool so start from testing your site with this add-on.
   Move from shared hosting to dedicated or cloud hosting. There are many dedicated and cloud hosting services, however it is worth to do a good research before you decide to go for one. It is almost as serious decision as getting married, so choose carefully…;)
2. Shared hosting is very cheap (usually costs up to £10/a month), however it contains several different websites on the same physical server, which are on the same IP address. All that means that we share disk space and bandwidth with other websites. Also, you are somewhat liable for the activities of the other websites on your server if someone is running an unscrupulous website and the government orders the server to be shut down, your site will also be affected. Whereas, dedicated servers are faster and more accommodating to sites that require more disk space. Also, you are given more freedom with regards to software that can be installed in a web folder, as the effect on other websites will not to be taken into consideration.
3. Install Plug-ins which will also help you improve WordPress Page Load Speed. Recently a plugin called W3 Total Cache became very popular. It improves your server performance by caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network integration.

To sum up, improving your Worpdress Page Load Speed is a great thing to do in general. Visitors to your site will be happier – the conversion rate on your side might increase or they just might use your site more often, so just read the above steps and implement them as soon as you can. Also, if you have some other ideas, please feel free to leave the comment below, so we can learn from each other!

                          

Google has lunched a new, short-trem experiement, called Life in a Day. The goal is to create a user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by everyone who would like to attend. The project is an iniciative of Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald.
On 24 July, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera. The most compelling and distinctive footage will be edited into an experimental documentary film, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

There is also a price, if your movie is included in the final film, you’ll be credited as a co-director and may be one of 20 contributors selected to attend the film’s world premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

                          

Whilst exploring widgets available for Netscape, I came across this really weird link sellig widget! It’s nature is obviously quite straight forward, but have  look at its description below.  Some people are really so disrespectful sometimes…

                          

I came across this funny picture on abstrusegoose.com. It looks pretty cool:) As my both parents are physicist, now I understand why we could not understand

                          

During the launch of Google Coffeine, Google search results page changed many times so did our eye tracking in universal search.

Before launching the universal search system (which blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages) the way we used to track search (our reading pattern) resembled an F shape and had the following three components:

Users would first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content

Then they would move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that would typically cover a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar

Finally, users would scan the left hand side of the content in a vertical eye movement

There seem to be two fairly obvious reasons why Google started changing its page layout and all searching system(s).

First, it was obviously the willingness to provide more accurate information for the user.

The second however was to increase the amount of time we spend on screening the paid search.

As we can see, the F pattern was not particularly friendly for PPC as audience automatically didn’t pay any attention to the right side column of the Google page and that obviously had influence on the amount of clicks and automatically on Google’s profit.

After launching Bing by Microsoft, Google started losing in PPC battle. Sponsored links on the right hand side of the search page attracted more attention on Bing (42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (25% of participants per search). Another difference between Bing and Google involved related searches. Bing’s related searches (shown on the left) had a much higher visibility than Google’s (below the organic search results), attracting the attention of 31% of participants per search. Google’s related searches attracted the attention of only 5% of participants per search.

All the above was definitely the reason why Google started the biggest system changes in its history. After launching universal search in 2008, the heatmaps and eye tracking started changing quite drastically:

However the results were still not satisfactory. Users were more likely to dig deeper into their queries as the options were ready and available and easy to use, but again PPC results were completely not visible for the audience.

Now, with the, apparently, final version of Google search results page is ready – was its launching really profitable for Google? Again, from the heatmap and research, it looks like the new layout is still not the best deal for the PPC listings. Just nothing new there:

Obviously, Google is already preparing an alternative for their sponsored links. They are creating a drop down menu on the top, just above the natural search results. It is going to be more personalized, also more local business related searches will become available for the user (including additional map and listings from Google Places)…

Would it help Google to increase their profit from PPC ads? Will this actually help the final user to find the best results? I guess we are going to find out very soon…

                          

Today I came across interesting results whilst checking rankings for one of clients. I typed “matrimonio roma” in Google.it and one of the listings had quite unusual description as it contained a link (not a breadcrumb nor sitelinks etc)…

When I inspected the element, the link looked like: http://www.google.it/url?url=http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrimonio%23Il_matrimonio_nella_Roma_antica&rct=j&q=matrimonio+roma&usg=AFQjCNGWA5FtpbOchaPTnmGieSsOFmSqgw&ei=0DD8S7PSFeGN4gayxbi7Ag&sa=X&oi=section_link&resnum=15&ct=legacy&ved=0CF4QygQ

The question is, how this description has been generate/ created? I couldn’t find it when I read the source code. Also, this phrase has been used twice on the Wikipedia pages (it is also a title of a chapter there), so would it have any influence on the fact that it appeared in Google SERP? Would it mean some crucial changes in Google algorithm? What do you think?

                          

Google is launching its new, huge product- Google TV. It will be addendum to your game console or music player… it will be fully integrated with Google Chrome and will also have a search engine built-in on it, so you will be able to find channel or program that you want to watch.

Simply type in a show’s name on the Google TV search bar and Google TV will find it for you. What is more, if you are not able to find anything interesting or you just don’t know what to watch, Google TV will give you some suggestion as you type a few characters on the search bar!! And at this point, in my opinion, it is getting a bit creepy… Will we completely get dependend on Google, which is already everywhere else…