This marks the third consecutive month that Bing has gained market share – from 8.92 percent in December 2009 to 9.70% in February 2010 – and the third consecutive month that Google has lost market share – from 72.25 percent in December 2009 to 71.49 percent in February 2010.

Nevertheless, Google’s share of the US search market continues to be greater than all of the other search engines in the Hitwise – combined.

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US Search Market Share_January 2010_Hitwise Experian Statistics

Experian Hitwise goes on to report that the 65 other search engines in its Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches.

And while both Google and Yahoo! were down a little over the previous year, Bing posted a gain of 5%, which is significant considering that US search volume approached 23 billion.

Nevertheless, Google maintains its stranglehold on its position at the top of the search engine heap – owning more of the US search market than Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, and the remaining 65 search engines that make up Hitwise’s analysis combined.

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“With relief efforts underway, many displaced Haitians and their friends and families around the world are deeply concerned about the safety and whereabouts of loved ones. In response to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can submit information about missing persons and to search the database.

You’ll find this gadget on our Haiti earthquake response website as well as on the State Department website. In order to prevent the proliferation of multiple missing persons databases (a big problem during Hurricane Katrina), we’ve made the People Finder gadget standards-based and easily embeddable on any website (see here for instructions). The gadget is currently available in English, French and Creole.”

If you have – or are seeking – information on missing persons in Haiti, make sure you visit The Official Google Blog to access the People Finder gadget.

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If you’ve ever tried to do this simply by typing “google.com” into the browser bar and hitting the enter key, you know this doesn’t work.

Here are three tips that can help you use a different Google site, no matter where in the world you are:

• Click on the Google.com link on any other domain
• Visit the Language Tools page (the section with the flags) and manually select a Google domain*
• Enter http://www.google.com/ncr into the browser bar (you may want to bookmark it) – it’s an alternative address for Google.com and will always take you to Google.com without redirecting you*

If none of these tips helps, Google may be detecting your IP address incorrectly. If so, let them know about the issue (it may take a month for them to resolve the issue).

*Note: In order to save the preferences you pick, cookies must be enabled because Google settings are saved in a cookie. If you don’t know how to enable cookies, click here.

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Every VC that has made a bet in the real estate sector just poured a second drink and put their feet up.

This is very positive for the internet sector in 2010. With Google promising to make handfuls of purchases, expect the Palo Alto real estate market to tighten just one more notch.

Google is a very important player in real estate online, albeit not in as direct way as they apparently wish. Google is a popular tool, via its Map search engine, for aspring home purchasers to browse neighborhoods. Google is looking to import even more data to their products.

By purchasing compaines working in real estate, Google will be able to bake in new levels of data into their current offerings. Google wants to have all the data, everywhere.

Of course, Google is not doing this just to allow some VC’s to hit their ROI targets. Google is going to forge even closer relationships with some of the most important users of the internet: realtors. Realtors have been pulling their ad dollars offline in droves. Google will be looking to connect the sellers with the purchasers, making money on the handoff. Google playing middleman for yet another huge market.

So, if you own an online real estate firm, shine the door, and bake Google a cake. Big things ahead.

via Google Bulking Up In Real Estate – Looking To Buy Several Online Real Estate Companies Monthly.

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Wouldn't it be fun to scoop all the virtual billboards on Time Sq?

Two independent reports less than a week apart claim Google considers inserting some kind of advertising into its Street View maps.

CNET last week: “In the presentation, Google tossed out the notion that ads may one day appear in Street View. Those ads would be tied into the listings in the Google Local Business Center and the Google Favorite Places program.”

RRW today about Google’s new patent: “In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.”

(Update):  One question people seem to have about this is whether there’s enough scale to make Street View billboards interesting to advertisers. Probably not so much on the PCs, but I’d say the Street View GPS navigation in Androids will make it interesting.

This is yet another twist for a subject AdLab’s been covering for years:

• The classic hit: Advertising With Google Maps (2005)
• Microsoft Launches Virtual Earth With Billboards (2006)
• Billboards in Google Earth (2007)
• Time Square in Google Earth (2008)

via Take Over Billboards In Google Street View… (Advertising Lab) » TechNews.AM.

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• Post to your Place Page: You can now post ‘status updates’ on Place Page directly from your Local Business Center dashboard. Once you’ve logged in and are on your business’ dashboard, post an update and it’ll go live in just few minutes.

• Badge for Your Claimed Place Page will help users identify listings that’ve been updated and improved by their business owners, helping them to trust that the information about your business’s as accurate as possible. Also, you can now claim your listing directly from Place Page by following “Business owner?” link.



via Place Page on Google Local Business Center gets ‘Post message and Badges’.

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By Diane Mermigas | Jan 15, 2010

Google’s intensifying stand-off with China has implications for Internet users that exceed the  company’s threatened withdrawal from the Asian powerhouse over cyber attacks and censorship.

On a macro level, the confrontation focuses global attention on personal data security, freedom of expression, open commerce and reprisals by governments that have as much leverage and resolve as many of the Internet players involved. On a micro level, it publicly showcases how Google can use its clout for corporate and common good.

Some short-sighted press and investors are fixed on the mere drama and its impact on quarterly results, which Google reports Jan. 21. Wall Street has already written off the situation as a footnote to Google’s balance sheet, with China generating about two percent (or less than  $500 million) of its annual $20 billion revenues, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.

Skeptics question whether Google’s new found morality is too late to make a constructive difference, and whether it will adversely affect sales of its Android operating system-based smart phones in China’s booming mobile market. Cyber attacks on Twitter, Yahoo and other firms in the past year have failed to rouse as much attention and action.

As the world’s largest Internet market (it has more than 384 million users) and soon expected to become its dominant economy, China’s compromise of Internet security and freedom is all about the global long view. It compounds China’s  uncomfortable hold on US debt, technology and markets. The Chinese government’s heavy-handed censorship is uniquely evident in the sparse, skewed media coverage in China of the Google conflict.

Whatever the outcome, it will set a precedent for western corporate and consumer relations with China, where Google and other multinationals have long struggled. US lawmakers applauding Google’s defiance are urging other US firms to do the same even as it complicates American diplomacy and efforts to avoid a damaging trade war.

In a Jan. 12 post on Google’s official blog, the company said it was reconsidering the way it conducts business in China in the wake of continuing cyber attacks and censorship. As a result, it no longer censors its results on Google.cn. While the central issues are not new, Google’s willingness to take a demonstrative stand will shape the global Internet ecosystem, for better or worse.

Here are 10 more reasons why this unprecedented stand-off and its outcome matter:

1. It  raises the prospect that the Internet can be shackled by authoritarian governments with their own Web agendas, standards and values. Within the past year, the Chinese government has shut down thousands of web sites, arrested thousands of Internet users, and blocked social networking sites including Google’s YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
2. It could leave China with a single dominant search engine, Baidu, which has about two-thirds of the exploding market. Baidu has been criticized for poor quality search results and advertising, and removing links related to sensitive news.
3. It heightens concern about the security of the detailed data Google amasses on individuals. Chinese hackers have used sophisticated programs to tap profile, account information and communications of human rights activists to use against them.
4. It fuels China’s flagrant theft of intellectual property. After decades of permitting the black market piracy of films, TV programs, books and other copyrighted materials, China has increasingly turned a blind eye to the illegal hacking, manipulation and sabotage of information stored on or linked from Google and other popular web sites.
5. It underscores the risk assumed by employees of multinationals working in potentially hostile foreign environments. Google says it is working to protect its China-based employees from potential government reprisal including interrogation, arrest and imprisonment.
6. It puts Google in the precarious position of potentially leaving behind some 700 trained technology experts and some infrastructure to the benefit of its Chinese competitors. For now, Microsoft says it would not follow Google out of China.
7. It would limit the ability of US companies to continue working inside China with free expression advocates, who instruct citizens on how to use restricted media resources such as Twitter and virtual private network servers outside of China’s boundaries and control.
8. It will set the tone for similar tussles over cyber attacks and censorship in several dozen countries where Google and its peers face similar challenges and conflict.
9. It is providing Google with new support and respect at home, which will not necessarily translate into regulatory clear sailing for many of its more controversial domestic business ventures. That includes Google’s latest proposal to become an unregulated market maker in energy services.
10. It is challenging the Obama administration to take a more definitive stand on Internet security and freedoms at home and abroad. Leading tech company executives meeting with the President at the White House  this week encouraged more aggressive incentives for innovation and protections for global expansion. The State Department said Friday it will lodge a formal complaint with China over the alleged hacking incidents. During his recent trip to China, President Obama  characterized Internet freedom as a central human rights issue.

via Google’s China Stand-Off: 10 Reasons It Matters | BNET Media Blog | BNET.

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By Chris Crum

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

via How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter | WebProNews.

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