Google Earth Hour

I was confused, but it's all good! It's Earth Hour!

I was out this evening and as per usual, in a rather sad way, sparked up the laptop and checked out what was going on with Google, and I got this:

First thoughts were had Google been hijacked by Blackle? No, of course not!

Of course this is Google's contribution to the Earth Hour where throughout the world on the 29th of March people are encouraged to switch off their lights between 8am and 9am local time. That's what got me!

Cities around the world taking part include Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv and all are holding events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Good on them, do your bit too! Go on, switch out that light!!

 

It's rant o'clock!

Why the iPhone does not work for me

Welcome to our new column called Kent Brockman. This is where we get to have a rant about the things that are bothering us - feel free to join in!

I love gadgets, always have always will. But they have to be practical and they work otherwise they go straight under the kitchen sink to join the ice cream maker, the thing for cutting onions really thin and the fancy looking juicer that didn't juice.

So I recently took possession of an iPhone and while there are many things it does well it's the fact that the basics do not work well that have finally driven me back to my trusted Blackberry.

So here is where I have been struggling with my iPhone:

• Typing, actually typing something is next to impossible to do at any speed. I have tried a number of approaches but none of them work for me. And the predictive text does not seem to learn as the Blackberry does.
• Connectivity, the connection to the internet struggles in places where it really should not.
• Emails, they are more of a pull than a push option,they take ages to load and often do not load in full which is really annoying.
• Battery life, this is OK if you are just picking up emails but talk and the battery does not last that long. This may just be my expectations of what is good but I was not too impressed.
• Random deadness, several times if you press a number of buttons too quickly the iPhone just goes into 'shock' mode and dies. You can do nothing, not even switch it on or off. You just have to wait for it to recover, the poor wee soul!
• Synching, I had a vew issues getting it to synch with my outlook contacts and global diary.

In the interest of fairness here are some good things!

• Music, easy to download, surf through the albums available and to listen to.
• Photos, OK to take and really easy to email to people, nice one!
• Web browsing, when it worked great for viewing websites, PDFs, Excel sheets and so on - I am going to miss those options!

So there you have have it, I am not alone having issues with the iPhone. Maybe some could be solved and maybe I should have taken more time to learn to type on it. But I did adjust to my Blackberry a lot quicker so that is where I am headed.

This has been a Kent Brockman production! Have a good weekend.

Google's founders lose $17billion

Lofty growth expectations as well as a perceived weakness in the US  economy and the rumblings of a recession have had an affect on Google's share price.

Having reached a high of $747.24 a share in November last year it has now dropped down to $450 a share. A regularity fillings release on Tuesday revealed that Google’s stock tumble has resulted in Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page losing a massive $8.5 billion off their personal wealth. CEO Eric Schmidt lost $3billion.

Even after the $8.5 billion loss, Brin and Page are both still worth around $13 billion each. Eric Schmidt fortune comes in at $4.3 billion.

Brin, Page, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt all received their customary $1 salaries last year.

Google Layout in China

Google’s homepage in China looks a bit different to the one that we know and love in the UK.  If you check it out you may be shown the normal page because of Google detecting where in the world you are and showing you what it thinks you want to be shown.  Anyways if you can’t see it don’t stress as there is a screenshot of it below:

So yeah apart from the obvious language difference it is hard to see where I am coming from.  What is different is below the search box.  Basically there are a number of animated buttons that expand when the mouse moves over them. 

From the left these are:

• Videos – which unlike Youtube seems to be working today
• Images – works as you would expect
• News – most stories coming from the biggest local news site.
• Maps - Works well, but I would love if there was an English option
• Blog Search - Good, but almost all of the western blog providers are blocked including Google's Blogger
• Frebang - This is kind of like Google trends on a page.  It shows the most popular bands, TV shows, movies, stocks etc from a search perspective.  Would be cool to get something similar in the UK
• Daohang - This is a portal page that lets users jump to popular Chinese internet destinations including their big competitor Baidu.  This is an interesting piece of functionality as it is really different from Google's normally clean and simple interface. 

This all shows that Google is willing to make local adjustments to it's product in order to be competitive.

When I arrived in Shanghai last year this page was being used as a test for www.g.cn.  Google had set up www.g.cn as research had shown that the word Google did not translate easily into Chinese and so a number of users just weren't getting through to the site.  Now www.g.cn is just a redirect to www.google.cn.  It is interesting to see that this interface has now made it onto the normal site.

Yahoo! to join Google's 'Open Social'

My Space get into it as well!

Yahoo and MySpace have confirmed that they are joining the Open Social platform to form the nonprofit OpenSocial Foundation along with Google.

The Open Social platform allows developers to create a single application that works on multiple sites, which makes sense!

It's encouraging that we are seeing more and more collaberation between the search engines and social sites. The creation of the sitemaps.org protocol last  year was the first real joined up effort by all three major search engines and it will be interesting in these 'take over' times whether Microsoft will get on board as well.

The Mobile Search Battle

Opera, the Norwegian browser maker,  ended its cooperation with Yahoo , and chose Google  to again be  the  default search engine for  Opera Mobile and Opera Mini in 2008.  Just a year ago, Opera  had  dumped Google for Yahoo.   It is not going all Google's way as earlier this year T-Mobile Europe replaced Google with Yahoo for its mobile portal web ‘N Walk.

Apparently, there is a fierce battle for mobile search, due to  its  the huge market.   According to Opera there are 35 million cumulative users browsing 1.7 billion pages within a month.  Much of the traffic is generated through searches.

(News source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142927-page,1/article.html)

How does PPC stack up to a good natural ranking?

Its official!

Natural search delivers twice as much traffic as paid search for number one ranked terms..

We have been monitoring traffic for a number of competitive terms that have consistently ranked number one in the natural search rankings and compared these numbers with estimates from the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator.

It becomes clear that the PPC numbers estimated by the tool only deliver between 30% and 60% of the natural search traffic. So does this mean Google is playing down the actual traffic estimated? Or is it simply that organic search delivers more in actual clicks than PPC?

The figures we looked at were in a very busy and competitive sector and were based on a months data.

We will continue to review these traffic trends as long as we have the number one ranking!

Trust Me!

Getting the Search Engines onside

It doesn't matter whether you have an online only business or a bricks and morter shop. Either way you need to install a level of trust before anyone will do business with you.

And the same can be said of the search engines. They need to know that your business is a 'safe' one before it can be included and rank highly (OK, I 've taken a bit of punt on that one but you can see what I mean!) 

So what indicators do search engines look for? Well not surprisingly the same ones as real life living human beings, there's a thing!

These include:

• SSL certificate -shows the site secure when shopping
• Street Mailing Address - shows you are an actual business and not a fly by night operation
• Privacy Policy -again shows you take your business and customer seriously
• Aged domain - proves you are in it for the long haul (and if a .com buy it for the next 5/10 years!)
• Links from reputable trade bodies - they are vouching for your integrity

All of these should be on your site as standard but if not think about adding them. They not only reassure the search engines but potential customers as well.

Microsoft finally opening up their Windows

It was only last month that we saw computing behemoth Microsoft receive yet another fine, for failing to adhere to EU laws regarding open source protocol.  This most recent penalty brings the total to a quite frankly staggering sum of €1.7 Billion, most certainly not your average slap on the wrist!  So will this most recent development finally signal a new era in Microsoft’s open source policy, or will its established culture and entrenched legacy prevent change.

We know that its not going to be easy, the culture of secrecy and modus operandi that renowned giants in Silicon Valley have carefully crafted throughout the 1990’s that prevented ‘fair’ competition and in effect monopolised the industry is systemic and runs deep into each companies make-up. 

However the ‘goal posts’ are being moved and now rather than eliminate competition, these companies are embracing opensource values.  Open collaboration has become inextricably linked with success in this ever more competitive arena, and surprisingly the rhetoric currently coming from Microsoft’s top brass certainly seems to be in agreement: “we have been through a 10 year battle and I don’t want it to turn into a 100 year war”.

But before developers world wide get too excited, the actually scale of this change is relatively small.  Yes there have been steps in the right direction, the most notable of which being Ray Ozzie appointed chief architect in place of Bill Gates.  Nevertheless the cultural cleavages associated with the old guard and the companies past dominance, are attributes that are very hard to break down – especially as taken 30 years for them to harden.  But as with all predictions, it will be left for time to decide the fate of Microsoft's willingness to embrace open source.

News Results back again

Now between rank #3 and #4 - sometimes!

After a holiday it is interesting to see that the News results have started to appear again, well sort of. It's actually a bit on and off but when they do appear we are seeing them feature between the third and fourth ranked sites on some terms. The quality looks better than of old so maybe Google has been listening to our previous complaints ;)

This also seems to tie in with the contstant updating we are seeing as we reported here. So some fluctuation in rankings and the appearance of the News results.

Fun times!