Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Orange, California unveils Preservation Online database .

New free Web site for learning to read Chinese.

New search engine for India: Aflatoon .

Comparative gallery of world maps shaped like butterflies. Cahill maps. THA’S RIGHT!

Weather Webcams!

State of Wisconsin puts all state bluebooks online — all 56,000 pages of all 87 editions.

Yet more libraries joining the Google Digitization Project .

A wiki of shapes? Map shapes?

Happy Birthday, Search Engine Watch!. Danny rocks.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

What do you get when 2,740 Chinese internet users don’t know which search engine they’re using? Surprisingly the outcome is that the majority favors the Google results over Baidu’s results.

Chinese research company Intelliconsulting released a report (in Chinese) on the search result preferences of 2,740 web users that participated in a 12 day blind test.

Whenever they did a search during the test period they didn’t know whether they were searching with Baidu or Google. The software used for this Blind Test was developed by Tsinghua University (Beijing). More information on the method Intelliconsulting used is not available at this time.

Participants had to rate 8 different type of search results: news, Internet and technology, finance/business, entertainment, shopping/dining, travel/transportation, science/culture/education, and government services/public information.

The main conclusion of the research is that Google delivers more satisfying results than Baidu. 48.2% for Google, 39.8% for Baidu.


The results show as well that the differences in satisfaction with the search results between Baidu and Google gets bigger as the age of the user increases. The same goes for education. The more educated an Internet user is, the more he prefers Google results.

Another noteworthy part of the research is that the more a respondent uses search engines, the better he likes the results of Google.

The respondents were also asked what they didn’t like about the search results.

The instability of Google’s website, thanks mostly to the great Chinese firewall, was seen as negative as well as having no page-caching. The fact that Google doesn’t offer a search functionality for free mp3’s and other downloadable entertainment was also not appreciated.

The instability of Google’s website is a matter of politics, mp3 search is more likely a matter of law I think.

35.7% of the participants indicated that they didn’t appreciate that Baidu’s natural search results were mixed with advertising. The respondents also didn’t like the fact that results don’t include Chinese content from websites outside of China and that they don’t seem objective. (note, read filtered)

These are interesting results considering that Google’s China search engine mostly makes headlines with their decreasing market share and political issues about filtering results. The survey shows that even though Google is still trailing far behind Baidu, it doesn’t seem to be because of their search results.

Making sure the website gets more stable is key at this stage and offering more “entertainment” search will likely attract more younger users.

At this stage I can’t see Google directly starting to offer the hugely popular “entertainment” search yet on the Google.cn domain for legal reasons but as mentioned in my last overview of what happened in search in the last weeks, they may be experimenting with this on other domains.

Baidu can counter by making their natural results less advertiser biased and becoming more objective. The latter is easier said than done as they’re based in China and will have to comply even more with all the censor regulations.

The coming years, when the young internet generation matures (and downloading becomes less important in their daily life), will show if people will stick with Baidu or venture out more to Google.

Note: The charts are taken from Intelliconsulting and modified to make the results more understandable. Any possible mistakes in the translations are mine

–
Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of Tiger Internet Marketing which provides Chinese seo services.

What has been happening in the last 2 weeks in the world of the search engines in China. Here’s the overview

Baidu Video Search, and Denied Rumors

Since the beginning of this year Baidu has it’s own video search, which is still officially in Beta. In May, they started a cooperation with Video-sharing website KU6. Youku.com has become the latest partner of Baidu. Video search results will now contain links to the Youku inventory as well.

There was a rumor published that Baidu is planning to conquer the European market. Later the rumor was denied by Baidu.

I would be surprised if they would enter Europe. They recently entered Japan and it’s not clear yet whether they have been making any inroads. Going into new territory would take up a lot of resources while there is still much to do in China.
Then again, the fact that they denied the rumor, doesn’t mean much as well.

Google Rumors and Entertainment Search

Staying with rumors. Google has denied they bought directory website 265.com, eventhough on May 31st the domain registry records showed that ownership had changed. They did admit they want to cooperate. Search on 265.com is powered by Google.

Xunlei, a company that Google invested in earlier this year, bought the domain Gougou. Gougou, which used to be a RSS reader, now serves as a search engine for mp3’s, movies, torrents and everything else that is (illegally) downloadable. Google may be involved with Gougou as well reports the CWR Blog,

“In the search result of Gougou, there’re links to Google search in the right sidebar and footbar. Also there’s Google suggest like feature in the search bar. These suggest that Google may have participated in the development of the search engine.”

This may be Google dipping its toes in the entertainment search. An area, as shown in a recent report by Intelliconsulting, that search engine users miss in Google.

Yahoo.cn Changes Interface

Yahoo.cn has changed its interface. Again the CWR Blog tells us more.

This is a universal search, which includes search result from webpage, image and blogs, etc, all in one page. There’s no next page. You can navigate to more results though tabs.

The new search engine is called OmniSearch. The name reminds me of OmniFind, but Yahoo said it’s based on OneSearch, Yahoo’s mobile search platform.

Yahoo had already mentioned at the Xiamen SES conference they wanted to adjust to more of a Web 2.0 version and this seems to be the first step. On the Yahoo.com.cn domain they still offer the Web 1.0 version.

China Internet News Snippets

MSN China’s portal opens a new dating channel

Microsoft’s Beijing Lab predicts age and gender

Baidu search engine fraud exposed

Flickr blocked in China

A Firefox extension to access Flickr in China

Tom Eachnet (aka Ebay China) cancels paypal service and the rumor is, it will adopt a new domain name sometime in July.

If you have been reading till this far, I commend and thank you:) Next time more Internet news from China.
–
Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of Tiger Internet Marketing which provides Chinese seo services.

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In case you didn’t see this over at Pandia — Pandia has noted an interesting feature Google image search. If you search for something and then add &imgtype=face to the result URL, you will get only results that have faces in them.

Pandia mentioned doing this in conjunction with a name search, but I found getting the results was much more dramatic when I did the search in conjunction with a fairly pedestrian search like lightning. That search by itself gets almost two million results. That search with the &imgtype=face result URL modifier narrows it down to just under 25,000, with images including dogs, reggae bands, Native Americans, and the comic book superhero Black Lightning.

Now if this only worked with Google Product Search….

Briefly, as a child, I rode horses. The knowledge that I was falling off horses more than I was actually RIDING them curtailed that activity. But I couldn’t suppress a bit of nostalgia when I got a notification for Equilink, a search engine for all things horsey, available at http://www.equilink.com/ . At this full-text search engine you can do a keyword search or you can browse by category (racing, dressage, western, vacation, etc.)

The first search I do on targeted search engines is intended to break them — the search is “Strawberry Shortcake” . If I get search results about a certain little annoying 80s cartoon character, the search engine has flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test. (There are at least a dozen vertical search engines I have not covered because they flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test.) Equilink passed with flying colors, giving me no results.

Turning to more horse-related searches, I did a search for withers acupressure. I got at least 100 results (I didn’t get a result count) of searches that covered e-commerce, information sites, and at least one result from Amazon. Results contained page title, URL, and snippet. A snapshot of the site would have been nice, especially a sometimes the whole URL is not included (too long?)

Once you have the search results, you have the additional option to filter them by state and city. Not sure how the state is being determined, though — several attempts to filter by state brought no results. California? 0. New York? 0. TEXAS? 0. The only state filter that worked was Alabama, and that brought one result. Use this feature cautiously.

All the searches I did, and all the browsing for that matter, brought very targeted, focussed results. I would like more descriptions and full URLs in the search results (because it’s always good to see where you’re going) and RSS feeds would be nice, of course. Worth a look to the equestrian-minded.

* IP addresses are not considered personal information. They do not believe that they collect sensitive information.

* Vague, incomplete and possibly deceptive privacy policy. Document fails to explain detailed data processing elements or information flows.

* Generally poor track record of responding to customer complaints. Ambivalent attitude to privacy challenges (for example, complaints to EU privacy regulators over Gmail). Privacy mandate is not embedded throughout the company. Techniques and technologies frequently rolled out without adequate public consultation (e.g. Street level view).

* Will utilise Doubleclick's "Dynamic Advertising Reporting & Targeting" (DART) advanced profiling system.

* Google account holders that regularly use even a few of Google's services must accept that the company retains a large quantity of information about that user, often for an unstated or indefinite length of time, without clear limitation on subsequent use or disclosure, and without an opportunity to delete or withdraw personal data even if the user wishes to terminate the service.

* Google maintains records of all search strings and the associated IP-addresses and time stamps for at least 18 to 24 months and does not provide users with an expungement option. While it is true that many US based companies have not yet established a time frame for retention, there is a prevailing view amongst privacy experts that 18 to 24 months is unacceptable, and possibly unlawful in many parts of the world.

* Google has access to additional personal information, including hobbies, employment, address, and phone number, contained within user profiles in Orkut. Google often maintains these records even after a user has deleted his profile or removed information from Orkut.

* Google collects all search results entered through Google Toolbar and identifies all Google Toolbar users with a unique cookie that allows Google to track the user's web movement. Google does not indicate how long the information collected through Google Toolbar is retained, nor does it offer users a data expungement option in connection with the service.

* Google logs search queries in a manner that makes them personally identifiable but fails to provide users with the ability to edit or otherwise expunge records of their previous searches.

* Google fails to give users access to log information generated through their interaction with Google Maps, Google Video, Google Talk, Google Reader, Blogger and other services.

In what could be yet another blow on Google’s current web standing, Privacy International, an independent internet watchgroup has ranked Google in the bottom of other internet companies in terms of privacy practices. The study was conducted among major internet players using various core parameters relating to internet privacy protection best practices. Among those major internet players included in the study are Amazon, Microsoft, mySpace, Bebo, Facebook, among other web 1.0 and web 2.0 major players.

In ranking the internet companies the following ranking categories were used:

• Corporate administrative details,

• Corporate leadership,

• Data collection and processing,

• Data retention,

• Openness and transparency,

• Responsiveness,

• Ethical compass,

• Customer and user control,

• Fair gateways and authentication,

• Privacy enhancing innovations and privacy invasive innovations,

And based on these categories, the study revealed that the lowest ranked company is none other than, Google.

The reasons? Here are just two of the many reasons cited by Privacy International on why Google ranks the lowest among major internet players in terms of user privacy protection:

• User personal information is retained by Google for an indefinite period of time, without giving the users option to delete those information,
• Google records and maintains search strings and IP addresses of users for 18 to 24 months without giving a clear policy on when those information are deleted from the system,

The other reasons cited are specific to the various web apps services provided by Google such as Orkut, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Video etc. The report gives a consolation to Google by citing that none of the companies received a “green” status or none of the internet companies is actually privacy friendly and privacy enhancing. However, Microsoft, one of Google’s major rival got a ranking that is two steps “friendlier” than Google. Yahoo on the other got a “red” status meaning the company poses a substantial threat to privacy.

In response to the report, Google’s Deputy General Counsel, Nicole Wong said:

“We are disappointed with Privacy International’s report, which is based on numerous inaccuracies and misunderstandings about our services. It’s a shame that Privacy International decided to publish its report before we had an opportunity to discuss our privacy practices with them.”

Meanwhile, Privacy International accused Google of conducting smear campaign to discredit Privacy International and the findings of their study.

Expect more Google press release regarding this issue by Monday. Let’s see how Google will further react to the findings of the study. But then, does it really have to? Should Google be afraid that the confidence of its user base would go down? Your guess is as good as mine.

Okay the Quality Score discussions have been busy lately. While we would all like to have a light turned on inside the 'black box' there has been some insight given recently if you have been watching carefully.

Yesterday, Barry Schwartz posted about Google's announcement of more small changes to the algorithm. He noted that while Google claimed not many advertisers would be impacted by the changes, the members at both DigitalPoint and WebMasterWorld seem to differ on that point.

Click to read the rest of this post...

For those of you that like to follow social media sites such as Digg, an easy analysis tool may be of some use to you. Yahoo Pipes lets you very quickly put together a suite of tools to organize a web feed’s items. In this example, I’m going to to sort the Digg homepage RSS feed by the submitter of each story.

To do that, we need to manipulate some of the content of the Digg feed using the Yahoo Pipes Regex (regular expressions) module. Otherwise, all the information we need is in the feed.

Regular expression patterns:
I’m not going to get into an elaborate discussion of regexes. Instead, I’ll just list what I’ve used in the screencast video. (If you’re familiar with regexes already, bear with me.)

1. ^ - caret - match the beginning of a string.
2. $ - dollar - match the end of a string.
3. .* - dot star - match any sequence of characters.
4. ^.*$ - match the entire string.
5. (^.*$) - match the entire string and save it in parameter 1, aka $1.

Digg feed variables used:
The Digg home page RSS feed has a number of fields/ variables that we can access in Yahoo Pipes. In this example, I’ve only used one:

digg:submitter.digg:username

Within Yahoo Pipes, to access it, we place braces (curly brackets) around it:

${digg:submitter.digg:username}

Process:
These are the steps I take in the video below.

1. Grab the Digg home page feed.
2. Insert the digg username (of the story submitter) in the item.title field’s values, at the beginning of the title, surrounded by square brackets.
3. Do the same with the item.y:title field. (This is probably redundant, but it’s not a big deal.)
4. Replace the item.description fields with nothing - i.e., an empty string. For our analysis, getting rid of the description reduces visual clutter in the results. It’s just easier to see only the title and submitter.
5. Sort the resulting manipulated feed by the item.title.

What we’re doing is taking a story title such as

Paris’ Sob Story

with

[RainbowPhoenix] Paris’ Sob Story

for each home page story. The string in the square brackets is the name of the Digg member that submitted the article. So ^.*$ matches “Paris’ Sob Story”, and the () brackets assigns this string to $1. Thus the Regex replace rule (^.*$) for item.title takes the very same title and inserts the current digg username in square brackets in front of the title.

[${digg:submitter.digg:username}] $1

Other than getting rid of the story description, this all we’re really doing, followed by a sort on the title values.

Yahoo Pipes modules used:

1. Fetch Feed
2. Regex
3. Sort
4. Output

Here’s a SplashCast screencast showing the process of creating the Pipe. (Apologies for the choppy narration, as I had to use an earlier voiceover due to upload problems.)

You can take my Digg by Submitter pipe, clone and tweak it to your heart’s content. Or wait for the next one. In the next part of this mini-series, we’ll sort the Digg homepage by category (and prove an Apple bias for the home page).

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says people often create social rules for community projects by assuming the worst behavior among the community participants. He presents an interesting analogy why we shouldn’t do so [WMV].

This bit is part of a larger interview Jimmy did with Mario Sixtus of the Elektrischer Reporter video blog. Other topics covered include:

• The rules to create a good community (like a good community police: guard against “muggers” but also allow dissent and protest)
• Why Wikinews didn’t take off so far (it has a big competitor when it comes to current news events: Wikipedia)
• Wikipedia and the lack of advertisement
• Why he really dislikes the term “crowdsourcing”
• Jimmy’s new search engine project (which is in its “very early design stages,” Jimmy says)
• Why Jimmy thinks software patents pose a “threat to creativity”

[Video Creative Commons licensed.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

According to reports from some of you, Flickr photos are currently blocked in China (so you can still access and browse the site, but all images disappeared). The Flickr staff writes:

<<It seems that access to our image servers is being blocked for users in much of China. Our technical staff has looked into this at depth and determined this is not a technical issue from our end. We will keep an eye on the situation and update if we get any developments.>>

And in a later update, they add:

<<We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven’t detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives.>>

Just two days ago, Amnesty International warned:

<<The virus of Internet repression is spreading. The ’Chinese model’ – of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy – is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers.

Unless we act on this issue, the Internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come. More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online. And major Internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts.>>

(Google is one of the companies Amnesty International refers to in their release – as is Yahoo, owner of Flickr.)

[Thanks ShellehS/ JasonIT!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

I’m back from SMX Seattle. It was wonderful to visit with familiar folks. I met a lot of neat new people too.

I plan to spend the next week or so talking with folks at Google and seeing just how much email stacked up while I was on vacation. Catching up with my team is my top priority, so it will take me a little while before I can get my blog posting velocity back up to full speed. Some things I know I want to talk about:

- discussion of the extra info that’s been added to our webmaster quality guidelines
- thoughts on SMX Seattle and giving more context on some of the things I discussed at SMX Seattle
- talking about how I ordered a machine with Ubuntu pre-installed instead of Windows
- a reminder of a good .htaccess practice, possibly with some thoughts on WordPress caching
- five things you don’t know about me
- a few book reviews from my vacation

Please be patient if I concentrate on catching up on webspam stuff before I blog much. Thanks, and it’s good to be back!