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I was alerted to this by a thread at WebMaster World, seems Google search results are promoting Google Books product. To see an example of this do a search for "building wealth" and go to the page four and beyond results.

Initially this was being shown on the first page and beyond but it seems they have pushed it back a little. Google has been known to test changes to the algorithm without announcing the tests. Hey we are all part of their testing pool.

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Since my last update on the Chinese search world all the major players have been very active in launching new channels and products.

I like to start with the latest report from China IntelliConsulting Corporation (CIC) that researched the current market shares of the search engines in China. CIC conducted a survey in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (the most urbanized and modern cities of China).

The main conclusion, based on the last 12 months, is that there are only two parties left that can be taken serious.

Baidu leads comfortably with 69.5% (7.6% more than 12 months ago) and Google account for 23% of the market. Hanging on are Yahoo and Sogou with respectively 2.3% (lost 2.9%) and 1.8% (lost 1.4%). If you look at the last 6 months the picture looks a bit more positive for Google as they increased their share with 1.4% and Baidu grew 0.4%.

Chart from CIC

Some other highlights from the report:

• Chinese users response positively to Google’s localized products
• Google’s market share gains are mainly from student users.
• Google lost 5.6% of it’s hi-end users where Baidu picked up 9.7% over the last year
  (Hi-end users: Aged 25 and above, bachelor or higher and a salary of more than 3000 Renminbi)

The report also gives an overview of what they call frequently visited websites. Sina is the most popular, followed by Sohu and Netease. Yahoo China is number 4 on the list. The last 3 websites all lost market share according to CIC.

The battle seems in favor of Baidu at this stage but Google is in China for the long run and won’t give up easily. You can find a pdf version of the report here.

Let’s have a look of what they have been up to as well as the other players. And if you make it all the way to the end of the article, I even have something funny, well a bit funny at least.

Baidu

Video advertising is hot. Google launched their video advertising product some time ago (also available in Chinese) and, no surprise, Baidu has launched its own version and the principle is the same. It will sell video advertisements which will be distributed via its Union network (similar to Adsense) of 150,000 partner sites.

Not long after that they launched Baidu Game.

CWR blog describes it as:

… a search driven forum for sharing know-hows of any games (in future, currently only 5). It’s a natural derivative for game players to turn from asking in Baidu Zhidao to Sharing.

The five games that are included are: Perfect World 2, Zhu Xian Online and Legend of Martial Arts, Zhengtu Online and World of Warcraft.

And if this wasn’t enough they launched their Olympic channel.

From China Tech Stories:

Head of Baidu’s Olympic platform, Wang Xiao said: “We will utilize the world’s leading Chinese search technology, to guide the hundreds of millions of Olympic-related inquiries daily to the best Web sites that users want. This will not only promote an environment of efficiency and fairness for the Olympic media coverage, it can also greatly highlight the authoritative nature of Baidu as a new media.”

Google

Baidu is not the only one speeding up its launches. Google China activated it’s blog search engine at the end of last month. It’s self-censored as is their search engine but as Blogoscoped mentioned, “blog information is especially hard to control.

Talking about blogs, Google’s reader is since September 18 also available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese (as well as in many other languages).

China is one of the countries where the new Adsense for Mobile will be available. Given the huge number (44 million) of mobile phone users that, if you can believe the stats from CNNIC, spend time surfing mobile, this might work here. I still struggle with the potential of mobile ads, that display is sooo small, but that’s why I attend Mobile Mondays and maybe one day I’ll get it.

And then very recently yet another launch, well actually 2. The first one makes it possible to search Chinese video sharing websites. It’s similar to Baidu’s video search. The second is a Chinese version of Google Transit. You can plan your trip in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing for now.

And before I end up with the Google news, the last tidbit is a report from again China Tech News that President of Google China, Kai-fu Lee, announced a massive market promotion in the coming months in order to entice more users to try Google’s products.

Ok, one more, although not so fresh but still a nice win for Google.

From China Vortex:

Alibaba has chosen Google China as its main advertising platform partner for its online advertising service Alimama over Baidu.

Alibaba had been in secret discussions with both Google China and Baidu. The discussions with Baidu broke down for undisclosed reasons, and soon after, Alibaba announced its partnership with Google.

The Rest of the Best

Although search market wise trailing behind, Yahoo is still a popular destination website for its services. They have launched their map service as well as the Lifetime Emailbox. It’s a mailbox with unlimited capacity.

Microsoft has lost its CEO for Greater China, Timothy Chen. He will continue his career with the NBA to lead its newly created NBA China division.

MSN was in the news for the fact that their partner for its MSN China joint venture intends to get out of the partnership and is looking for buyers for their stake. This will have to be a Chinese company to comply with Chinese regulations that say that the majority of the stake has to be held by a mainland company.

Links that may be of interest:

Alipay makes it now possible for consumers in mainland China to buy directly online from global retailers

Chinese online payment company Yeepay partners with Eachnet. EachNet is a joint-venture between eBay and TOM Online. The question is here, where has paypal, an eBay company, gone in this setup.

The CEO of Myspace, Luo Chuan, has been talking about the user growth. Not yet a hit in the market it seems. Ad company WPP has faith in the venture and bought a stake in the venture capital firm backing MySpace China.

The biggest video-sharing website in China, Tudou (potato), is now 360 million videos a week according to Nielsen.

Blogs and other websites hosted in the mainland are under scrutiny and data centers have been closed down in the run-up to the meeting of the National Congress. You’ll find an overview here. It will make you think twice before hosting here.

A little fun

There are many expat classified magazines here in Shanghai and reading them can be entertaining. This ad made me chuckle, considering the on going discussions about the colors of one’s hat.

If you want to apply you can check it out here. If you want to know what else can be found in these magazines, check out these classifieds.

The always helpful technology how-to site Tech-Recipes has posted a quick and dirty tutorial on how to use Google to search DivShare, an online file storage service, for multimedia.Similar to the tutorial for searching MediaFire, you're basically using Google to unearth free media that you can download - anything from music to videos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports that Google will “announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle ... and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.” [Hat tip to Search Engines Web and Waxy.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Buried under too many Lifehacker posts? Turn down the volume with our daily, trimmed-down top stories feed or once-weekly highlights feed. This week's best posts include:

• Transform Your Classic Xbox into a Killer Media Center
  "Don't ditch your classic Xbox just because you can't play Halo 3 on it: nowadays it's easier than ever to transform that old neglected console into a Unix-based media command center."
• Five Tools to Capture Your Thoughts
  "One of the best productivity tips I've found--courtesy of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done--is keeping 'buckets' for your ideas. "
• Mirror Your Mac on a Bootable External Drive
  "If and when that terrible day your Mac dies finally catches up to you, you can be back up and running with all your applications, settings and data in under 5 seconds with a bootable system clone."
• Remote Control Your Computer with Your iPhone
  "You could spend hundreds of dollars on a multimedia remote with a touchscreen interface, glorious album art, and all of the fixings, but if you've already got an iPhone, you really don't need to."
• Yahoo Mail Innovates, Gmail Stagnates
  "Google makes a great beta, but with Gmail they've been much too slow to actually take the application to the next level."
• Top 10 Firefox Extension-free Tabbed Browsing Techniques
  "Sure we love our Tab Mix Plus, but there's a ton of tabbed browsing features baked right into Firefox that don't necessitate the extra baggage of an extension."
• Desktop Show and Tell, Linux Edition
  "From the wholly minimal to the completely ornate, the Linux desktop has never been sexier."
• Best Free Software to Unlock Your Favorite Hardware
  "It sucks that your favorite gadgets have more functionality than their default software exposes, but it rules that several software applications are built to unlock that potential for free."
• Follow Your Favorite Lifehacker Commenters
  "The wisdom of this crowd surpasses that of any other community on the 'net, and now we're making it easier than ever to stalk follow your favorite commenters."
• Google Docs Adds Presentations
  "Google finally rounds out their web-based office suite with the addition of Presentations to Google Docs."
• Hack Your Home Telephone with Asterisk
  "..the free, open source Asterisk software does some crazy stuff, like IM's whenever the phone rings, sets custom MP3 hold music, and--my favorite--forwards annoying telemarketing calls to the very loud sound of monkeys screaming."
• Ask the Readers: Best Firefox userchrome.css Tweaks?
  "Just as extensions add functionality and about:config tweaks change behavior, you can style Firefox's "chrome" using the userchrome.css file."

Google Maps mashup Gruvr lists live local music by date and location. Just head to their homepage and enter your location (if it doesn't automatically locate you). Gruvr begins automatically displaying upcoming concerts one at a time in what at first seems like a fun tour of what's happening. If your location has a lot of venues, it quickly gets irritating, since you can't stop the playback to focus on one that piqued your interest until it finishes displaying every show for the upcoming week. Despite that one user-unfriendly quirk (which could be easily fixed), Gruvr is actually a really nice idea. The weekend is upon us, so if you're looking to hit the town for some live music, Gruvr is a good option. If you want the latest on local music but you're not keen on Gruvr, check out Pollstar, Upcoming.org, or the iConcertCal iTunes plug-in.

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."

Can you help?

In yet another bid to free itself from the Verizons of the world, Google will soon drag a multi-terabit communications cable under the Pacific Ocean.…

Grahame Lynch of CommsDay reports (my emphasis):

<<Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day has learned.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan in Sydney last week. (...)

Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways - considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.>>

CommsDay says Google didn’t directly deny or conform the rumors, with Google’s Barry Schnitt telling them:

<<Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.>>

Does this rumor sound crazy? Well, have a look at this Google job position:

<<Strategic Negotiator, Submarine Cable - Mountain View (...)

Submarine cable Strategic Negotiators are specifically responsible for working with internal technical and business teams to identify, select, and negotiate submarine networking contracts as part of the development of Google’s global backbone. These negotiators will work closely with vendors to identify highly cost-effective solutions under the most favorable commercial and technical terms possible. They will also be involved in new projects or investments in cable systems that Google may contemplate to extend or grow its backbone. Negotiators will need to have in-depth knowledge of the global submarine cabling system and a rock-solid understanding of how terrestrial constraints drive strategic submarine networking decisions.>>

And it may just be a coincidence, but a while ago Google Blogoscoped co-editor Tony Ruscoe found the Google intranet subdomain “unity.corp.google.com”. John Paczkowski of Digital Daily comments, “It’s clear Google has telecom aspirations, but apparently they’re quite a bit grander than previously thought – undersea-cable grand.”

[Thanks John! Photo source Creative Commons-licensed by Scott.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Eric Case works at Google, and when you search for his name an ad to his blog appears at this time. Googlaxy, who sent this in, wonders “Why he’s buying ads if he has all the top results?” (Note it could be him or someone else who bought the ads...) Is this perhaps a way to track to find out how often people searched for his name in Google? After all, the AdWords statistics contain an “impressions” field.

[Thanks Googlaxy!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Yesterday I had the priveledge of being asked to do a guest spot on SEO 101, the Webmaster Radio show hosted by David Brown of Neo1Seo, Brian Mark of Toolbarn.com and Carolyn Shelby.

Here’s the Podcast of the show:

SEO 101 is a live podcast, broadcast over Webmaster Radio at 1 pm EST and the show discusses basic SEO techniques and news for those new to SEO & link building, and those needing a refresher.

We announced on the show yesterday that Search Engine Journal will be doing weekly wrap-ups of the SEO 101 show for our readers, and I will be doing guest spots on the show from time to time.

Here’s what we discussed on the show : basic blogging and the blogosphere’s influence on SEO.

* B.L.O.G. = Better Listings On Google
* Blogs are good for linking because they attract links as a resource
* Blogrolls (great place to ask for links on other blogs)
* Blog Hosting (hosting on your own domain vs. blogspot or wordpress)
* Posting frequency and the Google Freshness factor
* Blog Directories : free listings, lots of links, link juice, Best of the Web
* Basic Blog SEO tips (Wordpress SEO Plugins)
* Submitting posts to Digg, Netscape StumbleUpon and other sites
* Netscape’s Launch of Propeller.com

How was the show? Please leave your comments below!

When it comes to analyzing the performance of your website, there is a seemingly endless (well, at least a few hundred) list of factors to consider. Faced with so many analytics options, how do you determine which criteria will be the most useful for grading your website? And how many different factors should you look at? Well, the short answer is, it depends…on the type of website, the time available to devote to analytics and the depth of information you’re looking for. Here we’ll take a look at some of the “key” Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure the effectiveness of your website with quantifiable and actionable results.

Central to determining the effectiveness of a website, a Key Performance Indicator is simply one data point that can be used to measure a certain aspect of the site. By comparing KPI numbers with your web goals, you get a sense of a website’s ability to engage visitors. If results don’t measure up, KPIs indicate, as the name implies, which areas of your site need improving.

Let’s take general page views as one data point. A raw number of page views just tells you how many times in a given period people looked at pages within your site, which basically doesn’t tell you much at all. More meaningful, however, is how those page views translate to the effectiveness of your site. This is where a KPI can help. Let’s say your site is built around providing in-depth content on a specialist subject and generates revenue through providing in-depth content on a specialised subject and generates revenue through a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) advertising model. Your goal is to have a site that engages visitors and encourages them to view a large number of pages and, by doing so, ads. In this case, average page-views per session or visit is the KPI to look at – and the higher the better.

On the other hand, if a site’s purpose is to deliver information quickly so visitors can get what they need quickly (e.g. an e-commerce site for office supplies), your goal would be a low number of average page views per visit. Determining which KPIs to use depends on the overall purpose and goals of a website.

Perhaps the most difficult part of web analytics is determining which KPIs to use. The sheer number of KPIs available can be overwhelming, as can the multitude of ways to compare the data they offer. This can mean you’re looking at every possible “this means that” scenario. To help cut through all the KPI confusion, we’ve come up with a list of a few basic KPIs that will tell you the most, while requiring the least (amount of time, specialty knowledge, etc.).

Visitors per Conversion, Lead or Order: This KPI could just as easily be called “how many visitors does it take for your website to achieve its goal?” Whether the goal of your site is to generate leads for the sales team or to have visitors purchase goods or services, this measurement tells you if your Web site is working. Consider this example: You decide to host a Webinar because you have content that appeals to your target audience, and you get 100 people to visit your Webinar registration page, but only 5 people sign up (convert). This is a good indication that there is a problem with your registration page. Most likely, the layout design is poor, the copy itself is confusing, or the page requires visitors to provide too much personal information. Knowing this, you can tweak these aspects of the page, reexamine the KPI, and determine what was hindering your Webinar registration.

Cost per Lead: For any organization streamlining processes to get more out of their investments, the cost per lead measurement can help you see which investments are paying off and which might need cut off. To return to the Webinar example, let’s say the aggregate cost of your Webinar project was $5,000. You generated two leads. The boss says he’s not paying $2,500 per lead. Next steps? Try finding ways to cut your event costs or updating content to improve response rates and registration numbers (ie. conversion).

Stickiness: Consider the previous example of page views per visit. It measures how deep a viewer gets into the overall web site content. By measuring the level of involvement and length of time a visitor spends in a specific content area, though, you can determine a number of actions. If viewers are highly engaged in the content area, you may want to keep the section the same, or put links to other parts of your site that relate to this content. If visitors aren’t spending as much time in a section as they once did, it’s probably time to update your content. In some cases, if visitors are not going to a page at all, it can signal that there’s a problem with your navigation.

Percentage of New Visitors: By measuring what percentage of visitors are new, you can gauge how successful your marketing programs are in attracting new visitors to your site. If you’re at a point in the year when you’re trying to keep the loyalty of your existing visitors, then ideally percentage of returning visitors should make up the majority of your web traffic.

These four examples have probably gotten you thinking about the best KPIs for your website. The four here are common and useful, and even if your website requires more or different measurements, the importance of KPIs remain. If they’re a tool that can do what we’d all like to be experts in – performance improvement – being well-versed in the basics will certainly help you and your website achieve your goal.

Julie Mason is the General Manager for Kellysearch.com, the comprehensive online buyers’ guide and vertical search engine, with more than two million company listings from over 155 countries world wide.