Spy into Google™.
Google China turned its logo to black and white in memory of those who died in the Si Chuan Earthquake. Also, the banner below is showed on Google.cn which is translated into: "Let us remember the moment [of earthquake]. Hope that those who died with rest in peace, those who survived will strive on."
According to the Official Google China AdSense Blog , ads of Chinese AdSense publishers will open in new window starting from today. This is in respond to the overwhelming request from publishers and to improve user experience of Chinese web surfers. This is what the rest of the post said:
The Chinese market and the demands of Chinese publishers is very important to Google AdSense network. We hope to being better experience to users, more revenue to publishers and more earnings to advertisers through constant improvement of our products. By this, we could achieve four-win situation: users win, publishers win, advertisers win, Google wins.Currently, worldwide publishers cannot alter their AdSense codes to open ads in new window according to the AdSense Help Center.
Is Google going to own all "g" domains, how about "g.us" or "g.hk". :P
Related Posts:
Google Beats Baidu in Blind Test - Google China on its way to success
Google Life Search (生活搜索) - Search for localized results for China
According to the Official Google China Blog, AdSense China has announced a new feature in hopes to protect publishers' account from being sabotaged which they call it Allowed Sites. Publishers can enter a list of allowed domains (in which they own) and only impressions, clicks and earnings generated from that list of sites would be reported in the publishers' AdSense account.
The main aim of this feature is to prevent publisher IDs from being placed in spammy sites that do not below to those publishers. Currently, you can enter up to 100 sites in to the allowed list and would take up to 4 hours before the list is activated.
What is interesting is that ads would still show up in sites out of the list though any clicks wouldn't generate earnings for the publisher and there is no mention whether advertisers are charged for these clicks.
It seems that this feature is has not yet gone international. AdSense publisher, would you welcome this new feature?
Google achieved an overall satisfactory rating from 48.2% of the 2,740 Web surfers who participated, beating Baidu’s 39.8%. Participants in the test accessed the search engines through pages that disguised the companies' identities.
The quality of their search results were rated for the eight most common types of searches in China: news, Internet and technology, finance and business, entertainment, shopping and dining, travel and transportation, science and education, and government services and public information. Google is ahead of Baidu in all categories but entertainment, suggesting Baidu has a better understanding of the music and movie tastes of Chinese Internet users.
The survey also find out that users were most dissatisfied (scoring a 30.3% disapproval rate) with the connections to Google.cn have been highly unstable, particularly during the test period, when it was periodically blocked by Chinese censors, resulting in blank pages and slow speeds.
Google was also complaint about its failure to provide page-caching in China, the absence of a search function for free downloads of music in the MP3 format and for not providing a popular chat-room like message posting board called post bar.
I suppose Google China is trying very hard to catch up with in entertainment and other local search services by launching Life Search (the Chinese version of Google Base) in China.
| Related: Copy of Report Chinese | English |
Google China released a product called Google Life Search (谷歌生活搜索) for Chinese users to search for Housing, Jobs, Train Tickets, Goods and Food with the Google Base interface where you can refine your results by using specific attributes. I have to admit that this product is extremely localized and relevant as it searches only reputable Chinese sources and allows users to search for items in specific provinces in China. For the time being, there is no way for users to directly submit their own items for listing.
The recently announced Google IME (Input Method Editor) a.k.a. Google PinYin in China's Google Labs but has been discovered by users that it uses the thesaurus from another search engine in China called 搜狐 (Sohu). Facing the vigorous accusation, Google China Blog decided to apologize publicly to SoHu and admitted using their thesaurus. From the Official Google China Blog:
We are willing to face up to the problem, and therefore would like to apologize to both our customers and Sohu.Well ... there has been very high expectation when Google first entered China. Yet to date, it still is being accused of its slow pace in localizing its products to meet the needs of Chinese Internet users. This time they rolled out a product that copied other's database, many have expressed disappointment towards this legendary company. Could Google break the curse and take over the search engine market in China?
Meanwhile, we immediately took action this week (April 8, 2007) at noon, We have completed the second update (version 1.0.17.0 ) and spent two days to complete the re-escalation of the current thesaurus. Currently, the Google thesaurus comes from the massive searchable database accumulated over the years produced by tens of millions of entries.
| Important Announcement: This is the 100th post in gSpy. I would like to thanks all my readers for the unfailing support and I shall continue googling more Google! ;) |
I was in Thailand during the past 8 days and didn't have time to blog about Google. Let's catch up by summarizing the hundred something RSS feeds I missed:
Google China released two beta products: Rebang and Daohang
Rebang and Daohang means Hot List and Web Navigation in Chinese respectively. Rebang is the Chinese version of Google Zeitgeist but creates more dynamic content and puts search trends into various groups. Daohang is a directory where users can find top sites in one single page.
Google Talk Gadget released
Google Talk Gadget allows users to chat within their personalized homepage and even your own homepage. There are two new features that the talk client does not support: Video and photo preview within chat window. (i.e. the gadget automatically identifies links to YouTube videos and images in Picasa Web Album and displays a snapshot in the chat window)
Google acquired both Adscape and Gapminder
Adscape is an in-game advertising company based in San Francisco California that "offers dynamic delivery of advertising with plot and storyline integration". Gapminder is a non-profit organization from Sweeden aiming to "make the data more accessible and easier to use for instant visual analysis". They developed a tool called Trendalyzer "that turns boring ... statistics into attractive moving graphics".
St. Patrick's Day Doodle
According to Wikipedia St. Patrick's Day is “the Christian feast day which celebrates Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. … A major parade takes place in Dublin and in most other Irish towns and villages”.
Aggregated Source: Official Google Blog Googlified Google Operating System
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