ISM Signpost #4
SIGNPOST is the monthly executive summary of the
internet search marketing industry.
12.06 ISSUE 3
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** The great firewall of China
** A game of tag
** Picture this
** Google’s shopping spree
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+++ The great firewall of China +++
Google compromises its corporate mission
The thorny issues facing Western internet companies as they expand into China was reverberated when Google agreed to censor search results in its new Chinese service. Google.cn will be forced to comply with legislation by removing any links deemed offensive by the Chinese government. After a year of internal debate, Google grudgingly joins Yahoo! and Microsoft in helping the communist government block politically-sensitive content such as references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Dalai Lama or the Taiwanese government. China’s limits on free speech jars with Google’s corporate philosophy of ‘don’t be evil’ and its mission to make all information readily available via the web. However, Google has said that it’s better to make some information accessible, rather than none at all. The search engine will alert its Chinese users if material is censored, with a small notice at the bottom of the results page. That is, if the government allow it to.
Although the search engine will initially host the service from the US, the government will allow Google to use servers located in China. For this reason, Google has said it won’t host its popular Gmail or blogger services on Chinese servers, to ensure they can’t be seized by the government. China is the world’s most restricted internet environment, with around 30,000 online police monitoring blogs, chatrooms and news portals.
Local servers should speed up Google’s service and add appeal to China’s 110 million web users, an attractive audience for search engines. Although Google voiced its reluctance to swallow ethics and spur growth in China, there was a strong economic motivation. The Guardian estimated that the mushrooming Chinese search market was worth £84 million in 2004 and noted that Chinese web users are increasing at a rate of 20 million a year.
In a striking juxtaposition to its co-operation in China, Google has refused to hand over user data to the US Government. Citing the privacy of its users, Google has said it will not co-operate the Justice department in an investigation into child pornography.
Yahoo!, MSN and AOL have all agreed to cooperate, insisting they would not hand over data that identified individual users. Meanwhile, the justice department has asked for a court subpoena to force Google to comply, insisting that it’s interested in general search patterns rather than personal details.
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+++ A game of tag +++
Yahoo! has decided tagging refines search
A common complaint among search engine users is their inefficient, clumsy science. Frequently, surfers are forced to sift through scores of different results pages before they discover what they were looking for.
Yahoo! has placed a bet that a new method called tagging will drive the inefficiencies and clutter out of searching. Its £16.8 million acquisition, in December 2005, of De.lic.ious, a popular tagging site, which will join Yahoo!’s own tagging site My Web 2.0, suggests that tagging is moving into the mainstream.
Tagging enables users to only search sites that other people have already deemed useful. Although initially tagging sites were used by individuals who wanted to retrieve their favourite web pages, they’re frequently becoming destinations that users visit first when they want to search for something. That means they’re beginning to compete directly with the search giants.
Other tagging start ups include Shadows.com, which allows individuals to save favourite web sites under keywords that others can also search and attracts more than 275,000 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore Networks. Similarly, PreFound.com, allows users to upload pages they want to save into their own profiles or share them with the public.
There are some downsides to tagging sites. First, that their quality is dependent on the quality and quantity of their users; and second that users have to use the same tags for a search to capture all the relevant pages. For example, a search under the tag “eating out” could miss out on pertinent information tagged under “restaurants.” However, only 17% of Internet users say they always find what they are looking for when they use a search engine, according to a 2005 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
It seems likely that tagging is here to stay. Anything that can help internet users refine their navigation of the information minefield online has to be valuable. Similarly, tagging is tapping into the two key, growing trends of human recommendation and social networking.
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+++ Picture this +++
Ask Jeeves launches an image search service
Ask Jeeves has relaunched a service which searches for pictures on the web, called Ask Jeeves Pictures. It taps into the growing popularity of image search among internet users, and joins the ranks of Google Images, MSN Images and Yahoo! Images.
A Keynote survey has said that 63% of Yahoo! users and 56% of Google users take advantage of their image search function from time to time, while Ask Jeeves has said that one sixth of all its searches are for images. Although Ask Jeeves has had an outsourced image search service since 2003, the new version has been developed internally and also examines the colour and brightness of images. Image search has traditionally been more complicated than word search, because search engines are unable to precisely look and examine images, and must instead rely on other clues such as filenames and context.
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+++ Google’s shopping spree +++
An update on Google’s latest acquisitions
Google has a lust for shopping. And with about £3.3 billion cash on its books, the search engine isn’t holding back. It is rapidly expanding into new areas of business and new geographies, which betray its ambitions to expand beyond its core internet-search business.
In mid-January, Google plunged into the world of traditional media when it announced a deal to acquire a radio-advertising group called dMarc for £680m. The agreement follows Google’s dabbling in press advertising last year, when it bought space in technology magazines to resell to its online advertising clients. (See Signpost, issue one) Google plans to integrate the business with AdWords, which places relevant advertising on its search results pages as well as partner sites. Google said dMarc provides an additional promotional platform for AdWords advertisers.
Before Christmas, Google splurged £560 million to take a 5% stake in AOL (as predicted in Signpost, issue two) from Time Warner. The deal valued AOL’s 26 million worldwide users at £437 each. A hefty valuation, but nothing compared to the £2,800 that Time Warner placed on each of AOL’s 20 million users in January 2000.
Both Google and Microsoft were keen to pounce on AOL and the battle was intense. But the deal was essential to Google’s survival because it provides the search engine technology underlying AOL, and is its biggest single source of revenue.
The blogosphere has been grumbling about the acquisition because it doesn’t understand why Google would get involved with something as old-fashioned as an ISP. But the answer is quite simple. It was a defensive acquisition to prevent Microsoft from taking the spoils.
SIGNPOST is published monthly by Internet Search
Management Ltd. The opinions expressed are those of
the Editor and not necessarily those of Internet
Search Management Ltd.
All material Copyright 2005 Internet
Search Management Ltd. All rights reserved.
ENDS
