The “one search box” option of yahoo was certainly a problem for the Chinese search engine. The Chinese feel that the option suits only the western users. The search engine was not able to work in harmony with the features of the web 2.0 era.

The Chinese also feel that the Chinese search engines should be exclusively tailor made for the natives. And that is why yahoo china has come up with an indigenous search engine which would cater the needs of Chinese people and would also work well with the web 2.0.

A simple home page was launched by yahoo china last year, but now after various featured augmentations the page is brimming with new contents. “Recommended music”, “recommended headlines”, “recommended pictures” are some of the latest additions.

Yahoo china is now a full fledged search engine with even more better features, planning to add more in the near future. The yahoo china introduces every feature keeping in mind the user’s demands.

Source: people’s daily online, china 5/4/2006

China has a majority of its population flocking to the search engines for its services. No wonder that search engines have topped the priority of preference for the internet users.

A recent study reported that baidu and google are the two most imperative search engine masters in china. But in the race between the two, it was baidu who topped the list despite the struggle made by google to control the Chinese search engine market.

iResearch, revealed the facts that baidu.com leads with 56.6 percent, where as google is trailing behind with 32.8 percent of shares. But then yahoo has also joined the race and is only 5 percentage less.

Google has missed the leading position owing to the mishaps of the censorship obligated by the google china after its alliance with the government of china.

Source: palyfuls.com 3/4/2006

This is of course a combination of triumph; the world’s greatest icons google and Nike have combined to produce a novel product, the joga.com. If you belong to the I-will-die-for-football-community, you can now shriek in joy as the website intends to open out a new vista to distribute the zeal of the game.

Play beautiful- this is what joga means in Spanish, and that is what the site premeditates to offer its members. This brainchild of Nike and google can make wonders, no wonder!

The geeky google and the sporty Nike have created this online football community to help the worldwide football fans drench in the fantasy about the game and its facts.

Google assures three different aspects- content, community and players.

In a nutshell, this website lets you maintain your own personalized pages (do anything you want in your page, but that anything should be related to sports of course), you can enlighten yourself about the Nike players and most importantly you are allowed to play here.

Step in the world of wonder, connect to people and explore the facts of the game exclusively in joga.com.

Source: Googleblog.blogspot.com

Google now offers animated ads in their adsense advertising program, As we all know google’s adsense is one of the most successful business model of internet both to publishers ( website owners ) as well as google.

Google introduced image ads a year back and now they introduced animated image ads., This is what google says about their Animated image ads in adsense.

What are animated image ads? –>
We’ve recently expanded the image ads we offer to include animated image ads. Animated image ads will fit the file size requirements of static image ads and will need to abide by an additional set of editorial policies. We anticipate that this new type of image ad will attract additional advertisers, leading to more image ad inventory and an increased variety of ads that can appear on your pages.

pages.google.com is new google’s page creator. Attractive web pages can be created without any programming or html knowledge.

See what google says about their page creator.

About Google Page Creator
Want to create an online photo tour of your vacation to Bali? An overview of the South American precipitation cycle for your science class? A shrine to your pet ferret?
Now’s your chance. We’re testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There’s no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.
At Google, we’ve found that listening to our users early helps us develop the best possible products. So we’re giving our users a chance to play with Google Page Creator even though it’s not yet fully baked, and we’re counting on you to send us your feedback and suggestions. If you’d like to stay up to date on all the latest Google Page Creator happenings, sign up for our updates mailing list

I tried creating couple of web pages it looks pretty easy to use. We are able to navigate all options without any problems.

Initially the servers are a bit slow. Can understand since this is a new product and that too from google we can expect huge traffic to this service.

Google rocks with all their new products, So what next a web browser or an OS?? Microsoft beware with google.

Petitiononline.com has an interesting post about people voting for google to stop using word verification in its various services.

It says

“To: Google Inc.
We, the undersigned, ask Google Inc. to “do no evil” and follow their mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” by promptly adding accessibility to their visual word verification scheme so that the blind and visually impaired are allowed to fully participate in all products and services offered by the company on terms of equality with our sighted peers.
Sincerely, ‘

MSN search recently announced free prizes for people using msn search

According MSN search blog

Earlier this week we launched MSN Search and Win. It’s a contest that will be running through April and you have the opportunity to win some pretty great prizes. I like it because it’s easy. As you search on our main site (or through the flash interface) you have the ability to win prizes. If you’re not interested in the prizes then you can ignore the ads.Why are we doing it? Well there certainly are a number of people who have pondered our motives, but when it comes down to it we have made a lot of improvements over the past year with our algo so people should notice a difference in relevance and a marketing campaign like MSN Search and Win is a good way to encourage people to try us again so they can see the improvements for themselves.

Since you’ve all been doing extra searches on our site due to the contest I am sure that you’ve seen the new UI on MSN Search that we rolled out yesterday afternoon. We’ve traded in the blue for a steely grey. Other changes include a longer search box and hit highlighting in the title. On the first, we’ve listened to your feedback and on the second, trust us, it makes your job as a searcher easier. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming. Personally, I like the change, but I’ll continue to search from live.com – I can’t do without my Seattle Traffic map.

To participate in search and win go here

http://www.msnsearchandwin.com

Yahoo has stepped forward and has planned to offer incentives for their email users who will use yahoo search has their primary search engines,

Incentives include:

“No Yahoo Mail ads.
• Unlimited Yahoo Mail storage, versus the one gigabyte now provided for free.
• Outlook Access to Yahoo Mail. Users could use Outlook or Outlook Express to manage their Yahoo Mail as well as download and read it while offline. This is not currently offered.
• Five free music downloads a month for playing on a PC or portable MP3 player.
• Discounted music subscriptions. Users would pay nothing for the first month of unlimited access to Yahoo Music Unlimited and $3.99 a month thereafter, rather than $6.99 a month for unlimited access.
• Donations to charity. Yahoo would give a percentage of revenues generated from user searches to nonprofit organizations of the users’ choice.
• PC-to-phone calling credit. Users could receive $5 in calling credit per month for PC-to-phone calls over Yahoo Messenger with Voice, which costs 15 cents a minute.
• Netflix discount. Users could receive one month free Netflix DVD rentals and pay $10.99 thereafter, rather than $17.99 a month.
• Discounted Yahoo Personals subscription. Users could receive the first month free for joining Yahoo Personals and pay $19.95 thereafter, compared to the current cost of $24.95 a month.
• Frequent flyer miles. Users could earn 250 frequent flyer miles each month that could be transferred to most major airline mileage programs. “

Eff says no to google desktop,

this is what they say on their site,

“San Francisco – Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password.
“Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google’s search logs, it’s shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “If you use the Search Across Computers feature and don’t configure Google Desktop very carefully—and most people won’t—Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn’t even be notified in time to challenge it. Other litigants—your spouse, your business partners or rivals, whoever—could also try to cut out the middleman (you) and subpoena Google for your files.”
The privacy problem arises because the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, or ECPA, gives only limited privacy protection to emails and other files that are stored with online service providers—much less privacy than the legal protections for the same information when it’s on your computer at home. And even that lower level of legal protection could disappear if Google uses your data for marketing purposes. Google says it is not yet scanning the files it copies from your hard drive in order to serve targeted advertising, but it hasn’t ruled out the possibility, and Google’s current privacy policy appears to allow it.
“This Google product highlights a key privacy problem in the digital age,” said Cindy Cohn, EFF’s Legal Director. “Many Internet innovations involve storing personal files on a service provider’s computer, but under outdated laws, consumers who want to use these new technologies have to surrender their privacy rights. If Google wants consumers to trust it to store copies of personal computer files, emails, search histories and chat logs, and still ‘not be evil,’ it should stand with EFF and demand that Congress update the privacy laws to better reflect life in the wired world.”

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004400

Google’s share took a nose dive after the delivered their revenue for third quarter current stats,

Last Trade: 382.47
Trade Time: 2:13PM ET
Change: 0.92 (0.24%)
Prev Close: 381.55
Open: 385.25
Bid: 382.17 x 800
Ask: 382.28 x 200
1y Target Est: 476.31

Day’s Range: 379.56 – 389.90
52wk Range: 172.57 – 475.11
Volume: 6,853,227
Avg Vol (3m): 11,742,200
Market Cap: 113.04B
P/E (ttm): 76.17
EPS (ttm): 5.02
Div & Yield: N/A (N/A)