Europe and the U.S. continue to drift further apart on Google. Even as European parliamentarians and regulators seek ways to restrain Google’s discretion over search results, U.S. courts continue to affirm Google’s right to do whatever it wants with search results — paid and organic. A California state court in San Francisco recently granted Google’s […]
Google is facing daily fines of €1,000 in France, under a punitive ruling tied to the Right-to-Be-Forgotten (RTBF), unless it removes links to an article from its index globally, according to The Guardian. Several politicians in Europe have recently suggested that the RTBF should extend to all Google results worldwide, not just country level indexes. […]
China’s leading search engine Baidu posted its 3Q 2014 earnings yesterday, reporting $2.2 billion (RMB13.520 billion) in total revenue, a 52 percent year over year increase. According to Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li, the site’s mobile traffic surpassed PC traffic last quarter, with mobile revenue representing 36 percent of total revenue. “In the third […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Agencies Take Note: Google Third-Party Policy Changes Coming Nov. 2014 Last month, Google rolled out an updated policy center for all advertisers. Starting in November, agencies and other third-party firms and […]
App search engine Quixey has announced a relationship with Alibaba in China that will bring its search capabilities to the latter’s mobile operating system YunOS. Quixey enables users to search for content within apps — essentially what Google does for PC search Quixey is doing for apps. Quixey calls this “functional search.” It depends on […]
Nokia’s Here Maps, which power maps on Windows Phones, has released a beta version for Samsung Galaxy Android phones. It’s not available through Google Play, though presumably it will be in time. Nokia’s hardware/handset division was sold to Microsoft but Nokia retained the Here mapping service. Now Microsoft is going to phase out the Nokia brand […]
From an American legal perspective, the recently established European Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) is a disaster. It’s a confusing, vague, impractical and possibly even dangerous decision. But from a European historical perspective, it makes considerable sense. The different histories of the U.S. and Europe in the 20th Century have shaped different attitudes and rules […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Will Ask.com Google Arbitrage Ever Stop? Google has been steadily cracking down on sites with poor quality content, both on the organic and the paid side. So why does Ask.com continue […]
China has blocked DuckDuckGo, the privacy search engine, that recently made big news when Apple added them as a default search option to iOS and their upcoming desktop operating system. The Founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, confirmed that his search engine was blocked by Chinese regulators. He confirmed this yesterday on Twitter and […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Launches Xiaolce Chinese Chatbot With Cortana Smarts For Windows Phone After taking its Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China last month, Bing announced today the launch of XiaoIce (“little […]
After taking its Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China last month, Bing announced today the launch of XiaoIce (“little ice”), a Chinese-speaking social assistant chatbot for Windows Phone users. According to the announcement on Bing’s search blog, XiaoIce’s technology is far beyond a normal chatbot. [blockquote cite=”Bing Search Blog”]XiaoIce is a sophisticated conversationalist with […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Getty Images Sues Microsoft For “Massive Infringement” Of Copyright By Bing Image Widget It didn’t take long for Bing’s new Image Widget to come under fire for alleged copyright infringement. The […]
Bloomberg reports on an interview with Andrew Ng, the chief scientist of Baidu, China’s largest search engine. Andrew Ng, who founded the Google Brain project at Google in 2011 and now is at Baidu, said that Baidu is working on building out a computing cluster that will be 100 times more powerful than what they […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Ads Introduces Bulk Editing In Web UI, Now Review Up To 1 Million Keywords Bing Ads has been building out its capabilities in the Web UI this year so that […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Indian Govt. Rages At Google Maps Outing Of Secret Bases In 2013, Google imitated a “mapathon” project in India, offering prizes to encourage people to help fill in gaps and improve […]
A gay Chinese man sued search engine Baidu in Bejing for allowing an undisclosed ad for an allegedly unlicensed psychological counseling center to appear at the top of search results. He underwent “gay conversion” therapy and was traumatized by the experience. Without the benefit of knowing Chinese law, the case appears to raise two issues: […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Experts Weigh In On Google’s “Pigeon” Update Aimed At Improving Local Search Results Last week, Google made new search waves when it rolled out updates to its local search algorithm. The […]
There’s increasing evidence that Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana is being positioned as a key differentiator vs. Android and iPhones. A new TV commercial (below) purports to compare Cortana to Siri, with a mock Siri voice saying “I can’t do that” a number of times. This morning Microsoft announced new geographies and new features for Cortana […]
According to a story appearing in The Verge yesterday, Microsoft is not allowing users to set Google as the default search engine for mobile web browsing on new Lumia 8.1 devices (630 and 930). As the article points out, the search button on the handset uses Bing and cannot be switched. I reached out to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Not Getting Screwed By Google Yelp may once again feel Google is robbing it of its fair share of search traffic, with a study […]
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” the saying goes. There are plenty of good intentions with the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate, as well as Google’s attempt to meet new obligations under it. Things are still going to hell regardless. Thanks to the new right, the EU has helped enable convicted […]
It’s far too early to consider monetizing Cortana, Microsoft’s new virtual personal assistant, but the company is already thinking about how to scale her across different devices, platforms and around the world. Those were two of the key points from Microsoft’s keynote conversation Thursday morning at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Marcus Ash, a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Takes Down Japan’s Honinbo Shusaku Doodle On Google UK On D-Day, Offers Apology The Telegraph reports Google has taken down a Google Doodle, aka Google Logo, from Google UK and […]
The Telegraph reports Google has taken down a Google Doodle, aka Google Logo, from Google UK and some other countries, out of respect for D-Day. The Doodle featured Japan’s Honinbo Shusaku, a top professional Go player. Go is a board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. The Doodle […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New: Connect Your Google+ Business Page To Your Google Maps Listing Google has now enabled those with Google+ business pages to connect their page to their local business listing on Google […]
The cat and mouse game between China, Google and the internet continues. Today and tomorrow are the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Fearing another anti-government uprising, every year at this time China cracks down on its citizens’ ability to access information about the event online. However this year, China is going to greater […]
Maria Belen Rodriguez is an Argentina-born model, actress and TV personality who now lives and works in Italy. She successfully sued Google and Yahoo in 2006 in her native country, alleging that her likeness was wrongfully appropriated by porn sites and then indexed/republished or disseminated by search engines. There was an alleged sex tape involving Belen Rodriguez (in […]
The Internet Archive announced that the Wayback Machine, a huge internet archive of web pages dating back to 1996, has surpassed 400 billion pages indexed. In January 2013, a little over a year ago, the Wayback Machine said they had 240 billion URLs indexed and since then, they have added another 160 billion URLs! That […]
Chinese search engine leader and advertising provider, Baidu, released financials for the first quarter of the year reporting total revenues of $1.53 billion USD at $1.24 earnings per share. That’s a 59.1 percent increase in revenue from the previous year and beats street expectations on both fronts. Analysts had expected the company to report $1.5 […]
Covario released its Global Paid Search Spend Analysis for the first quarter of 2014 today. Its client set — made up of enterprise technology, consumer electronics, and retail advertisers –increased paid search spend on mobile devices by 135 percent year-over-year and 35 percent over the previous quarter. Mobile now accounts for 25 percent of paid […]
Late last week, Chinese search engine Baidu succeeded in gaining dismissal of a lawsuit by pro-democracy activists based in New York (Zhang et al. v. Baidu.com, Inc). Plaintiffs had sued in the US and argued that Baidu improperly blocked them from seeing content on the search engine. Specifically, according to Reuters, the plaintiffs said that people in the US couldn’t […]
Chinese search engine and advertising provider Baidu announced quarterly earnings today. The company fell just shy of financial analysts’ estimates, which were $1.54 billion (51 percent growth). Instead, the company announced $1.573 billion in revenue, which was a 50.3 percent increase from a year ago. For fiscal 2013, Baidu reported total revenues of $5.277 billion, a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Matt Cutts On Being A Spam Fighter: Looking For Patterns & Always New Spam Efforts Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts posted a longer video today answering what it […]
Bing censors search results in China in accordance with Chinese law. But does it do so in the US and elsewhere around the world for Chinese users? That disturbing proposition was raised yesterday in an article appearing in The Guardian. The article asserted that Bing search results for Chinese language speakers in the US were […]
Though the numbers vary, the Q4 reports we’ve covered all point to solid year-over-year increases in paid search spending. Covario’s Q4 analysis of the global paid search advertising landscape is no different. Based on results from their high tech, consumer electronics and retail clients, PPC spending increased 17 percent year-over-year and 13 percent over Q3 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google Webmaster Tools Adds “Security Issues” Section Google has announced the addition of a new section within Webmaster Tools named “Security Issues.” This new section is aimed at better communicating to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live The fifth confirmed release of Google’s “Penguin” spam fighting algorithm is live. That makes it Penguin 5 by our count. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google Patent Search Expands To China, Germany, Canada & WIPO Google announced they have expanded their database of patent documents within Google Patent Search to include patent documents from an additional […]
Google announced they have expanded their database of patent documents within Google Patent Search to include patent documents from an additional set of agencies. The new patent agencies included in Google Patent search include China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Since the database now includes patent documents from around the world, […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Ads Releases New API, Version 9 Microsoft rolled out version 9 of the Bing Ads API for developers to start using immediately. The API will include the following additions to […]