Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Visits China's Top Search Engine

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By: Leslie Horn

• 12.20.2010
 
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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is vacationing in China, a country that has blocked his social-networking site for more than a year. Despite the ban, Zuckerberg has publicly expressed interest in China, and on Monday he met with the head of Baidu, the country's biggest search engine, the AFP has said.

"It makes sense – he is interested in the Chinese Internet, he's made that very plain," Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told the AFP. "Obviously this is one of the big dark spots for Facebook because it is blocked here in China. He has had a long-standing interest in China. I'm sure he wants to get the advice of someone who knows the Internet landscape well here."

Zuckerberg, who was recently named Time's person of the year, toured Baidu's Beijing office and dined with chief executive Robin Li in the company's "private dining halls," the AFP report said.

With 420 million Internet users, China is a market that the 26-year-old Facebook CEO would like to tap into. He recently told an audience at Stanford University that he is learning Chinese.

"It's kind of a personal challenge this year, I'm taking about an hour a day and I'm learning Chinese," Zuckerberg said. "I'm trying to understand the language, the culture, the mind set – it's just such an important part of the world. How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion-six people?"

Twitter is also blocked in China, and Google Google pulled out of the country, refusing to censor search results at the urging of the Chinese government. When conducting a search, Google Users in China are redirected to the Hong Kong domain, Google.com/hk.

Bloomberg said that Baidu has almost three times the Internet searches that Google does in China. In the third quarter, Baidu accounted for 73 percent while Google comprised 24.6 percent.

The Chinese government has a history of blocking the sites that it deems inappropriate or subversive. Most recently, that has included WikiLeaks and many sites that reported the leak of more than 250,000 classified U.S. embassy cables.

Zuckerberg is vacationing in China with girlfriend Priscilla Chan. Details about their itinerary haven't been disclosed, besides Kuo remarking that the two visited the Tibetan Lama Temple in the country's capital.

Microsoft Bing gains on Google

Monday, 20 December 2010 07:08
Patrick Stafford

More on Internet

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Read more on:

• Bing
• ComScore
• Google
• Internet
• SEO

Microsoft Bing has gained some ground in the search engine war, according to the latest statistics from ComScore.

The figures show that Microsoft gained 0.3%, while Google and Yahoo each dropped 0.1%. AOL moved to the bottom of the most popular five engines, losing 0.1% to take 2% of the market.

"More than 16 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November," ComScore said in a statement. "Google sites ranked first with 10.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo sites in second with 2.6 billion, and Microsoft sites in third with 1.9 billion."

But despite Bing's recent successes, it has a long way to go before it can challenge Google, which was introduced a variety of features including Google Instant to help increase traffic.

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Companies : Google, Microsoft

AltaVista likely to end after 15 years

AltaVista, one of the web's best and most popular search engines in its formative years, is likely to be shut down.

Currently owned by Yahoo, it is one of eight services scheduled for 'sunsetting', alongside Deliciousm Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and others.

Launching in 1995, AltaVista had a minimalist interface unlike other search sites (which would later be adopted by Google), and covered more pages than were previously believed to even exist. Within a couple of years of launching it was getting over 80 million hits a day.

However after rebranding itself as a portal in the late 1990s and branching out into other areas like email and shopping, it lost market share to the up-and-coming Google search engine.

In February 2003 it was sold to Overture for only US$140 million, despite being valued at $2.3 billion in 1999.

Overture was later acquired by Yahoo.

China launches Google rival

PTI, Dec 21, 2010, 03.31pm IST

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Tags:Search Engine|People's Daily|Goso.Cn|Google

China's search engine has been launched by the country's largest newspaper the 'People's Daily'

BEIJING: After taming Google into submission, China has launched a new search engine of its own to make foray into its 420 million strong net users' market, a move believed to be aimed at taking firm control of the web media. 

Known as 'Goso.cn', China's very own search engine has been launched by the country's largest newspaper the 'People's Daily', which is the official daily of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). 

The state-run media already holds sway over the country where the flow of information is tightly controlled, and the move to introduce its own search engine signifies its aim to take control of the web media as well. 

The move came as blog news is catching up fast posing a direct challenge to the hold of official media in the country. 

Google was involved in a face-off with the Chinese government in March this year after it shut down its Chinese search engine and re-routed mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong, protesting cyber attacks. 

Google, which resisted attempts of censorship for many months later gave in and got its license to operate in China renewed only after it agreed to abide by all restrictions. 

Months later, the country's largest newspaper has launched a news search engine which came after six months of trial operations, state-run English dailies the China Daily and Global Times reported. 

The launch of the "People Search Engine" is part of authorities' efforts to enhance the CPC international communication capacity, Zhang Yannong, president of People's Daily, said. 

Given the fact that most of the rules and regulations of the information industry were set by foreign companies, and that several countries view development of the Internet as part of their national strategies, China must develop a search engine with independent technology, thus creating a good Internet environment for 420 million, China Daily quoted a "netizen" Zhang as saying. 

"The search engine is an Internet tool that obviously has ideological characteristics," he said. Deng Yaping, general manager of Goso Network Limited, said Goso.cn is a vertical search engine product that integrates news, news forums, pictures, blogs, videos and micro blogs. 

Since its renewal, Google operated on a low profile in China and Google Earth Maps did not even take part in the bidding, leaving the floor open to mostly local competitors. 

China has already launched its own version of earth maps which showed Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet. 

Goso.cn is expected to go after local search engine Baidu.com, which expanded it operations taking full advantage of Google's problems.

Read more: China launches Google rival - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/China-launches-Google-rival/articleshow/7138974.cms#ixzz18p0KjzrQ

Make Your Web Pages Faster For Your Users and Search Engines

In the world of the modern web it is vital that you keep your web pages fast for your users to see and use, this is also true for search engines as Google is now going to take into consideration load times when indexing websites.

It can be very difficult to make these web pages smaller and faster with clients requiring high quality images/ graphics and dynamic effects such as videos and slideshows. There are however a number of things a web designer can do to make sure that the website is at top speed.

Image compression

It is important to make sure that any images used within the website are at their smallest file size without losing quality. There are many graphics programs out there that can help you to re-size your images so that they are smaller. It is also important to use the correct formats such as GIF and PNG.

The GIF format (Graphics Interchange Format) has been very popular on the web for a number of years due to its ability to create very small file sizes.

You do not really want to be creating large images through this format as you will see a loss in quality but for buttons, small images and backgrounds it is ideal.

The PNG format (Portable Network Graphics) has taken over the GIF in recent years due to its great compressed quality and low file size. PNG is great for logos and other large sized graphics.





       


    
External CSS Files

CSS is a very powerful web tool and when used well it makes websites look amazing. It can however slow down the performance of a website if it is used internally (inline) because it gives the browser too much code to read through at once. The best way to use CSS is externally, linking it in to your HTML.

Every great website needs a good style sheet or two but there are many websites relying on 4 or 5 style sheets which slows down performance and the way a search engine crawls the site. Try and keep CSS files down to a minimum and make sure they are external.

External JavaScript

JavaScript works wonders on a website helping it to look and feel more dynamic but just like CSS, if it is used too much internally it can slow down your webpage and give search engines too much code to look through when crawling your site.

Use JavaScript files externally and link them into your HTML for optimum performance.

Unnecessary code

When looking through the code of a website there is very often areas of code that really do not need to be there. This could be due to various developers and designers working on the same project or a website that has had changes over the years.

Unnecessary code like this makes the browser read things that are unimportant or non existent, which will slow the load time of the site. Just take the time to read through the code and strip out any areas that aren't needed.





       


    
Server

Good hosting is key to the speed of any website. Make sure that your server is up to date with the latest processors and can handle the traffic your website is getting. If you have a website that attracts thousands of hits then shared hosting will just slow down the website and make it unavailable to others, this is where a dedicated server is needed.

Keeping a check on your hosting can really speed up your website and keep users happy.

Script compression programs

It is a good idea sometimes when running various scripts and style sheets to run them through compression software which will compress JavaScript, CSS and HTML files to ensure that they are as small as possible. This will help to make the webpage fast.

There is one problem when doing this however, if you use a program like Mozilla Firefox's Firebug to inspect your code, it can be hard to find the exact area you need. This is because it tends to bunch things like CSS together as so it can be hard to spot the areas you wan tot change.

About the Author: Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales. He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business. http://clearwebservices.com/ - For More Information, please call 01594 835 857 or email info@clearwebservices.com.

Why My site get a severe penalty?

I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.platnumsneaker.com
Description (including timeline of any changes made): Hello, My site is about 5 years old domain, it's live in top rank 5 for 3 years, from 2 month ago, it drop to page 7 after I redesign site. Then I tried to post article to article directory etc for link building, and tried to write unique product descrpiton and post unique and fresh article on my site blog, but site rank still is no change on google.com. I tried to find out what's wrong with my site, and i found a tool http://tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker/ When I tried it, it's saying This domain has a severe penalty. Please help and give advice how to fix this problem, thanks in advance.

SEO Trends - What 2011 Holds for Us?

In the world of web technology, we have not witnessed any major upheaval this year. Being an ardent web surfer and a webmaster it's all but natural for me to become curious about what holds for us in 2011.

The most interesting area to look forward to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), without which no website under the sun passes the fitness test. The SEO domain has got a tremendous boost owing to the growing popularity of social networking sites and various improvements in search technology. In this article and the following one, I will share with you some of the SEO trends that you can look forward to next year.

Social Media Optimization

Close on the heels of Search Engine Optimization, comes Social Media Optimization, the newest incarnation of SEO. I know that you are not getting surprised any longer by this new term, thanks to the tremendous popularity of social networking sites worldwide. Webmasters should not consider Social Media Optimization as a distraction from their normal SEO efforts; but this new activity should be deployed to boost a site's SEO prospects.

Social Media Optimization activities may include back links from individual social media sites, development of a credible profile on these sites, and targeting towards real time searching. The greater impact you can cast on the social networking sites, the greater your SEO prospects will improve in the coming year.

                               

               

Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities

There are some webmasters who rely on off-page optimization rather than on-page optimization. But in 2011, you should give equal, if not more importance to on-page optimization. Most importantly, the site load time is going to be the litmus test.

Google, in its effort to improve websites' performance has decided to penalize those sites that take a longer load time. Simultaneously, improper use of Meta tags in website coding will have a negative effect on major search engines in the coming year.

The Web Is Going Mobile

Smartphones are getting more and more ubiquitous and people have started surfing websites on their mobiles more than ever. This trend is going to increase in 2011. The number of mobile Internet users has touched 90 million already. The need for optimizing your site for mobile users will naturally be more pressing. Your site needs to be optimized for relevant mobile applications, such as Google's Mobile Search Services and mobile keyword tool in AdWords.

Google itself has stated that mobile search results takes precedence over desktop search results when it comes to mobile searching. This underscores the need to invest your time and money towards mobile SEO in the coming year.

Online Videos

Video is the buzzword today. Your site needs to be powered with YouTube video clippings, one of the most popular media on the web today. If you upload a video on YouTube against a particular keyword, your site gets a better chance to be "visible" by leading search engines like Google against that keyword.

One cannot ignore the growing popularity of YouTube. It has outdone Yahoo! To become the second largest search engine in U.S. Therefore, putting up a relevant video on YouTube not only enhances your site's SEO prospects in Google, but boosts up the SEO prospects in YouTube itself.

Personalized Search One of the important trends in online search features is personalized searching. This trend will get further intensified in 2011. Google, the global leader, has in fact made personalized search the default option. Unless users opt out of this default option, they are likely to experience only personalized search features from Google. Personalized search results are based on the user's web surfing habits. The probability of your website showing up on the search results is going to be lesser, unless your site is one of the frequently accessed sites by the user. If your site is widely popular and users access it frequently, you are likely to enjoy better search positioning on the days ahead. Else, you need to build up your site's branding (by other means) and entice users to access the site from time to time.  Local Search Experiments with local search were seen in 2010 and the trend is likely to continue well into the next year. Leading search engines like Google has started depending on local search listings. As a webmaster, you should emphasize more on improving your site's SEO abilities in local search engines. Dominating the local listings is pretty easier as there is lesser number of players. Big search engines will then filter the top results into their search lists and you will get an automatic entry. The outcome is debatable if you have hosted your site in a different country to grab the advantage of global search. Generically, it is advisable to host your site in the same country where your business operates in order to take the most advantage of local search listings. So folks, these were some of the SEO trends for the upcoming year. Pay attention to these if you want to retain or improve your site's search-friendliness.