After Google decided to close down google.cn, China’s top Internet search firm Baidu Inc seems to be the first winner. Gradually Google’s Chinese traffic splits between Baidu and google.com.hk. It’s still a miracle how a huge company such as Google, prefers to lose money in order to avoid the self-censorship demanded by China. What could have changed their mind, considering that first they agreed and cooperated with Beijing?
Google has been working on some new technology that improves indexing infrastructure. They named it Caffeine. The aim is to make Google faster, more accurate and to give the ability to index more pages.
Currently the update is live only in one datacenter and in January 2010 it should go live on all of them.
Speed is now important.
A new factor in ranking will be the time it takes for a site to load, this means both hosting and site optimization will count.
This is a little strange, because Googlebot crawls from US, so websites that are hosted in Europe or Asia will generally take more time to respond than those nearby in US. The closer you will be to Google, the better ranking? Does this means Google wants to enter the Hosting Business? It could be a good plan, their customers will have faster sites, so they will be better ranked so competition will have to do the same.
Anyway, we’ll find out soon…
After a face to face meeting, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer are finally discussing about advertising and also search partnerships, the companies may possibly strike, said several sources with knowledge of the situation. According to other sources, the talks between the Yahoo and Microsoft representatives are preliminary and wide ranging, focused just on what kind of commercial relationship Yahoo and Microsoft could have in the near future. But, informed sources close to Yahoo, said that the discussions are not about a renewed acquisition attempt by Microsoft and also might not result in any kind of deal. Yahoo and Microsoft representatives refused to comment about the meeting and of any agreement that they could make in the near future.
Such a partnership, which plays to each company’s strengths, would bring the two closely together, even though they still compete on many other fronts on the internet.
