Google

Google’s logged 87.8 billion searches in December 2009, or 66.8 percent of the more than 131 billion searches conducted worldwide. Google hopes to grow its search and ad dominance by focusing on a convergence of mobile search, advertising and applications, including location-based technologies with a heavy dose of social networking. Smartphones as Google’s Nexus One, paired with mobile search, applications and advertising seem like a fine way for Google to extend its search dominance from the desktop to the PC. Google will pit its mobile technologies those of Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple in 2010.

Google’s strategy to “double down” on its core search business helped the company clean up as the top search property with 87.8 billion searches in December 2009, or 66.8 percent of the more than 131 billion searches conducted worldwide.

That’s good for a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year, according to figures released Jan. 22 by researcher comScore. These world-leading totals helped Google rake in a fourth-quarter 2009 profit of $1.97 billion and sales of $4.95 billion.

Google hopes to improve on these numbers through focusing on a convergence of mobile search, advertising and applications, including location-based technologies with a heavy dose of social networking.

Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google, attributed Google’s successful Q4 to the company’s doubling down on its efforts in search, AdWords search advertising and display advertising.

“Search did particularly well in 2009 and I think that may be the best example of what we feel we can do when we double down and focus,” Rosenberg said on the company’s Q4 earnings call Jan. 21. He cited Google’s 550 search quality enhancements; a bigger and faster index; universal search expansion; and Google’s new music search service.

However, Google’s crowning search achievement arrived Dec. 7 in the form of real-time. Google indexes tweets from Twitter and public status updates from Facebook, as well as info from MySpace, news publications and blogs only seconds after the content is published online.

Rosenberg noted that two minutes after a force 4.1 earthquake struck California two weeks ago, Google’s real-time search algorithms surfaced local Twitter tweets and news reports. The idea is that retrieving this type of content will keep users coming to Google.

It’s difficult to gauge the financial impact of these real-time results, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on the call real-time search was “very successful.”

Source: eWeek

This week Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) revealed Bing.com to the world as its new search engine, or as MS likes to call it, a decision engine. It is a new way to search the web and can provide some interesting results. MS wasted no time in setting the engine up to work with mobile devices.

You can access the site by typing m.bing.com into your phone’s browser or by visiting the Bing mobile page and entering your phone’s number there. The site will send a text to your phone with a link you can click on.

Once you are on the site, you can tell it your location and then save it. It has the ability to remember three locations for you, home, work and a third you can label yourself. These locations are important for search results. If you search for “coffee house” it will first try to find coffee shops around you. It will then offer up links to define what a coffee house is, just as a traditional search might. It will also give you other local results like movie times at nearby theaters or weather forecasts.

Bing for Mobile also does mapping. Once you have your location set on the home page, just tap on “Directions” and then tell it where you want to go. It will bring up a map with driving directions. If you have a Windows Mobile device you could always download the interactive map application, but not everyone has Windows Mobile and even if you do, if you use maps sparingly, a web page once in a while is easier than installing an application and setting it up. Once you have the directions, you can switch it to walking directions or driving directions that avoids traffic if traffic status is supported in your area.

If you go into Bing’s preferences from the home page, you can set it to filter your results to block out explicit results or not, and tell it whether or not to let you through to the actual web site when you click on it or let Bing reformat the page so it works better on your phone. I tried this on a few sites and it works reasonably well. Once you are on a Bing formatted page, you can quickly switch to the full site without modifying your preferences via a link at the bottom of the page. There is also a handy frame navigator that will show you a zoomed out look at the whole page and then allow you to zoom in on the frame you are interested in. This makes it easy to read a blog or news article without all of the advertisments, history and navigation tools that tend to make sites look horrible, difficult to navigate and slow to load and render on a phone.

I’ve played with Bing on my desktop and it has an interesting way to return information. It hasn’t replaced Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for me, but unlike Live Search before it, it has earned its place as one of my browser’s search providers. With all of the extra features that Bing for Mobile offers in one place, it may become the default search engine on my phone.

You can read about these and other Bing for Mobile features here or get a full overview of the decision engine itself to see how it differs from other search engines.

Source: InformationWeek

In its first detailed look at web market share for cellphones, a research firm has found that Apple’s iPhone represents a staggering 66.61 percent of mobile traffic while its competitors have only just gained a foothold.

Net Applications’ February results show the iPhone operating system having managed over nine times the usage of its next smartphone competitor, Windows Mobile, which had just 6.91 percent of the traffic measured across tens of thousands of sites.

Other smartphone platforms haven’t fared any better, according to the metrics. Google’s Android and Symbian were both locked in a tie for 6.15 percent. Research in Motion’s email-centric BlackBerry OS was used less often at just 2.24 percent and was even outmatched by PalmOS devices, which represented 2.37 percent of cellular web use last month.

Why the particularly wide gap exists between Apple and its rivals hasn’t been explained. However, the data backs up AdMob findings which showed the iPhone getting half of all US smartphone traffic and a third of smartphone use worldwide during the month before. The use has previously been credited to a spike in Apple device ownership after the holidays as well as to the relative strength of the Safari web browser.

Even with such a discrepancy, Net Applications noted that the achievements of Android and BlackBerry OS are significant; Android wasn’t even available before October and so gained in four months the web share that took Symbian years to achieve.

The news may have to placate Apple fans given a fairly stale month in desktop-class operating systems. Windows has reclaimed a small portion of its steadily declining share and climbed a fifth of a point to 88.42 percent, while Mac OS X share has backed down from its all-time high in January to 9.61 percent.

And compared to all operating systems, the iPhone still has the same 0.48 percent of the web — making its usage still very small in comparison to that of the larger computing world.

Source: AppleInsider

Ever wonder where your friends or your spouse or your child is? That’s the question Google hopes to answer for you with a new service launching Wednesday called Google Latitude.

Using a combination of Global Positioning System, WiFi, and cell tower location data, the service, an extension of Google Maps, Latitude can determine where you are in the world via your mobile device depending on which of those technologies the device can use. It will work on most color Blackberries, most Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, most Symbian S60 devices, and phones powered by Google’s Android mobile software, such as the T-Mobile G1. No iPhone or iPod Touch yet, but Google says that’s coming very soon.

The service wasn’t yet functional when I was briefed by Google, so I can’t yet vouch for it, but here’s how it works: You download a new version of Google Maps onto your mobile device, then invite friends via an email to join. Once they accept, and if they have a Google account with a profile picture, you’ll see that on a map. Then you can send them an email or text message or call them, and of course get directions to their location. You can also view locations of your friends from your desktop through iGoogle, the company’s personalized home page.

The service sounds a little like Dodgeball, the location service that Google bought a few years ago, only to announce recently that it will shut it down. But Latitude was developed by the Google Maps team with different technology, and it’s an extension of Maps rather than an entirely separate service. It also goes further than My Location, a Maps feature introduced in late 2007, which let you see your own location on a map. But Latitude also follows similar services such as Loopt.

In some ways, it might seem like yet another way for 20somethings with a lot of time on their hands to party spontaneously with their friends. But in three months of testing inside Google and with “trusted testers” outside the company (including the Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret), broader use cases emerged. If you’re home and wondering when to start making dinner, you can tell when your spouse left work to time it right, even if he or she doesn’t remember to check in. Parents of adult children can feel more connected to their offspring knowing where they’re traveling.

Of course, the obvious question is: Isn’t this just a fine stalker tool? Not surprisingly, Google thought about this a lot, and offers a wide variety of ways to make sure you can’t be tracked if you don’t want to (and a readymade quote from Cindy Southworth, firector of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, saying she worked with Google on the privacy aspects). The service is opt-in, and you can control precisely who among your friends and relatives can see your location. You can hide your location from everyone or particular people, opt to share only the city you’re in generally, or just turn the service off.

I can imagine this kind of information would help Google advertisers target local pitches to you eventually, but Google says it has no specific plans for this yet.

Source: Business Week

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Internet media firm Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday that its mobile search service will be offered by six more telecom companies in Asia.
 
It now has 60 such partnerships worldwide, including with Mahanagar Telephon Nigam (MTNL) in India, Hong CSL Limited, Smart Communications and Digital Mobile Phlis (Sun Cellular) in the Philippines and Vibo Telecom in Taiwan. “We are now able to reach 600 million subscribers,” David Ko, Asia managing director and vice president of Yahoo’s mobile division, told reporters at a media briefing.

“This creates the scale to make mobile advertising attractive.”

He said the mobile advertising market is expected to rise to $16.2 billion in 2011 up from $1.5 billion in 2006 and that Yahoo “would obviously love to take a large chunk of that pie.”

Yahoo!