SEO Blog

A couple of weeks back I blogged about search engine loyalty trends according to a study by Forrester Research. The gist of it was that competition between the search engines is high, and only 40 percent of users claimed loyalty to one engine.

Another recent survey, this time conducted by Compete in December 2005, breaks down the loyalty percentage of each search engine as follows:

• Google — 71.0%
• Yahoo — 48.1%
• MSN — 27.8%
• Excite — 23.4%
• AOL — 23.2%
• Ask — 21.6%
• AltaVista — 16.6%
• Clusty — 10.3%
• A9 — 6.4%
• Lycos — 5.8%

Thanks to Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch for the information.

It seems as though Google’s move into China has been nothing short of a double edged sword for the search engine giant. After taking heat in recent weeks from western media for abiding by strict Chinese censorship laws, Google is now under fire by the Chinese media.

The Beijing News recently ran a story accusing Google of operating without a suitable license. Another state run paper wrote a slamming editorial about Google coming into China uninvited and complaining about China’s censorship laws.

According to Phillip Pan of the Washington Post, this suggests that the Chinese government is less than satisfied with Google at this point. “The unusually bold attacks in the state media suggest that the Chinese government is unhappy with Google’s efforts thus far to filter politically sensitive results from its popular search engine in China, and that its ability to do business in the country may be in jeopardy,” wrote Pan.

Currently Google in China offers a dumbed down version of what we have access to in the west. Pages in violation of Chinese law are filtered out of the search results.

Google can’t win with this one.