Archive: February, 2006

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.

Here’s a bit of sad news. Looks like the butler Jeeves, mascot of askjeeves.com, is packing his bags for good. Various blog reports pointed me to the well know butler’s retirement page, and it’s official—Jeeves is a goner. This coincides with ask.com dropping the jeeves portion off the end of its name. Farewell Jeeves, its been a slice.

Last week I blogged about a reported security risk with Google’s latest Desktop software. A watchdog group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that Desktop 3 was dangerous to users, since it transports user information via the ‘Search Across Computers” feature and stores it on Google’s servers. The EEF stated that not only did Desktop 3 make personal information available to potential hackers, but also to government subpoenas. Cnet News reports that Google now recognizes there is in fact a security risk with the software, cautioning enterprise companies about the problem.

According to Cnet, Google says it is the responsibly of business owners to provide their own security resources, by disabling the Search Across Computers feature if worried about company data falling into the wrong hands. What does this mean for the personal user? The same thing I guess. Don’t use the Search Across Computers feature if you’re worried about security issues.

A new study by WebSideStory gives the lowdown on business to consumer (B2C) conversions for each of the major search engines during January 2006. The verdict — AOL takes top spot, while Google finishes last.

The four engines studied were Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo. The results were as follows:

AOL: 6.17 percent
MSN: 6.03 percent
Yahoo:4.07 percent
Google: 3.83 percent

“With portals rich in content and services, AOL, MSN and Yahoo may tend to appeal toward a more buyer friendly demographic. Google, meanwhile, may appeal to more browsers – those with less of an intent to buy,” Said Ali Behnam, senior digital marketing consultant for WebSideStory

More from the WebsideStory press release:

Each of the major search engines posted conversion rates well above the median average for all search engines, which was 1.97 percent for the month of January, according to the index. This compares with a median average of 2.30 percent for the last three months of 2005, which WebSideStory reported on last month.

Conversion refers to an actual follow through transaction by a client, whether it be an online purchase or submitting an online form. WebSideStory culled the statistics from their own HBX Analytics software. Stats were measured from both organic and paid keywords.