Action taken by local searchers is also significant. During Q2, 2006, 47 percent of local searchers ended up visiting local merchants after performing local queries, while 37 percent made online contact with merchants.

The value of local search cannot be underestimated. There’s a huge potential audience within your regional geographic seeking your products and services. Just examine the Yellow Pages of any large town or major city and you’ll see why it’s such a potentially lucrative marketing opportunity. Since a significant percentage of leads and sales can stem from local customers, it’s important your web property is found within the top listings of the most popular local search engines through the proper balance of SEO and pay-for strategies.

China Telecom and Microsoft are teaming up to provide approximately 25 million China Telecom subscribers and 80 million Internet users with access to Microsoft Live Search technologies, packaged under the name 114. The search service currently offers white page, yellow page, BBS and blog search. Local, video and image search will be added in a few months.

Yahoo! formerly provided China Telecom with search services, but the contract was terminated in August, 2006. The contract between Microsoft and China Telecom is said to terminate in 2008.

Baidu currently enjoys a massive 62 percent share of the Chinese search market.

Microsoft fights at the front of a lot of battles. But one historic battle it’s had problems winning is the Battle of the Search Engines. MSN’s share of the search market has always been significantly lower than either Google or Yahoo, although it still manages to hang onto third place (current Nielson/Netratings show Google at 49%, Yahoo! at 23% and Microsoft at 10% – courtesy of searchnews). This could change with Live Search.

Live Search completely replaces the old MSN Search interface. Right away you’ll notice a much simpler, cleaner design and layout, a standard made popular by search king Google. The change in usability is step one to drawing more users. Step two will be to garner a stronger reputation through popular services and better results than the other guys.

Aside from the standard Web, Images, and News search functions, Live offers:

• Language selection: from a well organized list, located under the options menu.
• Local search: growing database of North American cities, with kick butt maps that let you zoom into specific areas; contact info and driving instructions.
• Related searches: This feature helps you refine your query by offering more search suggestions.
• Live QnA: MSN’s social search feature, to compete with Yahoo Answers.
• Video search beta: Video search is a must, considering the popularity of sites like youtube.com and Google video.

Here are a handful of SEO tips for Live Search, taken from Live Search’s Site Owner Guidelines:

• Submit your site to Live Search if it’s not already indexed.
• Adhere to MSN’s site design guidelines, such as well formatted HTML, strong relevant Meta tags, and proper use of the robots.txt file, to let the MSNBot know how to crawl your site.
• If a page’s URL is changed, point this page to the new page with a 301 redirect.
• URL’s should be simple and static. Long winded names are more difficult to crawl.
• Make sure your content is relevant and valuable to your target audience.
• Use traffic rich, relevant keywords to draw searchers to your site.
• Add a sitemap with links to all your pages, so the MSNBot finds and indexes your entire site.
• Your top pages should only be 3 clicks away from your main index page.
• Don’t use black hat SEO tricks, such as hidden text, irrelevant keyword stuffing and link farms.

It will be interesting to see if this change pays off for Microsoft. At this point I still have my money on Google.

“The next Evolutionary Step in Search,” according to Google, is Google Co-op. It’s still in its infancy, but with Google Co-op users (experts) have the ability to interact with the search results by specifying which web sites and pages they consider most relevant to a topic, as well as recommend query refinements. The idea is to make search more contextual by allowing users to help define website/web page authority.

With Google Co-op, contributions can be made to current topics, or new topics can be created.

For instance, an automobile mechanic that specializes in a particular type of car can contribute to a topic by annotating web sites and pages she/he feels are most relevant. According to Google there are three ways to contribute to a current topic:

1. “Create a document in either XML format or in tab-delimited format. We have created two Excel templates, one for health and one for destination guides to help you get started.
2. Find URLs of webpages or sites that you want to label.
3. Decide which labels you want to associate with each URL and record that in the file, this is referred to as annotating URLs.”

Creating your own topic provides customized search to users who subscribe to you. This requires you create your own profile first. When users click on your subscribed link, they are taken to a page set up with search refinements, or labels, that you created. These are relevant web sites and pages to a subscriber’s query. The best subscribed links stem from highly targeted keywords and fresh actionable content.

Developing topics and label creation can be a pretty in-depth process. For example, Google offers a number of tips for label creation, such as defining:

• Audience
• Source Type
• Document type
• Subject

Tips with regards to:

• Synonymy
• Polysemy
• Proper punctuation

You can also write topic definition files in XML, which specify which queries will trigger your subscribed links. You can also code advanced label definitions to bring your labeled web pages higher in the search results.

There’s a lot of depth and detail to this system. It definitely tags Google Co-op with a usability factor that’s more complex than other social search engines, such as MyWeb. However, this added depth has its benefits by granting users a huge amount of control over search results. It’ll be interesting to watch Google-Co-op develop.

Check out this Search Engine Roundtable discussion on Google Co-op.

China is a different story. Although China has undergone drastic changes over the last few decades, the government still upholds a number of strict laws over its citizens. For instance, freedom of speech and access to information is highly controlled. You may have read about Google’s dumbed down portal in China and the backlash it received for conforming to China’s principles. Then there’s the notorious situation involving Yahoo, which reported one of its users to government officials for blogging about items the government didn’t approve of.

The question is how long will the Chinese government be able to manage Internet usage? Like the rest of the world, the amount of Internet users in China has exploded. It will become increasingly difficult to fasten a watchful eye over what people see and do unless the watchdog infrastructure can keep up with the pace. Maybe it can.

More to the point; how can the government restrain every bit of information contained within blogs? I don’t think it’s possible. Blogs are geared for free thinking thought process; as bloggers jot down their ideas / feelings and publish them immediately over the wire, there’s little play for censorship.

Following the worldwide trend, blogging has become very popular in China. There will be an estimated 100 million bloggers in China by 2007; it seems unfeasible that the government can maintain the resources required to regulate this blogsphere explosion over time, unless the activity is banned completely. Blog channels are also becoming increasingly available. American owned search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already offer blog services in China, and there are a number of smaller Chinese companies that do as well. And, China’s largest and most popular engine, Baidu, has now joined the mix. It will soon have a blog service available through Baidu Space.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Chinese government handles this over the next several years. Will it persevere to maintain control over its principles? Or will the power of the Internet be the technological determinant that finally opens the door to higher freedoms?