Daniel Alegre, vice president of Google’s Asia Pacific and Japan operations, stated:

Yahoo Japan will use Google search results and Google’s technology for supplying the accompanying search ads. With such partnerships, revenue from the search ads is shared between the Web site and the company that supplies the ads, in this case Yahoo Japan and Google, respectively.

I guess Bing just wasn’t cutting it for Yahoo.

Other domains Google treats generically include .tv and .me. A Google spokesperson stated:

We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.

This news is very good for early adopters of .co as Google’s announcement will surely increase the market value of .co names .

Source | PC Pro
Photo | Wikimedia Commons

Although a capital investment is any physical asset that has long-term value, most of Google’s capital investments are IT-related. Large capital investments are often a sign of recovery. However, Google’s current expenditure figures are nothing compared to the $842 million it spent in Q1 2008. The company drastically cut back data center spending after the recession set in.

Other tech giants like Microsoft are also expanding their capital investment budgets. At this point, it is unclear where Google’s data center is going.

Photo | pzado

Right now the domain doesn’t point anywhere. In fact, Yahoo’s owning of a popular typo for a Google domain is a bit of a coincidence. Blogsport.com was owned by sports site Rivals.com. But when Yahoo bought Rivals, it also bought all of its assets, including the domain.

Yahoo will probably never monetize the domain or redirect it to a rival service because it does not want to face legal action from Google.

As you can see, Google doesn’t use normal servers. All of its systems are custom-built to meet its needs. It also keeps much of its technology secret, so seeing this server in-person is a big deal. The power supply has a built-in battery that acts like a UPS, for instance.

The most obvious feature is the large amount of RAM. The Mountain View company supposedly stores all server data on memory for fast retrieval.

Earlier this year, Google strongly considered leaving the country due to its strict Internet censorship, and began redirecting Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong site. Google has since stopped doing this, but still keeps a link to the other site on its homepage.

Google must renew its license annually. The search engine has had trouble attracting users in China as local competitors such as Baidu have limited its market share.

Source | The New York Times
Photo | Flickr

Bing’s May market share was 9.23%. With the 7% increase, its new market share for June was 9.85%. Google’s market share only decreased from 72.17% to 71.65%. While Bing’s growth sounds enormous, it really isn’t considering how small of a market share the search engine had to begin with.

Most of Bing’s growth is the result of a large number of visitors performing automotive, health, shopping and travel searches. The market shares of Yahoo Search and Ask.com stayed about the same.

Photo | guitargoa

In what will undoubtedly send ripples through the Web, IBM has announced that Mozilla Firefox will be its new official browser. All 400,000 IBM employees are expected to make the switch on their desktops and laptops. IBM believes Firefox is “enterprise ready”, and as more of their products are sold as web applications and cloud services, one can safely assume that IBM will recommend Firefox to their customers.

Since its creation, Firefox has gradually chipped away at the large browser market share held by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Over the past year, however, Google’s Chrome browser has stolen some of the spotlight. This move by IBM will certainly give Firefox a boost. For web hosting providers that use IBM’s services, it will make sense to use Firefox, if IBM optimizes their applications with the open source browser in mind.

Source: CNET
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

When registering domains, I use the search volume data to get an idea of what keywords to pick and what kind of market a name has. It might tell me, for instance, that LouisianaLawyer.com is worth more than WyomingLawyer.com because “Louisiana lawyer” has a greater search volume.

The AdWords Keyword Tool is also great for SEO. Use it to find the most popular keywords to optimize for.

Without delving too deeply into the new technology, it is sufficient to note that Google’s indexing just got faster…a lot faster. They are currently refreshing their indexes 50 percent faster than their previous search index technology. The new tech is called Caffeine, and it has a more organic approach to indexing. While the old technology re-indexed the entire web in layers, Caffeine will index small portions more frequently.

I put the new system to the test, just to see how fast it actually was. Yesterday, I posted a new blog entry on one of my other sites. By the time I had saved it and headed over to Google, the new pages were already indexed. When you get things right on your website, this will be a good thing. When you get things wrong, be mindful that Google may index and even cache that page within minutes. Overall, however, it is a good thing, and website owners trying to get information out fast will appreciate it.

Source: Google
Photo: Flickr