Chicago SEO Blog & Web 2.0 » Google

Google out of China

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:24:19 +0000

Internet giant Google says it may end operations in China after hackers targeted Chinese human rights activists’ e-mail accounts. Should Google leave China?

The company did not accuse the Chinese government directly but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine – google.cn.

Google launched google.cn in 2006, agreeing to some censorship of the search results, as required by the Chinese government.

The search engine has now said it will hold talks with the government in the coming weeks to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country.

Do you think Google should pull out of China? What is the future for Google in China?

Is Google Search Case Sensative? Case Study on Capitalized vs Lower Case

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:53:36 +0000

Is Google Search Case Sensitive?

Does Google treat CAPITALIZED and lower case Search Queries Differently?

Something interesting I want to talk about today, and I would like to update my research from last year’s. The gap seems getting much wider now.

Basically, through searching, I found that Google was treating queries differently depending on whether or not the words in the search phrase were capitalized or not.

According to Google, they don’t treat the queries different:

Some Basic Facts

Google Search is always case insensitive. Searching for [ new york times ] is the same as searching for [ New York Times ].

Only it was far from the TRUTH. George Washing and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN have a difference of over 20,000,000 in search engine results page (SERP) today, as comparing to January this year; the difference was still 1,000,000.

gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN: 8,900,000 in SERPP

george washington: 61,900,000 in SERP

The results looked the same, but you can’t help but wonder why that SERP count is so far off and the gap is even wider these days.

Today, I’m looking at another case study www.ntpwireless.com using the search term

ntp wireless vs Ntp Wireless

SERP were still far off and even returning different search results on TOP THREE returning pages.

I took two screenshots of results to illustrate this as well:

Where have you been?

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:53:57 +0000

Douwe Osinga from Google has a great personal project that demonstrates the Google Chart API. Just by clicking a few boxes, you can make an image to show the states or countries that you’ve visited before. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States:

Apparently, I’ve only been to 11 States which concludes a 22% tour around the United States. Clearly I can do far more better than that!

visited 11 states (22%)

Luckily, New York will be marked very soon which is going to make the chart 12 States before the end of this year. :):) If you run a website, the Google Chart API is a great/free way to add pretty charts to your website or dashboard easily. You can make things like google-o-meters

Google-o-meter

and QR codes

in addition to maps:

Play around with it, you might find it interesting.