After the recent hacking of Gmail accounts in China, Google envisages leaving this new market with financial consequences.

Effectively some the human rights activist’s email accounts were hacked. Google suspect the Chinese government of being behind this attack.

This announcement by Google to stop any operations in China arrive only one day after the declaration of Hillary Clinton who was concerned about charges by Google that China is censoring web search results – “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation”.

Google’s retreat is probably welcomed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin who has publicly been against the Google activities in China since the beginning.

The possible exit of Google from China will obviously help the search engine Baidu, but only for the short term because without any serious competitor Baidu may not be driven to expand as quickly.

At the end of the day Google has a chance to change its image by becoming a company with values. This change would be probably very profitable in terms of reputation when presently we hear more and more negative press about Google’s monopoly of the online world and its omnipresence (web, phone, computer…)

Let see what happens over the next few weeks and wait for the reaction from the Chinese government

Google has launched a new website section on what we can do on/with Google. They are actually doing a PPC campaign about this new advice page.

This new section is called “Google things to do.” It is a list of clickable sentences like “Share your YouTube favourites on the bus” , “Keep your family videos in the family”, “Flight arrival and departure times in real time”. Every time that you click on one of these sentences, a little box opens with the explanation. Sometimes it is a video or goes directly to the application.

Google Things to do

This new “Google things to do” is a great idea because it is pretty hard for a user to keep up with all the new Google applications and functions.

The way they have organised this page is not clear though, we have too many diverse functions/applications on the same page (e.g.: Google map, image, Google Doc, YouTube, the search engine…). They probably should have created a page by categories.

More positively, this page shows the impressive number of innovations that Google has developed. Clever Google.

Google Suggest - Universal Search

This Google update is pretty simple. When you are on the home page, Google will suggest some ideas for keywords and shows some universal results even before you have pressed enter.

This new update is only available for the .com and doesn’t work with Google UK. It is also very limited; just useful for the weather and some basic functions (conversion rate…). It is far from what I would call a ‘universal’ search… if you are looking for ‘Nike logo’ nothing shows up (same for ‘London map’ or ‘tiger wood news)’.

Google Suggest - Universal Search

Anyway this function has the possibility of expanding, and consequently being more useful, with more media integrated into it (map, news, football result, image, video…)

Right now this update is too limited and very few people will even see it. However, at least Google is trying to do something a little bit different from Bing or Yahoo

The new Google live search has finally appeared on the Google UK results page. It is just a little window with a continual feed of information. Most of the results are from Twitter and news websites.

Google UK Live Result - Tiger Woods

It is hard to say if this is a good initiative, obviously the quality of the links can be very poor because the content is judged the same way as a traditional website. You just need the keyword to be on your Tweet to be on this little window. I think that a lot of scam will happen with this new functionality as well.

Anyway, it is a new and interesting function that shows that Google can crawl extremely fast through a different number of sources, but in the long term I don’t see the additional value of it compare to the traditional Google news result

After Google removed a penalty (on the Search ranking) from two different websites of Media Corp, the shares of Media Corp increase by 158%!

Effectively, Google penalised two websites of Media Corporations, gambling.com and creditcardexpert.co.uk for an undisclosed reason. Just after the announcement of Media Corp that the penalty was removed by the giant search engine the share increased significantly…153% in a week!

Google Result - Gambling.com

This shows you how powerful Google has become and also how important is to do SEO for a major company… if all the share holders know how many top companies don’t care about their visibility online, they would probably change some of their investments.

On YouTube today I noticed that the most viewed video is one about Google. Quickly watch it; it is only a ten second video. It is about the test home page of Google, where the top menu and the links fade in.

My surprise wasn’t that Google had a new homepage, but that so many people are interested in it and the huge amount people watching this video (75,000 viewers in two days). Does everything that Google does important to everyone?

For me, this is a proof that Google is highly important for most internet users. Everybody seems concerned about any tiny changes to our favourite search engine.

A few months ago Google tried to predict the result of the Eurovision Song Contest by studying the number of searches on each contestant. The weird thing was that Google was right, correctly guessing the winner of the Eurovision contest before everyone else.

There is definitely a relation between the number of searches and the results of a vote (at least where entertainment is concerned). We can also use YouTube to see how many users saw contestants on video, although it is harder to geo targeted the result.

This technique is not alwyas… accurate, do you remember Susan Boyle (Britains Got Talent) was by far on top of YouTube viewings as well as the number of searches but at the end did not win.

Now lets see if Google/YouTube can give us the winner of the X factor 2009.

Based on Google insight (UK search only), the winner will be……….. Danyl Johnson, followed by Jamie Archer.

Searches X factor Winner

If we look at YouTube top watched videos we have once again Danyl Johnson but this time followed by Stacey Soloman.  

X factor Winner - Youtube

So based on the above, the next X – Factor winner is Danyl Johnson! Let see in few months if I am right…