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

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

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

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.

SERM was been big topic foe at least 4 years now… and is getting very important for most of the users to have a clear search reputation.

Google advise you to remove all the content that can be negative if you own the content or ask the people who posted the negative content to remove it. These advice provided by Google is pretty simple but good common sense.

Probably good advice if you are a simple user and a few of your friends posted some stupid pictures of you but if you are a business it would be a lot harder to remove the negative content.

Anyway, it is still interesting to see that search engine reputation (SERM) has become one very big subject.

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.

This Superbrands ranking is defined by the product quality, the brand trustworthiness and brand characteristics. The top five UK Superbrands 2009/2010 are:
1.Microsoft
2.Rolex
3.Google
4.British Airways
5.BBC

SuperBrands Ranking 2009/2010

This ranking is a little bit different to Top brand, organised by BrandZ where the most valuable brand comes up top. Superbrand is more about the idea/image of the brand in the business.

Anyway, the war between Google and Microsoft has just started…

Google new presentation

This new presentation looks a little bit better but it is not a major change. When you click on the picture on the left of the map you are automatically redirected to Google Maps with the location where the picture was taken.
Compared to Yahoo!, Google is (once again), a little bit late with this update. The Yahoo! results page has a different view and offers its own content relevant to the city and not a direct link to the map. You can, for example, find information about hotel, restaurant, flights and maps. Yahoo! also proposes some pictures of the city and the top rated things to do.

Yahoo! London Search Result Page

For this kind of search the Yahoo! result page is definitely the best functional solution and they also eliminate the competition (because all the content proposed is from Yahoo! or partners). This is probably why Google did not propose any hotel, restaurant on its own result page.
Once again they Google seem to have attempted to copy Yahoo!

 
Today Microsoft is not so omnipresent anymore and doesn’t really annoy anyone. Google has still a got a good reputation and people still like them but I think that it going to change soon. Effectively, over the past three years Google has created these additional services: search engine, email, calendar, YouTube, phone, internet software, and now the new Operation System (O.S.) for computer.

Google Everywhere

They have done the opposite of Microsoft – starting via the internet to finally producing some software. Google has different strategy to Microsoft by trying to make its products free. It will be the same with this new O.S.

 
How very generous of them?…I’m not so convinced. A few months ago some senior Google managers decided they wanted to increase profits. Do you remember YouTube’s (owned by Google), new ads on the videos?. .. Google generally offers the latest innovations for free, but they almost all always come with advertising.

 
So when Google announced that they are going to develop a O.S. for free, I cant help but wonder where they are going to add some adverts to this nice O.S. or how there are going to make some money with this service.

 
Or maybe I am totally wrong and Google want to get back at Microsoft after they went after Google’s primary market (with Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing).

 
And to be honest, I starting to be tired of seeing Google everywhere…