Frontier India Technology

Goggle dishes you some advanced technologies that may be advanced or confusing. Yesterday, google said that you can block the websites you don’t want on google search.

Probably, this will help us to circumvent google big site bias. I am planning to block all major websites which keeps coming back on and on for searches. Although I tried to work on the procedure that google gave to block a website, but, I couldn’t. May be not enabled in India right now.

Webmasters beware. Here is what google says

In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.

Just yesterday we heard that Bing has overtaken Yahoo in terms of search. Today, we hear that Internet Explorer is eating up Mozilla Firefox marketshare.

Geographic Shifts in Internet Usage Show Firefox Over-Reported, Internet Explorer Gains Share

With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global internet users. Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users.

On Google Chrome, the report says

Chrome surpassed 10% share of global browser usage for the first time in January by gaining .72% share month to month.

Overall, Internet Explorer is going to be the winner in medium term of say 10 years? I have seen that people have not even loaded mozilla or Chrome as they don’t come built in. In India, atleast, the government applications are built to support IE and people do not have internet connections with unlimited plans. The same trend is shown by the report too.

Internet Explorer 8.0 showed strong growth in January, gaining 1.15% share month to month (1.18% including custom editions). The latest beta version of Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 9 surpassed 0.5% usage share worldwide. Windows 7 remains the largest user base of Internet Explorer 9, and it now accounts for 1.82% usage on Windows 7 worldwide.

Bing has a lead over on Yahoo says Statcounter. Please read my past posts, I have been betting on Bing for quite sometime now.

One of the reasons, I saw it coming is that “Yahoo is a selfish search engine.” It tries to promote its own links first and it may not what we want. This is the same mistake Google is making and we have already told you that.

But Bing is by no means the Google of 1990′s even if we have fond that it is the best new bet on pure search engines. Google is not going to be defeated by the Bing any time soon. Here is what Statcounter has to say

StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market. In the United States Yahoo! at 9.74% still retains its lead over Bing at 9.03%. Google’s share in the US is 79.63%. In July 2009 Microsoft announced an agreement whereby Bing would power the Yahoo! search technology. This has been implemented in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

Facebook, an important player has refused to share its data with google, but, Bing has included Facebooks likes in its search and powers facebook search. This could be a loose brick for google.

If you read my recent posts, I have hinted that most of you cannot count on google if you are a webmaster. Even if you dish out unique content. But, at the same time, you cannot do without google, as it will still give you most of the search traffic. Today, google has come out with this new post. Rankings of your sites are going to be reduced if you are not a “quality site” as per google yardsticks.

The problem, as many webmasters are saying is that they cannot do without similar content. Its not possible to sustain blogs and websites with unique “only” content. They need to have similar content in order to increase volume and engage “their” viewers. A common problem is that, they don’t understand google terms as it is too much to read and they joke that you need a full time lawer or university degree in Google studies. One of the webbies says that he writes on keywords like “Al Qaida”, Lashkar e Taiba etc. He has very unique content. But, if you search with those keywords, the bigger sites come first and not his site. He is worried about what he calls “Googles Big Site Bias.”

Most small webmasters I have spoken to say that only big sites can come up with unique content and they hog the keywords too. One of them says that, why do you need google to search for bigger sites, people anyway go to bigger sites.

One of the webbies tells me that he has complained so many times to google regarding the Times of India website for splogs, common / similar content etc. He says that google would have penalised small website for the same reason, but, the Times of India website goes on. He says that Google is essentially scared of banning big sites.

As google keeps cold shouldering and insulting internet community with their search policies, adsense disruptions, unhelpful explanations and most of all “un-understable technologies,” people will increasingly take towards Facebook, Twitter and Bing.

In past few days, I have been waking up to the latest search engine trends on Internet. I have discovered that there are 4 major search drivers on Internet. The four are 1) Google 2) Twitter 3) Facebook and 4) Bing. The four I have listed are in the order of importance.

1) Google: This is going to be the most dominant search engine. It is going to give you a very personalised search. It will even bring in its competitors search into its results. The flaw is that, its too technologically advanced for a common man to understand and its results are more skewed to bigger websites and popular content. Don’t expect to find a unique content from google search any more. If you are just a user, then, you may not need any other search engine again. But, if you are from the webmasters side, consider it to be a headache. The problem with google for both users and webmasters is that, google is too segmented. For example, if you search for a particular phrase, the chances are that you will get a crammed search page, that will show the latest twitter, google news, regular search results, results from your friends etc. In my experience, this is too complicated and distracting.

2) Twitter: Most of the webmasters who have created content, will tweet. You can get topics of your interest while you are connected to your friends. But, this will not let you search deeper inside the content. It can be a good competitor for Google News, Google Alerts and limited amount of Google search. Chances are that you may not have to use other search engines if you are connected to twitter. You may need other search engines only if you need a deeper search. I know of people who have said that they have reduced usage of google search by 90%. This should be the darling of webmasters in years to come.

3) Facebook: This is going to emerge as an alternative Internet ecosystem. First of all you will not get Facebook content in Google search. Secondly, it is replacing myspace as preferred social media by artists, companies and individuals. You will terribly miss major aspects of Internet in case you are not on facebook. Webmasters need to be here too.

4) Bing: This is the search engine to watch. “Currently” it will give you search results which is totally different from google’s complex biased search results. Bing is biased too, but, is increasing getting better with the quality of results. Of late, I have begun taking a good look at it, as it has begun bringing in traffic. Although, its a far cry from google traffic potential, you will be sorry as a webmaster if you do not pay attention to it.

In future, an individual search may look like this:

a) Twitter + Facebook + google/Bing + favourite social media. (Most definitely)
b) Twitter + Facebook + Google + favourite social media. (Most likely)
c) Twitter + Facebook + Bing + favourite social media. (less likely)

During early 2000, I shifted from MSN and Yahoo to Google. Google was everything we asked for. It gave us traffic, freedom, some awesome storage, email chat etc. Then Google was not perfect. Today Google owns me. Google can make or break me. I have nothing particulary to complain against google. It is still an awesome service. I am perfectly willing to co-exist inside the great google firewall.

My romance with google is not yet over, but, I am not willing to let my old flame go. MSN has stopped taking me for granted. MSN has brought webmasters tool, Bing, Live, revamped hotmail, translator and ofcource has started sending some traffic again. MSN is something that google was back in 2000.

I have split up the workload : Firefox/chrome + google search and Internet Explorer + Bing.