Posts by Simon Davies

More Search Engine Optimisation News: Google has put a great deal of effort into preserving its motto of “do no evil”. The recent news that Google may (but probably won’t) be  pulling out of China completely due to China’s censorship laws is, I believe, at best a cover for the fact that they can’t stand being the second largest market share holder in the world’s largest market.

Western Internet companies (including Google) often fail to break into the Chinese market because they simply fail to understand the different culture over there. You only have to watch a couple of Chinese TV shows to realise how different it is to our western one. Imagine the problems setting up the branch of a multinational business over there. So bearing this in mind, Google needed a way of pulling out (or at least reducing its services) without losing face and admitting defeat.

That’s not to say that China didn’t try to hack Google. It’s just that if its business over there was doing better than a 20 percent market share for internet search, Google would happily ignore it.

The bottom line is, no matter what they claim, this isn’t about helping the Chinese people. It’s about making money from them. If it was about morals, Google would not have gone to China in the first place.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer

Pretty much all of us have heard of and use one of the big three search engines on a daily basis. Google, Bing and Yahoo collectively make up just over 95 percent of the western world’s search engine market share.

As search engines optimisers we tend to put most of our effort into Google (and rightly so, with 70 to 80 percent of the market share.)

I was surprised to learn that a lot of the ancient search engines from back in the infancy of the Web are still up and running: Lycos, AltaVista and Excite are all still live and claim to be indexing and coming up with relevant results. My own personal favourite, long before Google was around, was Dogpile – and even that is still going.

There are also experimental new search engines, each with their own speciality. There’s the ill-fated Cuil that was launched in 2008 by ex-Google employees. It was far too over-hyped, but does integrate quite nicely with social media. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on.

There’s also Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge” search engine that attempts (relatively successfully) to understand the meaning of web content computationally. As an example, you can enter “population of the UK” and it will return information taken from Wikipedia on the population and other information (such as age expectancy etc.) It sounds like a simple idea, but once the meaning of content can be properly understood by a computer (not just matching keywords and phrases) you can start ranking and graphing data much easier. It would be fantastic if this really took off and became more successful.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer