About a year ago, Google launched real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries. Today, Google is taking this one step further and is launching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example. For the time being, this feature is only available in the U.S.

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Smarter Spelling Correction for Names

In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don’t know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person’s profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person’s name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections.

This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months.

Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages

Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says “Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb.”

Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling.

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March was an interesting month for the search market, according to new statistics from comScore.  Not so interesting that Google isn’t still on top by a huge margin, of course, but interesting insofar as the search giant lost a bit of market share, even as Bing and Yahoo improved their standing.

Let’s start with Google’s story.  In February, comScore puts its market share at 65.5 percent.  That declined to 65.1 percent in March, which is a moderately unusual turn of events.

As for how Bing did, it’s still Microsoft’s little search-engine-that-could, achieving its tenth straight month of gains.  Not huge gains, perhaps – its market share just moved from 11.5 percent to 11.7 percent between February and March – but the streak remains impressive, and even the tiniest numbers add up over time.

Then there’s Yahoo’s tale to consider.  Unfortunately for Carol Bartz, the company’s standing had dropped each of the previous 13 months.  However, moving from February to March, comScore recorded a 0.1 percent gain, nudging Yahoo from 16.8 percent to 16.9 percent.

So it was definitely an interesting month, as these things go.  And Bing and Yahoo, at least, are no doubt hoping April turns out to be just as unusual.

Google Bookmarks is one of Google’s lesser known services. The new star marker in Google Search – which syncs with Google Bookmarks – gave this tool some added exposure, but most users are probably still unaware of this service. Thanks to some new features Google just introduced today, Google Bookmarks may soon become more of a household name, however. Starting today, you can organize your bookmarks into lists (instead of just labeling them) and – more importantly – share these lists publicly and collaborate on creating and editing lists with others.

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Getting Started With Google Bookmarks

If you are not an active Google Bookmarks user already, you can start using the service by starring a few items in your search results on Google Search and Google Maps. These links will then appear on your Google Bookmarks page (note: to see the lists feature, you have to follow this link – the standard Google Bookmarks URL does not feature lists yet).

Features

One nifty new feature is the ability to add items to your lists without having to leave the Bookmarks Lists interface. By clicking on “Add Stuff,” you can easily append links, images, videos and local search results to your lists, as well as any Google Docs document. Other features include the ability to rearrange lists through a simple drag and drop interface, the ability to comment on any item in a list and to preview videos, maps and Wikipedia entries directly in the Google Bookmarks interface.

What’s Missing? Integration

As is so often that case with Google’s products, the lists in Google Bookmarks are a great feature, but while they are nicely integrated with some tools (Google Docs, YouTube, Google Maps), some obvious integrations are still missing. Why, for example, doesn’t Google Chrome’s bookmark syncing feature work with Google Bookmarks? Using the stars in Google’s search engine works well enough, but that same star feature on Google Chrome is linked to Google Docs and not to Google Bookmarks.

Tip of the hat to Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System for being the first to notice this update.

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Google may end its search operations in China very soon, according to a new report.  A local employee supposedly told a Chinese newspaper that Google will announce its plans to leave on Monday, March 22nd, and then actually pull out on Saturday, April 10th.

It’s hard to judge the accuracy of this information.  On the one hand, there have been no shortages of rumors and hoaxes surrounding the situation in China.  Also, Saturday seems like a rather odd day for any company to execute a major business maneuver.

At the same time, the tension between Google and the Chinese government has been mounting for months, and there have been multiple signs that the two sides are just about done talking.

So we’ll just present what little fresh info is available.  A Bloomberg article stated this morning, "Google Inc. may pull out of China on April 10, China Business News reported today, citing an unidentified Chinese sales agent for the company."  Furthermore, "The search engine may announce its exit on March 22 . . . .  It may also reveal plans for its China workforce on the same day, according to the report. "

We’ll see what happens.  At least the Monday target date won’t keep everyone on edge for too long.

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It’s almost like an ocean where there’s no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it’s always raining in it. The rain is the new content that’s added into the ocean.

Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook.

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Guest author Julien Genestoux is the founder and CEO of Superfeedr, a company dedicated at making RSS and Atom feeds realtime. It has implemented PubSubHubbub from day one and now host several hubs, including ReadWriteWeb, Tumblr, Posterous and Gawker. Follow Julien on Twitter.

When you’re a search engine, you obviously have an exhaustivity requirement. You can’t really skip on indexing the Indian Ocean. Google sends its bo(a)ts all over the ocean where it’s raining to update its index. However, the ocean is growing so fast that it will eventually become harder and harder to stay exhaustive.

Unfortunately, not only the ocean is growing, but it’s also raining more, which means that if a bo(a)t is away from a zone for too long, when it will be back it will have changed tremendously. That’s what happens when you see results in a search engine that are 1- or 2-years old, or even older. They’re not wrong, they’re just often inaccurate, but rank well.

It’s a real technical problem for search engines to know where to send their bo(a)ts, and at the right time! And when Google says they’re going to feed their search index with PubSubHubbub data, that’s what they’re trying to do: save a little bit on the boats.

I strongly disagree with John Battelle when he says this is not a huge deal. My take is that he sees this only as a great technical and infrastructure opportunity for Google, not so much as an immediate benefit for the end user. I strongly disagree – and so do you. You disagreed when you typed “earthquake” into Twitter Search, or even “hudson crash”, or “Mickael Jackson”. At that point, you knew that Google wasn’t able to provide you with the information you were looking for, and this is a massive loss for Google.

Google will have a hard time getting this brain share back. The first thing it needs to do is to actually have results that date back from the minute when people look for these things.

You may argue that if you search 10 times a day on Google, you go maybe once a week to Twitter search. I’m the same, no worries. Yet, I know that Twitter is much better than Google at contextualization. When I do a search on Google, I expect to find the absolute truth. If I look for earthquake, I’m looking at facts about earthquakes: pictures or maybe historical data. If I look for earthquake on Twitter, I’m looking for context; I want what is being said about earthquakes now (and here!).

As a matter of facts, Google always had a lot of issues about context because they know so little about the people who search there (or maybe they know a lot, but don’t want to scare us). Adding PubSubHubbub is a way for them to be able to take the “time dimension” back. They many never have the conversations that Twitter has, but they will have a much bigger ocean of data than Twitter’s sea of Tweets

Photo by Pam Roth.

Discuss

It’s great to have everything customized to suit just you, right? You like your bed a certain stiffness, your oatmeal a certain thick and your coffee a certain sweet. How about your search results? According to an article by The Register, Google is working to “‘personalize’ as much as 20 percent of your web searches”.

While this might be good for some things, we’re thinking it could also be like formulating an answer before someone even finishes asking the question.

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The Register quotes Google software engineer Bryan Horling, who spoke this afternoon at the Search Marketing Expo, as saying that one in five searches are customized using a user’s location, web history or online contacts. “Between these three techniques,” Horling said, “just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

Horling explains that many of the changes, however, are rather subtle and usually involve rearranging a few results on a page and not providing an entirely different set of results. Google has tailored results on a large scale, such as by country, for years, Horling explains, but is now “applying it at a finer granularity.”

While people we are in contact with are often of the same mindset and our location comprises much of our interaction with the world, do we really want Google to assume this for us? If we are researching a topic that is normally completely out of our realm, do we really want the search engine to pull us back in, however subtly? Take Google’s “social search” for example.

“The idea behind social search is that we surface content from your social circle,” he said. If you know a particular person, for instance, Google may ensure that a document they wrote receives particular prominence on the results page.

Customizing search results, it would seem, can be like putting us in an echo chamber of similar ideas and opinions. If we look up technology related topics in Google, suddenly we are fed links from our tech savvy contacts that Google pulls from our Buzz stream. But what if we are looking for the outside perspective? Even if we aren’t intentionally looking for the outside perspective, we’re suddenly being subtly driven back to our own world view, as repeated by our peers.

While some examples, like searching for a bus schedule or searching for the words “coffee shop” seem self evident, we have to wonder how these one in five results are changing the way we search the Web.

And if nothing else, we’d rather be able to opt-out if we need, without having to sign out, delete our cookies, clear our cache and reboot the system.

Discuss

China’s standing in the scientific community might be damaged if Google leaves the country, according to the results of a new survey.  This isn’t a simple matter of reputation, either; a great many Chinese scientists instead acknowledged that they regard the search engine as a useful research tool.

As reported by Reuters, the journal Nature contacted over 700 scientists, and "84 percent said losing Google would ‘somewhat or significantly’ hamper their research and 78 percent said international collaborations would be affected."

One scientist even said, "Research without Google would be like life without electricity."

These findings could make it harder for Google to justify leaving China, given that the search giant would lose the moral high ground if it looks like its departure would do too much damage.  Plenty of people have argued that it’s better for Chinese citizens to have access to some information rather than none.

On the other hand, since Chinese authorities must not want to curtail their own country’s development (at least in this respect), the survey’s results could make them rethink their position.  Or perhaps be willing to give Google and free speech advocates a better compromise, anyway.

Most people regard typos as nuisances, just inconsequential mistakes that cause them to lose a second of time hitting the backspace key.  But for Google, typos may equal big business, as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that they make the search giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore, who both call Harvard their home, coauthored a paper titled "Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders."  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, "According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads."

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: "Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year."

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

Now, it’s necessary to mention that Edelman is involved in a lawsuit against Google ("arising out of Google’s use of typosquatting domains to display advertising"), so he may not be the least biased person in the world.  The numbers he and Moore presented are still stunning if true.

UPDATE: Ben Edelman was good enough to drop by in the comments section, and he wrote,  "Surely it’s not Google’s fault that some people misspell. But our study [shows] that typosquatters register more domains targeting companies in sectors with high PPC prices. That tells us that PPC funding is *causing* and *exacerbating* typosquatting. Without PPC payments, there would be fewer typosquatting registrations — much less reason for squatters to register these domains. Google’s payments put the system in motion; squatters register domains exactly in anticipation of getting paid by Google. Google knows where it’s showing ads. (Example: Google shows Expedia ads if you misspell Expedia, but Travelocity ads if you misspell Travelocity!) So it’s natural to look to Google for resolution of these problems." 

>> Click to read the rest of Edelman’s comment …

In the late 90′s, a spokesperson for the Coca Cola corporation said, “Our primary competition isn’t Pepsi. Our real competition is water, tea, nimbupani and Pepsi… in that order.”

While it’s a gruesome thought to see water considered competition to the top cola manufacturer, I didn’t include the quote to make a commentary on public health or privatization. I did it to remind startups that competition includes all products that solve the same problem, in this case – thirst. When a startup claims they have no competitors, it makes me wonder if there’s a need for their product in the first place. You have competitors. Below are a few ways you can find them, research them and then beat them.

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It’s About Solving A Problem: Whether you are connecting friends online, providing a reference resource or building a better mousetrap, your product is one approach to a problem and you need to find others who claim to take on the same challenge. Your obvious competitors are those with similar products but your less obvious ones are those with vastly different products who still compete for market’s attention.

Know Your Competitors: Think about your problem statement and the problem-related keywords and categories that drive users to your site. Now take those same keywords, type them into your favorite search engine and look at who dominates those pages. This is a good indicator of your competition. You can also search your keywords and categories through sites like KillerStartups, YouNoodle and LinkedIn to determine others in your space. Conversation tracking services like Echo and UberVu also allow you to track your perceived direct competitors through public conversations, blog posts and traditional media sources.

Reach Out Early and Make A Better Case: Often when ReadWriteWeb writes an article about a company, we get a pitch about a similar product the next day. Unless you prove that your product solves the problem much better than the last guy, we are not going to write about you. Similarly, investors don’t want to hear a pitch about an exact replica of a product they’ve already funded. It is your job to reach out to stakeholders early, explain the problem, give an accurate description of the competitive environment, and then blow our minds. You need to prove that you are the best solution to the problem bar none.

Photo Credit: Dan Bennett

Discuss

Most people regard typos as nuisances, just inconsequential mistakes that cause them to lose a second of time hitting the backspace key.  But for Google, typos may equal big business, as Benjamin Edelman and Tyler Moore have estimated that they make the search giant $497 million per year.

Edelman and Moore, who both call Harvard their home, coauthored a paper titled "Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders."  In a blog post summarizing it, they presented several sets of statistics and wrote, "According to our analysis, 57% of typo sites include Google pay-per-click ads."

Then they made a rather more interesting comment regarding the effect of Google’s connection: "Combining our observations with financial reports and others’ estimates, we conclude that Google’s revenue from typosquatting on the top 100,000 sites is $497 million per year."

Also, Google’s pretty much the only search engine they point a finger at, since not nearly as many ads from Yahoo and Microsoft appear on typosquatting sites.

Now, it’s necessary to mention that Edelman is involved in a lawsuit against Google ("arising out of Google’s use of typosquatting domains to display advertising"), so he may not be the least biased person in the world.  The numbers he and Moore presented are still stunning, though, and would remain noteworthy even if halved.

According to a new rumor, Google could soon take Street View indoors and allow its users to walk into virtual stores. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land just received information from a retailer in New York that Google came to their store to take pictures of the inside of the store.

Update: We just received confirmation from an anonymous source that Google is indeed working on this project.

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We just heard from a retailer in San Francisco that Google also photographed the inside of their store about 2 weeks ago – after seeking permission to do so, of course. According to our source, the Google employee used a “specialized camera which he rotated to take the 360 degree shot.” In addition, he also took shots “looking out of the store as if exiting.” This last part makes sense if Google wants to use this sequence of images to simulate the process of entering and exiting the store.

Of course, scaling up a program like this would be a lot harder to do than having a fleet of cars drive around the country and take photos in what is now a mostly automated process.

Here is the image that Search Engine Land received from the New York-based retailer:

Given that Google is already using its Street View trikes in parks, university campuses and zoos, locations like large malls would seem like a more reasonable area to expand Street View to first. Taking Street View indoors does make a lot of sense, however. Stores and malls are the obvious example that Google could monetize, but the company could also use the same technology in museums or public buildings.

The problem with these locations, though, is that Google can’t rely solely on GPS to create these indoor views. Maybe that’s why the company decided to work with smaller locations first to try out different methods for creating reliable indoor maps efficiently. It is worth noting that there are currently only a handful of mobile apps that offer indoor maps.

We asked Google for a comment about this rumor and will update the story once we hear back from them.

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Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps.

Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under the "Too many Sitemaps" error:

The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.

The larger number was confirmed by Simon, who came back to the conversation, saying, "Thanks for resurfacing this thread as we’ve improved our capacity a bit since then. The limit used to be 1,000. The Help Center article you point to is correct. The current maximum number of Sitemaps that can be referenced in a Sitemap Index file is 50,000."

As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who stumbled across this post points out, "This is a huge increase in capacity…Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps."

In other words, you can have a lot of sitemaps in one sitemap index file. That’s some good information to know, and it is a little surprising that there wasn’t a bigger announcement made about this.
 

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Those who have been following the search industry for some time, may recall that Google had some legal issues with the (former) magazine Perfect 10 (nsfw). The company, which ceased publication of its magazine, but still operates on the web, has issued a press release saying that its five year battle with the search giant is "about to heat up."

This week, Perfect 10 completed its filing of a motion for sanctions against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Perfect 10 is accusing Google of "widespread discovery abuse," which the company says includes multiple violations of three separate court orders.

Perfect 10′s legal feud with Google began back in 2004. The case dealt with Google’s use of thumbnails from Perfect 10′s site. It was essentially a question of whether or not that was considered fair use. Google had eventually lost the case, but the ruling against Google had been tossed out by an appeals panel. That was in 2007. However, it did not end there. Fast forward to now.

"Google appears to have the view that it is above the law," says Perfect 10 President, Dr. Norm Zada. "We spent a great deal of time and effort obtaining Court orders requiring Google to produce documents critical to our case. In our view, Google has not complied with those orders."

Perfect 10 says the case revolves around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed by Congress in 1998 to address issues concerning copyright infringement on the Internet.

"Under the DMCA, a search engine such as Google may receive limited immunity from monetary damages for copyright infringement if it complies with the requirements of the DMCA," Zada says. "The search engine must act expeditiously to remove or disable access to infringing material upon receiving notice of infringement from the copyright owner, and it must adopt a procedure so that copyright holders will not have to provide the search engine with notices about the same infringing material or the same infringers over and over."

Perfect 10 says it has argued that Google has "failed to satisfy" these things. Perfect 10 says a judge ordered Google to produce its DMCA log, which the company says is defined as "a spreadsheet-type document summarizing DMCA notices received, the identity of the notifying party and the accused infringer, and the actions (if any) taken in response."

Perfect 10 is insisting in its press release that Google has violated multiple court orders, and that Perfect 10 can’t "fairly litigate the case" without such documents. 

Perfect 10′s  motion for sanctions against Google is currently set for hearing on December 21. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Perfect 10 hasn’t had the best of luck in the past.

Related Articles:

> Court Is OK With Sexy Google Images

> Perfect 10 Loses Again

> Perfect 10 Tries Again, This Time With MSN

Google’s "suggest" feature can be quite useful. It can save you time when typing your query if you happen to be searching for something that a lot of others have searched for before you. The feature is even useful for Google itself, because a while back, they began incorporating ads into it.

Google Suggest has some problems though. This is nothing new. People have discovered some strange suggestions from time to time. One that has been discussed around the web frequently this year for example, is Google’s suggestion of "Why wont my parakeet eat my diarrhea" when a user begins a query with "why won’t". This one has even repeatedly made it onto the Google Hot Trends list.

That one was kind of funny (if that’s your sense of humor), but Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable is pointing to a more disturbing set of suggestions from the search engine. When a user begins a query with "little kids," the very first suggestion is "little kids having sexs". Among the other suggestions on the list are "little kids dancing nasty," and "little kids grinding."

Schwartz  also pointed to another suggestion from Google saying "I am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People" that a user is presented with when beginning a query with "I am".

Schwartz notes that Google’s suggestions are purely algorithmic. It’s not as though Google’s staff is actually encouraging searches like these, but the suggestions do highlight the need for some adjustments and/or human intervention.

In the case of the "little kids" suggestions, Schwartz says a Google employee responded to his report by saying, "Thanks for reporting this to me — I’ll take a look." However, at the time of this writing, each of the aforementioned suggestions are still in place.

Have you seen other inappropriate or otherwise odd suggestions from Google Suggest? Share in the comments.
 

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