Google-Sina in China

Google has teamed up with Sina, one of China’s largest portals. Google will now power Sina's search features in return for integrating its famed AdSense technology on to Sina’s pages. Also Sina's search traffic will be directed to Google and search ad revenues will be shared.

This may help both companies counter Baidu which has a commanding 55% search market share in China in opposition to Google's 21.7%. Both Google and Baidu are competing to sign up smaller websites for their traffic. Advertisers may be less willing to pay a higher keyword price at Baidu now that Google is a more creditable competitor.

The deal with Sina is Google’s largest in China and will increase Google’s market share in search traffic and search revenues.Google’s has so far has made a $5 million investment in China in P2P video site Xunlei.

China has the world's second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online, and is on track to surpass the United States as the largest online population in two years. Though Google and Yahoo have been making inroads into China, domestic operators such as Sohu.com, Baidu and Alibaba held an obvious cultural and first-mover edge.

Ask gets a makeover

Ask has launched a new interface and a few cool new features for its search engine, which it's calling Ask3D.

The first thing users will notice is a very attractive new home page, with pretty buttons to narrow a search into a silo, such as images, maps, or blogs. Users can select one of several photos as a background image on the main search interface. In the future, you'll be able to use your own image. When you begin to type in a query, a drop-down box gives you suggestions to fill it out.

The new interface splits up search result pages into three panes. In the middle, you get ads and your main links. Many results have a spyglass icon, which will display a snapshot of the search result when you hover over it as well as displaying useful stats like the page size and load time.

On the left of the main pane, you get links related to your search. These links do a very good job of conveying the context of the search you're looking at.

On the right of the main pain there are related links from different search silos. On different searches you get different clumps of content. For example, search for a famous musucian and you'll get links to audio previews. You can play the clips in the search page, which is pretty slick.The new Ask.com results page also uses your IP address to locate you, roughly, and can display results related to your location.

One thing that isn't radically different in Ask3D: Ask's core search engine. As far as I could tell from my usage experiecence, the search results that Ask3D returns were the same as Ask.com previously. When compared to Google, I did not get consistently good results with Ask.com.