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.

Google gears up for offline web

Gears, an open source technology allowing browsers to support offline web applications has been released by Google to coincide with the company's annual Developer Day.

Gears provides three main JavaScript APIs. LocalServer stores and accesses application pages offline, Database stores and accesses application data on the user's computer, and WorkerPool performs long-running tasks such as synchronising data between the user's computer and the server.

One thing mentionable about Gears is that web applications must be rewritten to take advantage of its facilities. A Gears-enabled version of Google Reader has been released to demonstrate what's possible.

Support for the project has been voiced by Adobe, Mozilla and Opera. The Google Gears beta is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and requires Firefox 1.5 or later, or Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Safari will be supported in a later release

Google and Salesforce.com- An Alliance

Wall Street Journal reports that Google and Salesforce.com are discussing an alliance that could help them compete more effectively with Microsoft, meaning not a buyout but a tie-up deeper than the AdWords deal the two have now. It’s a natural alliance of two very smart companies that are leveraging the Internet and their respective business models to the hilt.

The talks are still ongoing and there has been speculation of a deal in the last few months to this effect.The deal could be where a Web-based offering integrates some of Google’s online services such as email and IM with those of Salesforce.com.

The Giant called Google

Once in a century does a company come that takes the world by storm and changes the way people live. After that invention of the printing press, if there is one invention that has rapidly changed the way we consume and share information, then it has to be the phenom called Google. In as span of a decade Google has become the most powerful and recognizable brand ever, beating brands like Microsoft, GE and even Coca-Cola who have been present for a considerable amount of time. Google has a market value of 147 Billion dollars and their major source of revenue is advertising. So what makes Google tick? What is it that they have and the others don't have?

On the top of my head I can think of the following:

The management:
The three people at the helm of Google, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the CEO Eric Schimdt make a powerful team and have their roles chalked out very clearly. With Page looking into the developments of various products and Brin, who is supposed be to be an excellent at making and negotiating deals, managing the Business aspects of Google both take on deversified yet important roles in shaping Google's present and future. Eric Schmidt looks after the day-to-day at Google which has helped in Google growing so rapidly yet without losing its focus and speed.

The infrastructure:
Google boasts of an infrastructure which only few companies can even think of building. Google has inexpensively built out its computing infrastructure by using thousands of "commodity" servers, instead of fewer high-end, and high-priced, machines. These servers deliver instant search results to millions of internet users across the globe. The company also wrote its own file system, called Google File System, which is optimized for handling large blocks of data.

The culture:
Though Google has grown rapidly both in revenues as well in number of employees, it has tried hard to maintain the feel of a startup. The workplace at google still is supposed to be quite similar to that of a grad school. At the Google Headquarters recreational amenities, snack rooms are scattered throughout the campus. Also they have 80-20 work culture whereby an employee works 80% of his time on google projects and 20% of his time on projects that interest them. One of succesful projects coming out of this is the massively popular social networking site Orkut and the email service Gmail.

The people:
Of all the factors mentioned above its the quality of people at google that makes google what it is today. At the time of the dot com bubble when all companies were firing everyone in Silicon Valley, Google was smart enough to hire these computer genuises and build up a strong foundation in terms of brain power. And today the brain power that google has at its disposal is something that every tech company envies.

Even if Yahoo!, Microsoft, or some unknown upstart manages within the next few years to unseat the reigning giant of search engines, I doubt any will be able to replace the mystique and the niche that Google has achieved. Google has managed to fascinate everyone from the homeless at your local public library to presidents. Some people mistake it for the Internet. And nearly everyone has their favorite Google story. There seems to be no end in site to Google madness, mimicry, or mutation. All we can do is sit back, click, and enjoy it.