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While following the World Cup in South Africa I sometimes find myself searching for scores and more information about the games and players. That is also the reason for Google launching a new service where you can keep up to date…

The service basically helps you find information you need (tadaaaaaa ) - so when you complete a search related to the World Cup, you’ll see live scores, latest results and match schedules at the top of your search results. You’ll also find TV broadcast information and quick links for game recaps, live updates, standings and team profiles. The feature works on all Google search domains in 44 languages, including Afrikaans, Amharic, Swahili and Zulu.

Example searches: [world cup], [world cup spain] and [world cup group g]

Caffeine indexing system
Also just announced is Google’s completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. This new indexing system provides fresher results for web searches (nearly 50 percent fresher than Google’s previous system) and it’s the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered. The reason for building Caffeine was to help us meet the evolving expectations of their users, especially as content across the web becomes more global and is published in real time.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Google launched Google Ad Innovations end of March - a sort of a Google Lab, but this time for its many advertising products that it is currently experimenting on.  Google Ad Innovations will showcase Google’s latest idea around advertising technologies.

Google Ad Innovations currently has several new advertising products that Google may or may not release in the future. You will among other things find the recently announced Search Funnels for AdWords, which are sets of reports that describe the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that result to conversion for ad campaigns. You can find out more information about Search Funnels, as well as watch a video walkthrough of the new product etc.

Check out the Google Ad Innovations site for more info on advertising-related products categorized into search, display, mobile and measurement: Google Ad Innovations

Most online publishers already know instinctively that a slow-loading website isn’t a good thing. After all, who has the time to browse around a website on which pages take forever to load? Not a lot of people in today’s fast-paced world.

Google knows that, and after it dropped a hint late last year, has followed through on its plans to incorporate website speed into its ranking algorithm.

A post on the Google Webmaster Central blog explains:

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

Common sense stuff to be sure, but that said, it’s worth pointing out that it’s probably not advisable to fret over your website’s performance and hosting setup if your website generally performs well. That’s because website speed is still a minor ranking factor:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Nonetheless, in the highly-competitive world of SEO, any opportunity for gain will be of interest to publishers and SEOs.

Full story here: Econsultancy

Microsoft finally persuaded Yahoo to surrender control of the Internet’s second most popular search engine and join it in a daunting battle — taking on the overwhelming dominance of Google in the online advertising market.

A 10-year deal announced Wednesday gives Microsoft its best shot yet to show its new search technology, Bing, is as good as or better than Google’s. Microsoft also hopes to use Yahoo to divert sales from Google, which generates more than $20 billion a year from ads.

By spending less on its own search technology, Yahoo expects to boost its annual operating profit by about $500 million — but not until 2012, when the two companies expect to have all the pieces of a complex technological puzzle in place.

“I am very enthusiastic,” Ballmer said in an interview. “This is what I have basically been saying for the past 18 months: The world will be better served for consumers, advertisers and publishers, and there will be more competition for Google, if we can somehow figure out how to get Microsoft and Yahoo together in search.”

Like Yahoo, Microsoft has invested billions in search technology during the past decade. Yet it remained a distant third in market share while its online losses piled up. Microsoft is counting on Bing, unveiled last month, to turn things around. Bing has been getting mostly positive reviews and picking up slightly more traffic with the help of a $100 million marketing campaign. Analysts believe the successful debut pushed Microsoft to reopen negotiations so it could expose its search engine improvements to a wider audience.

While Microsoft and Yahoo await government approval of their partnership, there is no doubt Google will try to increase its lead by upgrading its own search engine, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter SearchEngineLand. Already, Google is going after Microsoft’s bread-and-butter business of software for personal computers. It’s working on a free operating system for inexpensive PCs, a move that could threaten Microsoft’s Windows.

The Microsoft deal with Yahoo will allow the both to have about 30% of the world’s total search market share (according to some reports - i.e. ComScore). It still is a far cry from 65% held by Google - but I think that that 30% might just increase. It will also change the dynamics of the search marketplace globally - and also in Asia. With this deal, Google’s dominance is going to be a little less - well - dominant, and threatened.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Google has launched a free voice-based mobile internet search facility in India that has been built entirely by the internet search giant’s India engineering team. Further the work is on in order to improve the facility as it might have some problems due to different accent prevalent in the country.

India is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in world. Mobiles (slightly over 415 million) outnumbered personal computers (PCs — slightly over 30 million). It could be the next biggest medium for advertisers!

Here are the details:

The voice-based mobile search throws up results similar to a PC-based search query. A user can log on to the internet on his/her mobile, open the Google search page, and ask for a particular location, pizza joint, taxi stand or florist while driving a vehicle. Simply speaking the word “weather” into the phone, for instance, would throw up the top results.

Currently available only to the estimated 400,000 Blackberry cell phone users, the company hopes to extend this facility to other handsets by the end of the year.

A couple of months earlier, Google India had also launched an SMS-based search in Hindi and Telegu in cities like Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The mobile internet-based voice search, however, is currently available only in English.

Right now, Google is struggling to reconcile India’s variegated accents and pronunciation with the search engines. “Accents are indeed a problem, and we are working towards improving the application,” said Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India.

For its SMS-based “voice search”, Google uses a combination of an automated voice recognition engine and operators to provide this facility. To make the service faster and better, it is also experimenting with voice recognition technology, which will ensure 24-hour support. The company plans to extend the technology to other cities once it is confident of the quality of its speech recognition technology “in any region of the country”.

Meanwhile, as handsets and data plans get cheaper and the number of mobile internet users grows, Google India is gradually moving its focus away from just SMS to other value-added services (VAS) like social networking, Google Maps and voice-based internet-based search on mobiles, according to Goel. The logic is simple. Mobiles (slightly over 415 million) outnumber personal computers (PCs — slightly over 30 million) in India.

On the social networking front, “one out of 10 mobile internet users use Orkut in India. The users are primarily in the age group of 19 to 25,” said Goel, adding that Orkut “is the largest source of photo uploads in India. Many users upload photos from Orkut to YouTube (another Google property)”. The Google Maps application, on the other hand, provides a cheaper alternative to GPS or global positioning system-loaded devices. Unlike GPS, which uses satellites to guide users, Google Maps uses mobile operators’ cellphone IDs (from towers) to help users identify locations, especially in cities.

Google also hopes to be a catalyst in the dialogue between device manufacturers and carriers to foster the development of Android (its open software platform which any handset manufacturer can use) phones in India.” Pricing is the key to Android’s success in India. While pricing is the prerogative of each handset manufacturer, the Rs 10,000 figure is a sweet spot. This should foster data usage and growth of mobile internet,” asserts Goel.

Source: SiliconIndia

Naver Japan search, the culmination of years of hard work by the Korean search giant, has finally been unveiled and is now available to some 5,000 beta testers. Reviews are already coming in, and the service is well received. Naver uses flash graphics to create a graphically rich UI, much in contrast to Google and Baidu. Naver is arguably the pioneer of universal search but in addition to universal search, Naver also offers other interesting search types such as Kuchikomi, BBS, and Q&A.

The Korean search giant Naver is extending its hand to Japan, another internet savvy country.  Naver is famous for their innovations and stick to this business model, we can be expecting a lot of advertising opportunities in Naver Japan.

Source: Web 2.0 Asia