Michael Jackson’s legacy came to an end after his unfortunate demise. Popularly known as The King of Pop, his death brought the world to a standstill; just like his music did.
The internet virtually collapsed due to the death of MJ. Popular news sites like CNN and Google News were inaccessible due to their failure to deliver the updated news. Another popular site, Twitter was constantly showing the whale images, indicating the huge amount of traffic on the site. Even Wikipedia, was not behind. In less than 24 hours, the site saw more than 500 people edit MJs page on Wikipedia.
Facebook and YouTube were also heavily loaded with people trying to share the information about the incidence. YouTube was flooded with people searching for MJs famous Moonwalk step.
Techcrunch and CNN provides an exhaustive report about how the internet almost came to a standstill following the demise of MJ.
Search and advertising, we are a small share….It’s all about Google. They have share, we don’t have share.
These were the words of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer back in February. He did accept that nobody has any competitive edge in the search and advertising space other than Google. Its a complete monopoly by Google, but now Microsoft has come up with their new search engine - Bing. Here’s the video of Steve Ballmer announcing the debut of Bing from the D7 stage.
So, how much of an impact does the arrival of a new search engine makes to Google? Well only time will tell. But one thing is sure that its gonna take something out of the world to beat Google in their game.
Social Media - The word that is driving many people crazy is actually unpopular amongst the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies. In a recent survey carried by ÜBERCEO, it was revealed that very few CEOs have ever touched the social media sites. And the ones who did create an account, never came back to update or manage their profiles on the social media sites.
The popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr, etc. have failed to lure the top bosses to use them. Take a look at the presentation from ÜBERCEO and get to know the real stats.
What did this presentation tell you? Do you think that the top bosses are lazy in not maintaining their social media profiles? Will their active participation help their companies to fare better than others?
Share your opinions and you might just be able to make a difference.
Recently I read that Google understands flash files in a better way now. Until now, Google was not completely able to understands the script in the flash file and hence was facing difficulties in indexing them. Until now, if there was some supporting content which was relevant to the content of the flash, then Google used to establish a relationship between the content and rank it accordingly for the keywords.
But now, with an enhancement to their search quality, Google can also understand the content within the flash file and index it so that it can be returned for relevant search queries.
To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, it can:
Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.
Discover links within Flash files.
Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 and AS3 in addition to the older versions of AS.
This new capability will ensure that Google is able to provide relevant results that may contain flash animations or flash videos. Its interesting to note that Google has come up with this enhancement to their search quality so late. Should we term this as theBing Effect?
Probably the arrival of Bing has created lot of ripples in the industry. Every day there is so much spoken and written about Bing, its positives, its negatives, its features and many more points. Almost everyone associated with the search engines has been publishing their views, thoughts and reviews about Bing and whether it can displace Google as the #1 search engine.
But Paul Savage, a web programmer and SEO specialist had other ideas to when Bing was launched. Instead of reviewing it, he developed a cool tool which allows you to compare search results for Bing and Google at the same time.
I tried searching for the keyword - ‘i am sam’ and here is the screen shot of what I could see.
Now its interesting to note that both these search engines are giving different search results. I won’t dwell into the review part, but one thing is for sure that Microsoft has made it very clear that they are not going to allow Google to play the monopoly. It has been a long time that Google has been the most used search engine, and Yahoo and Microsoft have been fighting for the remaining bits and pieces, but not any more. MS has taken the first step to make this search industry more competitive and I am happy about it. This is so because this competition will give us a chance to witness some great innovations that may be round the corner.
By the way, if you are a Yahoo faithful, you are not lucky enough to compare the results for Yahoo and Bing. I am afraid, you will have to stay contented with search results for Google and Yahoo for the time being.
