“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is “Just how many books are out there?”” says Leonid Taycher, Google software engineer working on the Google Books project.
They counted 129,864,880 titles, or almost 130 million.
As you would expect, not everyone is buying Google’s count of all the world’s books, with Jon Stokes amongst others coming out with their own announcement, and that is the Google book count is bunkum.
So, a long time ago (at least it feels that way), having posted about Google’s desire to reproduce the world’s books, and the ensuing arguments that arose from it, I thought it was time to do an update on the books project to find out where were at and what had happened since we last discussed it.
So last time we talked about the Google books project, Amazon (who stood to have its book retailing market pulled from beneath it), Microsoft and various Governments (including the German and French) had weighed in on the opposing camp.
GOOGLE is “reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China” and may back out of China entirely, as it disclosed it had been hit with major cyber attacks it believes to have originated from the country.
In a blog posting, authored by Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, Google said:
“First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities. Continue Reading
Yahoo! and Microsoft have finalised the terms of their search agreement, five months after announcing the deal.
The two technology companies have sealed the terms of a landmark search deal which will see Microsoft’s Bing power Yahoo!’ search engine.
In return Yahoo! will be responsible for selling advertising around the combined search efforts.
The companies today released a joint statement: “Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.
According to searchengineland, you have until mid/late 2010 to prepare your website for Microsoft’s Bing search engine ranking. The bad news is, if you’re already ranking well in Yahoo! it will all count for nothing.
So how do you know whether you should worry about Bing? Start with identifying how much traffic Yahoo! is sending your way. If the number is significant, you should invest the effort to do what’s needed in Bing.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is emerging as a challenger to the dominance of Google after capturing a near-11 per cent share of the market in little more than three months.
The latest statistics from Nielsen, the research firm, show that Bing, which went live in June, is now the fastest-growing internet search engine in the United States. Its market share leapt to 10.7 per cent in August, from 9 per cent in July — a rise of more than 22 per cent.
If you’ve just started to use Google Analytics and aren’t sure which reports to look at, this video provides a helpful first-time analysis walkthrough.
Learn how to interpret what you see in these key reports and what actions you should take as a result.
GOOGLE has bowed to European Union pressure and will make concessions to European publishers and authors in an attempt to stem rising anger over its move to digitise and sell millions of books online, a report said.
It has made a promise to consult European publishers before cataloguing some European works in its digital library.
The company has agreed to have two non-US representatives on the board of a body that will administer a US legal settlement over the controversial online project, the Financial Times said.
The newspaper cited a letter sent to 16 European Union publishers’ representatives at the weekend. According to the letter, Google also promises to consult European publishers before cataloguing some European works in its digital library. Continue Reading
When it comes to site load times, you really want to be the hare not the tortoise.
Page loads essentially speed at which your website will load in a visitors browser. Having pages that load quickly is important from a usability point of view.
From a marketing perspective. you want the experience of coming to your website to be quick and easy for your visitors. If you are a store, you want them to buy.
People on the internet really expect immediacy – they are really impatient.
They get frustrated when pages are slow to load – so much so that they just hit their back arrows and just exit right out. And they head off somewhere else – and that might be to your competitors if you’re selling something online.
While a lot of people are on broadband, and that does improve things, there is still a portion of the Internet population still using dialup to connect through.
If you want to be accessible to people using dial up you really have to pay attention to your page load and make sure your page is quick to load. And by quick I mean a few seconds – the fewer the better.
The kind of things that affect page load are pictures, graphics and video. Also some scripts and the number of objects each page contains. Continue Reading
“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is “Just how many books are out there?”” says Leonid Taycher, Google software engineer working on the Google Books project.
