Goojje is a play on words, sounding like sister while  ‘Google’ in maderin sounds very much like big brother. The creators of Goojje even left a message on their front page roughly translated as “Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister”. Many are interpiting this as a mockery of Google potentially pulling out of China while others believe it is a plea for Google to stay.

Goojje Home- page suspiciously similar to Google

It is very clear that the site has modeled itself off the searching giant from the style of layout to the Google font and colours. There is even a small nod to Baidu with the paw print in its logo.  The search engine returns many of the same results of Google but only ‘clean’ government approved websites. It is well known that the Chinese government has implemented filters on the country’s internet access dubbed as The Great Firewall of China, with any content that is deemed ‘undesirable’ blocked out. This includes many foreign sites such as the BBC news site.

The Google owned Youtube was also reproducted with a Chinese makeover. A variation of Youtube called Youtubecn popped up not long after Goojje showing videos that are usually blocked on the Youtube’s site. Although its slow and often described as glichy, Youtbecn is gaining alot of momentum.

Google refused to make any comment on Goojje or other copycat sites.

Search engine optimisation is a way of getting your site to rank highly on search engines by choosing words and phrases that best relate to your website. As users search these terms it is a sure fire way to display your website at the top. By making changes to your meta tags and HTML, the quality of searches can be improved greatly. Its widely known that the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves like to keep their search algorithms and strategies a secret to stop spam sites from clogging up their searches and still claim credit for the highest search results.

SEO algorithms are very complex, meaning, for example that a website could be ranked 600th on Google and 1st on AOL. There’s often no need to submit a new site to a search engine as a cleverly placed link to an existing site will do the trick, connecting all the content together on the search engine. From then it takes a few days for all the new sites to be indexed. Now it is imperative that research is carried out to find the best search phrases and keywords to improve your search engine ranking. This is usually time consuming for business’, who are now choosing to seek additional help for this kind of promotion and marketing. A kind of a consultation service to help improve the design and traffic of their site

123 Ranking is one of those that business’ are turning to guarantee their top ten position in search engines. SEO with a difference they are defiantly one to be looked up.

www.123ranking.co.uk

Well, Hakia has come up with nobrandsearch.com – a blind test of search engines. It takes results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and it’s own Hakia and delivers them unbranded to see which results people prefer. Search Engine Watch goes into more detail on this and is well worth a read and even a test.

What did you find on nobrandsearch.com? Did you click Google every time?

Nowadays search engines are finely tuned to deliver the most relevant results to its users in the quickest possible time, taking in many factors to make split-second decisions on which results you need to be shown. Back then, search engines were a lot more simple and their approaches were somewhat different to what we are used to today.

Bill Slawski thought it would be fun to look at how the search engines looked a decade ago.

Google’s approach isn’t to simply offer a new service to further their goliath brand. They explicitly state that they “may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.” This means that your information, although anonymous, will be tracked, monitored and potentially published and used for better targeting of their adverts or otherwise.

Even though we’ve seen similar services such as the tr.im closedown recently, it looks like URL shortening services are here to stay. And why not? They are perfect for posting long URLs on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a service that is borne out of other leaders imposing limits on their service. Twitter for example with their 140 character limit on all tweets.

At the moment, Google’s URL shortening service can only be used for shortening Google’s own products and services and “not for broader consumer use.”

What are your thoughts on Google’s new venture? Are there enough URL shortening services? Do they simply disguise where you are linking to, shrouding your link destination in a cloud of fog? Should long URLs be there to let you know exactly what you’ll be seeing when you click on a link? Post your comments below.

Top Local Listings (www.toplocallistings.co.uk) – A popular localised business directory
Web Listings (www.weblistings.co.uk) – A small but highly rated business directory
Business Directory UK – (www.businessdirectory-uk.com) – A popular UK business directory
Gay Arrangement – (www.gayarrangement.com) – The first gay sugardaddy dating website

The  proposal was unveiled by Google’s Matt Cutts last week, during which page loading time was included in a list of ‘things to expect in 2010.’ Matt explained that the loading time of a site  is already a factor in Google Adwords  advertising  and that there is a strong desire to incorporate the speed of a site  in Google’s organic search ranking algorithm and making it a quality factor.

Seeing as Google have over 200 other organic ranking algorithms being taken into consideration, which are changing all of the time,  page loading time may not ultimately prove to carry a significant weight, and will probably only impact those sites that take an excessive amount of time to load. Nevertheless, loading time is a factor that site owners have some degree of control over and this decision may see users taking measures to ensure their pages are loading as quickly as possible.

This decision may provide a justification for webmasters to spend more money on larger hosting packages with hosting providers with high connectivity, or even move to a dedicated server . Although this would seemingly provide a “quick fix” site owners are being encouraged to put more of a focus on the quality of their dynamic pages and work to employ the best coding and SEO practices to produce fast loading, high-performance sites.

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.” Google

This may well turn out to be a big problem for some website owners, webmasters and SEO companies – but it also may not be. We briefly tested the developer’s preview of the Google’s Caffeine sandbox while it was available and did see some differences in the results but, for the most part, things didn’t look too bad – although we did see some fluctuation. In fact we were quite happy with the results!

Google reiterate that the changes were predominantly ‘under the hood’ and they don’t seem to have redeveloped their ranking algorithm so most users won’t even noticed much of a difference.

“The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Matt Cutts

The Google Caffeine update will initially be rolled out onto one datacenter in order for them to test it and collect data to ensure that both them and we are ready for the launch – not to mention the anxiety some webmasters will be feeling as they don’t know how their websites will be ranked once the changes have been rolled out. They just want to make sure everybody is ready.

“Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.” Matt Cutts

How do you think the caffeine update will affect you? Did you test out the sandbox while it was available? Comment below.

Visual search has been described as being similar to walking into a shop of physically looking at products. And it’s hard to disagree. We think it should prove to beneficial for anyone browsing for makes and models of items such as electronic products as well as sofas and clothing where quite often the visual aspect is important.

Many electronic products, for example, use combinations of letters and numbers to differentiate between models – such as mobile phones. Visual search would be a great bonus for anyone looking for something visually pleasing or where its design or colour is important and text-based search doesn’t easily give you the results you are after unless you know what it is you are looking for.

Being rolled out to US users at first it is also only being launched for a select few categories and is to be expanded upon in the future.

You can try the visual search from Bing at bing.com/visualsearch and make sure you let us know what you think by posting a comment below.

Receiving a 404 error? You will need to set your default country to United States in order to view the visual search feature until it is rolled out to other countries.

Both parties are currently refusing to comment on the deal, and it still remains unclear as to which of Sony’s computers will receive the installation and as to whether there may be some initial restrictions to the initial roll-out.

A Google spokesman recently divulged that the response to Google Chrome has been better than imagined so far and they are continuing to explore new ways to make Google Chrome accessible to even more people.

The deal between Sony and Google will represent a major challenge on Microsoft’s current computing dominance and Google has also announced plans to develop its own operating system which will prove even more of a threat for the current global leader.

Could this see Google completely take over the computing world?……… Only time will tell, so watch this space!