Reports suggest that initially, as early as January of 2010, Google will be selling unsubsidized unlocked phones to the public. They won’t be affiliated to any specific carrier and will be compatible with GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. As mobile internet usage has gone up significantly in the recent past Google seems to recognize this trend and the phone seems to be its first move to cement its position in the mobile market.

Google plans to sell the Nexus One online. Most phones sold in the US tend to be carrier subsidized. However outside the US it’s the norm for unlocked phones to be sold independent of the carrier. How Google will price its product in different countries is still unknown.

Google has been trying to break the hold of mobile carriers on the mobile market, and with recent acquisitions like Gizmo5, they seem to be ready with a new strategy. They can set themselves up to offer subsidized and inexpensive services directly to the consumers using a product like Google Voice. In exchange for advertising, they could offer services that cost a fraction as much as charged by carriers presently.

The growth of mobile search revenue by 30% this year looks like the key reason why Google is looking to strengthen its mobile presence. Apple’s contribution to this increase was pivotal, and this also seems to make the company nervous. They do not want to rely on an outside company to control a major component of its revenue.

Analysts have expressed some concerns about Google’s move into the handset market. Currently, the only presence Google has in the mobile market is through the Android phones made by third parties and the iPhone which supports Google. With the company deciding to enter into the handset market, it stands the risk of alienating their current handset partners.

Google had spent the most of last year teaming up with carriers and handset makers to release its Android OS. As of now, nine phones and 32 carriers have partnered with Google. It looks like Google’s phone will likely upset a handful of their partners.

This also seems to bring to the forefront the growing battle between Apple and Google. Previously thought of to be working together against a common competitor, Microsoft, this move seems looks like the beginning of stiff competition among the two companies.

For example, the Droid, Motorola’s phone with the Android OS offers turn by turn navigation as a standard free app on its phone. The iPhone on the other hand offers an app from TomTom which costs $99.

As we continuously see the search engine market shake things up tremendously, the consumer seems to be getting better and better options. If Google’s phone ends up being the phone the public really wants, then whatever is said about the negative repercussions could be history. And finally Apple might see it’s worthy competitor.

Now Google on its search page gives real time results for keyword searches as tweets stream into Twitter. The results constantly update, and it has its own scroll bar.

For example, a search of Michael Jackson would show up a box which constantly refreshes itself, and more messages are added which can be scrolled.

For the regular user, Twitter might not have seemed like it would be of much use, but to marketers Twitter is a treasure chest of market research. It also seems to be the new tool to deliver breaking news. In most cases Twitter updates are faster than traditional news due to direct streaming from source.

Public opinion comes streaming in from different sectors and businesses who would like to assess their brand can use Twitter effectively. This potential of Twitter has got venture capital to the tune of $100 million dollars.

Google has not made a secret of its wishes to index more and more information. It has long expressed interest in real time results and in mining data from services like Twitter. This move will be beneficial to the search engine as well Twitter or any other future real time data services. They can avoid the delays of regular news sources which update their news at a much lesser frequency. Microsoft and Yahoo have also signed similar deals using the same reasoning.

People have questioned the longevity of Twitter once it allows its content to be searched. But analysts say search engines will now literally be able to listen in on the world’s conversations. Privacy issues have been brought up many time, but the public seems to like the open approach of Twitter.

Goggles supports searches of books, DVDs, popular landmarks, company logos, barcodes, products etc. The search base will grow in time as more and more data is attached to the search.

When an image is captured, the app breaks it down into signatures of objects. These signatures are then compared to the image database. Within a short time it retrieves results that closely match the signature that is present in your image. Some results are generated even without the picture using GPS and the compass functions found on the android phones.

You can walk up to a storefront, click a picture, and in seconds you could be looking at links that are associated with the business. You could get ratings, reviews or price lists as well. The same goes for books or DVDs. Though with the present beta version, there are a fair number of misses coupled with the hits the potential of the product is not hard to see.

Keyword based search is pretty much the only option most of us have when it comes to search. Using rich media like pictures to do the same operation can radically change the game. Even SEO experts will find this a new avenue, as most strategies that are currently implemented deal with language based search.

The movement from text to visual search can potentially mean that the importance of good content will rise. Since the search will be based on signatures of the object in the image, relevant content becomes easier to index in a sense. The actual implementation at Google might be complex, but this aspect is hard to miss.

Presently, Goggles is only released to Android phone users. No timeline has been given on when the product might be available to other smart phones like the iPhone and the BlackBerry. Good news however is that eventually the app will be available to the other phones as well, and Google will not be looking to restrict it to just the Android phones.

The initial limited release is intended to be more of a test version. Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering has this to say, “Today Goggles recognizes certain images in certain categories, but our goal is to return high-quality results for any image.”

The current version of Goggles, by admission of Google, barely scratches the surface of the power of this kind of visual search.  Some examples of future applications are identifying images like leaves and returning the name of the plant, or possibly get help with a chess game by taking a picture!

There is a product called “Sixth Sense” that is being developed at MIT by students. It seems like Goggles and Sixth Sense have some common traits. Both products vie to ID the world, and make it possible to index everything that exists in the physical world, and make it accessible seamlessly in the digital world. And in the distant future, maybe we will have search that could work off our brain waves.

Until this future arrives, at least for the time being, people seem to be happy to let Google show us the way forward.

Though the feature in itself is still in its nascent stages the video scripts that now get associated with a video will help give YouTube content a robust presence online. The captions will get indexed on search engines, and the relevancy of video search results will improve as a result.

As of now, few videos online enjoy the companionship of captions. Most videos would rely on just the title and some meta-data for search engine indexing. With captioning, now video can be looked at almost like traditional text content. For example, if a video on cooking is posted, it is likely that words like meat, vegetables etc show up on content. Unlike just relying on the title that says “xyz recipe” the actual video script now will enhance its ranking and relevance to a certain keyword.

Google will be using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to generate English subtitles. Though initially it is said to be limited in performance, it is said to improve in stages as time goes by. YouTube traffic could potentially rise much higher than its current levels as a result. Lot of work has been going on with the image search lately, and this addition to video search could be a vital avenue for internet marketing and SEO of any form.

This automated generation of captions will first be applied to thirteen partner channels. Currently they include channels like UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and some Google and YouTube channels.

Through another feature called Automatic Timing, users can manually add captions to their video. To carry out this task, users will need to supply a text file with the script that is used in the video. It is different from traditional subtitle files (.srt files) in the sense that it does not need to contain any timing information. Google will automatically synchronize the words with the spoken data in the video.

With Google embroiled in anti-trust cases around the globe, this feature certainly does help make Google look less evil than it is made out to be.

News Corp owns a number of newspapers around the world including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Sun and The Times of London. The first reports about talks between Microsoft and News Corp pointed toward Microsoft paying millions to News Corp for exclusive search rights. Neither party however has made a formal statement to the press.

Murdoch has repeatedly expressed his displeasure about people accessing news content free on the web. With the traditional newspaper industry slowly moving toward its demise, Murdoch seems to be trying to hedge the same fate for its online version. He states that the consumer should pay for receiving quality reporting from its newspapers.

The actual act of taking its content off of Google isn’t very complicated. They simply need to include a robots.txt file on the website which instructs Google’s crawler to not index its pages. However the more important question is how wise is Murdoch’s move.

To help get a clearer picture of the consequences we look at a few numbers. Google has been responsible for almost 25% of Wall Street Journal’s traffic. This is higher than any other source that drives traffic to its site.  Removing its content from Google could potentially kill this section of their market.

The flip-side is that Microsoft is willing to pay millions to News Corp to index its sites. Since print and advertising revenue has been slumping big time, this could mean added short term revenue for News Corp. In the long term however, they risk becoming irrelevant in the news industry.

This is simply because Google dominates the search market at present. If users do not see news from WSJ or its other news sites on Google News, they will most likely just click on the next available source. And there are definitely going to be third party sources that simply plagiarize News Corp’s content and put them up on their sites. These sites in turn will get more traffic.

Google hasn’t been overly alarmed by this development. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director had this to say “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue.”

Whatever might be the outcome; this marks the aggressive plot that Microsoft seems to be using to attack Google. Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, is fixated on beating Google at its own game.

Teracent works with an algorithm which helps advertisements to be modified on the fly. This can help ad agencies modify parameters like images, products, color etc in real time, increasing effectiveness of the advertisements.

“Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads,” read Google’s blog posting.

For example, a clothing store can display ads for snow jackets to people in Alaska. If someone from Brazil were to go to the same page, the ad could be modified to show summer clothing. This additional flexibility offered by real time advertising is a big win for advertisers as they can hit their audiences exactly when they show intent.

The online display market currently is dominated by its rival Yahoo!, with a market share of 14.5% compared to Google’s 2.2%. Co-incidentally, Teracent had also had ties with Yahoo! in mobile ad delivery. How the acquisition by Google will affect this partnership isn’t quite clear, but it isn’t hard to see that it will most likely fizzle out.

The acquisition of Teracent by Google comes after its recent acquisition of AdMob and DoubleClick. All three companies are based on advertising technology. Though search marketing had grown faster than display marketing, Google had said earlier that there will be a shift in the near future. The recognition of this fact by Google seems to be the motivation behind these recent purchasing sprees.

Though Google’s growing advertising muscle may seem bad for traditional advertising, small businesses seem to be the big benefiter. Traditional marketing tends to cater only to a few big organizations. With this massive online presence being built up by Google, small businesses can get as much if not more exposure as big guns get through traditional advertising at a fraction of the cost.

Traditional media like radio, television and print do not have the capability of the internet to reach millions of people at the same time. And even so, through these media it is hard to target just the relevant audience. Through keyword based marketing, businesses have the choice to advertising just to their audience. And since they pay based on this model, almost all the capital expenses on advertising spent by the companies go toward an audience that is more likely to respond. Of course the big guns can use the internet as well to advertise their product, but the playing field is a lot more leveled on the internet.

Who might be next on their purchase list is hard to say. However what we can take for granted is that they will add new twists to the advertising game. Constant innovation and key purchases of new technology seem to keep Google consistently ahead of its competitors. And so far, it has meant good news to small businesses. Let’s hope this trend keep growing in the future.

Current search engines provide links to what might be relevant content. A user has to scan these different links, and decide which links to follow. Most links do not satisfy user needs and they proceed to other sites to find the information. Time is spent on this click-in click-out process and it wears on a user’s patience. Factery Labs now have a new search engine that does away with the whole link system and instead gives the user “facts” instead.

In recognition of PageRank, Factery Labs uses a technology called FactRank developed by Paul Pedersen. What FactRank does is crawl through web-pages or whatever source content looking for semantic information which is evaluated by an advanced language model. When it identifies a passage with a targeted message it cross references it against other similar sources. By doing this, the algorithm starts accumulating “facts”. These facts aren’t exactly a guarantee for truth, but more like a democratic fact. What the user gets in the form of results is a page with chunks of information that is organized based on its relevance. They get the gist of the subject they’re searching for right there on the search page in one glance.

In fact, most searches on a website are done just to get a small snippet of information instead of lengthy paragraphs. If these snippets come organized from different sources on one platform, it saves the user a lot of time.

One fall-out will be spammers trying to hack into the algorithm by manipulating content. This is no different from the challenges faced by a regular search engine. By maintaining a blacklist of potential offenders and constantly tweaking their system, results will get incrementally reliable.

The product isn’t fully functional as a consumer search engine yet though. The website offers demo searches as a proof of its concept. It searches inside real-time and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. They have made available an API for third party developers to use. Possible applications could be to deliver reading summaries rather than traditional links. This is particularly beneficial to mobile users, due limited screen space; condensed information contained in a tight package is highly valuable. The range of products that the technology can be morphed to fit into is pretty interesting.

The biggest issue though is accuracy of the results. The fact remains that judging the truth of any content is outside the realm of any existing technology. Even a human being is incapable of discerning a fact’s accuracy independently. Since nobody really knows how to tell fact from fiction, the best possible path to follow is the one of neutrality. By not placing a bias on any form of content, it relies on the democratic nature of the service. If enough people talk about some particular issue, then that snippet will be treated as a fact. The only real bias that the company can afford to have is toward malicious sites. Spammers will be included in a blacklist, and popular sites will be given importance, just as it is done in traditional search technology.

The current goal of the company isn’t to become a big search engine, at least for the new future. The real potential that is being targeted is the API service offered to developers. There are a number of obvious and non obvious applications that this technology can provide. The ones that do come out in the near future promise to bring with it a new paradigm in the web experience.

Just when we thought the search engine market was getting interesting, the stakes just went even higher!

According to Experian Hitwise Microsoft achieved a market of 9.57%, whereas Google and Yahoo! lost 1% to end up with 70.60% and 16.14% respectively. The report by Comscore suggested that Google’s share went to 65.4% October from 64.9% in September. Microsoft went from 9.4% to 9.9% and Yahoo! dropped from 18.8% to 18%. Though the estimates in each study vary slightly, the bigger picture is becoming more apparent. Google’s monopoly is being threatened ever so slightly and Bing is creeping to public consciousness.

Microsoft has shown steady growth over the last 5 months since its launch. The deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft to collaborate in search engine operation is set to close early next year. The 10 year agreement points to growing market share to Bing and splitting ad revenue between the two companies. This partnership is expected to grow Bing’s market share to 30%. How much this will threaten Google is still a question that hangs in the air.

When Bing was launched it received a very tepid response. It was expected to be another failure. Since then, Bing has moved from being just another attempt at beating Google to becoming a worthy opponent. Bing had also recently partnered with Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine. The addition though labeled as a “geeky” service has added to Bing’s product image. Facebook and Twitter are now integrated into Bing as well.  Video and image search is a lot more user-friendly compared to Google and SEO experts now have a new avenue to explore through the visual search offered on Bing.

Microsoft has announced its “Windows Theme Experience and Windows Personalization Gallery in Windows 7”. This is a radically new area into which internet based advertising will move to. Users will have to option to choose a branded theme which they are passionate about. Ducati, Porsche and Twentieth Century Fox have already entered this market. Users can download their favorite themes and convert their desktops into a branded experience.

Though Google hasn’t changed its UI dramatically and offered a snazzy Bing-like interface, it has kept re-inventing its back end infrastructure. Users are very familiar to the “plain-jane” interface Google offers. Any changes to the UI are not expected anytime soon. However subtler changes are becoming apparent with the integration of the Caffeine search algorithm. Search results will now include video and image results on the first page of Google results. Results will become more and more relevant to the keyword searched.

Google stock has risen by $4.23 to end at $576.28 at closing on November 16^th, the highest in the last year and a half. This only goes to show the trust of the public in Google’s product. Microsoft’s efforts to topple Google will have to a long drawn battle and they should expect a very tough fight.

The good news for advertisers from this increased competition between the two giants is plain to see. More options, better platforms and ever improving quality in the product. Prices will tend to be controlled as the competition fights it out as well.

Google has the Google calculator which tries to mimic Wolfram’s product, but isn’t quite the same. For people involved with SEO, this could mean some added work. To service websites who would like their content used for quantitative purposes it might be needed to follow a slightly different approach to what is needed for text based search.

To add to Bing’s aggressive attempt at catching up with Google they have started to return richer results. Results no longer are just links to other websites. Bing actively pulls up media and tools hosted on various sites and return them in the results. For instance, they retrieve videos from Hulu and YouTube, provide airline ticket info and even offer weather updates.

Google has been working secretively on a search engine algorithm called Caffeine. It isn’t slated to be rolled out until 2010 but is said to be a very powerful change Google is looking to bring in. Initial data suggests there won’t be a big shake up in the results retrieved, although many suggest the impact is being downplayed as Google does not want to create a panic among web developers. Caffeine is said to include a real-time search as well as have improved indexing capabilities.

Yahoo has been struggling to break to the forefront in the search engine market. In October, 2009 they stated that they will be ending the paid placements program by the end of 2009. The notable change they are about to offer is the real-time search capability that will be executed in partnership with OneRiot. They will be covering social networking structures like Twitter, an area where Google isn’t in yet. SEO professionals will be watching closely to all these changes to see how they will have to adapt.

All the commotion we are seeing exposes the amount of work that search engine giants need to put in to either maintain their top spot or try and chase down its competitors. Internet users on the other hand can sit back and enjoy exponentially better services from these companies as they battle it out for market share. Currently the search engine market is split up roughly as: 64% Google, 16% Yahoo, 10% Bing, and the remaining 10% between AOL, Ask etc. Though Google has a lion’s share of the market, the competition isn’t willing to give them a free ride. This pretty much ensures that Google doesn’t relax at any point and doesn’t behave like it has monopoly.

Google, Yahoo! and other web companies have urged the FDA to modify the current regulations that place such a stranglehold on online advertising. Major revenue for these companies comes through advertising. Not being able to tap into the enormous drug advertising market has led them to move the FDA to modify its regulations.

Yahoo! Vice President David Zinman said “We need to get some adjustment to the way the medium is used because it’s very different from print and broadcast — that’s the main challenge”.

Companies that do advertise their drugs do so indirectly. They advertise anonymously for certain medical conditions. Links shown are connected to the drug website. This indirect form of advertising makes it hard for the consumer to find what they are looking for.

Current FDA regulations require drug advertisements to have all documented side effects and benefits made known to the consumer. Due to the differences between television or print and the internet, the monitoring of ads is not straight forward. The regulations placed by the FDA aren’t without reason either. The motivation behind the regulations is the safety of the consumer. Proper information on the side-effects and risks of a drug are rights of the consumer.

Due to the vast nature of the internet, monitoring drug advertising by the FDA is a difficult process and an expensive one. The FDA regulates products that make up one quarter of the US economy. Adding monitoring of web advertising will be an incredible burden on the already overburdened institution. If a change in regulation will be required, then the expenses that will be incurred for the additional monitoring should be borne by the new industry user fees. Drug industries already pay millions to fund the review of new drugs by the FDA.

The modifications to the present regulation are not likely to be released until 2011. This extended timeline for the modifications are what are of concern to Google and Yahoo! Since media technology is growing tremendously over short periods of time, this lengthy wait could cause a lagging effect. The regulations would never be able to keep up and the industry as a result would never reach full potential.

A study by American Journal of Public Health offers certain guidelines. To form a balanced package, the ads need to be designed to satisfy the following goals:

• Ads should provide information on the prevalence of the conditions, who is at risk and the obvious symptoms that are known. If there are unobvious symptoms, then provide information on what the risk of contracting the condition is.
• Use quantitative information to describe the drug’s potential benefits to give the user a realistic idea of the drug based on facts.
• Use quantitative information to display the risks associated with the drug. This information should not be cloaked by any distractions to the user.

The infrastructure to monitor all ads and verify if they satisfy these conditions is not trivial. The lengthy timeline expected is a result of the complicated nature of this problem. With the pharmaceutical lobby and web companies now asking for quicker changes could prompt an expedited release of new guidelines. We can only wait and watch as it plays out.