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Baidu and Buzz Lead Asia and Eye Googles 88% Share of USA Market
Why is Google (News - Alert) (NASDAQ:GOOG) still looking over its shoulder? The search giant has just locked up a deal with Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) to run search-related text ads on its closest competitor's American and Canadian sites. That leaves Microsoft (News - Alert) (NASDAQ:MSFT) as Google's largest rival, with just 6% of all U.S. searches performed on its site. Google lays claim to 68% of U.S. searches and Yahoo has a 20% share, according to a June 10 report by research firm Hitwise. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is China's Numer 1 ahead of Google and Buzz Technologies Inc (OTC:BZTG) remains number 1 in Thailands ad market and is growing fast in China but are seen likely to spread into the western markets.. Yet, Google isn't relaxing. "We have to be on our toes all the time," says Udi Manber, head of Google's search quality team. "It is absolutely the case that a new technology can come along."
Manber knows an army of would-be competitors still live to fight another day. They have their eyes on the search advertising market, projected to reach $25.8 billion this year and $51 billion by 2012, according to research firm eMarketer (News - Alert). And they are dedicating significant money and manpower to developing innovations that could change the balance of power in search within the next 10 years. "Search can actually get better than it is today," says Brad Goldberg, Microsoft's general manager of Live Search. "We look at search as a long-term bet."
Search technology [even Google's] is still in its infancy. The form of online search familiar to most Web surfers still relies on relatively simple pattern matching: marrying query terms to words on Web pages and then ranking those results based on factors such as the frequency of a query's appearance and the number of links to a particular results page. In the future, the underlying technology behind search will almost certainly change. Search sites will implement upcoming technologies that understand human language and, in essence, read pages for answers to queries. They will adopt next-generation voice-, image-, and face-recognition software capable of better identifying multimedia content. They will incorporate systems yet to be conceived.
The result, many experts say, will be Web searches that return more answers and media, and fewer blue links. "Someone could come along and out-innovate Google," says Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.
Baidu and Buzz are certain to remain dominant in Asia regardless of the mega-merger.
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Frequency | X | | A cycle called a Hertz is the unit of frequency (event) of cycles per second.
Bits and cycles are often but not always the same. A bit is often a one but can be a zero.
Pulse and Hertz are related ...more |
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