Last week when MS bid for Yahoo! i was a not very keen in the news. Most of industry experts already had predicted this.

Then all of sudden, Google came out openly against this offer. I was a bit surprised with the kind of reaction Google gave. Specially when they said that “Microsoft’s hostile bid” will be “threat to openness and innovation”. Need i say how stupid it seems to me?

Google is already leading the market with 75% of market share (some say 62%, i am not sure whom to go with, but either way, thats clearly the 3 times the nearest competitor).

What made Google worry about this deal?
What i believe is that Google fears one thing, which is very likely if this deal goes through and that is the way MS is going to rise in the market. I mean, the tactics.

How about an ad supported free version of Microsoft Windows?
Windows is the most widely used operating system around the world. Most of the users who constitute Google’s 75% (or 62%, whatever, just consider it’s 3 times) market share are on MS Windows. If MS promotes free Windows, it will be like a double hit. One way that will be a big relief from piracy. The other way, it will incredibly boost ad revenues from search ads.

Yahoo is already leading banner ads markets. By acquiring Yahoo, MS will automatically lead in banner ads, and with free Windows, you can imagine how well MS might just knock off Google.

Well, it looks like a “threat to openness” now. But it is certainly not something for Google to say.

Dear Google, is that what makes you worry ?

Alright, since last week, there has been enough of buzz that i was forced to come back unexpectedly to blog it. Microsoft has bid for Yahoo, something that was long expected from the industry. And most recently, Google has come to Yahoo’s rescue. Seems there is going to be big battle ahead for this acquisition with Microsoft trying really hard to acquire Yahoo and on the other end Google trying as hard to prevent this acquisition.

Only thing makes me worry is Google’s increasing dominance in the web. I am not against Google, but sometimes you cant help with it. Same brand, everywhere. Similar sentiments are echoed by Andy in here.

Don’t you think so?

Google is leading the way in “horizontal search” which in simple words means “generic search”. It covers a very wide spectrum with no inclination to particular niche. Over the last few years, there has been a rapid evolution of new kind of search engines which specialize in providing you results from a particular niche they are made for. These are “Vertical Search Engines” or “Vortals”. A few i remember right now are : SimplyHired.com(Job), Indeed.com(Job), Kayak.com (Travel) and alot others.

With the kind of money being pumped in the Vortals, the industry experts estimate this to reach over $1bn by 2009. Clearly, it is going to be a big thing in the very near future. Lets take a quick look.
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As most of the industry experts have envisaged search engine’s inclination towards local search. Google has further taken a step in that direction. Google has incorporated a specific tool in the Google Webmaster Central which allows webmasters to specify the geographic location of their website.

This is specifically useful for the sites who want to optimize for local markets. You might have noticed that “page from countryname” option below the search box that lets you choose if you want to search pages from that specific country/region. That’s the local search.

Google traditionally returns country specific results by using :

1. The Top Level Domain (TLD) of website.
Many websites have country specific TLDs like .co.uk for United Kingdom, .in for India, .ca for Canada etc. Google used to and will keep identifying the location by such country specific TLDs.

2. IP Address of host
Another way is knowing the IP of the web host. Location can be easily known with the IP address.

However these methods have certain limitations.

Not all websites have country specific TLDs
Many websites want to rank higher in local market but they have non-country specific TLDs like a .com, .net, .org etc.

Web Host may reside outside the country market
Many of you have experienced this. Your market is abc country and have servers hosted in xyz country. Like, i do not have American specific market for many of my sites, but my servers are mostly in America.

Google needed to find a solution for these problems, and i believe the tool they have come up with, very well addresses the problem.

However, things to note :
1. Google will keep associating a website for geographic location that is associated with the country level TLD, if it has any. Meaning, if you have a .co.uk, Google will consider it for local results for UK only. One cannot change this.

2. You can only specify the location in case you have a non-country specific domain name like a .com. And if you choose not to specify such information, Google will keep associating your site with the geographic location associated with your web host’s IP address.

Back in 2000, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch wrote about the growing “invisible web” here. Since then, search engines have made a lot of changes in their algorithms to index as much of the invisible web as possible. With this post we take a look on where the invisible web or dark web stands today. For those who are not familiar with the term, lets take a quick look at the basics.

What is invisible web?
When you want to search for something over the web, you mostly use search engines for that. You type a keyword in the search box and get the relevant results. These results returned to you by the search engine are stored in a database and form the “index” of the search engine. In short, these are the pages that match your query and the search engines knows about them.

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