April 28, 2008

Microsoft Prepares Push into Chinese Search Market

When it comes to search, Microsoft is ever the egg while Google remains the chicken. Just a week after news of Google amping up its efforts in the world's largest nation, Microsoft is revealing its plans to make headway into China.

But just how serious is Microsoft about this oh-so-important market? Only 100 employees are currently dedicated to Chinese search while Google will be adding 200 to its existing 600 person staff this year with expectations to continue adding to its numbers along those lines in coming years.

No doubt, acquiring Yahoo is part of Microsoft's overall Asia strategy. Yahoo has a strong showing in Asia, something the Sunnyvale search engine wishes Microsoft would have taken into consideration when making its recent unsolicited bid.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:20 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2007

Microsoft Takes Stake in CareerBuilder

Microsoft has acquired a minority equity stake in job search engine CareerBuilder, owned jointly by newspaper companies Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy.

In addition, the 3-year-old agreement to display CareerBuilder results on the MSN network was extended through 2013. The agreement continues to be performance-based, with payments determined by the quality and quantity of traffic delivered by MSN. Under the agreement, CareerBuilder will pay MSN up to $443 million over the course of seven years to serve as the exclusive job search engine on the MSN Careers channel.

Microsoft will also begin deploying CareerBuilder results abroad, expecting to launch CareerBuilder on MSN sites in most European countries by the middle of 2008 with several rolling out by the end of 2007.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:20 PM | Permalink

February 6, 2007

Niched or Vertical Approach Popular in Chinese Search

The allure of 1.3 billion people has many international corporations adapting their marketing and product offerings to the Chinese market. The search industry seems to be following the same direction.

In the last 30 days, both Yahoo! and MSN have announced vertical initiatives into the Chinese market. Interestingly, though China is a Communist country, both service Chinese business interests.

MSN is launching a job search service - funny I always thought in Communist countries the government told you what your job was. Yahoo China, last month, announced its intention to develop as a business search engine for the China market.

Guess the capitalists of the world are being won over to the profits available from Communist customers.

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:16 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2006

Microsoft To Enter Chinese Market With China Telecom

People's Daily Online reports in Microsoft opens search market with China Teleco that Microsoft is starting push their way into the Chinese search market through a new deal with China Telecom. China Telecom China's is said to be China's largest "network operator and internet provider, providing 25 million customers with broadband service. It has more than 80 million internet users and over 400 city portal webs." The deal, in some way, will give the 25 million customers Live Search features (not sure how exactly). As we noted earlier, Baidu is rocking in China, Google is doing OK and Yahoo is in the race.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:54 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Amnesty International Asking Users To Pressure Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Over China Policies

BBC News reports that Amnesty International is urging users of Google, Yahoo and MSN in the UK to email the search engines opposing the way each operates in China. Amnesty International says that the search engines are aiding the censorship. The search engines say that Chinese users are more well off then they were prior. More on the Amnesty campaign can be found here from the organization.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:24 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2006

Report from U.S. Congress Briefing on Human Rights and the Internet and China

The Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a briefing (not a formal hearing) on Wednesday about human rights issues and the Internet in China. The News.com article: Politicos attack tech firms over China, provides a look at what was said at the briefing.

"These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which organized the briefing. With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day," Lantos went on. "They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."

The full text of the opening statement by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus Chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos from California is available here. Lantos mentions Google, MS, and Yahoo by name in his comments. Look for more prepared statements by others at the briefing to be posted on this page soon.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo were all invited to appear before the caucus but did not send representatives. However, all three companies did provide statements to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that can be accessed in this blog post.

Today's "briefing" will be followed with a formal congressional hearing by the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Global Human Rights. The hearing is set for February 16.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:38 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

MSN Powers UK's Times Online; Ask UK Scales Back Ads

Two brief items from the UK search scene today.

+ Revolution Magazine reports that MSN Search (MSN.co.uk) will power web search on the Times of London web site.

The six-figure deal will mean the Times Online Search the Web toolbar will be MSN branded, and will drive Times Online users to the MSN Search homepage. The placement will be fully integrated into the Times Online site and will run until June 2006.

+ The Netipmerative article: Ask scales back UK paid search ads, reports that Ask UK has done what we saw Jeeves.com do a few months ago and cut back on the number of ads on web results pages.

According to the company, Ask.co.uk will remove Branded Response and Answerlink ad products from the site as of December 31st.

The article also notes that Ask.co.uk has postponed its plans to offer their Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings in the UK.

Finally, Ask.co.uk is planning a "phased reduction" of their UK sales force between now and the end of the year.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:15 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

US Search Players Moving More Into China

U.S. Web Giants Target China from BusinessWeek is a general overview with lots of stats on US search players moving further into the China market.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:49 PM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Blair "Liar" Linkbomb Highlights Country-Specific Skewing

About a month ago, Google Blogoscoped wrote of a link bomb that pushed UK prime minister Tony Blair's official biography to number one in a search for liar on Google. That is, if you use Google UK. Do the same exact search on Google.com, and the biography currently ranks fifth.

What's going on? It's not a case of having used the "Pages From The UK" option at Google UK to get UK-oriented results. This difference happens when using the default search "The Web" option at Google UK. In short, a search across the entire web at Google UK is not equal to a search across the entire web at Google's flagship Google.com site.

This isn't a Google-specific issue. The liar query underscores a big change that's snuck up on search users of several major search engines over the past year. Search engines have straying more and more into showing different results at the various country-specific versions they operate, even if country-specific results were not requested.

For Search Engine Watch members, I've posted an extended version of this story that looks at how and why these changes have happened, ranging from mirroring and censorship issues to specific ranking differences that are done in hopes of bettering the user experience.

Overall, I understand and can even applaud the desire to try and help users in a particular country get better results. But I think better disclosure that skewing is happening should be done if a user is choosing to search the entire web, when at a country-specific edition of a major search engine.

I'd also like to see all the major search engines ensure that if you go to a particular country-specific edition, regardless of where you are at, you see the same thing.

In other words, everyone who goes to Google UK should see the same thing, regardless of whether they are in the UK or not. The same for those going to Google US (FYI, Google says that's currently the situation).

The above is terms of editorial results. In terms of ads, I also think the search engines should provide options. If you want to see ads targeted at those in particular countries, when at a particular search engine, you should be able to say so. As an American who lives outside the US, I still have an interest in US-targeted ads. I'm hardly the only expat of any country like this.

My extended article on this topics for Search Engine Watch members is here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:51 PM | Permalink

February 2, 2005

Escaping MSN Search's Country Redirection

Annoyingly, the launch of the new MSN search engine came along with a helpful "feature" forcing me to MSN UK, because I'm based in the UK. Even if I went to search.msn.com, I was redirected to search.msn.co.uk.

I sent a query to MSN about this yesterday and have yet to hear back. But someone clearly got the message, because today I found a new "Back to search.msn.com" link at the bottom of the MSN UK home page I was shown. Selecting that finally overrode the switching.

Those being switched to other country-specific versions of MSN should look for similar links. If you don't find it, then try this: http://search.msn.com/?noredir=1. That might solve it, if you really want MSN as based out of the US.

Why might you? For one, the results I see on MSN UK are often radically different than on MSN US, more aimed toward what MSN seems to think UK users want. That's great when it works -- but when it doesn't, you may wish to search at the US-based site.

FYI, other search engines like Google might also do such redirection. In this cases, you'll often find similar links that let you override it. Our forum thread Google forcing UK users to google.co.uk looks at this more, including the situation with Lycos where even if you use the "override" link, it stupidly still redirects you.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:25 AM | Permalink

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