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We wrote about Google Caffeine, the new, improved search engine Google was trialing back when it first came out. Caffeine, as you might recall, was the first major search engine core code tweak for Google since 2006 and it was direct response to the Microsoft announcement that Bing would power Yahoo! search engine queries.
The internet has never been more Anglo-centric than when it comes to web addresses where anything which is not written with Latin characters cannot be understood by the www address system. Yet the web has truly gone global with countries like Russia and China representing a sizeable portion of traffic, closely backed by countries in Eastern Europe, Greece, and those in the Middle East whose writing is decidedly non-English.
It’s official. eBooks are the latest global battleground as eBook publishers suddenly realize that there is a lot of money to be made provided their business model is right and their eBooks provide the correct combination between perceived value and price.
Amazon has announced that it was introducing a new version of its Kindle e-book reader that can wirelessly download books in the United States and more than 100 countries. The new device, which is expected to ship towards the end of October is physically similar to the previous Kindle with a six-inch display. However, the new e-reader will be capable of downloading books and periodicals via wireless networks belonging to AT&T and its international partners.
There is nothing new under the sun and this is true even for the bran-spanking-new world of search engine technology. Forums became all the rave back in the early days when having a forum was instant search engine bait and in 2006 Google took note and introduced a filter which discounted sites which had, up to that point, over 5,000 forum pages. The result was chaos as the organic Google index became a bloody playground where those who had relied on forum posts to benefit from organic Google traffic suddenly found their sites dropping to page 50 and beyond.
I know it’s a little early to put dates to events and names to faces but 2010 is really going to be the year when the search engine world will go to battle for the attention of every online user. The battle, as it is shaping right now is really between Google (who are testing Google Caffeine) and Microsoft (whose Bing search engine has actually gained some ground). Yahoo! Is now part of the Bing game and so no longer counts as a player.
Which begs the question of course: so what? Wellll, Google Caffeine is a whole new ball game and when Bing comes out of Beta it will have the power to attract a lot more searches. Add to the game niche players like Ask Jeeves (led by ex-Googler Cesar Mascaraque) and you begin to see that webmasters who no longer SEO their sites properly are really going to suffer. The beneficiaries will be searchers who will start to get a lot more relevant results than they are getting now and SEO companies who know what they are doing. We will keep you posted of course and should you need to get your content on the web fast you might want to consider our special guide on the subject: Get Indexed in 48 Hours.
Because there is the pressure of a deadline and I need to make quick predictions based upon facts I am busy sacrificing a chicken whose spilled blood and state of its entrails will tell me all I need to know. Ok, ok, maybe this is not quite how I am now going to do it but it isn’t far from the truth either.
The launch of not one but several Sony eBook Readers alongside the entrance of Google and Barnes & Noble in the eBook market suggests that the signs are portentous in terms of whether or not you should start thinking about releasing your next best-seller as an eBook or paper book.
On paper (we really will have to stop using that expression) eBooks are a much better deal. Cheaper, convenient, global, instantly accessible, searchable, bookmark-able and with the ability to be carted about in their hundreds in a shirt pocket or a briefcase. Paper books, however have proved their longevity and are not about to go out without a fight.
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