Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are undocumented is a very grey area. The news that an application has shown up in Apple’s App Store that used an undocumented API has disturbed some users, especially since it’s against the terms that iPhone developers agree to when they download the SDK.

Google’s voice search function on the latest version of its Google Mobile search app is pretty darn cool. It knows when you hold the phone up to your ear, then delivers a prompt for you to talk into it, then resumes searching as you take it away from listening position. Pretty cool, right?

Google admits to using undocumented APIs to create the voice search mobile app, thereby violating the iPhone’s developers’ agreement. The real question is how did Google’s application made its way to Apple’s App Store?

This is all brand new, and an investigation shows that the code used to provide that level of functionality is completely undocumented by Apple themselves. This is NOT so darn cool. Apple is rigid about this type of thing, often rejecting apps for much, much less.

Using undocumented APIs is heavily frowned upon, as these are often in active development. This means they are subject to change; third-party applications that rely on them could break or crash as things progress. The real question is how in the world did this app with its glaring violation make it past the Apple watchdogs and into the app store?
Google has admitted that it used undocumented APIs, although they deny using private frameworks, which could have been disastrous from a technological point of view.

Did Apples just miss this, or did they know that the app used undocumented APIs and simply chose to let it go? Are they that threatened by gPhone and all the accompanying drama?

There are lot of speculations that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt might take a break from his office as Google’s CEO. However, there are no official announcements to this effect. These speculations suggest that Eric Schmidt might be taking up some position in the America’s new President’s administration. Eric Schmidt has been taking with Google for over 7 years and he has been highly successful in growing Google into a $20 billion company during his tenure. Google has seen great success and reached its glory during his term.

There could be number of reasons for this move by Eric Schmidt. Speculations suspect that this might be the ideal time to take a break from Google; taking Google to the next level can be more challenging than taking Google to the $20 billion mark. Under financially stressful times, holding on to that $20 billion mark itself could be hard enough and taking it to $40 billion can be an almost impossible feat. Google is already planning to cut down costs by retrenching thousands of employees. Even Google is not immune to the effects of credit crunch. If it has to keep itself afloat, they have to do some thing decisive. This being the situation, Eric Schmidt is bound to feel the heat and if Google has to slide from its glory owing to the current financial situations, then it would become another Jerry Yang episode – Google’s CEO certainly would not wish this to happen to him. Does this mean that Google’s CEO too speculates or smells something?

As we can easily observe, Google has tried almost everything with the search industry and been successful too with 90% of its efforts. Now this cycle is likely to come to an end. If the company has to grow and reach the next level then it is important that Google launch another product that gets the attention of the crowd failing which life at Google could get boring. For people such as Eric Schmidt, a less challenging work environment can be unpalatable. Probably Eric Schmidt too wants to follow Larry Page in solving world’s energy crisis. One’s goal will shift interest only when the challenges become less challenging. If the challenges are big, enough then they will not have time to look for other interests that will feed their abilities and talents.

Now the question is if Eric Schmidt has to step down for whatever reasons, how will it affect the online search experience? Is Google’s success dependent on individuals or its business models that are independent of foundation figures? Though every organization tries to build its business model independent of top management, inevitably at one stage or the other the entire business model disappears behind individual personalities. Therefore, in Google’s case too we need to wait and see how far Google is able to fair the weather without Eric Schmidt. All the competitors are just waiting for a leeway to leverage their success and all eyes are on Google.

Baidu is China’s leading search engine; for the Chinese, it is what Google is for us. It is much more than a search engine; it is more of a portal for the online users to find all that they need in one place. However, Baidu is facing problems recently owning to the scandals associated with it. The stock values of Baidu have dropped drastically. The major revenue for the company was through the advertisements. This too has dropped severely.

Baidu has allegedly given high rankings for unlicensed medical personnel who sold fake medicines that did not work at exorbitant prices. Baidu, which is listed in NASDAQ, was blamed in a television show in China for allowing the dubious services to pay for top positions. Baidu has an advertising program called pay for performance or P4P. Under this program if you paid more you will be given prominent positions in this top search engines. However, Baidu should have checked the documents carefully for before it advertised these services. After this incident, Baidu received severe criticism from the public this also made Baidu’s stock plummet at unprecedented levels.

People who went by the search engines listing to these fake medical practitioners were talked into buying expensive medicine, which apparently did not work. Baidu CEO Robin Li promised to take severe action against those employees who were involved in the scandal. According to his statement to the media, “Baidu employees who are found to have been involved in the scandal will be penalised … We have already fired people who helped fabricate documents for unlicensed suppliers.

“We have removed the key words of all four clients mentioned in the report and have begun to double-check the licenses of all other hospitals and pharmacies on our client list.”

However, the question is will Baidu be solely responsible for this mistake. It should not be the responsibility of Baidu to verify the documents and for that matter, any search engine for advertising products and services in their search engines. No other search engine is currently validating the documents of medical practitioners or other service providers. If it has to do that, with the current volume of advertising that is happening online, search engines will be involved fulltime in validating documents and not on other core functions of their business.
Baidu has however promised to revalidate the documents of all the other medical service providers who are advertising their services and products through Baidu. If the situation should continue, Google, which has been trailing Baidu in the competition, is more likely to take the lead. Baidu currently owns 60% of the Chinese market and its popularity was increasing day by day before the scandal. Now people would think twice to click on a result and to trust what is said their. It will also bring down the traffic to the search engine. According to the reports, one of the unlicensed clinics offered Baidu 16.56 per click for the top listing of their services.

Microsoft is toying with the idea of renaming their search engine. They went from a fairly recognizable MSN to the confusing and unspecific Windows Live Search to simply Live Search - apparently that’s just not hip sounding enough when stacked against Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft has been considering a search engine name change since August; testing three possible names has been in the works as research only - Hook, Bing and Kumo. Kumo either means “spider” in Japanese, or “cloud”, which makes sense in this age of “cloud computing”.

The Kumo.com domain has been moved from a registrar to Microsoft, and is now pointing to an internal Microsoft test site.

By choosing Kumo, Microsoft will follow Yahoo! and Google, by selecting a word that does not immediately signal what the service is about. It is easy to pronounce and remember, and helps people distinguish the search engine from the vaguely defined concept they are currently struggling with.

Microsoft failed to take over Yahoo this summer, and has been struggling as Google adds layer on layer of services which threaten to eat into their highly lucrative word editing and processing programs.

The concept of a name change is not a new one - many smaller companies have successfully rebranded in time of crisis - but many analysts warn against such a move for a business as large as Microsoft’s search product.

Whether a name change would give them the strength to compete on a new level or simply moor them deeper, remains to be seen.

Microsoft in an effort to be on par with Google and Yahoo has recently launched a powerful webmaster tool that will detect the embedded malware. Google already has its safe browsing diagnostic tool that warns users of harmful sites and Yahoo for its share has SearchScan. Microsoft did not have anything so far in these lines and to fill the gap, it has launched malware detection service.

If there is any malware embedded in your website or if you happen to link to websites that have malware then you can be causing a considerable amount of damage to your website visitors and they are not going to like it. Using the Microsoft’s tool, you can now find whether there are any malwares in your web pages. You will be able to download a report that can be accessed offline. This report will tell you clearly the pages that are affected by malware. This will also help you protect yourself from linking to websites that you are linking to if they have any malware. All your outbound links will be checked and you can identify problematic sites and end your relationship with those websites.

Often the malware that get embedded in our websites can remain latent and the harm they are causing may not be that evident. Microsoft’s latest tool seems to be more powerful in terms of identifying the malware. It picks up malware that are ignored or not identified by Google Safe Browsing and Yahoo’s SearchScan. Microsoft can pat itself for making their tool better than its competitors. This is of course a free service and thanks to the competition and it is because of this competition we are able to get better and more powerful tools.

Microsoft hopes that this free tool will help webmasters to audit their own sites and their security. Microsoft has been notorious for its exposure to websites with malware that are served by unethical search engine optimization. Microsoft has felt the need for such a tool not more in terms of fighting its competition but the need was felt because of the increasing number of malicious players who abuse Microsoft’s networks. Even recently, Google trends keywords appeared automatically on the Live Spaces of Microsoft and this in turn redirected fake codecs.

This new tool will therefore will make Microsoft’s networks safer than before. However, the security factor has to be ensured by individual webmasters and they will have to monitor their websites constantly. Website security is not a one-time endeavor, which they can test once and forget, they need to come back month after month, week after week if they want to enjoy good reputation online. Microsoft has plans to refine this tool further and enhancing its capabilities. This will indeed become a useful tool for webmasters who want to ensure that their websites do not become victims of malware.