thenowledge

Posts tagged Google

The company has just bought SocialDeck, a mobile game startup focused on delivering games across various platforms such as the iPhone and Blackberry.

This is part of a series of acquisitions by Google in the social arena. It bought social search startup Angstro last week. And in the past month, it picked up app maker Slide and virtual currency firm Jambool.

Don’t ignore what Google is doing here. They’re getting serious about social.

Ever wondered what instructions from a government censor sound like?

China’s so-called “Ministry of Truth” was out in force after the Google affair this past week, issuing specific instructions to Chinese media companies about what to avoid in coverage.

According to the China Digital Times, a news service run by the Berkeley China Internet Project, ordered among other things:

This is the biggest shift in the “now” revolution for the search industry.

Google first announced realtime search for its Finance product last week. And now, realtime results have been rolled out on the company’s flagship search product.

This shouldn’t be a surprise since the company announced its partnership with Twitter and Facebook about a month ago. It is however a significant step forward in the “now” revolution.

You can try this out for yourself — just click on “latest” in the “show options panel.” If you’re looking at a developing news event for example, you’ll not only see the latest blogs popping up, you’ll also get the latest from Twitter feeds.



Staying up to date has never been more exciting. It would be interesting to see how advertisers and marketers can leverage this.

So what’s Bing and Yahoo! gonna do about it?

Google has a new plan that will probably make Old Fox Rupert happy.

Through Google’s “First Click Free” plan, publishers can now stop unrestricted access to their subscription sites. So if you click on more than five articles a day from a subscription site at Google News, you’ll hit their pay wall on your sixth click.

This is clearly a compromise. Google still wants to be able to crawl these news sites, but at the same time hasn’t fully figured out how to provide real value to content publishers.

For now this measure will satisfy pay-wall companies like the WSJ and FT. But as their costs go up (“content is cheap; journalism is expensive”), expect further cries for help.

I’ll give them a year.