Yet another cool google tool fir information analysis.
This Books Ngram Viewer will now give more detailed information about what has been a topic of interest to various populations over time.
Books Ngram Viewer:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com
This is not really a surprise to see that cybernetics is not really the most fashionable topic at the moment. But it is nevertheless interesting to see that it is loosing in popularity.
But what could be the topics of interest:
The first which come into mind or drugs, sex and rock’n roll. But maybe over time, this could be more love, religion, war.
Interesting to see that war clearly has 2 peaks during the second world wars. Religion has been decreasing steadily. Man and love have been increasing. Clearly more information here, which could be used for studies in human behavious and interaction.
I often talk about facebook and google, but what about baidu? This search engine is the 6th most visited website in the world although it is only available in a few languages, Chinese and now Japanese, in other words about one in 5 people. What can it be which makes Baidu such a huge success? What is Baidu?
“The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”
1. Content:
First thing to do is use chrome with the translation plugin, in order to visit the site correctly, if you do not talk chinese. You can immediatly see that it is really similar to google, a mix between, yahoo, wikipedia. With prime features are: News/Search/mp3s/videos/images/Knowledge/maps/forums, and many more in the more section or in english. Baidu is very user centered and a large amount of the traffic comes from the forums or messages with friends. It has a google analytics, trends, messanger, and google anaytics.
Most of the site is pretty well done and optimised. With good scores in Yslow or Google Page speed 96%.
The maps were a bit disappointing since they only seem to have China. If you search for Barcelona for exemple, you will only get Barcelona Bar in Shangai. Although they had a pretty call 3 dimensional vue of the town in Sim City mode.
The video and image search lacked a few recent features from the google version, but maybe I just didn’t find the .
The mp3s search is interresting, since this clearly the killer feature which made Baidu popular to the younger generation, And which Google was unable to offer to to lobeing in the West. Once again the Music industry has shown is lack of knwoledge and conservative approach which has not benefited growth.
Baidu’s social network is based around sharing content such as videos, tests votes or playing games similar to facebook’s farmville. It appears to be oriented to a younger age group than Google would and more comic focused.
Most of the other features seemed pretty good. Unfortunatly I havn’t connected to many friends since they do not have the check address book feature yet, which doesn’t make the contact propogation viral yet.
2 History:
Baidu was originaly founded by Robin Li it is interresting to see that google invested 10Million $ in Baidu in 2004, and selling this 2.5% share of the company in 2006.
CrunchBase made the following report in 2006 along with this regularly updated page.
You can get a better view of it’s stock value here:
Alexa, compete.com or quantcast give us these interresting statistics:
The alexa stats show indicate that it would be the 6th most visited site in the world although it still stays pretty far from google and facebook. Wikipedia also indicate that it would now represent 63% and Google 24% of the chinese market share for search
It has a higher page views per user though, which means that it is an essential tool for its users.
3. Future of Baidu
One surprising fact is that baidu looks very country centered, since it does have other translations such as baidu.jp and baidu.cn, and there doesn’t seem to be many ways of going from one site to another or no easy feature to translate pages,
But with such a marlet share in China, we can really expect it to become a huge global player the minute it will go global. Up to now, it has been looking like a cheaper copy of Google, with 6000 engineers this could change on some killer features.
This article on Robin li’s fanclub shows that it is what Baidu will probably be looking at doing in the near future, in the same way as google is focusing on China.
There are no real rules set on the web. Everything is just there to make things easier for the users. And it seems normal to copy the neighbour and include every feature you can make. I will definitly be keeping a close eye out on this search engine though.
We simply cannot go passed the worlds number 6th website, even if it is in a language which I don’t know yet, if there is something good there, we will need to brag it.
Baidu grew with the mp3 feature which was not allowed in the West but it will most likely gain the west on another feature. There is still a lot of work and therefore potential for Baidu. We will see what the future holds for Baidu.
A recent article mentions various studies which use public data to try and predict, the stock market or the house values tendency. This studies use data available to the public via, google trends or twitter to correlate the public mood which is extracted from twitter logs to housing value. This study seemed to demenstrate that stock values were more dependent to calm and to some extent happyness could have an impact on the stock tendancy to increase or decrease.
The second study uses google trends queries logs on housing to predict if houses are going to be sold or not. This follows another project Google setup last year where it used it’s search queries to predict the flu-trends after the H1N1 outburst.
Recently google also added a number of new datasets available to the public via it’s public data tool recently, which gives us a really interr
If correlation on these datasets was made succefully enough to predict house market value and probably stock exchange. Since, if anonymous mood information can give us tendancies of the market. This is nothing compared to the actual information which can be extracted from social networks such as facebook or google history, since by including the relation between people, geolocation and the knowledge or the information people actually know. We will not only be able to predict but actually know what people are planning to do, learn or discover.
Historically we have always seen information going in one direction. Going from Event to press to public. But if we actually know who has read what article, then we know exactly what they know and therefore, based on that information what choices they are capable of making. The control of the information in this case is complete.
Today was also the day wikileaks published a large amount of information on the Iraq war. Including this very interresting casualties map. Many people had predicted that this would happen in Iraq, but maybe that if we had had the tools to prove it. We could have avoided a huge amount of casualties.
Microsoft and google have been thinking for a long time. And this shows the Microsoft strategy as well as Google’s.
The success of microsoft in the 90s and noughties, is highly based on they software.
You get yourself a computer and a few servers, and we will provide you with good software. If you cannot get yourself the hardware.. then they cannot be blamed.
This has allowed very successfull decades of good Microsoft software.
But now everyone has a computer, and access to a fast internet connection, the issue now to not have to worry about those old servers any more.
Let them handle the hardware “in the clouds”, we don’t need them anymore. And that seems to be the way Microsoft and Google we be heading.
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