Google has just released Local Business Center to enable business owners to analyze their company online listing through Google data in a dashboard.

Introduction to Google’s Local Business Center

▲ Official Introduction Video of Google’s Local Business Center

▲ Google Map Listing of Pizza Hut Restaurant in Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong

Customers have already search products, services and places through search engines like Google, while a nice business listing which is informative and with postive review in Google Map definitely bring more customers to you.

Local Business Center it the web analytics tool you can extract data from Google, which is impossible before accessing their data, to optimize your listings as well as for business development.

In Hong Kong, thanks to OpenRice.com, there are many restaurant listings in Google Map. Not only those chain restaurants should adopt Local Business Center immediately, individual restaurants should also take online medium as an effective channel to promote their business with analytics results as well.

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Bing! Microsoft just released their revamped Live Search engine and name it Bing. Make sure you have selected “United States” as country and not “Hong Kong SAR”, otherwise, you will just get a Bing Beta rather than a Preview version of Bing.

Google-like Search Result Page

▲ Bing Search Result of “Hong Kong”

▲ Bing Map Search Result of “Hong Kong”

▲ Bing Images Search Result of “Hong Kong”

In sense of user-interface, I can’t really spot any major difference. The look-and-feel of the search result page is even very similar to Google, except Bing has some photo clip art under its logo and a search keyword sidebar are insert on the left.

The sidebar should take a credit, it does list out keyword-related information, e.g. additional keywords, related search phrases and result display options. However, as a decision engine, Bing’s results during I try-out disappointed me as it is not as intelligent as i expected, and it doesn’t differentiate itself from a general search engine to become a real tool to help people to make decisions.

Shopping and Video Search Results Look Better

▲ Bing Shopping Search Result of “Mobile Phone”

▲ Bing Video Search Result of “Britain’s Got Talent”

Bing’s Shopping Search with users & expert reviews, and other product options are great to ease user to compare different product, but i doubt if we will have this features in Hong Kong. And it’s Video Search result listing are awesome too, as we can play the videos within the search result page, of which Google has stopped this features.

In general, Bing surprised me without any suprising features and I can’t see any major features making it as a decision engine as Microsoft Bing team said. I will wait to see for more intelligent search engine in future release.

Extended Reading

• Google and Bing: Plagiarism or … ? by Cappella’s Blogspot
• Bing Launch, Day Two by The Big Money
• Badda-Bing Indeed. by TechCrunch

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Microsoft is launching their latest generation search engine – Bing (previous known as codename Kumo) by June 3. Together with the recently released Wolfram|Alpha, they introduce much speculations about the future of search engines, in my view, it’s about evolution of intelligence in search engines.

Bing – A Decision Engine

▲ Bing Search Result Page (See more in Bing’s Introductory Video)

The biggest change in Bing is the presentation of information on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). They are customized for the type of search keywords. Its aim is to help users have a better way to search, bing and decide easily, so the Bing team calls Bing a decision engine in introduction letter:

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions.

- Bing Team, Microsoft

Microsoft is going launch this decision engine with pretty huge spending campaign of $80 – $100 million [via AdAge]. Definitely, it is looking for a bigger slice of market share in both search engine and keyword ad market. Let’s see if this decision engine can bring any challenge to search giant Google in June.

Wolfram Alpha – An Answer-Engine

▲ Wolfram|Alpha Search Result for “President of U.S.”

Another powerful intelligent search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, was just launched on Jun 16. Its significant difference with other search engines is that it answers your specific questions directly with appropriate format, but not listing links. So it seems like a Wikipedia to me rather than another Google, and kind of Google + Wikipedia as you can search the same questions in Google and probably it shows you Wikipedia links.

Search Engines need Intelligence

To conclude, both Bing and Wolfram|Alpha confirm the trend of search engine to provide better user experience, they have to be much intelligent. Their results should address users’ questions with easy-to-understand presentation, but not only links.

Extended Reading

• Bing! Microsoft Prepares For War With A Revamped Search Engine (Screenshots) by TechCrunch
• Wolfram ‘search engine’ goes live by BBC News
• Wolfram|Alpha by Wikipedia

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Google just launched Google Hong Kong Finance (Google 香港財經) Beta on March 30, 2009. It is a localized version of Google Finance, which has already been launched for over 3 years in U.S., and offers users with comprehensive finance information for Hong Kong, China and major worldwide stock markets.

Awesome and Unique features

 Streaming Stock Quote. Besides offering real-time stock quote for China and U.S. market and 15-minute delay for Hong Kong, the displayed prices are updated automatically like streaming quote without any clicks and refresh. And most importantly, it’s free.

Goolge Trend-like Chart. The charts come along with relevant news with labels associated on the timelines which is similar to Google Trend. It helps users to identify any possible causes of the price movement. The relevant news which suggested by Google serach engine consolidate the major local financial news sources like AAStocks.com and 128128.com which is very handy for users. I hope Google will introduce the relevant blogs feature of which Google Finance in U.S. offer real soon.

Interactive Analysis. The interactive charts and analysis tools faciliates users of all-kind. Chart analysis is handy with comprehensive tool in Flash with 10-year historical data. Technical analysis is also easy by specifying criterias in “Stock Screener” (“股票篩選器”).

Promotion Event in Causeway Bay

Just read about in Twitter today that Google has temporaily rented a store in crowded Causeway Bay to introduce Google HK Finance Beta to the public. I have got a chance to be there but realized there are not many passer-by interested, and I am one of a few to sit down and experience the new awesome localized service by Google. And I was surpised by their “Google Chupa Chups” and Octopus card case with a bull in 2008 :p

Extended Reading

• “Google Finance” by Wikipedia
• “Google Finance Blog” by Google
• “Google香港財經Beta正式推出　提供一站式股票市場資訊” by e-zone 討論區

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Photo is the key component making social media so hot. You may have tried your best to tag all your friends and yourself in photos on Facebook, but you’ll always get a chance to miss some photos of you taken by your friends, colleagues and in those other 10 billion photos in Facebook. Face.com’s ‘Photo Finder’ will help you discover them all automatically.

Auto-Tagged by Photo Finder

Face.com announced its alpha version of Photo Finder on Facebook. It adopts a proprietary facial recognition technology to scans through those photos in your own, your friends’ and other public albums instantly, and it will prompt an Auto-Tag results for user’s confirmation. We will be free from tagging photos in future, how cool it is!

Search Photo of You

Face recognition also enables searches over billions of photos on the internet too. Polar Rose launches its facial search engine Polar Rose beta, and you can search any public figures, celebrities and even yourself. How does it do it? It recognizes the faces and suggests the names to those users’ installed their plug-in to confirm them or add new names. These scalable eye-ball checks are made feasible by the power of crowdsourcing.

Though it sparks privacy concerns, Face recognition will definitely be the major technology on social networking and photo-sharing sites like Facebook & Flickr. If you want to try it first, join Face.com’s Photo Finder alpha and share your experience here.

Extended Reading

• Face.com Brings Facial Recognition To Facebook Photos by TechCrunch
• Facial Recognition Comes to Facebook by ReadWriteWeb

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