WCA January 2008

From the americas

Statue of Liberty Image from BigStockPhoto.com Photographer: Marty

firms use online recruitment techniques dismissed by many traditional pollsters. (‘Chinese Search Engine Comes Up No 3,’ 15 th October) Of related interest . . . The Nielsen Company, a New York-based provider of consumer and media information services, announced 18 th October that it had reached an agreement in principle for outsourcing a portion of its information technology (IT) and operations functions worldwide to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading IT services, business solutions, and outsourcing organisation based in Mumbai. Under the proposed 10-year agreement, valued at approximately $1.2 billion, the Indian company would assume responsibility for important IT and operational processes of Nielsen’s and help the American company integrate and centralise systems, technologies, and processes on a global scale. TCS said it will take direct responsibility for a Nielsen team based in Baroda, Gujarat. ❖ Google, the Internet search engine, is the brainchild of Google Inc (Mountain View, California), whose mission is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ On 20 th September, the Australian trade news service Communications Day reported the company’s latest initiative in support of that ambition: a plan to lay its own data communications cable across the Pacific Ocean. Under the umbrella name Unity, the Google project would include several telecommunications companies. According to the Australian report the group hopes to have a cable in service by 2009. Google’s dedicated portion of the multi- terabit cable would, of course, give it a significant cost advantage over rival Internet companies transmitting over the same route. Writing in the technology section of the New York Times , Saul Hansell noted that, while a Google spokesman in Australia declined to comment, CommDay reported that the company had run advertisements seeking people to ‘be involved in new projects or investments in cable systems that Google may contemplate to extend or grow its backbone.’ (‘Has Google Plans to Lay a Pacific Cable?’ 21 st September) Mr Hansell outlined what a longer, stronger backbone might mean to Google: “[The company] has long been buying up data communications capacity. Its search engine works by making copies of nearly every page of the Internet in its own data centres, requiring that it move no small amount of data around the world on a regular basis. And its new plans to deliver applications over the Internet will use even more bandwidth.” Dave Burstein, the editor of DSLPrime , who tipped off the Times to the CommDay report, told Mr Hansell that, even though there is a lot of unused fibre capacity across Google is mulling a plan for a Pacific submarine cable

Cyberspace

Inaugural report of Internet search engines finds Chinese-language Baidu.com right behind Google and Yahoo!

For business clients, the marketing research company ComScore Inc (Reston, Virginia) tracks the online behaviour of Internet users. On 10 th October, ComScore reported on the first comprehensive study of search engine activity worldwide, derived from data generated by its own qSearch 2.0 service. The resulting view of the search universe – gathered from the top 50 worldwide Internet properties – is claimed, plausibly, to be ‘panoramic.’ As indicated by the searches counted in the single month of August 2007, the extent of this activity is extraordinary. The ComScore study found that more than 750 million people aged 15 and older – or 95% of the worldwide Internet audience – instituted 61 billion searches, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher. Some other notable findings of the study: The Asia-Pacific region, including the large Chinese, Japanese, and Indian markets, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches in August. Europe was next, reporting 210 million searchers performing 18 billion searches; followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in the month. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region was the most under- developed, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70) No surprise, Google Inc ranked as the top worldwide search property in August, with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total, 31 billion were initiated at the Google search engine and 5 billion at YouTube.com. In second place was Yahoo! with 8.5 billion searches. Both are US-based. What may have come as a surprise, however, is that the Chinese-language search engine Baidu.com took third place, with more than 3.2 billion searches in the month. China is one of the few countries in which Google is not dominant. Microsoft, of the US, ranked fourth worldwide; while Korea’s NHN Corp, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches. Bob Ivins, ComScore’s executive vice president, told the Los Angeles Times that Baidu shows how one regional player ‘can break into the top five globally by its complete control of a very, very large market,’ and that Baidu’s numbers would likely keep increasing along with the growing online population in China. Anick Jesdanun, of the Times, noted that the numbers provided by ComScore and its rival Nielsen/NetRatings are closely watched by industry analysts, even as the measuring ❖ ❖ ❖

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2008