Technology As Innovator

A response to Anh Hung’s question on success possibility of CyVee.

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

Update

This slide made it to slideshare front page on September 6, 2008. Thanks SlideShare team!

You have been the one who create contents for the web.

You have been the one who teaches the web semantic meanings by tagging and linking information.

How much can You involve in organizing the web? The next step is You can change the order of Google search results.

Google Search started off one decade ago in 1998 with their search algorithm, and it’s been the core of their success till now. As the time grows, Google grew to be #1 search engine but has been facing a lot of challenges. Not only including Yahoo! and Live and Ask, the list of competitors is crowded with Wikia search, Cuil, Visual Search and many more. From this list, Mahalo and Wikia involve users in where they can provide feedbacks to the search results.

So what’s next from Google? An experiment to allow Google user to re-rank the search results. You can see the arrows in the screenshot below:

This is, again, only their experiment. But ain’t it interesting to follow?

My wonder is: does this feature collaborative or simply personal? How will Google absorb this feedback channel - algorithmically or mass-manually?

What do you think of this feature from Google?

Read more on their experiments on Search

“Within the next 5 years, Google Vietnam will have been Google Indochina.”

Read the article here: Google’s Advisor for Vietnam

That article was all the way back to early 2007.

We are now in August 2008 when we receive this big news: Google has officially set their foot in Vietnam.

Where is Google currently?

Currently, Google has 3 web properties standing in top positions in Vietnam market:

1. google.com.vn at #2, after yahoo.com
2. google.com at #7, after 4 local news portal
3. youtube.com at #10, after another 2 news site. Read more: Vietnamese bloggers go to YouTube chiefly looking for embed code

Source: Alexa August 2008

Gmail is second to Yahoo! Mail

Many Vietnamese also love spending time on Wikimapia.

A predictable and inevitable move…

No need to mention the localized version of the search portal google.com.vn, Google’s presence in Vietnam could be predicted since their AdSense for Vietnamese browsers has recently displayed contents in Vietnamese, and frequently with Gmail and Orkut.

An Orkut screenshot, click on the image to view the original version.

The 20-million-internet-user market is rich and potential to Google as well.

…getting over certain issues

It’s important to mention some issues with Vietnam market for Google

1. Volume of frauds in AdSense from Vietnam
2. Buyer habit
3. Revenues the business expect to gain from selling advertisements to Google services
4. e-Commerce law

(2) is changing dramatically and is driving (3).

We’ve seen signals to improvements to (4)

So I guess it is high time Google was here in this rapidly developing country.

News is just news, no news is bad news.
Or is it no news is good news?

What do you think when you know the news?

I’ve observed various reactions from people in the industry.

1. “Hitting the market first” is getting tighter it’s hard to breath.

Many service providers have aimed to push their products to the market before Google comes to Vietnam.

Now they do!

Any plan to pre-ampt Google would be extremely hard.

2. The non-technical users are not as excited as the technical communities

While most agree that Google search is powerful, many non-technical are happy with Yahoo! services including Messenger, Mail, 360, 360plus and other local service providers.

Another thing to look at is connection speed. Vietnamese users suffer from bottle-neck effect to international websites. However, even with that, Google search result load speed is surprisingly amazing with their distributed network.

So all in all, non-technical users have very few reason to celebrate

3. Technical communities are jumping up and down in joy now

Because they have established the habit of relying on many Google services.

Well I have two things to say

Firstly, I don’t want to be forced to use the localized version of Google without an option to revert to the international version. I have tested the result from Google international search and Google Vietnam search and they’re much different. I’d prefer the international version, thanks. And I appreciate that Google provides the URL google.com/ncr for the international version.

Secondly, I have to ask this: does Google really love Vietnam?

No I’m not kidding. You may want to know that Coca-cola doesn’t invest too much on marketing and market penetration to compete with Pepsi in Vietnam. They’re here to make locals aware of their presence and not to let Pepsi equate cola to “Pepsi”. You may want to know that Honda introduced the Click and the Airblade with heavy subsidy in Vietnam not to head on directly with Yamaha’s Nouvo series, but not to let Yamaha dominates the whole market. This is important to keep in mind because in Vietnam, “the web” is equal to “Yahoo!” for many beginning users.

We want to see how strongly Google will push the Vietnam market…