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Don’t be shocked if one or more shrines to Windows 7 are erected in Redmond today.  Microsoft released its quarterly earnings report this afternoon, and thanks in large part to the new operating system, the company’s numbers look quite good.

Analysts thought Microsoft might report something like $17.84 billion in revenue and earnings per share of 59 cents.  Microsoft overshot those forecasts by a significant amount, posting $19.12 billion and 74 cents, instead.

That puts the company up 14 percent and 57 percent, respectively, on a year-over-year basis.  And it would be an understatement to say that victories of this nature don’t occur every day, particularly given our economy’s current condition.

So if you’re happy (and as you’ll see in a minute, investors are), think well of Windows 7.  A record for Windows units was set last quarter, and Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, said in a statement, "Exceptional demand for Windows 7 led to the positive top-line growth for the company.  Our continuing commitment to managing costs allowed us to drive earnings performance ahead of the revenue growth."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, things didn’t go so well in every respect.  The Online Services Business lost a whopping $466 million, which makes for a significantly worse performance than last year (when it lost $320 million).

Then, one other possible cause for skittishness is the fact Microsoft hasn’t yet given any guidance.  Windows 7 can’t sell well forever, after all.

Still, investors have received Microsoft’s news with open arms and fists full of dollars.  Even though the Dow and Nasdaq both sank today (by 1.13 percent and 1.91 percent), Microsoft’s stock is up 1.47 percent in after-hours trading.

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Google has launched a new feature for search called "answer highlighting." This is based on Google Squared, Google’s structured data project announced last year at the company’s Searchology event. What it does is highlight answers to applicable queries within the search snippet.

For example, if the query is "empire state height," it will bold the actual answer for that, in addition to the words used in the query. Previously, it would have only bolded those words.

"Most information on the web is unstructured. For example, blogs integrate paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don’t follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their own formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web," says Google. "Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We’ve been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called ‘answer highlighting.’"

Don’t expect answer highlighting to be present in all search results, because in many cases, it just doesn’t make sense. You are more likely to come across it when there are specific answers or data involved.

Google also launched rich snippets for events today. To learn more about the RDFa, which helps Google find content for rich snippets, read this. Google has been using rich snippets for things like product reviews, and people information, but now events will sometimes utilize them. For example, if you search for a concert venue, you may see a few upcoming concerts listed.

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A little bit of data from the Efficient Frontier Q4 2009 Search Engine Performance Report has been made available, and it’s completely un-shocking in that it shows search marketers are still more than happy to spend their money with Google.  The interesting thing, though, is that Bing seems to have gained a little ground on the search giant.

To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow).  It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least.  And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

As for the future, Johnson wrote, "Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks."  The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, "SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010."

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Although spell checkers have been around for about 30 years, they still miss or incorrectly flag a whole lot of stuff (try "eye wonder weather this is write" and "monetize").  Google wants its transcription software to become better more quickly, and so is asking for users for a hand.

On the Google Voice Blog, Vincent Paquet, a senior product manager, recently wrote, "Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message.  You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad.  When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message."

Paquet then explained the meaning behind that phrase by continuing, "The messages you donate may be listened to, manually transcribed by us and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but they will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality."

For every Margaret who’s tired of being called "maggot rot" and Taylor who doesn’t make clothes for a living, this is a nice option.  Even people who don’t opt to donate messages may appreciate it, since it reinforces the idea that Google doesn’t eavesdrop on conversations by default.

One other important note: this may represent a step towards launching Google Voice in the U.K. and Australia.

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All sorts of corporations and individuals have agreed that the mobile market is key in China; many more people can afford Internet-enabled phones than PCs.  Baidu may be onto something, then, as it intends to have an app loaded onto phones before they’re made available for sale.

If Baidu can get a solid mobile app in front of a lot of people right from the start, it’ll decrease the odds of them ever turning to Google.  Given how Baidu’s doing so well in terms of desktop market share, it might even win converts.

And Baidu Palm, as the application’s known, should be plenty useful.  Owen Fletcher reported that, even in beta, it "hooks users into its search, message board and question-and-answer online services.  It also has a new quick-upload feature for pictures taken with a phone."

Another point in Baidu’s favor: things are looking pretty good on the distribution side.  Although no deals have been announced, Baidu’s already known to have relationships with a number of communications companies, including China Telecom and China Unicom.

It seems that we’ll soon see another big salvo in the Google-Baidu war, then.  Don’t count on Google taking too long to respond.

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Do you want to tell the world what you’re thankful for? Will the Twitterverse suffice? How about you followers and the few people that go to TurkeyTwitter?

What is TurkeyTwitter you ask? It is a site that was launched yesterday to give those celebrating Thanksgiving a place to see the collective thanks of Twitter users. Sure, you could simply use Twitter Search, and search "thanksgiving," but TurkeyTwitter provides updates and stats about the things people are thankful for. It gathers tweets based on the #turkeytwitter and #thanksgiving hashtag.

In actuality, it’s going to give you a lot more than just what people are thankful for. If anyone tweets anything remotely related to the holiday and includes a simple #thanksgiving hashtag, it will appear, but it is what it is. It’s Thanksgiving, and someone took the time to make a Twitter-based Thanksgiving site, so we’re talking about it. Case closed.

If you follow @turkeystats on Twitter, you can see the top ten thankful items tweeted out. The creators note that the site is just a quick experiment. They even offer advanced apologies if there’s something that doesn’t go well. Don’t worry guys, I think we’ll all sleep tonight if we experience some TurkeyTwitter hiccups.

If you have some time to kill, if you don’t like football, or you just want to know what strangers are thankful for, check out TurkeyTweets.

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Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Don’t worry, it hasn’t had an impact…yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google’s Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor.

"Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much."

>> Site speed ranking comments starts at the 02:35 point in the video…

"I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’" he says.

I would say that based on Matt’s comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn’t come right out and say that they definitely will. That said, making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so you might as well start optimizing it for speed anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you will have a head start on boosting your rankings.

Google has generally been pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites and potentially boost rankings and conversions. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages. Some of these, such as Page Speed and Closure tools come from Google itself. But there are a number of tools Google points you to from other developers as well.

If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking. Caffeine increases the speed at which Google can index content. Wouldn’t it make sense if your site helped the process along?

Have you given much thought to site speed? Is your site up to snuff? Discuss here.

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Earlier this week, reports surfaced indicating that Google had bought Gizmo5, a VoIP firm. The news came just on the heels of Google’s AdMob acquisition. Google has now officially announced that it has indeed acquired Gizmo5.

"While we don’t have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5’s engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience," Google says. "Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number."

"We’ve acquired a number of small companies over the past five years, and the people and technology that have come to Google from other places have contributed in many ways, large and small, to all kinds of Google products," the company adds. "Since the GrandCentral team joined Google in 2007, they’ve done incredible things with Google’s technology and resources to launch and improve Google Voice."

In a previous report, Doug Caverly of WebProNews noted that Gizmo5 is a good fit for Google. For one, Gizmo5 is free, and Google offers a great deal of free services as it is. It is also available in nine languages, and Google is frequently expanding its reach in this regard with most of its products.

A couple weeks ago Google announced that Google Voice users can now use their own existing mobile numbers. They no longer have to have a separate Google number. This should be a great way to attract new users. However, at this point, Google Voice is still only available on an invitation basis.
 

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Microsoft must be really into Halloween this year, as they’ve relesaed two "Halloween oriented" commercials for their latest search engine, Bing.

The first advertisement, which we told you about earlier this week, features the latest craze for "tweens" everywhere a Vampire. The latest commercial, entitled  Haunted Hotel, was inspired by the great Stanley Kubrick film, The Shining. Below is the description that accompanies the video on YouTube:

"You know what they say- all searching and no deciding makes the Web a dull place. And a confusing one as well, from the look of things. Don’t get lost in the search overload maze: use Bing."

So, what did you think of the latest Bing commercial? Tell us what you think.

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Don’t be surprised if Google’s sites and services become inaccessible to people within China.  The search giant has gotten in trouble with a newspaper called the People’s Daily, and said publication just happens to be the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China.

Not too long ago, the People’s Daily ran articles that were critical of the Google Books scanning project.  They touched on some of the same issues other people have raised, alleging copyright infringement and the like.  The trouble was that Google then stopped allowing searchers to access a portion of the newspaper’s website.

According to Liang Chen, searchers could just see a warning that stated, "This website may have malicious software, which might damage your computer."

The People’s Daily did not take kindly to this.  Chen continued, "[T]he channel posted a news story at the top of its Web page Monday, quoting a person in charge of the channel as saying that ‘Google has maliciously blocked the channel in retaliation.’"  A special, separate page was created, too.

Now, access has been restored, and Google’s chalked the malicious software warning up to an automated mistake on the part of StopBadware.org.  Still, this episode could hurt Google’s reputation in China, and it’s not at all unimaginable that the government would take action and do a little (more) censorship of its own.

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