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There is a lot talk about Facebook. The billionaires, the millionaires, the speculation, the complaining, the changes. You name it, the list goes on. Of everything I have read, one quote summarizes it all from Wall Street Journal article. It comes from Veronica Stecker the media manager for Omaha, NE based retailer Gordmans. Simply put [...]

With the Super Bowl being this weekend and the fact that two major metro teams, the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, are participating there is A LOT of press coverage. Usually the Super Bowl hype is overbearing but even to this sports fan (and New York Giants fan) this one is getting [...]

Last week I talked about how marketers should leverage culture to promote brands. Today I would like to talk about why we also can (and should) change culture. As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is marketing changing culture? Or is culture changing marketing?” Or in other words, are these [...]

Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s working wonders for the online ad business. According to eMarketer, video is showing the highest spending growth numbers of any category. Last year video went up 42.1% and it’s expected to keep in the double-digits for the next few years. More spending, means claiming a larger [...]

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.

Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.

Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:


As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in “market share” since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.

We’ve long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we’ll be updating to that version and to Unicode’s locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it’d be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.

Posted by Mark Davis, International Software Architect

In an ideal Facebook marketing world, fans would like our pages, leave sweet comments on our amusing daily updates, and share their joy with their friends. In the real world, it doesn’t work that way. You already knew that, but did you know how much it doesn’t work that way? AdAge recently published the results [...]

Thanks to Avinash Kaushik Created by Kashmir Hill, Forbes.

Can you believe it’s been more than a year since we last gave away an awesome marketing book? Yeah, time to fix that! We’ve got 3 copies of Brian Carter’s The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook to give away to Marketing Pilgrim readers. Barely two months old, Brian’s book is already garnishing [...]