This new Razorfish Search blog series, Digital Marketing News, will feature quick hits on recent changes, success stories, and other news in the field of digital marketing.

The first entry briefly explores Google+‘s impact on SEO, sourced from PCWorld.com. The immediate impact: Google Realtime Search has been missing in action since July 4, 2011. Follow the link below to continue reading!

“Google suspended its Realtime Search on July 4. The search feature, which displayed Twitter feeds in real time, was turned off by Google because its contract with Twitter had expired. It is clear however, that the contract was not renewed because Google plans on including their own Google+ live feed into their searches, rather than Twitter’s.”

Continued: Google Suspends Realtime Search | Found and captured by Joe DeVita in NYC.

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Baidu’s share of searches in China increased 6% from Q4 to Q1. Google redirecting visitors from mainland China to their Hong Kong site doesn’t seem a likely factor for this growth, given that Google’s change didn’t happen until March 22nd. It looks more like the increasing number of Chinese internet users is responsible. The share of Chinese citizens regularly accessing the internet was less than 30% in 2009. Internet penetration is increasing a lot faster in China than in the US, where penetration is now above 75%.

Employees at Razorfish’s offices in Beijing and Shanghai report that Google users are loyal, citing the accuracy and relevance Google is trusted to provide. Also, Google is necessary for searching for English-language pages in China.  Baidu results are only available in Chinese. Google will have a significant market in China until Baidu makes a big strategy shift.

Baidu’s strategy is to increase query share by concentrating on new users, rather than stealing from Google. Baidu also hopes to capture more of the mobile search share in China. This week, executives from Baidu explained their ambition to achieve the same query share from mobile as they have on PCs. With less than 1% of their sales teams dedicated to international business, it’s clear Baidu is not looking to the West.