Last thursday we saw the announcement for Google’s browser Chrome being taken out of its “beta” testing stage. This came as quite a shock to the web community as there were a few problems along the way, however the Chrome development team must be happy with their bug fixes, and the slick new browser has left “beta” stage with almost 10 million users.

Although Chromes 1% marketshare is probably on a gradual rise, expect a surge following the eagerly expected releases for both linux and mac. This public release really shows the web world how confident Google are with their browser against market leaders Internet Explorer and the awesome Firefox.

According to BBC News, Britain is set for its busiest online shopping day of the year, with an estimated £320 million to be spent online today.

Despite being in the midst of a credit crunch, UK shoppers will be venturing online to buy a record number of items online in the run up to christmas, the IMRG (internet trade body) estimating the UK’s Christmas online retail sales could reach £13.6bn. This also coincides with a huge increase in christmas related search engine optimisation, as advertisers attempt to cash in on the frantic shopping months of november and december. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Livesearch, the ever-weakening Microsoft Live Search may be considering a rebrand. Rumours are pointing towards a newly registered domain by the Microsoft corp – Kumo.com.

The snappy new domain name, shows a “You don’t have permission to access “http://www.kumo.com/” on this server” message for regular visitors, but is said to give access to an internal portal for Microsoft employees. Perhaps a test area for the newly branded search software?!

It seems that if rumours are true, the former big name in the search industry are pulling out all the stops to regain their waning search marketshare.

You may remember a post i made some time ago, about the effectiveness of video marketing and Youtube as an advertising platform. I still feel quite confident that videos will gain importance in online marketing in general. Amit over at Labnol strengthens this view, posting a great example of search results going ‘video crazy’. Read the rest of this entry »

Struggling search wizards Yahoo have recently seen the resignation of their CEO Jerry Yang. This comes at a crucial time, following Yang’s decision early this year to reject a buyout offer from Microsoft. On top of mounting pressure from the board, and an estimated $30bn of lost share value, experts think it was too little, too late. Read Jerry Yang’s full email that was sent to employees explaining his reasons to step down.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to some recent research over at Google HQ, web users like simplicity when searching the web. After conducting numerous tests on web surfers, which track the eye movements of the surfer on the search results page, the Google team have redesigned the advanced search page to make it more user-friendly.

Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word “occurrences,” for example, just didn’t mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way.

One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn’t understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a “visible query builder” region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators.

It just goes to show how much thought is put into even all aspects of web search. Im sure that by futhering this type of research, we will have a clearer idea of the “perfect website design” from a usability standpoint!

View the full Google report and Eye-tracking video here.

In another staggering attempt to index the worlds information, Google have released their Google Audio Indexing application, codename ‘GAudi’ for Beta testing. The application, found in Google Labs allows users to search through a limited number of Youtube videos by words or sentences contained within those videos. The translation software, still in its infancy, can interpret the audio and convert it to text with is then searchable by its users. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft are again dealt another blow to their waning internet presence, as funky web browser Firefox takes a 20% market share. According to the official mozilla blog, the popular browser is, for the first time ever used by 20% of the worlds internet surfers.

It’s hardly suprising, considering that users now have so much choice on how to browse the web and there is no exscuse for buggy, virus prone software! We all love Firefox at Onlineworx, and are hooked by its simplicity and ease of use – Heres to Firefox’s worldwide internet domination!

If you want to work away from your desk or keep track of your SEO projects on the move, this handy little application for the iPhone could be just what your looking for. Developed by infinidigm, the iPhone only application costs $14.99 from itunes and comes with the following features:

• Complete source code listing
• Listing of META keywords
• Listing of META description Read the rest of this entry »

Google are soon to release text message functionality to their popular Gmail client. According to Techcrunch, the application will be integrated into the chat box. By typing a friends number into the chat window, the mail client will automatically allow you to send an SMS to any friend stored in your contact list. Currently this feature is only available to googlers in the US, but expect to see it introduced in the UK very soon!