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.

A search for “christmas present ideas” shows how little the big advertisers are prepared for this time of year however. You would expect at least some search engine optimised landing pages perhaps?! The big dogs are having to do with PPC ads to attract visitors at this time of year. Many of the listings found for such searches are pureley affiliate or adsense sites which link through to the bigger distributors.

Considering how lucrative this time of year is, i would have expected to see the like of Play, Amazon and similar sites to rank highly for such search terms and to cash in on the christmas boom! So, if your listening Play, your new years resolution is SEO in time for xmas 2009!

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.

Notice how 7 out of the top ten search results for “Matt Foley” show video snippets from Youtube and various other video sites! However, if i search for something like “curry making video”, (because lets face it.. i love a good curry) I would hope to receive a similar results page, seeing as i include “video” in the search query:

I actually only receive 5 video results out of the top ten, but 50% isnt bad in my opinion! I think the search results depend heavily on the type of search query made, and at this stage we shouldnt read too much into it.. As with many changes to search algorithms, it can take a good while to get some of the imperfections ironed out to return the most relevant, quality results.

Should videos become more prevalent in the future however, this could be seen as bad news for some text based websites and may, in some extreme cases make ranking regular web pages more difficult. If Google decides video results are more popular with searchers, we could soon see a proliferation of video based sites. This could spell bad news for our fellow web designers and search marketers alike, so close dreamweaver right now… and go get yourself a video camera !

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.

To: all yahoos
Fr: Jerry
Subject: update

yahoos -

i wanted to address all of you on the news we’ve just announced. the board of directors and I have agreed to initiate a succession process for the ceo role of yahoo!. roy bostock, our chairman of the board, is leading the effort to identify and assess potential candidates for consideration by the full board. the board will be evaluating and considering both internal and external candidates and has retained heidrick and struggles to help in this effort.

i will be participating in the search for my successor, and i will continue as ceo until the board selects a new ceo. once a successor is named, i will return to my previous role as chief yahoo and continue to serve as a director on the board.

last june, i accepted the board’s request that i assume the ceo role to restructure and reposition the company as a whole in order to more effectively meet the fast-changing needs of both users and partners. since taking on the ceo role, i have had an ongoing dialogue with the board about succession timing. thanks in large measure to your tireless efforts, we have created a more open, competitive yahoo! and we believe the time is now right to transition to a new ceo who can take the company to the next level.

despite the external environment we face, the fact remains that yahoo! is now a significantly different company that is stronger in many ways than it was just 18 months ago. this only makes it all the more essential that we manage this opportunity to leverage the progress up to this point as effectively as possible. i strongly believe that having transformed our platform and better aligned costs and revenues, we have a unique window for the right ceo to take ownership over the next wave of mission-critical decisions facing the company.

all of you know that I have always, and will always bleed purple. i will always do what I think is right for this great company. while this step will be an adjustment for all of us, i know it’s the right one. i look forward to updating you on this process as soon as the board has developments to share, and will continue to do everything i can to make yahoo! fulfill its full potential.

thank you,
jerry

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.

This is an awe inspiring step forward in providing a google user access historical speeches, informational articles and a whole wealth of content that is hidden away on the web. Imagine its use for researching coursework, helping writing news stories and getting opinions on political standpoints! I can only imagine the scale of the programming needed for such a project. However, to make this application fully functional, the application must be able to take into consideration dialects, accents, different languages and background noises for example – A fair bit of work then…!

The original article, found at SEO Chat also raises some important points about its affect on Search engine optimisation, which will affect webmasters targeting Youtube and video searchers. Videos can no longer be stuffed with keyword in the hopes of receiving a click, and will encourage more relevancy in the content! This kind of change is certainly in the interests of the end user, but will definately make SEO consultants rethink their video marketing campaigns.

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
• Listing of all META tags in the document
• Tag counts – this feature counts all the tags in a document to give clues about composition.
• Contents of the
• The body of text with tags removed
• Percentage of body words that are stop words (See Supported Languages Below). Stopwords are not counted by the search engines, so you can determine how effective your marketing copy is by knowing how much of what you’ve written will be ignored.
• The total word count of the document for words that are not determined to be number
• Phrase counting for phrases of length 1 to 5 words — this helps you determine repetitive phrases in the document
  • The anchor tags in the document — and, specifically if there is an image in the link text.
  • The inner HTML of of the tag. This is the same as the link text.
  • All the image tags in the document
  • The the text of the image “alt” attribute

  Im all for innovation and enterprise, but considering how slow mobile internet is right now – will this really be that useful?

  ]]> http://www.onlineworx.net/blog/the-web/seo-on-the-go/feed/ 0 http://www.onlineworx.net/blog/the-web/google-to-offer-gmail-sms/ http://www.onlineworx.net/blog/the-web/google-to-offer-gmail-sms/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:43:10 +0000 Peter Cadney http://www.onlineworx.net/blog/2008/10/31/google-to-offer-gmail-sms/

  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!

  ]]> http://www.onlineworx.net/blog/the-web/google-to-offer-gmail-sms/feed/ 0