Google continued to dominate online search in the first half of the year.
As of May, Google maintained a 65% share of online search, up 2 percentage points from the start of the year, according to comScore. Yahoo, on the other hand, slipped 0.9 points to 20.1% and Microsoft lost a half point to just 8% of the search market.
And then along came Bing, which debuted in early June. Microsoft's new ballyhooed search engine immediately stole market share from its competitors, climbing to a 16.7% share just two weeks after its release, comScore said.
Though experts don't expect that huge jump to last, most think that Bing will begin to chip away at Google's dominance and perhaps challenge Yahoo's second-place status in the second half of the year.
"Bing, in terms of interaction design, is a leap forward," said Susan Feldman, search engine analyst at IDC. "I think it will gain market share, but that depends mostly on Microsoft's marketing as opposed to its technology. It's easy to switch, but hard to get people to change their habits."
To really challenge Google, some say Microsoft will need to partner with Yahoo -- a back-and-forth dance that has never materialized but one both companies have said they are receptive to.
Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst with Collins Stewart LLC, said he expects a Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to be reached by the time the companies report their quarterly results in late July.
StatCounter
Hi guys, Here is another interesting service from Google.
Want to know, which movie is being showed in which theater
at what time?
Just enter your city name. It lists everything. Really
http://www.google.co.in/movies
Mozilla on Monday released beta 3.5 of Firefox, a revamp of the open-source Web browser designed to include better performance, several new Web programming features, and a private browsing mode.
The earlier betas had been numbered 3.1, but Mozilla switched to the version 3.5 name after concluding the changes were more significant than it envisioned earlier. Mozilla has said earlier the fourth beta will the last, with more polished release candidates expected before the final version of Firefox 3.5 is released. You can download Firefox 3.5 beta 4 from CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac.
The software emerges amid what's become a fiercely competitive browser market. Microsoft has released a significant new version, Internet Explorer 8, while Google has entered the market with Chrome and Apple is trying to secure a Windows foothold for its Safari browser. Firefox holds second place in market share to IE.
Among the changes compared with the current Firefox 3.0.x versions are the faster TraceMonkey engine for running Web sites' JavaScript programs; built-in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers; support for tags to describe audio and video content the way images have been available for years; the private browsing mode for leaving no traces on your computer while surfing; support for technology to let permitted applications know the user's location; and support for the Web workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a Web application's user interface.
There are a number of known problems with Gmail and with AVG SafeSearch v8.0 on Windows, and as usual, many of those extensions that are so popular on Firefox could break.
Internet search engine Google has become the world's first 100 billion dollar brand.
It is worth almost 25 per cent more than rival computing corporation Microsoft, according to the annual BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands report.
The top-ranking British brand in the global survey was Vodafone, followed by Tesco and HSBC.
According to The Telegraph, it is the third year in a row Google has secured the top spot.