Google is rolling out in the next few days Search+. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.

Read more on: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/plus.html and http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/gpsf

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, twitter

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Apparently Google’s Chrome became the number two browser in the UK during the month of July for the first time, according to StatCounter. The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that Chrome took 22.1% of the UK market, up from 3.9% in July 2009. In the same period Microsoft’s Internet Explorer fell significantly from 61% to 46% globally and Firefox dropped slightly from 27% to 22%.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

“Chrome continues to make significant gains in the browser market going from under 4% two years ago to over 20% today,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Despite falling market share Internet Explorer still leads in the browser war but the next few months will be interesting to watch with Chrome and Firefox almost neck and neck.”

Chrome is also performing particularly well in Ireland where it overtook Firefox in May to become the number two browser. In July it reached 27.7%, ahead of Firefox’s 24.2% but still behind IE at 39.9%.

Technorati Tags: Browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, StatCounter

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Everyone is talking about Google+, how they love it, how they don’t get it and how confusing it is. Yes you heard me, some people find it confusing… well I did at first, it took me a few looks in to realise, oh this is easy. I was actually making it out to be more complicated, it’s like when someone in a foreign country says something in English and you don get it because you assume they don’t speak it.  For my own interest, and maybe of others, here are some interesting and useful links about Google+.

• Mashable’s complete guide to Google+
• CIO’s Google+ Privacy: 5 Settings You Need to Know
• Google+ vs Facebook [comic]
• Make short url for your google+ profile.
• Got WebRep Overall Rating? Problem solved.

Technorati Tags: comic, Facebook, Google, privacy, Social Networking

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Facebook has finally entered the Search war with Google. With the acquisition of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the company will be head to head with Google and is expected to bypass the search giant within a year. See official statement.

Technorati Tags: Bing, Facebook, Google, Google +1, Search

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I am deeply shocked at audible.com for not having an app for Android. They claim that “the Android media player does not allow playback of our titles“… right.  Anyway they are now attempting to get the ball rolling for an App for Android in 2010. There’s a signup for upcoming  beta testing on their website and I urge every Android user (or user to be) to sign up and put a little bit more pressure on them.

Android is a great mobile platform and companies like Audible.com (an Amazon associate) are stalling its growth with short sightedness.

UPDATE from comment by JP White: “A Beta Audible app is now available for Android devices.  Read more at
http://wp.me/pCOs1-aw“

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Android, Android App, audible books, Audio books, Beta, Google

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Once again Microsoft is showing it’s dirty claws.  According to a report in the Financial Times (also mentioned in the KPMRS Blog), Microsoft is planing to offer to pay publishers to remove their content from Google in an attempt to make its search engine Bing (no link on purpose) the #1 search engine.

According to the FT, one website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.  – extracted

I cannot believe the greedy minds in the media industry are already thinking about embracing it. Again Microsoft has gotten it all wrong, will they ever learn? Attitudes like this will only promote two things, firstly the dissemination of online content theft, were people will republish full content of paid websites to drive traffic to their sites/blogs and secondly it will take away the choice that users now have of using any search engine they like.  This is so “un-internet”!

I agree with the comment on the KPMRS blog  by blogger Greg (null pointer) who said:

“How about instead of Microsoft spending millions to make their search results appear (artificially) better than Google’s, they spend that same money to create better search algorithms? That’s real competition!” – extracted

Technorati Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, newspapers, search engine

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Google Wave is an online (and open source) tool for real-time communication and collaboration.

A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

On an interview with the BBC technology site the developer behind Wave described it as “a communication and collaboration tool”.

“It struck us that e-mail is still the main communication tool on the web, which seemed remarkable given that it is 20-year-old technology,” said Lars Rasmussen, who, alongside his brother Jens, was the brains behind Google Maps. (extracted from BBC Technology)

An interesting (but possibly annoying) feature is the live transmission as you type. With this live typing participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

To test Wave you will will need to request an invitation, if accepted you can then invite 5 more people to join in the experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Technorati Tags: Google, Google wave, instant messaging, Open Source, share photos, social network, team collaboration, TEchnology News

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Great tips on the use of Redirect 301 and rel=canonical among some other good stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hSoXutuj0g

Technorati Tags: crawl, duplicate content, Google, redirect 301, rel canonical, search engine, search ranking

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Any webmaster and marketer will know how important it is to keep track of their website ranking, keyword positioning, visits, ROI and so on…  There are a lot of interesting tools out there to help us. 

• Google Analytics – Visitor tracking, keyword positioning, goal setting, demographics and more…
• http://www.alexa.com – web traffic metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more… 
• Google Webmaster Tools – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google
• Yahoo Site Explorer – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Yahoo
• Bling Webmaster Center – detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Bling (former LiveSearch)
• Keyword Spy – Research and track keywords in 3 search engines and 30+ countries.
• KPMRS – website rank monitoring services on various search engines
  for multiple keywords.
• XML-Sitemaps – Generate sitemaps online. Up to 500 urls Free.
• WP Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

These are just a few tools I use the most, please share yours.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Bing, Google, Keyword lookup, KPMRS, ROI, Search, SEO, Site Explorer, Sitemaps, Visitor tracking, webmaster tools, WordPress, Yahoo

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Optimise your WordPress blog or site for search with a couple of plugins and the web tools provided by Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch. The All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress will let you manipulate the specific SEO content of your blog like page title, meta data and description. Defaults can be set in the admin area of the plugin on your dashboard and specific settings can be tweaked as you create or edit a post.

The other important plugin is the Google XML Sitemap Generator, which creates a nice sitemap for you. After installing this plugin you need to create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files in the root folder of your blog and change their permissions CHMOD  666. The easiest is to right-click on the files in your FTP client and change permissions under properties, 666 stands for Read and Write permission for Owner / Group / Others.  For more information see the README.txt included with the plugin. 

After installation go to the Admin area of the plugin on your Dashboard (Settings>>XML-Sitemap) and if the sitemap has not been generated yet click on the link Generate sitemap.

Search Engine Webmaster tools. (there are links to them on the XML-Sitemap admin)

1. Google webmaster tools – add your site and sitemap url, Google requires that you add a verification to your site either by adding some code to your home page or by uploading a html file to your root folder.
2. Yahoo Explorer – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
3. LiveSearch Webmaster Center – add you site url and upload a verification file to your root folder.
4. Google Analytics – create a profile for your site, doesn’t influence ranking but is  a great stats provider.
5. Google adsense, Scribefire QuickAds and TextLink – You can use these to place pay-per-click ads on your site (also does not influence rankings)

Constantly check these webmaster tools for stats on your site as they will tell you the errors you need to fix to make sure your site gets good search rankings with them.  By doing all this you have covered the basics and have a site that could rank well with search engines. There’s although a lot more to Search Optimization, a good source of information is the book  SEO Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Technorati Tags: Google, Live Search, Marketing, Search, SEO, Sitemap, WordPress, Yahoo

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