The guys at the ‘plex must be rubbing their hands with glee over the figures from ComScore’s ‘first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity’. ComScore have calculated that 61% of searches performed worldwide are executed through Google’s servers - wow! And perhaps what is more worrying there’s no major contender out there either, with Yahoo hiding back in second place with a measily 14%. Poor old Microsoft have dropped to fourth place on the list with 3.5% behind Chinese search engine Baidu in third (5.3%) with Ask almost off the scale at 1.2%.

Google have certainly entrenched themselves in the search engine niche with their name now being synonymous with internet search and is used in movies, tv programs and general day to day life - ‘Just Google it’ has become a favourite phrase of many people was when referring to looking for something on the internet. Will there ever be another search provider out there that can compete with Google and more importantly do we, as searchers, want one?

Anyway for some more details on the figures check out ComScore.

Featured Tags google, microsoft, search, search-engines, yahoo


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No, neither of the merger names really work, but despite this Microsoft and Yahoo are again looking at a merger. According to the New York Post Microsoft had made an offer for Yahoo a few months ago which had been rejected but it looks as if Microsoft have made yet another more vigorous offer this week. Yahoo’s share price reacted appropriately to the rumors, ending Friday at around $31 an increase of 10% for the day. Yahoo’s price tag was a mere $50 billion at the end of trading.

Ever since Google purchased DoubleClick Microsoft has been under pressure to increase it’s own web advertising presence. Purchasing Yahoo would achieve that goal, although it would not make much difference to Google’s search domination. We’re certain that it would take more than a merger of the competition to worry the guys at the plex.

A lot of the media reports stated that the merger would not happen due to the diversity in the culture of the staff. We’ve never noticed that being a problem before with any mergers we’ve been a part of. There’s always a bigger partner whose culture slowly infiltrates the smaller.

With this merger it’s just a question of how much Microsoft want this, will they stump up the cash? And if Bill opens up his wallet Yahoo may not get to play much part in the joint role.

Would a MS-Yahoo merger be a good thing, could it spell the end of Google’s domination? Let us know your thoughts.

Featured Tags merger, microsoft, yahoo


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Well, Messenger in a Browser to be more precise. I’ve just been taking a look at Yahoo’s browser Messenger beta, so it’ll be live in 2012 or so. Removing applications from your desktop and system tray seems like a good idea to me and as you can add MS Live contacts too so you get to remove even more icons and applications from your PC. It also means you can IM while you are away with your laptop or from any PC anywhere.

On downside is that your addins like Yahoo Finance are not automatically displayed but there is a link to My Yahoo which you can modify to suit your information needs. Also there’s no new faetures so it’s not really a giant leap forward more a little bit of a tip toe into the future.

Source: Reuters

Featured Tags IM, messenger, yahoo


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It was announced on March the 27th, so it’s a good five days away from April Fools. However, it does sound like a prank: “Yahoo! announces that it’s offering free unlimited e-mail storage starting May this year”. When I first found out, it seemed rather far-fetched, and it still does.

Basically, this means that Yahoo! is giving up one method of income, from users who payed 20$ per year for 2GB of space (and it’s losing those money from users starting May, as they will be refunded, if they want to), and it engages in the race to buy a LOT of storage space.

Irrealistic as it seems, this comes at a turning point in Yahoo!’s mail service. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail was being launched, a service which was capable of holding up to 4MB of mail, more than an average attachment today.

On the other hand, this might seem like a method of distracting people from GMail’s gimmick of the ever-expanding mailbox. Whether or not it will work, only time will tell. My guess is it won’t, mainly because people don’t look for storage space when they analyze possible e-mail accounts. Not unless they plan on using that space specifically to store stuff, rather than storing them on their on computer. While this might seem like a godsend for those kinds of people, it’s not. Yahoo!’s service states that abusive accounts will be suspended, however leaving their owners with the possibility of accessing their accounts and their stored data.

Instead of a conclusion, let’s look at what John Kremer, the Vice-President of Yahoo! Mail, said in his announcement:

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Very optimistic words, but is it really possible? My guess is it’s not. Because Yahoo!’s Mail is not unlimited, it just means they will have to acquire an enormous ammount of extra storage space to fit the e-mails of approximately 250 million people worldwide. This is something that you can not do, with today’s technology, with your iPod.

Featured Tags gmail, mail, yahoo


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I don’t know what’s your opinion on Alexa but I consider it to be at least a hint when you talk about site statistics. If we consider the data Alexa provides as a guideline you can easily see that the top three sites listed are: Yahoo!, MSN and Google. Not necessarily in that order.

First of all we must consider the services provided by the three giants. Yahoo!, Google and MSN have mailing services, search engines and ads services. So in some way we can compare the sites, but also it must be considered that MSN has a separated site for the search engine: live.com. Let’s take a look at the stats and then discuss it some more:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, it seems that MSN beats Yahoo! and Google by a long shot. What you should know is that the majority of MSN visitors are located in U.S. If you take a look on the same charts provided by Alexa you’ll find out that in most countries of Europe MSN it’s not only in the first three places.

The big surprise of this experiment is that Google doesn’t rule the charts, as I was expecting. I thing this is partially due to Alexa’s rating algorithms and partially due to sub-site system that Google uses. Anyhow it doesn’t matter, Google is the most prolific company of them all in the last period.

Featured Tags Alexa, charts, google, microsoft, MSN, statistics, yahoo


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Yahoo recently launched a suggestion site that uses the Digg mechanism and resembles graphically with the well known news promoting website. However I don’t understand all the fuss around this, since Yahoo initially credited Digg for this in a post on the official blog.

“We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback. Though we aren’t always going to immediately act on it, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great suggestions with some Yahoo! schwag.”

Featured Tags digg, yahoo


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Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mash ups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be “text entities.

It’s something different than the Google Reader we’ve all got used to, and it’s worth a try.

Featured Tags pipes, yahoo


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