The launch of Google Chrome a week ago now seems ages ago – on the face of it, a new browser seems an odd plan for world domination, but in those seven days, this one committed Firefox user has just made Chrome his default browser. This is primarily because of the speed. Google’s technology behind their ‘Google Gears’ has made chrome a sheer pleasure to use. It sounds silly to say it, but it gives me such joy when I click on something and it’s open within a second or two.
Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

A good blog from my colleague Dave Bancroft on the Reverse Delta blog on how the little company who had a good idea about search engines just blew out the candles on tyheir tenth birthday cake poised tyo dominate the online world… Happy Birthday Google

Source of this and full story here

Watching how people use the most popular websites such as Google can be extremely revealing. A large number of users don’t understand the difference between a search engine and the Internet and are unaware of the difference between typing a url or search query in the address bar compared to the search box on Google.

People today are so used to using Google that for some the address bar has become obsolete. It is quicker to type “Amazon” into Google and click on the first result than it is to type www.amazon.com into your address bar.

Google makes huge profits from these navigational searches by allowing advertisers to bid on the names of other websites. Sometimes a site can apply to stop other advertisers bidding on trademarked terms but, as American Airlines is finding out, Google doesn’t always allow this. People could genuinely be searching for American airlines (note the letter case).

The lesson to searchers: You may be feeling lucky, but will you get lucky, or will you just get the highest bidder?

The Lesson to Pay Per Click bidders: Are you sure you’re getting the right traffic to your site?

As a user of BBC’s iPlayer since its very early beta, I’m quite encouraged by the big take up in the service recently – (See Hitwise Intelligence – Robin Goad – UK: BBC iPlayer traffic increases 14-fold in a month) – I don’t have a VCR and the DVD recorder died, as most seem to do, through lasers being just too darn sensitive to family life.

One big worry remains though as a user of the iPlayer and services like Channel 4’s “4 on demand” – bandwidth. The phone companies (and the government) got things wrong many years ago when they missed the opportunity to invest in rewiring the country before it got crucial. Now it is crucial and it’s pretty much too late. By the time our broadband speeds have caught up with the likes of Japan, our appetite for data download and upload will have already increased too much.

You’ve probably heard about this but I think it’s still worth blogging as a simple reminder about how powerful search has become. When the now infamous John Darwin was suspected to have faked his own death, and his not-so-widowed-widow Anne moved to Panama to console herself, a Daily Mirror reporter just, on the off-chance, did a Google image search using the term “John Anne Panama”, and immediately found a photo of the not-so-dead John and Anne, on holiday, since his death, in Panama.

This simple bit of evidence lead to so many questions in the media along the lines of ‘why did they get their picture taken in the first place?’. The quite simple, obvious answer, is that John and Anne were clearly unaware of the power of search.