InformationWeek is reporting that Google Chrome will soon have AddOns and User Scripts ala Firfox style. Chrome will also support Greasemonkey:
There’s two different kinds of add-ons," [Google engineer Ojan] Vafai said. "The Firefox things extend your browser, so to speak, and then there are user scripts. We intend to do both of those in Google Chrome." Greasemonkey’s founder, Aaron Boodman, actually works on the Google Chrome team.
[via Lifehacker]
Metamorphic Ventures has announced that ex-Googler David Hirsh is now a managing partner with the Venture firm.
[via Silicon Alley Insider]
Yahoo has released some new templates for its SearchMonkey results. Apps built using the previous template will seamlessly work with the new templates, so developers need not worry about the compatibility issues.
[via TechCrunch]
Google has now come out to openly defend its on-going ad deal with Yahoo. Tim Armstrong, Google’s Advertising President has argued that:
Question: Over time, will Yahoo! just outsource more and more of its ads to Google and cease to exist as an independent ad platform?
Answer: Yahoo! has made clear that it will still use its own system to serve ads, and it will use extra revenue from this deal to improve its ad platform. The arrangement only covers the U.S. and Canada, and does not cover the fast-growing mobile segment. Yahoo! also has a strong economic incentive to keep serving as many of their own ads as possible, since they get to keep all of the revenue from those ads, while Yahoo! will only receive a part of the revenue from ads served by Google. In addition, Yahoo! has a leading position in display advertising, and will be able to offer advertisers a unique combination of advertising opportunities.
This is so untrue, as the deal will actually erode Yahoo’s advertiser base and allow them to jump ship to Google. Google could easily offer them higher payouts in the short run to ruin Yahoo and once there is no Yahoo, it could bring the rates down to next to zero.
Google is celebrating a pirate day and have changed their homepage accordingly. The new homepage could be accessed here. On the pirate page you can "searrrch," look at some nice "engravin’s," or set "me likes an’ dislikes".
Microsoft is taking aid of the recession to make a come back in advertising, specially the display advertising in which it is the dominant leader rather than Google. According to WSJ:
… some ad-technology and Web-measurement companies are trying to engineer a comeback for display ads, offering data that they say show display advertising is more effective than marketers think. Microsoft
is the latest company to make this declaration, with new evidence coming next week that it says proves display ads are actually better than searches at triggering consumers.
[via Silicon Alley Insider]
Well its not an all out expansion on part of Google, they keep a close eye on what’s not working for them. So, keeping that in view Google is now shunning its Arizona office citing the reasons that the projects undertaken there were highly fragmented. Good Luck Arizona Googlers.
[via Google Blog]
If you thought that Google always kept everything forever on its servers, well think again. Google hosts stories from news agencies like Associated Press, but in case you decide to link to these Google hosted stories think again. As Google’s news articles would disappear after 30 days and you might end up having the above image while clicking on a article link.
[via Blogoscoped]
Xippee is a new plugin that allows you to easily refine your queries using words from the Google’s SERP. So if you conducted a search using keyword Chrome, most results would be about Google’s Chrome but some might be other things, all you need to do is to click on Google and this time every result would be Google Chrome related.
[via Google Operating System]
Google now commands 63% of the search market according to stats released by comScore for the month of Aug, 2008. 11.7 billion searches were conducted using Google which is 1.1% more than the last month.