The WebM is a combination of VP8 with Ogg Vorbis audio format for ‘open souce’ technology. It is a royalty-free format, so the audiences can enjoy more convenience in watching YouTube videos for free. Supported by its Chrome browser, Google has used this codec to all YouTube videos, with both Mozilla and Opera ready to support the Google’s WebM.

On previous 14th June 2010, Mozilla released its fifth developer preview based on Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine to be installed into its Firefox 4. This new developer not only supports WebM, but also enables the hardware acceleration for viewing HTML5 videos in full screen. The upgraded version of Firefox 4 is going to be available at the end of June 2010.

Opera in the other hand has also added WebM to its latest developer. Opera’s developer is available for Mac, Windows and Linux to support the ‘open source’ video, HTML5 offline web applications, geolocation, and the background running tasks. And this developer is available now.

Google’s statement reads in respect of the tie up between Microsoft and Yahoo that they are for healthy competition, which brings more benefits for users and would like to learn more about the deal.

Same views were expressed by Marissa Mayer of Google, saying the deal would likely to pose a negative impact for online competition and her company is studying the pact deeply.

It is noteworthy that during last year Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo as a whole – not the search engine part alone – when Google vehemently attacked the bid and made a contract with Yahoo regarding search engine operations.

But what happened was Google backed out of the deal, as US Department of Justice threatened to file a law suit, questioning the antitrust implications.

If their earlier deal with Yahoo had materialized, Google would have got a lion’s share of 90 percent in the Internet search market. Now Google questions about Bing’s competition, which commands barely 30 per cent of the market share.
However some people have expressed opinion that the Bing deal would only bolster competition to Google. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says in a blog post that competition equals innovation. In a field where one player is dominating the majority 70 percent share of search market, it is completely lopsided and Bing’s deal would mean a healthy competitor emerging on the scene, to keep everyone on their toes – Carol added.

Onlookers are of the view that Google still maintains its 65 to 73 percent share in the search market, although Microsoft Bing is increasing its search reach and advertisers may shift their loyalty from Google to Bing, if at all Bing shows a progress of 30 percent share, instead of 10 or 20 percent. But there is no alternative to Google for those who want maximum volume.

The new tools including search by image type and color are so simple, to save valuable searching time and get the search results most accurately.

Images in color or only black and white can be searched by the new search option, as also images of specific colors – red, pink or green.

Type search option will enable trimming down the results, if you are searching a specific kind of image like – a clip art; photo; face; or line drawing. Further users can get the specific size, irrespective of the usual size of images, by the Size option.

According to Google’s official blog, they have completely revamped their size search, whereby users can search, in addition to commonly searched-for sizes, exact image size or larger images than a specific size. Practically any image size including 70 megapixeles or more can be found.

Combined search options have been made possible now and Google will introduce more on this in future. These are not new, but were available already as “Advanced’ search. But they have been moved to the left-hand column and by clicking “Show options” in the blue bar on the search result page, one can get all these new tools – more than one option to trim down the search.

With the Creative Common License one more option of sorting by images is also available. Although Yahoo and Bing boast of similar options for filtering, Google has advanced tools to sort upto 12 different colors, whereas the other two can only allow sort by color or black and white.

Matt Glotzbach, director of products management for Google Enterprise, has strongly refuted the apprehension as baseless and some of the concerns raised are ill-informed and motivated by competitors. He asserted categorically the security and privacy will be best maintained by the transition to Google. Glotzbach further said those raising the concerns are not conversant with the cloud computing applications and its security strength and oppose them as they are new and different.

Top Managers of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA) meanwhile said that adequate provisions have been made to address the concerns of the critics, and they will go ahead with the commitment to go in for Google Apps. According to them, the city council has given the green signal only after thorough scrutiny of the proposed project.

The plan is to replace the Novell Group Wise e-mail and applications of Microsoft with Google Apps. The project is to transition 30,000 users to Google’s office productivity products and e-mail, at the cost of $7.25 millions, by the end of December 2009.

Whether the Los Angeles Police Department will use the new software depends upon the final decision of Justice Department, and after review by the city’s technology council the project will move to the next phase.

Incidentally Google won the contract among 15 competitors, because of their control over privacy and security of Google Apps.

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Yahoo has taken up the round-about way of beating Google instead of by itself and has come forward to support Microsoft’s latest wing Bing, as per reports appearing in the The Wall Street Journal and Boom Town Blog. Another report in Advertising Age says ads placed in the search results would be served by Microsoft’s new technology AdCenter and not by Yahoo’s advertisement platform Panama.

Editor of Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan is of the opinion that Yahoo is giving up on search and further analyses the matter thus:

Yahoo will continue to sell search ads both in its and Bing’s platforms with a 80% retainer; online search data and buying habits of computer users will be with Microsoft and will improve its ability to identify and serve up the most profitable and relevant ads in the long run; by running the technology underlying this arrangement, ultimate winner will be Microsoft.

Google has 65% and the Microsoft-Yahoo combination 30% in the present market share. But the progress Microsoft’s Bing makes with the support of Yahoo, will make it as the only search engine apart from Google. Surely an insurance for Microsoft and Bing.

World’s books are yet to be available widely and the service to get access to them concerns about privacy, while it increases access to knowledge no doubt. Google’s goal was to provide a voluminous database for books in major libraries that could be accessed by Internet users from homes or local libraries.

After fumbling to scan the books without permission from right holders, who sued Google, it reached a settlement with those parties. A New York federal Court would hear the case this fall amidst hot contests by opponents.

The efforts by Google would mean millions of books out of print can be accessed at no cost on the net. Just like a Harvard Professor, many freelance writers and students of community colleges can access those books.

Financially, authors and publishers can gain by the cut in revenue of 63%, while Google charges users to access copyrighted books from their computers and by selling online ads. The payments would be routed through a books rights registry.

Joe’s Online Library and Microsoft may be competing Google’s service, but if the settlement is through it could give monopoly power to sell “orphaned’ books, whose owners could not be located. The Department of Justice and the Court should ensure adequate protections for this while reviewing the settlement.

Google has a big job ahead in respecting privacy of people accessing these books.

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While writing on a company blog, Sean Suchter, general manager of Silicon Valley Search Technology Center of Microsoft quipped that for the time being Microsoft is indexing “few thousand people, primarily based on follower count they have and their volume of tweets”.

It appears that the company is not working directly with Twitter, towards delivering this capability. Suchter wrote that this is their first step in using Twitter’s public API, to bring up Tweets for the people while searching.

As it reflects popular public sentiment, there has been an increased interest in the content value of Twitter, from the search community worldwide. Wednesday’s launch of this new capability in Bing seems to be a coup, albeit limited, because the other major search engines are not indexing recent Twitter messages anyway.

The practice is most of the existing search engines, at best, turn up old Twitter messages and a link to a Twitter page of the concerned person is displayed. This has been changed by Bing of Microsoft, by listing recent individual messages along with other search results. However Suchter cautioned some users may not see the messages in Twitter now, as the new future is scheduled to roll out gradually.

Incidentally, the arrival of this new capability of Bing falls on the same day, when a new study showed Bing’s growth chart is steady upwards, at the expense of most popular Google search engine. According to Researchers at StateCounter, Bing has definitely increased the share of Microsoft in the search market, by 1 percent in June in the United States. This shows Bing is still behind Yahoo search engine and way back in the lead by Google though. StateCounter found Google still has a market share of 78.48 percent, although shedding some market share to Bing during the month.

Microsoft has recently unfurled a new and attractive alternative to Google search engine. And people want the two compared for performance appraisal.

Almost the usual thing happening is your web browser may contain Google’s Search box prominently on top. And yes of course Google is thorough in tendering search results in micro seconds with such a great speed.

To compare Bing, Microsoft’s new prop up just a month ago, although it is very impressive, with a Live Search Engine like Google would be – comparing two champions in two different leagues, unfairly.

On aesthetics, Bing seems best than Google. The Google Search button is prominent in otherwise clean and sparse Google Home page and links for videos, images, news, shopping, maps, Gmail and a lot more.

In contrast, the Homepage of Bing attracts with breathtaking travel related photographs being pasted daily. One day on this week, an amazing image of Mexico’s manta rays appeared at Bing homepage, with a beautiful description when your mouse crawled over the image “These curious creatures are gentle, sociable and playful”. And what fun these brief digressions make! Actually Bing offers facility to click on images to take you to shopping, videos, news, travel and maps.

Thinking of searches made in search engines like Google, there is more to it rather than a wild manta chase and you want comprehensive, relevant and also fast results. On this aspect, Microsoft holds its grounds more, particularly in the fields Bing is concentrating initially – health; travel; shopping and finding local businesses. What is more, you get on certain items a cash-back program when you buy through Bing.com.

For example if you type “New York Mets” on Bing, it shows on top of its results – most recent scores of the team and upcoming schedules – whereas Google will only display the score of their last game and when the next game will be played.

Similarly if you type a company name in Bing, what you get is the telephone number of the company’s customer service, which you can hardly get through Google.

Another charm of Bing search engine experience is, when you make a search you get the right snippets of only the information you want and not more leads. On moving the cursor to the right of the search result tendered by Bing, there appears a window containing excerpts derived from the site underlying it. This will enable you decide instantly whether or not to go into the full site.

Videos like YouTube, Hulu etc. start playing at once, when you crawl over a video thumb nail with your cursor and there is no need to click “play”. And you will watch the video in a larger window, when you click the thumbnail, not necessarily leaving Bing.com. Also hovering on an image will show the same to you in a larger window.

There is one more plus – on the down left side “the quick tabs” appear on the results pane and assist you in refining a search. Simply when you enter “Charleston, South Carolina”, category-wise results are shown – restaurants; hotels; real estate; local weather and so on. For the same thing on Google, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and see “related searches”, although you have the choice to a side panel “show options”.
In real-time searches also Bing excels. For instance, when you make a search for a celebrity such as “Al Gore Twitter” adding Twitter to your search – you are able to get a full list of their recent tweets.

Following is the illustration as how Google and Bing fared on some sample searches:

Cataracts: Bing search engine showed at the top of the search results, a full description of this eye condition, taken out of a Mayo Clinic article. It was an advertisement sponsored by a lens manufacturer Transition, showed at Google at its top result.  But both Bing and Google showed many relevant listings from same sources though. Google showed 3.3 million search results, whereas it was nearly 2.3 million in Bing.

Hilton, Paris: When searched with an intentionally vague query, Google results had a sponsored listing for Hilton.com as the starter and followed it with a news result for the socialite. For Bing it was hotelreservations.com at the top, followed by the site of The Hotels by Hilton and the “official” website of Paris Hilton.

Travel is Bing’s forte and if you click “Travel” you get a site resembling Expedia, where you can further search for hotels, flights, cars etc. Another help from Bing is its prediction about airfares and their fall or rise for certain cities, whereby you can decide whether to buy the ticket now or later.

Michael Jackson: For this search of the legendry Pop King, both Google and Bing tendered news stories about him first. Google linked first to Wikipedia entry for Michael Jackson and led to his official site – michaelackson.com over images and videos about him. All other related searches of jokes, songs, kids not his, came at the bottom.  On Bing search, similar sites were listed but putting images and videos higher up. The pane on the left of this Michael Jackson search enable me to narrow my search by songs, news, downloads, biography, merchandise and so on. It was only 85 million search results at Google, whereas it was 101 million at Bing.

Ford Fusion: When searched for this automobile, it was Bing that got relevant statistics at the top – user ratings, fuel economy, and price range. More help was available in the side panel for categories of reviews, dealers, manual, forum, recalls as also images. Google needs poking around a bit to get these details.

Accurate searches can be Google’s strength but Bing is for more elaborate and relevant searches readily.

Summing Up the Comparison:

Google = www.google.com – Gets two stars out of four.

Pros: Comprehensive and fast in searches that seldom go wrong.

Cons: Some search tools which are powerful are shadowed.

Microsoft Bing = www.bing.com – Gets two stars out of four.

Pros: Functioning is attractive to give voluminous information instantly, with no need to look elsewhere. Excels on resources of travels and plays videos within Bing.com site. Presentation of related searches is good and additional attraction is cash-back discount program for shopping through its links.

Cons: On some particular searches, not as exhaustive as Google and not strong on news items. Video glitches are experienced occasionally.

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Now there are media executives who are complaining bitterly about the way in which Google ranks sites and they feel that it is not a fair system. One does naturally have to remember that this is a primarily capitalist society and Google is a commercial concern, naturally it is going to promote those that pay it to do so. For this reason Google does put some media companies before others – they are generally referred to as trusted partners and there are a number of ways in which Google puts them ahead of the competition.  The search giant weights their domain higher than others, features their recent news in its News section and then also if one conducted a search and finally there is better coverage given to content that provides information and is not merely of a commercial nature.

This of course means that those in the media industry that are effectively not “in favour” with the search giant are at a disadvantage. But instead of sitting back on their heels and whining, perhaps they should view this situation as a challenging opportunity and rise up to take advantage of something that could change the way in which they produce their work and thereby generate revenue.

The simple fact is that there is a lot of nonsense on the web today and content that is well written is hard to find. Perhaps one of the easiest ways in which to determine whether content is good or not is to see the search ranking that the original article gets as opposed to a rewritten piece. If the rewrite scores higher, there is clearly something wrong with either the way in which the original was composed.

Ensuring that one has the right business model for the internet is another challenge that many companies face. Even if they were to get higher ratings from Google the fact remains that they are not adaptable enough for the dynamic nature of the internet. It is very important that media and marketing companies are flexible in their approach to the online medium. They cannot simply hope that a good article will mean they get fantastic coverage. Optimisation is not only about key words, it is about content that is linkworthy, interesting and relevant. It is only if content can fulfill these criteria that it can be considered to be of sufficient quality.

The starting point is you should know before hand, how much of natural traffic and sales are materializing to your site presently.  For this the web analytic program will be handy and by going through the statistics in last month, you will know which of the keywords and phrases have driven the traffic.

For example if you are running an online site for machine tools, your web analytic form will show as follows:

Monthly Web Analytic Export

This is for a regular business where transactions occur every month.  If what you run is a seasonal business, then there will be no transactions at all in off seasons and you have to select the data from the seasonal months – two or three at best.

The above format shows the keywords and phrases, which bring you natural-search referred traffic through the search engines and the sales they turned out at your site. You have to make a comparison of available keyword market that is on those keywords and phrases what are the number of searches made in an ordinary month and for the same keywords what is your site’s score.  KeywordDiscovery.com and Google Adwords Keyword Tool can help you in this regard to determine the current rate of success your site has achieved.

Then record the total number of searches as per your keyword tool estimates for each keyword and phrase generated. Now you can make a simple calculation to know the fact – Total Searches minus your traffic /Divided by your Traffic – to know the growth opportunity percentage existing for the keywords and phrases, which are driving traffic from natural searchers. Supposing the Google search total in a month for a particular keyword phrase is 10000 and for the same keyword phrase for your site is just 1000, then you can find the percentage growth opportunity is – 10000 minus 1000 divided by 1000 = 900%.

But this is not all.  The most upside work comes really from the keywords and phrases where you are drawing blank with no traffic and sales. The next task is big in identifying the keywords and phrases that your site needs for driving natural traffic and this needs in-depth research to ascertain what additional traffic the same keywords and phrases can send in to your site. Your keyword research tools can be used to find out the most popular ways of searching for the content, after identifying the keywords for which there is relevant content at your site.

The value of keyword research depends upon two things -1) the relevance of your site’s content to the keyword and 2) the types of search terms used by real users should be fully there at your site. In this context you can refer to PJ Fusco’s keyword research primer for more details on keyword research.

As can be seen from the above table, the keyword phrases “Magnetic Drill” and “Multi Drill” are already generating traffic and sales from natural searchers, whereas there is no traffic at all for the keywords “Portable Saw”, “Portable Panel”, ”Panel Saw” and “Magnetic Screw Driver”.

Now that you have collected all the data, you can sum the “Total Monthly Search Volume” column, so as to identify the total SEO Traffic upside. It should be remembered that this number indicates theoretically 100% of the total available natural search traffic. It has been studied by researches that the No.1 position ranking in search engine listings will average about 45% of the click-through available.  As such if you rank No.1 for the keyword “Portable Saw”, which is approximately 200,010 searches per month, roughly 90,004 searchers from them which is 45%, will be clicking through Google to your site.  However, a more conservative approach for 5% click-through rate is recommended in estimating the opportunity, with your efforts in SEO can bring forth for your site.

By knowing the average revenue value each visit can make your site, you can estimate the value of optimizing your site in order to achieve those additional visits by natural searches.

Further similar spreadsheets can be prepared by the growth columns sorted so that you identify the keywords and phrases that can represent the biggest opportunities for growth and that will give you a prioritized list of content-topics to be optimized.

The foregoing is only an example of six keyword and phrases and are a fraction of the total opportunity you want to be estimated on the keyword research for your site.

You will find that the ranking data is missing from this formula. Site owners would love to focus on them, since Rankings are easy and quick snapshots of SEO progress. It is true that higher the ranking, larger the traffic will be from that particular keyword.  But rankings are notoriously unreliable to indicate SEO progress, because of personalization, blended search, vertical research, and other factors that are large in number.

For reliably setting your expectations for SEO success, you can do well to sticking to traffic, sales and keyword research as the basis of your SEO upside estimations.

As can be seen from the above table, the keyword phrases “Magnetic Drill” and “Multi Drill” are already generating traffic and sales from natural searchers, whereas there is no traffic at all for the keywords “Portable Saw”, “Portable Panel”, ”Panel Saw” and “Magnetic Screw Driver”.

Now that you have collected all the data, you can sum the “Total Monthly Search Volume” column, so as to identify the total SEO Traffic upside. It should be remembered that this number indicates theoretically 100% of the total available natural search traffic. It has been studied by researches that the No.1 position ranking in search engine listings will average about 45% of the click-through available.  As such if you rank No.1 for the keyword “Portable Saw”, which is approximately 200,010 searches per month, roughly 90,004 searchers from them which is 45%, will be clicking through Google to your site.  However, a more conservative approach for 5% click-through rate is recommended in estimating the opportunity, with your efforts in SEO can bring forth for your site.

By knowing the average revenue value each visit can make your site, you can estimate the value of optimizing your site in order to achieve those additional visits by natural searches.

Further similar spreadsheets can be prepared by the growth columns sorted so that you identify the keywords and phrases that can represent the biggest opportunities for growth and that will give you a prioritized list of content-topics to be optimized.

The foregoing is only an example of six keyword and phrases and are a fraction of the total opportunity you want to be estimated on the keyword research for your site.

You will find that the ranking data is missing from this formula. Site owners would love to focus on them, since Rankings are easy and quick snapshots of SEO progress. It is true that higher the ranking, larger the traffic will be from that particular keyword.  But rankings are notoriously unreliable to indicate SEO progress, because of personalization, blended search, vertical research, and other factors that are large in number.

For reliably setting your expectations for SEO success, you can do well to sticking to traffic, sales and keyword research as the basis of your SEO upside estimations.

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