What is a browser?

Before you read on, ask yourself the question in the title of this post, agree on an answer and then you can carry on.

Google recently conducted some research on web browsers, which has delivered some pretty interesting results in the video below. They were doing this research as part of the marketing push for their new web browser - Chrome. They went out to locations across the States - in this example Time Square, to ask people what a browser was, which browser they used and so on. 

You might be surprised (or not - depending on your answer to the question) to find out that fewer than 8% of the people questioned knew what a browser is. 

It acts as a reminder that your average Joe Bloggs probably thinks about this stuff a little bit less than us... 

Cheers

Nic

Will Bing change the way you think?

Image from Don't touch my moleskin.

Are you excited about Bing too?

There is a lot of chat about Bing this week.

If you haven't already heard of it...

Bing is a new product designed by the Microsoft team.

It is branded and designed as a decision making engine, not just a content aggregator based on content relevance which is essentially what search engines do... find the most appropriate info you queried by scanning all corners of the web and if people refer to your pages on the info your ranking will also be higher on the search results (proven credibility).

The Bing Teaser video has not gotten a whole lot of views, but it still illustrates how the product can be used to make your search on the web a little more intuitive and social (referral marketing at work).

What does this mean for the future of Google?

At this stage, probably not a lot since the technology is still at its infancy and there are question marks over whether the product is suitably different (one doubts it is)

It would be interesting to see how the users from different countries adopt Bing and whether the design of the search algorithm will continue to evolve into a social phenomenon like Google had in the 90s but only time will tell.

There is a lot of heat from the business community on what Microsoft's search engine prospects are despite its attempt to aggressively advertise and differentiate its market position.

Personally I do not want to be dismissive about Bing, I am excited that there is something that can move the attention from Google for a little while. Hopefully Bing will make search more dynamic and socially inspired to help us make better decisions about what others think of the content we are looking at.

Bing is also supposed to be localised for the Au market soon as well, so keep an eye out and give it a go.

- jeff

Being eaten by our own statistics

I thought we’d have some fun with a few stats. Ok I admit, we’re busy and this is kind of easy to send ;-)

Cheers

Nic

 

20 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every single minute.

The word Google is Googled on average 68 million times every month

It would take you over 457 years to watch all of the content on You Tube.

346 million people read blogs across the world.

Over 11 million Tweets are sent a day. Check out this counter for the live counter… if you really want to. http://popacular.com/gigatweet/

700 million photos are added to Facebook every month.

The average Australian Facebook user has 107 friends.

40 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2008, and 95% of all music downloaded is illegal.