TAKA DESIGNS

Google recently announced that the number of people using its web browser Chrome tripled from 40 million to 120 million users within 1 year. According to a recent report its market share is now almost 10%. I remember back when Firefox was first released, reaching a 10% market share at a time when Internet Explorer dominated the web was a pretty big deal.

I was curious to see what the most recent stats were for http://ucla.edu and sure enough, Chrome is at about 9%. Here is a comparison breakdown from November 2009 and November 2010.

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There’s been a lot of buzz recently about Microsoft’s Bing search engine. A year ago Microsoft and Yahoo signed a deal that would make Bing power Yahoo’s searches.  With the integration now complete, Bing and Yahoo combined make up approximately 28% of the U.S. search engine market. Bing has also recently surpassed Yahoo to become the #2 search engine behind Google, which still leads with 65% of all U.S. searches.

Now there is growing concern that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should no longer be aimed only at Google. Traditionally, web designers and developers only paid close attention to SEO for Google. As Bing continues to gain market share, should you be concerned? Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly is…

[Updated on 10/18] Facebook and Microsoft announced that they will be partnering in search. “Among the new features that Microsoft will launch today are Facebook results for name queries (4% of all queries on Bing are name queries) and personalized results based on what your friends liked on Facebook. Thanks to this, you can now see what restaurants your friends liked on sites like OpenTable, for example, or if your friends liked a certain movie. Microsoft will roll these new feature out later today.”

URL shorteners have recently exploded in popularity with the emergence of Twitter. One of the most popular services bit.ly recently launched a free service called bit.ly Pro that creates custom branded short URLs. Companies such as Facebook and Google have also created their own using fb.me and goo.gl. So what’s the big deal?

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As applications continue to migrate toward the web, mobile devices are an even more integral part of our everyday lives. According to The Mobile Internet Report released by Morgan Stanley in December 2009, the mobile internet will be twice the size of the desktop internet. More users will connect to the web through mobile devices than desktop computers within 5 years. With the emergence of the iPhone and Google’s Android platform now able to create quality user experiences on the web, these findings shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

At UCLA, we recently launched a mobile version of the UCLA Happenings website, our campus events calendar at http://m.happenings.ucla.edu. If you haven’t thought about it already, then it’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to consider what you’re mobile strategy will be. Here are a few things to consider.

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The new Google Chrome OS has been getting a lot of attention recently. In short, it will be a light weight operating system for netbooks that rely on applications residing in the cloud, such as Google Docs. Nothing gets installed or updated on your machine. It’s the complete opposite of traditional operating systems such as Windows.

So why is this such a big deal?

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