Google has recently removed the beta label of Chrome, which claims more than 10 millions active users in just over 3 months.
Since launching, Google has collected tons of customer feedback and performance reports, and they keep rolling out new features and bug fixes. Chrome is fast, stable and secure without a doubt, but it still doesn’t support Mac and Linux. Also, an extension platform (Firefox’s add-ons style) is strongly required by a substantial amount of users.
As you may know, many google products are in beta for years, including GMail, Google Calendar, etc. So, why google took Chrome out of beta so quick?
Reason 1: Google is not happy to pay Firefox millions every year
Google paid Firefox $66 million this year for the default search box in the Firefox browser, and the bill would go up if Firefox gets more online search market share. So, Google desperately wants to reduce that bill by encouraging people to use their own brower, Chrome, and it gives users more confidence by simply removing the magic beta label.
Reason 2: OEMs require a full release Chrome
Some computer manufactures (OEMs) agree to pre-install Chrome on their new computers if Google takes Chrome out of beta. It always makes sense to keep the key customers and partners happy, especially when they offer to help you.
Back to February 1st, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion ($31 per share) to acquire all Yahoo’s outstanding shares, and Yahoo rejected it. Since then Yahoo’s share price has dropped to $9 per share over 9 months time, and Jerry Yang, Yahoo ex-CEO had to step down when facing intense pressure from shareholders. Later on, in November, Microsoft made a proposal to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.
Today, Microsoft is hiring former Yahoo VP engineering Qi Lu as President of Microsoft online services group. Lu was at Yahoo for 10 years, most recently served as executive vice president of engineering for all of Yahoo’s search and advertising development efforts. Before Yahoo, Lu was at the IBM Almaden Research Center.
There is no doubt that Microsoft needs Yahoo to rescue their online services arm as they are slipping behind Google in the online advertising market, which is worth $25 billion and growing. Google has a market share of 78.2% compared with Yahoo’s 17% and Microsoft’s 6%. Microsoft is desperate to change the current situation, and after unsuccessful attempt to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft is now trying to get Yahoo’s tech stars, who built the Yahoo empire, and they believe that the most valuable assets of software companies are their talented people.
Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.
Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.
Google has launched a brand new searching related app today, Insights for Search.
It helps users to track multiple search terms’ popularity across different verticals, geographic regions and time periods.
Let’s take an example of the search term CRM Software. The results include all popular search terms related to the search term and a list of Rising Searches as well.
- Top Searches List: free crm, crm software free, microsoft crm software, business software, open crm, act crm
- Rising Searches List: web based crm, vtiger, sugar crm, top crm software, sage software, saleslogix
In addition, it provides a heat map to explain where the searching come from.
Cuil is so brave that they labeled themselves as Google-killer. 
I like it and I think their launch was very successful in terms of broadcasting their messages, which have been posting onto many media giants, including PC World, TechCrunch, Time, Yahoo!, CNET, Mashable etc.
Unfortunately, cuil went offline just few hours after the over-heated launch. But, that is always a good problem to have. (I hope we could have that problem when bizroof was launched. 
)
I have to be honest that scalability and relevance are the 2 main problems for cuil at the moment. However, they have successfully created a BIG index, which I believe is the hardest part for searching engines.
Some suggestions
It is not an easy job at all to startup brand new search engines and compete with Google, Yahoo and MSN, even with $33M funding.
So…… maybe one of the followings could help……
- Open Source - Get some help from all the developers on the planet. (Firefox is a good example in the web browsers industry)
- Human Editing - Go a little bit further and keep in mind that you guys have got a fabulous indexing system. Wikipedia and DMOZ are successful, aren’t they?
Good luck, Cuil, and we will give you a hand if you need.
Have you noticed there were some changes in the Google PageRank toolbar during this weekend (July 25th and 26th 2008)? I have seen some changes of many sites PR, especially for new sites. It has been 150 days since the last Toolbar PR export (February 26th 2008), but I am not sure weather it is a major update or just a minor tweak this time.
Jason
