ReadersZone

I find some real good search results of last month while searching the web. I am sharing all of those search engine data with our reader.

Top search providers, ranked by total searches. Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider.
Top 10 Search Providers for June 2008, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

In June, Google Sites retained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9 percent, up from 20.6 percent in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2 percent, up from 8.5 percent in May), Ask Network (4.3 percent), and AOL LLC (4.1 percent).

Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 7-percent increase versus May. Google Sites handled more than 7 billion core searches (up 6 percent from May), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.4 billion (up 9 percent), and Microsoft Sites with more than 1 billion (up 15 percent).

Source : comScore Core Search Report

NEW YORK, NY – July 15, 2008 – Google accounted for 69.17 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending June 28, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.62, 5.46 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 42 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.70 percent of U.S. searches.

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending /28/08, 5/31/ 2008, 6/30/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.  * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Source: Hitwise

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Windows Live Calendar team working very hard to add more and more features to Windows Live calendar. There has been total 8 new features has been introduced by Windows Live Calendar team

Birthday Calendars: Windows Live calendar now automatically add birthday’s of your contact list and also send you reminders for birthdays. Only thing is Windows Live users have to do is that they have to add the birthday in their contact list.

iCal Subscriptions: Allow you to show calendars that update automatically from around the web. (This will be up and running very shortly!)

Holiday Calendars :Automatically add local holidays in your calendar. Windows Calendar team is adding more-and-more local holidays but currebtly they have added holidays for: China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, United States and United Kingdom.

User Interface Changes: Now windows live calendar user can directly add events by just clicking on any date

Improvements to accessibility functionality, including better tabbing and F6 key support

Print views:Windows Live added print view support that help users to easily preview their calendar tasks before printing

Calendar tab in Windows Live Hotmail. via this new tab Hotmail users now can directly access calendar from their Hotmail or Windows Live E-Mail account.

Synchronize Windows Live Calendar with Windows Vista calendar.

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Pirated software’s are hurting software industry, software partners and environment partners. Pirated software’s are now reach from home users to corporate users. A new white paper on the piracy phenomenon authored by market analysis company IDC and sponsored by Microsoft and the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners identifies no less than nine reasons which fuel software piracy.

Pirated software’s can be installed using peer-to-peer file sharing, black market via bootlegged media or Installed as genuine solutions. Pirated software’s are often cheaper then genuine software. Complex licensing is also a big factor for pirated software’s.

Here are the nine reasons as outlined by IDC for Microsoft:

1. As a deliberate attempt to save money

2. The pirated software came bundled with the hardware

3. Cash flow issues… the customer has the money, just not today

4. Procurement policies that burden IT staff. Who then use demo products to solve immediate IT needs

5. Company operations that grow faster than procurement increases legitimate licenses

6. An initial solution that has pirated software bundled into it, and when the company goes to upgrade it can’t afford the sudden cost to become legal

7. A master license agreement that is negotiated elsewhere in the company than where the software is used - confusion between implementers and procurement

8. Easily available demo or trial software that ends up deployed as production software; the vendor may never follow up

9. Vendor licensing programs that are too complex, users just give up.

Technorati Tags: Software Piracy

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Four new Windows SideShow gadgets are now available for download.

• 1. Browse the TV Guide and schedule recordings. Browse Recorded TV by thumbnail.
     • Browse TV and schedule recordings. Browse the TV program guide, view metadata on upcoming or current shows, and pick shows to watch and record (single showing or series), without interrupting the TV viewing experience.
     • Recorded TV. Select a previously recorded program to play back, without interrupting the viewing experience on the TV.
  2. Browse your music library and control music playback.
     • Play Music. Browse the media library, control music playback on the PC by using the remote control device instead of the primary display, such as a TV.
     • Play radio presets. Browse your radio presets and playback that station through your Media Center.
  3. Browse Picture and Video libraries.
     • Browse the picture and video libraries.  Make a selection on the remote and that picture or video will be displayed on the TV.
  4. View “now playing” information and control Media Center with playback controls.
     • Provide “now playing” information. The remote control device shows information about the currently playing medium, such as the track title or the time elapsed.

Download
Installation Instructions
Gadget general information and known issues
Send Feedback

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Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system. According to insiders the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of ditching Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said. An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company. Intel’s decision is certain to sting Microsoft because the two companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the earliest days of the personal computer. Indeed, the corporate duo is known as “Wintel” in the PC industry.

When a company as tech savvy as Intel, with full source code access and having written several large chunks of the OS, says no thank you, you know you have a problem. Well, everyone knows Microsoft has a problem, but it is nice to see it codified in such a black and white way though. Reassuring, like a warm cup of tea, or a public kick to the corporate crown jewels.

The Inquirer, a London-based technology website, was the first one to report Intel’s decision not to roll out Vista across the entire company. Intel is hardly alone in its reluctance to embrace Microsoft’s latest operating system, which was available to corporate customers in November 2006 and to consumers in January 2007. Large companies routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months, you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,” said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

His Gartner colleague, Michael Silver, said that about 30 percent of corporate customers skip any given new version of Windows. But the percentage will be higher for Vista, Mr. Silver predicted. Gartner’s corporate clients that plan to skip Vista, like Intel, do not see value of this upgrade, particularly since it requires new PC hardware at the time when the economy is weak and corporate budgets are tight. In the end, you have Intel flipping MS the bird, and telling them what they already know, Vista in undeployable by anyone with a grain of common sense.

There are more than 140 million copies of Vista installed on machines worldwide. Consumers and small businesses simply get the operating system that is on a new machine when they buy a PC, and that is Vista. Meanwhile, the Microsoft operating system engine chugs on, phasing out the old and proclaiming the new. The company reiterated this week that, despite some customer protests, it would halt shipments of the previous version of Windows, XP, to retail stores and stop most licensing of XP to PC makers next week. Microsoft also announced that the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to go on sale in January 2010.

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Microsoft bundled a new writing assistance tool in their Live Search.ESL (English as a Second Language) Assistant currently noting  more then a prototype and ESL currently focusing on limited number of mistakes

The ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest corrections for a number of common learner error patterns that are not currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office products. The service also tries to help users judge whether a suggestion truly represents an improvement by showing real-life examples returned by a web search

ESL Assistant deploys advanced statistical models in order to address and correct uncharacteristic mistakes. At the same time, the tool is intimately connected to Live Search, and each suggestion is also performed as a search in order to offer the user conclusive examples after the error is corrected. Additionally, Microsoft is intent on offering the tool as an add-in for the Office 2007 System, in an effort to make up for the limitations of the grammar checker.

In its present form, the service is unapologetically experimental (‘pre-alpha,’ despite the beta label). The range of error types that it corrects is still small, it does not capture everything, and it sometimes gets things wrong. Work to improve error detection accuracy and coverage is ongoing; we expect to roll out new modules and updates as the service matures. The present interface certainly does not represent what one would expect to see if this service were some day fully integrated into a shipping product. With the current prototype, we will be gathering data about where the service succeeds and where it does not, to help inform future directions of development

Some features of the ESL Assistant service include:

• Corrections for common ESL error types found in non-native English writing but not supported in by the Office grammar checker. More information about the specific kinds of error patterns that are supported can be found in the ESL Assistant Help (FAQ) page and on the team website. 

• Implementation as a web service, which permits the deployment of huge statistical models to identify possible error locations.

• Automatically generated searches to assist users by retrieving real-world contextual examples from the web.

• A downloadable add-in for Outlook 2007, allowing mail text to besent to the ESL Assistant web site for checking.

• An inline thesaurus feature that proposes alternative words appropriate to the context.

• An initial pass though Microsoft Office grammar and spell checking, that can be turned on by a checkbox, to ensure more comprehensive error coverage.

• Localized pages for users in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian markets (or if you set your default language in IE to one of these).

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A new study released by Net Applications shows that Microsoft Internet Explorer loosing it’s market shares. Last year internet Explorer has approximately 79% browser market share and after one year it only has 73% of browser market share. Mozilla’s Firefox is Internet Explorer’s main competitor. The web browser now holds 19 percent of the market, and is rapidly expanding the number of people that are using it. Over the last year, Firefox’s market share raised more than 4 percent, from the 14.65 percent it owned last summer. The browser’s latest version acquired 1 percent of the global market during the first day of its release.

The bad news for Mozilla is that the main people who downloaded Firefox 3 where users upgrading from Firefox 2. Even though the company’s latest version of the browser has managed to get about 4 percent of the web browser market, only less than 1 percent have been people that previously used other companies’ products.

Apple also hit the jackpot with Safari, increasing the number of people that use it from 4.71 percent last year, to 6.31 as of this month. The reason for this seems to be the increased popularity of the company’s products, and the fact that each Apple computer comes with Safari

Browser Market Share July 2007

Browser Market Share June 2008

Source : Market Share and efluxmedia

Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer,Firefox

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On July 2, 2008 Microsoft announced that it will release an all-in-one software subscription package Microsoft Equipt offers consumers Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Windows Live tools and Office Live Workspace. Microsoft Equipt customers will get the version upgrades as part of their subscriptions. This is the first time when Microsoft come with the concept of of Software as Service. Now Let’s compare both Google services and Microsoft Equipt.

Email and Online Storage: Both Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail offers a sufficient amount of storage. Both E-Mail services are easy to use and have most of the features common in each other. Gmail offers online storage via it’s E-Mail service while Microsoft offers online storage service via it’s SkyDrive service. So while using Google you get around 5 GB of online Storage but with Microsoft services users get 5 GB Storage for E-Mail and 5 GB online storage space.

Office Applications: Google offers office application through it’s GoogleDocs and Microsoft with it’s Microsoft Office Suite. Microsoft Office suite has more features as compare to Google docs but collaboration is missing in Microsoft office. Google docs offers only basic functions but  GoogleDocs collaboration features is best as compare to Microsoft office. Microsoft Office Live adds some collaboration but the online editing feature is missing and GoogleDocs offers a better services here.

Security: Google services as of now does not offer any security services and here Microsoft has added it’s OneCare security programs. OneCare offers a number of services like Firewall, Backup, system tuneup and many other services to it’s users.

Price: Google docs and its application yearly subscription for a single employee is cost you around $50. Microsoft Equipt offers it’s all services with just $69.99 per year.Anytime a new version of Office or Windows Live OneCare is released, Microsoft Equipt customers will get the version upgrades as part of their subscriptions.

Download Microsoft Equipt Products and Services Guide

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Now this is what we call competition. Apple tried to capture the mobile phone market with their innovative multi-touch iPhone. And here it is. iPhone’s competitor is taking shape now. Microsoft and Mitshubishi, are trying to change the way, we interact with computers. Ofcourse, iPhone and Surface has already shown the dustbin to your age old keyboard and mouse.

But still, iPhone users suffers from the problem of fat fingers. Using iPhone’s map feature and keyboard is really not so easy. So, Microsoft and Mitshubishi tried to solve this very issue. And voila, we have got something that’s really cool. Well, Microsoft has given it the name of Lucid Touch, and its still in research phase. But, one can expect it to be out by 2011.

But what exactly this Lucid Touch thing is? Well, its a multi-touch device. So, isn’t an iPhone a multi-touch device. Well, yes it is, but wait, in iPhone, you use screen to touch and navigate. Here, in Lucid Touch, you can use the back of the screen too. When you hold the device in your hand, your fingers will cast a shadow on screen. That means your device will act like if its a psuedo-transparent, just like those shown in Steven Spielberg’s Sci-Fi movie. So, if you have got fat fingers, that’s not an issue anymore. Wow, it sounds cool, rite. But sadly, its a mere prototype, and is way too bulky. So, for the time-being, you can read more about the same, and get a glimpse of the next revolution, on Microsoft Research Site.

   Surely, one thing is true. Microsoft do knows how to stay in the market. Even if Vista was a failure, they have got Surface, and this Lucid Touch, to compensate for the losses.

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Earlier this week Adobe said a statement that it’s work with Google and Yahoo 

To enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

And this is said on Google Blog

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

But there is no one talking about what is the role of Microsoft Silverlight.

• Is Microsoft Silverlight content can be search and index by search engines?
• Are these search engines interested searching and indexing Silverlight content? 

After searching on web I find that Microsoft has added the technology in Silverlight that help search  engines to easily index Silverlight content. What Microsoft officials said on this

Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.  Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines.  Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well.  Silverlight applications also support “deep linking” as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data.  Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.

So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes.  Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines.  By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines.

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