Logging The Cyber World

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Google plans to launch Tuesday its own Internet browser, opening up a new challenge in cyberspace to Microsoft and its dominant Internet Explorer.

The California-based Web search leader said the new browser, called Google Chrome, would “add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

“We realized … we needed to completely rethink the browser,” Google’s Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

The application can be downloaded for free in more than 100 countries and its code will be open source so no rights will have to be paid by anyone using or adapting the software.

Full article at Yahoo News
and screenshots at blogoscoped.com

Google continues to gain search market share in the United States at the expense of its rivals.

In July, according to Internet metrics firm ComScore, Americans conducted 11.8 billion searches at core search engines, a 2% increase from June.

Google sites accounted for 61.9% of July searches, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from the previous month. Yahoo sites accounted for 20.5%, a decrease of 0.4 percentage points. And Microsoft sites accounted for 8.9%, a decrease of 0.3 percentage points.

In numerical terms, Google handled almost 7.3 billion core searches (a 2% increase). Yahoo processed 2.4 billion, and Microsoft fielded 1 billion.

More on informationweek.com

Today Google joined a national initiative of public interest, civic and industry groups to help launch the Internet for Everyone campaign, whose goal is to make ubiquitous and open broadband access for every American a priority in the next administration.

Why is Google involved? Making the Internet accessible to more Americans is part of our corporate DNA. It’s what has motivated our work on municipal wi-fi, in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, our investment in Clearwire and development of Android, and most recently our advocacy in support of opening up the unused portions of the TV spectrum band for use by Internet devices.

For more than a decade the Internet has driven unprecedented innovation, economic growth, and prosperity. Companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook — and numerous smaller but impactful players — have fundamentally changed people’s lives. Their success wouldn’t have been possible without the ability of tens of millions of Americans to connect easily to a open Internet. And there’s no doubt that the next generation of inventions to transform our lives and our economy will happen online, making high-speed access to the Net more important than ever.

Read the full article

BusinessWeek.com has posted an article about Google’s Real Threat.

…As more people use cell phones and their tiny glass screens to gain access to the Internet, Google and its fellow online advertisers will have less space, or what’s called ad inventory, to place marketing messages for customers. Google makes money selling ad inventory. And its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone.

Full article here.