Google

As we are all aware, it can be really difficult to keep on top of email. Most internet users find themselves inundated with emails from all sorts of sources. Some of these they will have signed up for (albeit not necessarily expecting the sheer volume of email they then receive as part of their subscription) whilst others will be general items of junk and so on that you acquire over time.

In amongst all this are the messages you really want to receive – those from friends and family, from people you do business with or from interests you have. It would be pleasant to be able to prioritise these emails ahead of all the rest.

Google has taken steps to try and solve this issue for users of its Gmail system. The internet giant has launched a ‘Priority Inbox’ feature for Gmail that gets used to your personal email habits. It then adapts how your mailbox appears so that important mail that you regularly check goes straight to the top of the list.

The new feature is essentially an automated solution to do what you would normally do yourself when opening your mailbox in order to reorganise your mail, so it will probably save users of Gmail lots of time and effort.

Google’s dominance is something that rival search engines have sought to try and topple, but have had little success on their own. Google has recently been reported as the most visible brand in the UK so it is little surprise that competitors are struggling to keep up.

One way that two of Google’s biggest rivals have sought to try and get a foothold in the market that Google appears to have cornered is actually joining forces in the name of one common interest: halting Google’s supremacy online.

Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in the hope that their combined expertise will give them a greater chance of standing up to Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will now act as the major processing mechanism behind Yahoo! search, but the joint effort will only be available to users in the US and Canada.

The agreement is initially for ten years and the companies are planning to move into markets outside North America over the course of the decade. This will include plans for multi-lingual search platforms.

Google has so far come out on top in the race for internet domination, but Microsoft and Yahoo! hope that together they will put up more of a fight.

The Google logo is immediately recognisable to most people in the UK and a new survey has recently presented findings showing just how powerful that brand is among ordinary internet users. The findings suggest that nearly half of all users in Britain use the Google homepage as their personal homepage or else they visit Google immediately when they open their browser.

A third of those who made up the survey also revealed that they identified the Google logo as the branding they felt they saw most of during the course of an average day. In contrast, 15 per cent of participants said they saw the Microsoft logo most frequently, whilst 11 per cent opted for the Facebook branding.

Over half of the people surveyed said that they use Google as a makeshift spell-checker, something that may come as something of a surprise. A quarter suggested that they use a Google search bar installed on their internet browser, whilst a further 52 per cent said they used Google to perform an internet search on between ten and twenty occasions every day.

This is just the latest survey that details the omnipresence of the Google brand in everyday life. A total of 1,654 people took part in the survey.

Google Earth has been major success for internet users, offering them the capability of searching satellite imagery of landmasses all over the world. The technology has been implemented over a wide range of different areas, but for many it has just satisfied its users’ curiosity about the world around them.

However, the original version of Google Earth did have one glaring oversight which has been addressed in an updated version of the application. The first version did not account for the fact the majority of the Earth is covered with water. Google Earth 1.1 for Android makes no such oversight.

There are a number of new features available for use on the new version of Google Earth which is designed for use on your mobile phone. It supports Adobe Flash so can be used on phones that have flash installed on an Android operating system.

One of the most exciting new features of Google Earth 1.1 is the inclusion of underwater imagery for those areas overlooked by its predecessor. It also offers a feature called ‘Explore the Ocean’ which allows users to view videos and photos about the ocean which have been provided by more than a hundred contributing parties.

Google is still way out in front in terms of US search engine market share, but Yahoo! did make slight inroads last month.

Google had 65.8 per cent of the market, according to comScore figures, which represented a 0.4 per cent drop compared to June. Yahoo! which is in second place, seems to have taken that sliver, as it was up by the same amount to 17.1 per cent.

Bing remains in third place and retains the same percentage of searchers – 11 per cent. In June, Bing had seen greater growth. It went from 12.1 per cent of the market in May to 12.7 per cent in June.

Experian Hitwise figures show a similar overall picture. They have Google with 71.43 per cent, Yahoo! with 14.43 per cent and Bing with 9.86 per cent.

The Experian Hitwise figures are further broken down into different categories and the most interesting figure is perhaps the rise in shopping-related searches on Bing, which has seen an 84 per cent increase compared to the same period last year.