Filed under: Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Marketing and advertising

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s market share in April increased once again, going from 67.25% to 67.90% of all world wide web searches performed in the U.S. Sounds like a little increase, but we’re speaking hundreds of millions of additional searches here. Even a tenth of 1% is a major increase.

Google also earned the distinction today of being named the No. 1 most-visited site by ComScore, topping Yahoo for the first time.

Both Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) saw decreases in search market share due to Google’s continued dominance. April data from world wide web traffic research firm Hitwise indicated that Google continues to dominate U.S. internet searches, while being responsible for the lion’s share of connecting web searchers with specific industries as well.

For example, 31% of of web traffic and health and medical sites was supplied by Google, as well as 23% of web traffic to travel websites. This alone demonstrates the power Google has over the web. Some industries would see huge decreases in traffic if Google were to go away. In effect, Google’s web search dominance has a very broad and meaningful over entire industries on the web, including shopping and classifieds, news and media, entertainment and others.

Still think Google is worth $576.30 per share?

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Filed under: Productivity, Web services

If you’ve been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It’s an on the web assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That’s not Blackboard’s fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.

A swift Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which recommends to us that there’s already a demand for this product. Granted, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network — heard of LinkedIn, guys? — a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college children who still log into Facebook every day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you’re making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won’t wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.

The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook’s natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.

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Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Mozilla, Open Source

The first alpha release of Thunderbird 3, the open source mail client built on the Gecko rendering engine (what Firefox and all other Mozilla products use), is now available as a developer preview. The Mozilla Messaging team has named this release “Shredder a1″ to signify that this release is early, buggy and should NOT be used in a production environment. Mozilla is aiming this release at testers and developers and we don’t advocate non-adventurous users taking the program out for a spin.

As the release notes point out, Shredder Alpha 1 is built on Gecko 1.9, the engine running Firefox 3.

Some other highlights:

• New add-on manager that allows direct installation of Thunderbird add-ons and customizations
• Mac OS X version is a native Cocoa application
• Improved message searching

Again, be aware that this is a developer preview and is certainly not ready for prime time. We had issues getting IMAP or POP support working with any of our Google Apps accounts on the OS X version of Shredder Alpha 1 and the app was kind of crashy. Still, we were impressed with what we could see and look forward to future developments.

If you feel ready to give the newest alpha a try, you can download it for your platform of choice here.

[via Mozilla Links]

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