Google and Mozilla have struck a deal that renews their agreement making Google the default search engine in Firefox browsers. No financial terms were announced, but Mozilla's blog post says the agreement extends the companies' agreement "for at least three additional years." The renewal comes about three weeks after the previous contract expired. The two companies previously had another three-year deal that expired at the end of November. A couple quotes from the Mozilla announcement: "Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for [...]

Related Topics: Google: Browsers | Google: Partnerships | Toolbars & Add-Ons: Firefox Browser | Top News

Google announced a neat new visual display of Google's search volume by search query language. The tool is named the Google Search Globe. Search Globe plots different colored bars protruding from the globe. Each color represents a different language, and you'd see a nice diverse set of colors (i.e. languages) over places like Europe and parts of Asia. Here is a video of how it works: [youtube width="600" height="480"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpOlpZBZU-A[/youtube] The Google Data Arts Team put this together to help Internet accessibility throughout the world by geographic ar [...]

Related Topics: Google: Browsers | Google: Chrome | Google: Trends | Google: Web Search

Does the web browser you use say anything about your preferred search engine? It might, according to some data just published by Chitika. After measuring activity across the 80,000 or so sites in its ad network, Chitika reports that Bing usage is tied to which version of Internet Explorer a person uses. Specifically, Bing usage increases as users upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer. As you can see, Bing usage jumps from 16.9% among IE8 users to 22.9% among IE9 users -- that's a 35% gain. Is this just a case of IE9 making Bing the user's default search engine? No, not r [...]

Related Topics: Google: Browsers | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Internet Explorer | Stats: Popularity | Yahoo: Browsers | Yahoo: Search

Yesterday, Google and Firefox announced new tools to block behavioral targeting across the web. Behavioral targeting are a form of ads that use your online behavior to target specific ads to you, as you browse the web. Google calls these interest based advertising but most of the web calls them behavioral targeting. Google released a new Chrome extension named Keep My Opt-Outs. The extension helps block some of the personalized advertising and related data tracking performed by companies. I should note, Google has an older Chrome extension named IAB Opt Out that blocked Google's inter [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Google: Browsers | Google: Chrome | Legal: Privacy | Toolbars & Add-Ons: Firefox Browser

At the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Google CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to suggest that Chrome-based netbooks wouldn't be available for holiday shopping (or even before the end of the year). A year ago, however, Google said it was aiming for the "holiday season" with the intended release of the first Chrome-powered machines. (There's lots of conflicting information around release timing.) It's unclear what's causing the delay but in the intervening year the iPad arrived and the first viable Android tablets are starting to appear, led by the appealing but flawed-and-too-costly Galax [...]

Related Topics: Google: Browsers | Google: Chrome | Top News