Why Google needs Firefox – now more than ever

Google’s paying the bill for Firefox again – although the details are sketchy.

Most analysts don’t seem to realize that its a co-dependent relationship. They both need each other.

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

UPDATE: AllThingsD reports that Google will be paying Mozilla $300 million per year for the next three years, in exchange for top search engine billing. That’s more than three times as much as Google has been paying for the past three years. I, uh, toldja so.

Surprise! Google+ cookies behave themselves, unlike Facebook’s

I was quite amazed, actually. You can see for yourself. My article shows you how to look.

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

Invitation to sign up for Google+

Google has just given all Google+ account holders an easy way to let their friends sign up.

If you’re interested, go to the sign up site.

I’m using Google+ fairly regularly, although I’m still Tweeting quite a bit (@woodyleonhard), too. I really like Google+, even taking into account the privacy concerns, as documented in this week’s Windows Secrets Newsletter.

So sign up and, when you do, make sure you add me to one of your circles. Remember there’s an “h” in “Leonhard”…

Microsoft makes Google look silly in the Android patent wars

What on earth were they thinking?

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

The honeymoon’s over for Google+

And much of it’s Google’s fault.

InfoWorld Tech Watch.

Lots of changes coming from Google

If you haven’t looked at Gmail or Google+ yet, you should, especially if you’re thinking about switching to Google Apps.

InfoWorld Tech Watch. [Link fixed. Sorry 'bout that!]

(I’m back from vacation. Could you tell?)

Google gains allies in the war over HTML5 video formats

It’s like Betamax vs VHS all over again, except this time it’s Microsoft and Apple (talk about strange bedfellows) vs Google and the open source community. InfoWorld Tech Watch.

Google’s US search market share increases, but the rules changed

Last month I wrote about Bing stealing Yahoo search market share, and explained why that didn’t mean much: as of August 24, the Bing engine effectively replaced the Yahoo search engine, so even if you see Yahoo on the screen, the results and the marketing oomph go to Microsoft.

This month, comScore reports an important change. According to their just-released report, Google’s U.S. market share went up from 65.4% in August to 66.1% in September. At the same time, Bing/Yahoo declined from 28.5 to 27.9%.

While the numbers seem impressive, you have to take them with more than a dash of salt. comScore changed the way it counts searches, in response to Google’s new Instant Search technology (which some wags note isn’t all that new, but I digress).

As Cameron Meierhofer on the comScore blog explains,

[T]he comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user’s actions. Based on this insight, we have developed a priority scoring system that allows us to identify search results with explicit user action and interstitial results with a sufficiently long pause to suggest some level of implicit engagement.

If that sounds like a situation just begging to mess up search site usage scores, you’re right. In the end, comScore punted, assigning an arbitrary time-out period of three seconds, “Query result pages without explicit user action, but with a pause of at least 3 seconds, are considered as indicating ‘implicit’ engagement and will count towards Total Core Search.”

As a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon, I have to wonder out loud if comScore chose that three second threshhold before or after they saw the statistics for September.

Any way, it’s a new race from this point on, and it’ll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft fare. We won’t really be able to compare apples to apples until the October results are out.

And, of course, the really important numbers in the long run are for mobile search. But that’s another story.