Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

On Google’s blog yesterday comes the announcement of enhanced searching capabilities for Firefox, the up and coming browser. The enhancement allows Google to prefetch, or start downloading the top results of your search in the background allowing you to get to the site you click on faster. The Mozilla Organization which builds Firefox has an FAQ on prefetching available.

It’s comes as no surprise that Google is trying to support Firefox in any way it can, as they want to erode people’s dependency on Microsoft’s Explorer browser. I switched to Firefox myself about 6 months ago. It’s faster and more secure than MS Explorer. I was actually using Apple’s Safari before Firefox, but Safari still has a few faults, although it renders images and fonts better than Firefox.

In looking at the web statistics for all my sites I found that 74% of site visitors use MS Explorer compared to 18% for Firefox and 4% for Safari. That’s a significant increase for Firefox and a big drop for Microsoft, after all Firefox 1.0 was released just under 5 months ago.

In other news, Search Engine Watch, the respected leader in disseminating news about Search Engine’s announced today the winners of its 5th annual awards. The most surprising result, Outstanding Search Service went to Yahoo, not Google who came in second. Google did however get 4 other awards including Best News Search Engine, best US Shopping Search Engine, Most SEO/Webmaster Friendly Search Engine and Best Search Ads provider.

Looksmart, joining Google’s Scholar search engine has launched it’s own 24 Hour Scholar search engine.

I’m not sure how it stacks up to Google, no pun indented, but creating vertical searches is something I’ve been advocating for some time.

From science fiction to reality, NASA’s TETWalker robot successfully completed it’s first walk demonstrating technology that could eventually be minituarized and joined together to form autonomous nanotechnology swarms (ANTS).

Eventually ANTS will be able to “alter their shape to flow over rocky terrain or to create useful structures like communications antennae and solar sails. This technology has the potential to directly support NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration“.

Urchin, a provider of Web Analytics software and on demand services has been bought by Google (Wall Street Journal, subscription required).

About a year ago I had become dissatisfied with the software I was using to analyze the traffic for all my web sites. After some thorough research I settled on Urchin. I have not been disappointed. The software is great and provides a true picture of who comes to my sites, what they do and how I can take advantage of the patterns I see. Looks like Google agrees.

Every know and then I’ll post a little tip to help those of you out there who want to improve their companies Internet visibility or marketing. Today’s tip, getting your press release disseminated effectively for free.

Although I was familiar with the following company a several years ago it was not until last year that I had the opportunity to meet its President and CEO, David McInnis, at Search Engine Strategies. PR Web has been offering free online press release distribution services since 1997.

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