Microsoft has released IE 9 today. It’s recommended that all users of IE 8 upgrade to Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. Good luck and God speed.
Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category
I reported Last week that the Yahoo and Microsoft search deal has been approved in the US and Europe. Microsoft will supply all results seen when searching Yahoo, for both paid and natural listings. Obviously there are huge technological issues to work through, but if all goes as planned, the partnership could be visible to consumers as soon as late 2010. Yahoo and Microsoft have also setup a site to explain the partnership in more detail.
So, what does this change mean for your business?
Yahoo and Microsoft currently combine for a little under 30% of the search market. Individually they don’t come close to challenging Google, but combined, they represent a sizable portion of the market. If you have been focusing your SEM and/or SEO efforts solely on Google, it may now be time to start paying attention to Yahoo/Microsoft.
It remains to be seen if this partnership will be able to steal a share of the search market from Google. Even at 30%, if you aren’t including Yahoo/Microsoft in your SEM and SEO plans, you could be missing out on a significant number of customers. This partnership makes reaching the non-Google searchers much more efficient for advertisers.
It’s official, Microsoft and Yahoo have formed a search alliance. What this means is that “search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.”
Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.
HP Browser Tool Saves Web Content In One Document
There’s no denying the Web’s value as a resource, but the temptation to quickly navigate from one site to the next makes it challenging to remember where the content was found.
A query on hotels in Italy might lead you to select a link about Florence, then two links about Michelangelo and four links to Italian Renaissance art. Suddenly, the home page for a carefully researched hotel is forgotten. It’s especially tough to backtrack through research using new sites with rich Web 2.0 features that display extra data directly within a Web page.
Some people try to organize Web research by opening Microsoft Word documents alongside their browsers. They copy and paste data from sites into the documents, but this is usually a messy process that traps users into wasting time fixing formats and deleting ads. Others press Print whenever a helpful site appears, resulting in wasted paper and ink. Savvier users create folders within their Web browsers that hold multiple URLs about a research topic, but these data can’t easily be shared or printed for use away from the PC.
There’s a better way, and I took it for a spin. I tested the HP Smart Web Printing Software, a free program from Hewlett-Packard Co. that aims to help users compile a virtual clip book of content from Web sites while they’re browsing, within the same window. Using a tool in the browser, users highlight and copy images and text from a Web page and add them to the clip book. These clips can be edited, enhanced, saved as a PDF or printed out, without excess banner ads or sidebars.
HP Smart Web Printing Software isn’t without its quirks: It only works on Windows computers, not Macs, and only with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0. Not everything copies over to the clip book perfectly. Also, typed-in text has its limits: changing the font type, size or color of one word changes all words in the text box.
But all in all, I found this smart program to be a real boon. It’s unobtrusive enough to stay hidden until used, and you’ll remember how it works even if you only use the program once in a while. It functions as a printing assistant, helping to send certain sections of a Web site to the printer, and it will also save whatever you’re working on as a PDF — the universal format for sharing with others.
HP likes to tout its HP Smart Web Printing Software’s environmentally friendly qualities, namely its ability to print just what you want, without wasting ink or paper on extra pages that would otherwise print. But make no mistake about it: This product, while helping users not to print extra items from Web sites, still encourages users to print, thus helping HP sell more of its high-margin ink and paper.
I used the program to trim content from Web sites, printing more of what I wanted to read in fewer pages. I focused on this program’s clip-book functionality, which works as a bare-bones virtual scrapbook to organize research.
I downloaded and used the newest version of this free program on my machine running Windows Vista. I came across a few items that, when highlighted and moved over to the clip book, didn’t actually move, but most of the text and image clips moved without a problem.
A small HP Smart Select icon appears in the Internet Explorer command bar after this program is downloaded; selecting it toggles its highlighting capability on or off. By default, the clip book is hidden from view, but a quick change in settings opens this on the right edge of the Internet Explorer window.
The more I used this program, the more I wished it offered the ability to work with two clip books at once. For instance, if I was planning a trip and was researching hotels and tourist attractions at the same time, I could clip the hotel data into one book and store the touristy information in the other.
Maybe HP will release a version of this program for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and god forbid they introduce a version that is compatible with Apple’s Safari browser.
The HP Smart Web Printing program is a useful free solution that organizes online research right in your browser. Its ability to modify and preview documents before printing is also a help.
