Tag: search engines

Google’s search share falls

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

330ogleA report said that Google lost US search share in December while Yahoo gained share for the first time in a long time.
The report, from Statcounter, said that in December Google managed to grab 75.2 percent of US searches, with Microsoft’s Bing coming in second at 12.5 percent and Yahoo third with 10.4 percent.
Google had been the default search engine for people using the popular Firefox browser until last month, when Firefox instead struck a deal with Yahoo.
Firefox is not the most popular browser and held  12 percent of internet usage in December 2014.
Statcounter compiles its figures by surveying 15 billion page views a month to ver three million sites.  It does not record figures for Western Europe.

 

US gets shirty with EU over Google

Posted on November 25, 2014 by - News

euroflagzA motion in the European Parliament to be debated tomorrow and voted on on Thursday has raised the ire of the United States.

Two MEPs are proposing that Google should be dismembered because its power is excessive.

And even though the European Parliament has no powers to enforce such a move, it’s attracted ire from the US mission to the EU, according to Reuters.

In an email to the the EU the mission said it was concerned about the call to dismember Google.

It added that looking at competitive problems and remedies should be based on objective and impartial information and “not be politicised”.

If the European Parliament votes for the motion on Thursday, that’s likely to put pressure on the European Commission to step up its investigations.

Google has been under scrutiny by the EC – a separate entity from the parliament for four years following complaints by all and sundry that it is behaving in an antitrust manner.

UK high on Google purge lists

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

OgleThe European Court of Justice told Google that it had to remove information under its so-called “right to be forgotten” law and now it has emerged that one in 10 requests came from the UK.

According to the BBC, Google has taken down nearly 500,000 links from its search engine since May.  And, of those, 63,616 were UK requests.

Google doesn’t have to take down sites on requests, but people have a right to appeal if it decides not to.

Out of the 498,737 URLs it looked at, based on 146,357 requests, France accounted for the most requests, followed by Germany and then the UK.  Of the requests it received, Google removed 41.8 percent, and left 58.2 percent of them online.

Google said it gt a request from a defrocked vicar to remove two links covering an investigation of sexual abuse accusations.  It didn’t remove the pages.

Facebook accounted for most requests to remove references, followed by profileengine.com