One of the most attractive characteristics of Google Chrome when it launched in 2009 was its speed.  Everyone I knew had already added enough plugins to Firefox to choke the browser as it tried to load.  Even worse, Firefox add-ons, which the industry now calls plugins or apps, were an integral part of the browser’s loading time.  A misbehaving program was enough to crash your browser, potentially losing work and certainly losing time.  By comparison, Google Chrome seemed mysteriously sleek, like a racehorse running on an empty track early in the morning.  Even better was the way Chrome handled crashes for its extensions, allowing one part of the program to crash while keeping the browser intact.

I vowed to never add so much baggage to Chrome to cause the program to lag.   And I’ve been fairly faithful, pruning unused extensions whenever they’re unused.  That cyber-take on the “stop sending the report and see who complains”  has kept Chrome running fast.   The time to launch Chrome on my system, the only one I care about, is about 3 seconds.   Firefox typically runs 5-6 seconds unless it’s updating an add-on, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was apparently tested for speed using a sundial.   That’s one takeaway for you as a small business leader:  it’s nice to know how software and machines perform in magazine testing, but you should ultimately care about how they perform in your office.

Since then, Big Thinking has published a list of must-have Google Chrome Extensions with a short explanation of each.  The list was divided last year into extensions for everyone and extensions for marketers, and that’s still a method that works well for me and readers who have commented.   Since the first list in December 2009, only StumbleUpon has been on the list each time, but the venerable page recommendation engine is on my endangered list because I know I’m not using the tool very often any longer.  Whether the lack of use is due to lack of time or burnout after years is irrelevant because it will be uninstalled if still aboard Chrome when it’s time for this summer’s list.

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uneven balance - search engine shareWe’ve beat the drum about a search duopoly since before the Yahoo-Microsoft search alliance was finalized. A duopoly is a market condition when there are two competitors serving many buyers.  Literalists will insist that Yahoo, Ask, AOL and meta search engines still receive a very large number of search requests. That’s true.

What you need to know as a small business leader is that comScore’s latest data shows that Google or Bing “powered” 93.8 percent of US search in December.   There is an awful lot of money to be made in the fringes that remaining 6 percent or so.

But in January 2011, make sure you understand that web search is a two player game. Yahoo! is reinventing itself into a content company as fast as it can.   AOL isn’t far behind.  And we’re not counting searches on entities like Facebook, Amazon or eBay.  One could argue that an Amazon search is in many ways a proxy for a commercial search–certainly among its core categories.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is to remember that even Google says search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process and you have two different companies in which to position your company’s goods and services.   That’s the first, ultimate priority because you reach 94% of the United States that way.

Source:  “December 2010 Search Engine Rankings“, comScore, 1/14/2011

Image:  Balance by Stephen Stacey

Google will begin using information compiled by data aggregators to provide information to consumers in the growing Google Products area. The company has done this before, but things are different now.  The search engine once tried walling off internal information from products like Froogle and Google Product.  Now comes Google Product Search with product pages that compile “all the information” Google has on a product. Google manager Brian Lam blogged yesterday that the company would “[work] with suppliers and manufacturers to get product data straight from the source.”   The company chose Edgenet, a data company that organizes information from thousands of companies in multiple sectors, including consumer electronics, furniture and “general merchandise”. Read More