Google released the Chrome browser on September 2, 2008. Now that Chrome has been out for about a year and it’s been almost six months since I last looked at Chrome’s market share, let’s take another peek.
For the last 30 days, here are my Google Analytics stats for mattcutts.com:
For me, 8.97% of my readers run Chrome, up from 7.04% in March 2009.
Some different browser marketshare numbers:
- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 2.59% to 2.84% from July 2009 to August 2009.
- StatCounter gives daily stats. I’m seeing 3.31% on Saturday August 1st to 3.59% on Saturday August 29th.
- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 3.376% to 4.004%:
So after one year, three different sources report market share of 2.84%, 3.59%, and 4.004%. That’s pretty good for 12 months. More importantly, Chrome has pushed all browsers to be faster, more modern, and generally better.
I’ve really enjoyed making videos for webmasters. In the most recent recording session, we decided that it would be fun to talk about some of the “hidden gems” of Google: features, products, or tips that you might not know about, but you might like.
One of my favorite hidden Google gems is a program for Android phones called My Tracks. I like it enough that we made a short video about it. Enjoy!
Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings. When Knol launched, somepeopleaskedquestions about this. I dutifully trundled around the web and said that Knol wouldnotreceiveanyspecialbenefits in our scoring/ranking for search. With the benefit of six months’ worth of hindsight, I hope everyone can agree that Knol doesn’t get some special boost or advantage in Google’s rankings.
I think we can call that idea completely debunked now.
In the mean time, the Knol team hasn’t been standing still. In a recent announcement on the Google Blog, the Public Library of Science is starting up a new website on Knol to publish research results about influenza. PLoS Currents: Influenza will be moderated by an expert group of researchers. With H1N1, it’s important to communicate preliminary results, and this new site provides a way to do that.
I wanted to talk about something else cool that I recently saw on Knol. One of Knol’s strengths is making it easier to add knowledge to the web. For example, the web has fewer documents written in languages such as Arabic. One Google Knol project resulted in a ton of informative pages being added to the web in Arabic. They made a video about it:
Getting more useful content onto the web is a good thing, so I’m glad that Knol can help with that.
Some folks that I respect were giving me a bit of a hard time because they felt like I punted on this webmaster video:
So let me take another stab at the question, and tell me what you think. There’s a couple effects going on:
- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing. Most of the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) that are showing up now are .com sites like tescofinance.com and churchill.com that are relevant to the UK even though they don’t end in a .co.uk.
- I’ve been following some of the examples people have pointed out. I remember kiva.org in particular was mentioned and that probably is off-topic for the UK. I dug into that one, and it was an unrelated ranking experiment that was going on that we changed.
I’ve been trying to keep up with the examples that people have pointed out, and most of the examples that I’ve seen have fallen into one of those two categories. If people want to point out examples of off-topic .coms that I’ve missed, I’m happy to poke/prod the appropriate folks at Google though. Feel free to leave comments like “For the query [red widgets] on google.co.uk, redwidgets.com shouldn’t show up because they don’t really provide red widgets to the UK.” Then I’ll ask the appropriate team to check out the comments.
