Web search a prioity at tech's top players

It looks like Google's world domination plan is still full steam ahead. According to comScore, Google's search share checked in at 61.6% in March with Yahoo finishing a distant second at 20.4% and Microsoft posting 9.1%. These staggering figures demonstrate Google's massive superiority in the industry and provide a lot of insight into the recent tech merger talks.

ZDnet.com's Larry Dignan commented about this topic stating "These search market share figures put a lot of recent events in context. For starters, Google’s search gains are a big reason why Microsoft has been hot for Yahoo in either a full acquisition or some sort of search purchase."

Microsoft and its quest for Yahoo has been a hot topic in both the technology and financial worlds lately. With the proliferation of web based services and the move toward cloud computing, Microsoft can see the writing on the wall and is trying desperately to position itself in the web search world. On Monday, Microsoft inked a deal with HP to make Live Search the default search engine for all consumer PC's shipped in 2009. Microsoft is calling the deal "the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done.”

It will be very interesting to see how far the tech giants go to leverage the web into their product lines. We probably aren't far from a fully web based OS with a PC that opens to a web browser and doesn't rely on dedicated applications.

Can you define cloud computing????

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, you've even seen articles about it on this site. But can you provide the true definition of cloud computing? Can anybody!?!?

Well, Joyent hosting got together with some of the big boys in technology and tried to define cloud computing. Interviewees include Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Rafe Needleman, Brian Solis, and Stowe Boyd.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think of the cloud computing phenomenon.

IBM, Google stirring up a cloud environment

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Google and IBM are testing a cloud computing infrastructure that could become an important avenue for them to deliver software and services to consumer and business users.

Google's Eric Schmidt and IBM's Sam Palmisano addressed a gathering of IBM business partners in Los Angeles on Thursday and revealed the two companies have developed a cloud computing environment that runs on Linux and includes Xen virtualization and an Apache implementation of the Google File System called Hadoop.

Last year, the two companies teamed up on a parallel-computing initiative.

The IBM/Google cloud environment is being tested at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University.

The pair isn't the first to test the cloud concept.

Amazon is offering a cloud environment called EC2, which has companies or developers paying only for the capacity they need to run their applications or services that they in turn are offering to users or business partners.

While the two CEOs did not announce any future plans, they said the IBM/Google cloud would eventually be used to support an array of services and applications tailored for consumers and businesses.

Google already has a number of online services for consumers including calendars, photos and Google Docs word processing tools. Google also is positioning Google Docs as a suite of applications for corporate users, including offline capabilities.

IBM recently released IBM Symphony, a set of similar office productivity tools that users can download and run locally and can be tied into other services. It also has a set of social-networking tools that could be offered as a service.

The IBM/Google cloud initiative would compete with Microsoft's software-plus-services strategy and the recently announced Live Mesh, a storage and synchronization framework. Microsoft is attempting to tie the cloud to desktop and devices, and its on-premise business and server applications. In April, the company announced it had begun a beta to test a combination of Office and online services under the codename Albany.

Schmidt was quoted by the Dow Jones news service as saying Google's relationship with IBM is a "key plank" in its strategy "otherwise we can't reach the customers."