Google’s share of the search space has fallen from 78.72 per cent in May to 78.48 per cent in June according to internet data firm StatCounter. That might not sound like a lot, but Microsoft’s share of the market, meanwhile, has grown to 8.23 per cent – that’s a rise of one per cent since Bing’s launch.

Those might seem like tiny fluctuations, but when you consider we’re talking percentages of the four billion pageloads a month that StatCounter analyses, those tiny percentages become massive figures. Yes Bing has a lot of catching up to do, but the underlying trend is positive. And that can only be a good thing for Microsoft considering the fact that it’s spent close to $100 million dollars rebranding its search engine.

Elsewhere in the world of social media this week, I read on The Telegraph’s website that the future of social networking and online companies trying to turn a profit (according to Kate Burns, vice-president of Bebo) rests on peer-to-peer recommendation rather than search.

Speaking at the Future of Broadcasting conference in London, Kate Burns, a former managing director at the aforementioned Google, said: “I know and understand the power of search. However, social recommendations are the future. They will not only open us up as individuals to the web, but to publishers and social networks, it will offer a relevant and open engagement we didn’t have before.” An interesting insight. Let’s see if her predictions come true. If they do, then that’s two bits of bad news for Google in a week.

When all’s said and done, though, Google’s still one of (if not the) largest companies in the world. And as long as it continues to develop (Google just introduced a website translation tool update that automatically translates the website you’re reading into one of 41 languages), then proclamations of a demise would be seriously misplaced. It’s the competition from little upstarts like, ahem, Microsoft, that pushes Google to bigger and better things. And if Search succumbs to social recommendation sites then you can bet Google won’t be resting on its laurels. So, here’s to the competition. May it continue to push the big boys to bigger and better things. And all the better if they remain free.

First up was AllTop. Described by its creators as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. I would describe it as a melange between Google and RRS – RRSoogle if you will. Just type something into the search engine, Sony PSP Go for instance, and then pick the category (eg Games). What come up are a list of relevant websites to that topic and their top five headlines. In their own words Alltop “collects the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic”.

Alltop’s pretty handy if you just want a quick overview of what’s going on in a specific category, in my case, the technology world (or my other passion – Italian football). It’s updated every hour, so the news is pretty fresh, and you can even “recommend” adding sites to the Alltop feed.

Another interesting site I stumbled across was TinEye – a reverse image search engine. Now, that might sound ridiculous. It did to me. My first reaction was: “Who has any use for a reverse image search engine? Come to think of it, what is a reverse image search engine?” But it’s actually quite inventive. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like the Republic logo, for instance). Then the site goes to work, finding all examples of use for that particular image. The benefit of all this is that it gives you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the internet.

TinEye is still in beta mode, and only has access to just over a billion images, but it’s the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. And the general consensus on the web is that it could be a big step in image search.

It even works on your iPhone and has a function called TinEye Music, which finds out more about an album simply by taking a photo of it. Photograph any album cover and TinEye’s image identification system will recognize it and give you links for that album on iTunes, allmusic, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Pretty clever stuff if you ask me.

So, there you have it: Alltop and TinEye. Two ridiculously named search sites that are ridiculously useful. We’re off to search for more interesting sites. And before you say it, it’s not that sort of interesting!

Message Translation is a service for Gmail that will translate your email into no less than 41 languages! I didn’t stand a chance, really. And to think I could have avoided all those harrowing German lessons with Mr Johnson, wielding his broken snooker queue as if it were Excalibur, ready to bring it down on the desk of the next boy who wasn’t paying attention. Where were you then, eh Google?

Anyway, I digress. The feature integrates Google Translate technology into Gmail and will appear within Gmail Labs as an experiment called “Message Translation”. It will be available to Gmail users around the world. Anyone who takes part in this experiment will be able to view any emails they receive in any one of the 41 languages at their disposal. Much to my chagrin, I can’t deny it’s a really useful feature, particularly if you have relatives abroad and you’ve let your ancestoral tongue wane. Ahem.

The very fact that 113 million people worldwide use Gmail is reason enough to suggest that this feature will be a success. But I really do hope that it doesn’t mean the end for children learning foreign languages at school. It’d be a real shame to deprive them of the same experiences I went through…

One of the best ways to do this for a brand, is to step inside the business and bring it to the outside. This happens day in and day out on Nokia Conversations, which works tirelessly to bring the myriad untold stories to the people who want to read them. This not only helps break down the barrier between a brand and its customers, but gives us as editors something to write about when typically there might not be. It also gives users a reason and an excuse to visit a brand’s website more regularly. And Google loves this.

We hear all the time about Search Engine Optimisation (Snake Oil) but with little real understanding of what it means. To us, it means simply having something worth searching for. For that, it must be both interesting and relevant. Typically, that which is either interesting or relevant is also previously untold. New. In other words. The days are long gone when you could create a site, stuff it full of “optimised” “content” and hope for the best. Today, a site needs to be living and breathing, updated daily, continually developing and evolving and backed up by a solid editorial strategy. The best way for a brand to do this? Open up. Tell the stories that don’t normally get told. Allow the outside in, and crucially, allow the inside to venture out.

See, Google (the search engine, not the company) likes it when sites are updated regularly, when they offer something new or previously untold. Those same tales will initially be read by the very interested few. Quite quickly some of them will write about them elsewhere (linking back to the original in the process) and the few will turn into a few more, when the whole process will start again and ultimately, the few more turn into many. All the whilst Google (the search engine, not the company) loves it even more as the more links pointing to the same story, the higher up the results page the story will go.

It can’t be faked, it must be real, genuine, interesting and engaging. To do that, brands need to get comfortable with the concept of opening up and telling those stories they wouldn’t previously consider telling, in an environment where people aren’t just welcome but actively encouraged to share, comment and react. It’s the very antithesis of the traditional closed corporate mindset. Sure, brands could put any old stuff up on their site and hope for people to come. But if people aren’t searching for it, they won’t find it. Telling quality stories, that reveal something more about a brand, in an open and honest way is a great way to be found.

And that’s how Google is changing corporate culture.

Search Engine Optimisation

I’ve been carrying out a lot of online research of late – we’ve a couple of new projects in the offing – that has meant a lot of analyse of online content and what the ‘competition’ delivers. I’m sorry to say there are an awful lot of poor buying and review sites out there and for the most part, people are being short changed.

The problem is that there seems to be a land-grab mentality going on. That as long as you SEO something close to death and get people to click on that search then all is good. Too many sites seem to have got their headlines working well but when it comes to backing it up with actual content, you’ll find it sadly lacking.

Promising something and not delivering.  The worst offenders tend to be the larger online publishing sites, who insist that [Product Name] News, Specs, Video, Review, Tips be added to all and sundry, whether they’ve actually got content or not. What’s the worst offence online a publisher can make?

Another one that seems to crop up a good deal is calling a quick fondle and a photo of a gadget at a press show a ‘Full Review’. This kind of thing is great from an SEO point of view as it gets you to the top of the food chain nice and quickly but it also means your site loses all sense of credibility. How many times does someone need to get short changed before the next time they see your site in a Google search and think ‘No, that site is rubbish!’ – not many I can tell you.

On the plus side, there are plenty of good sites out there with plenty of information to offer. What I’m suggesting is there should be more online etiquette – be honest about what you have to offer and maybe, just maybe, it’ll help you to raise your game a little.

Is it laziness on publishers part, or is it, as my headline suggests, the fault of SEO and the almighty push for keyword optimisation? Surely, content is and always should be king. Content is something we at Republic are passionate about. We all come from editorial backgrounds so know the power of the word. Get the content and the SEO right and you have websites that grow month on month, which is something we’re proud to admit to be doing nicely, thank you very much!

I’ve been using Google for almost ten years now and I remember thinking two things when I first came across it: one that this was one of the most useful tools I’d ever encountered. And two, enjoy it while it lasts because there’s no revenue stream. No way of making money out of it. How wrong was that!

One of the most striking things about Google is its homepage. From the outset Larry Page and Sergey Bring (Google’s Founders) were determined to keep the site clean. I read somewhere that they even used to count how many words were on the homepage, pledging never to have more than 37 words on it at any one time. Obsessive? Yes. Pedantic? Maybe. Successful? Abso-bloody-lutely!

But behind that simple homepage is a wealth of free features for users to get stuck into, from Google’s mail facilities, to its controversial (some would say intrusive) geographical tools. It’s that depth that has seen Google sitting pretty at the zenith of the recent Top 100 Global Brands survey conducted by BrandZ, valuing the company at an astonishing $100 billion. It’s no surprise then that others want a piece of the big G’s market. Only today Twitter Search announced a major revamp that’ll see it including search through links inside tweets and ranking your tweets by user reputation. Stephen Wolfram believes his computational knowledge engine, WolframAlpha, will provide a better way of executing certain types of search queries than Google. That’s not going live until later this month, but there are plenty of pretenders to Google’s throne out there: Cuil, True Knowledge and Kosmix. Even Ask Jeeves has come back in full butler garb to try his luck.

Whether these other search engines will get a look in is debatable. Google isn’t perfect by any means, but I challenge you to find another company that provides as many useful tools as Google for free. And to think, I thought this little $100 billion dollar company wouldn’t make money…