I pretty much remember when talks about Google launching its own store for web apps started circulating before.  But Google remained mum about it until now.  The Google Apps Marketplace has been launched and is now open for business.So what’s this all about really?  According to the Official Google Blog, the Google Apps Marketplace is a new online store for…

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Google Opens Apps Marketplace for Business

While we normally don’t comment on market share fluctuations that occur in places other than America, some recent changes in the UK may bear mentioning.  According to the AT Internet Institute, Google’s share of the search market slipped by 1.6 percent between January and February.

That’s a significant amount.  Indeed, as the slightly upsized figure below shows (sorry for any blurriness), if Ask and AOL had suffered similar losses, they’d have been wiped out, hitting zero.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  Instead, both Yahoo and Bing benefited from Google’s dip.  Yahoo gained a not-bad 0.6 percent, and Bing increased its share by an even-better 0.7 percent.

Google’s still in an extremely dominant position, but given that Microsoft’s about to spend $2 billion on Bing commercials in the UK, these changes are noteworthy.  Microsoft might not be throwing its money away, as some people have speculated; there’s now the possibility that it could extend or accelerate this growth trend.

We’ll be sure to write again about the UK search market next month if anything out of the ordinary happens.  In the meantime, it should be interesting to see how those Bing commercials are received.

Update: After some delay, Microsoft is reportedly now rolling out the new MSN home page design over the next couple weeks.

Original Article: MSN.com gets about 85 million unique monthly visitors in the US alone, according to Compete. That’s significantly more than AOL.com. So now that Microsoft has unveiled a redesign to it, it stands to reason that a lot of people are going to be affected by it. Microsoft calls the new design MSN’s most significant home page redesign in over a decade.

"Now is the time to clean up the mess on the Web — people need less clutter and less hassle to find what matters most to them," said Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president, Microsoft. "Microsoft is uniquely invested in search, media experiences and technical innovation. Combining these assets to deliver our new MSN home page is a tremendous win for customers and advertisers."

What do you think of the new design? Share your opinions here.

The new design pays significant focus to local, Bing, social networks, and news. Coinciding with the announcement of the redesign was the unveiling of MSN Local Edition. This is a section of MSN that gives you local news, weather, sports, movies and events, restaurants, gas, traffic, a directory, lottery numbers, etc.

The Bing integration with the new MSN is deeper. It’s now used as the core search technology throughout the home page in areas like shopping, travel, and local. It is also used as a way to highlight hot topics, trends, and people.

There is a clean integration of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Microsoft’s own Windows Live "What’s New," which aggregates up to 50 web activities from various places like Yelp, Flickr, Pandora, etc.

"Customers told us they want the latest information from their favorite sources, their friends and the breadth of the Web — and the new MSN home page delivers via a fresh new look and new features," Jorgensen said. "Today is an important transformation for MSN, and it’s just the beginning."

There is also an emphasis on de-cluttering the home page. Microsoft says there are 50% fewer links than on the previous version. Here’s what the whole thing looks like:

The design is not live on a wide scale yet. It will be rolling out gradually over the coming weeks. It is, however available as a preview here.

On a related note, Microsoft is finally launching MSN Music this week. The launch has been postponed since July.

Related Articles:

> MySpace, MSN Now Said To Be In Talks

> Microsoft Partners With Advance Internet On Local Ad Deal

> Bing Gets More Mobile Features in The US

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social’ – so, how are we now? Last week was a pretty busy one out in the trenches, especially considering that SMX was on (generally slows the blogging world). I do suggest looking into today’s top story as it’s one that seems to have slipped by the radar… interesting stuff.…

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Weekly Search & Social News: 03/09/2010

A topic that has been discussed extensively by some people in the SEO community is the notion that having a W3C compliant web site is either critical to SEO or it’s not.  Most recently, Edward Lewis and I debated back and forth on Twitter, with Edward holding firm to his long-standing position that compliance is necessary…

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W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and Reality

Recently the company I worked for made a big decision to rebrand and with it came the dreaded domain name change. We are also having a new website being built so another SEO favourite URL’s. This article will share my leanings from my sleepless nights and epic amount of research into making sure it didn’t go…

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Migrating to a New Domain and URL Structure – My Learnings

One of the most advanced and usable features inside SEJ tools is its SERP tracker. The benefits of the tool include: (!) The tool is easy to use and configure;(!) The tool is organically integrated with all other tools inside which makes adding terms to tracker simple and fun;(!) The tool generates pretty and well-organized reports; etc. Step…

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Advanced Search Engine Rankings Tracker – SEJ Tools

How does searching on your TV using Google sounds like to you? Isn’t it enough that Google has conquered the web and the mobile devices and now it wants to try its luck on TV sets as well? According to a WSJ report, Google has been testing out a new  TV search service in cooperation with the second satellite provider…

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Google Search on Android Set-Top Boxes?

Studying the front page of Digg or Reddit can give you some pretty decent insight into what kinds of content is worthy of the communities votes.  However, it’s nothing compared to what you can learn by reading and being an active member of the “social” part of social media: the comments.  If you’re looking for insights…

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A Networking Guide to Social Media Commenting

Article submission sites do not have as much authority and link value as they used to, but they can still help build your link portfolio and give a temporary boost in rankings. Certain sites like EzineArticles and PRweb tend to rank better organically which can help increase traffic, while other article sites are better for gaining…

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75 PR/Article Submission Sites to Generate Inbound Links

It is not really often that I am actually impressed by the tool (this is because I come across 2-3 new ones weekly so it is not really easy to surprise me already). But today’s one is truly awesome. AlertRank is a free web-based tool that helps to make sense of your Google alerts. Most of us use Google Alerts…

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AlertRank: Google Alerts on Steroids

The Guardian UK is reporting that Microsoft Bing is preparing to launch a massive TV ad campaign aimed at challenging Google’s dominance in the UK search market. According to the report, the series of  Bing promotional TV ads is set to begin airing this week and will be promoting Bing as a “decision engine.”

Microsoft has contracted the services of ad…

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Microsoft to Run a Massive Bing TV Campaign in the UK

It’s that time of the year again folks, with the 82nd Academy Awards happens tonight in LA. According to reports, this year’s Oscar academy awards will be much more exciting than last year, with a record 10 nominations for Best Picture and a hosting lineup of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

But if you live in New York, you may…

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Watch the 2010 Oscars : Academy Awards Online

As you know, Microsoft and Yahoo were recently granted regulatory approval on their search and advertising deal, and we’ve discussed what this might mean for search engine optimization. WebProNews stopped by the Yahoo Headquarters in Sunnyvale before heading to SMX West in Santa Clara this week, and talked with Shashi Seth, Sr. VP of Yahoo Search Products about the deal, how it will be integrated, and timing, among other things.

Seth says that the integration of Bing results into Yahoo Search will take somewhere in the range of 18 to 24 months for it to happen worldwide, and they’ll start with the U.S. first. He says the core thing users will find is a compelling set of experiences that go on top of just the algorithmic and paid results that come from Microsoft. In other words, Yahoo users will still find the Yahoo experience.

Shashi says he feels like Yahoo can surface a lot of things better on its own, simply because of the content its properties provides (local, sports, finance, etc.). That stuff won’t be going away, and it will be weaved into the experience.

One thing that Shashi stressed was that the integration of Bing frees up a lot of Yahoo’s own resources, so they can improve on other aspects of the user experience. Comments from Yahoo’s Director of Search Marketing David Roth at the State of the Search Union keynote suggested that some amount of those resources will be moved over to work with Microsoft as well, with others staying at Yahoo:

WebProNews actually spoke with Roth himself after the event as well. He thinks he has something of a unique viewpoint about the integration, as he comes from search marketing himself. He will also likely be one of the first to be able to use the integration, given his position within the company. You can hear more of what he has to say in this interview:

Reactions from marketers are still mixed about how this integration is going to play out. This point was made clear in the keynote. Misty Locke of iProspect said a lot of her clients are excited about it, while former Googler Vanessa Fox is reserving judgment, hoping Yahoo doesn’t lose "all the Yahooness." From the way Yahoo has described the coming integration, particularly Shahi Seth, it doesn’t sound like it will be losing much Yahooness at all, but the extent of integration of things like Yahoo’s BOSS and SearchMonkey features is still largely unknown.

Google seems to be prepping up its online collaboration and cloud computing tools – Google Docs for the big league. Just recently, Google Docs supported uploading fo files from your computer and sharing that files with people you collaborate with via Google Docs. Now, something good is about to happen with Google’s cloud computing service – that is interoperability with…

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Google Buys Online Collaboration Operator DocVerse