The reality is somewhat different, or course; certainly in our office. Here, a 30-minute spell of advanced development is compressed into 90 seconds, and the cookie-eating and conversations with the rest of the team (both in the office and remotely via Skype) are revealed.

The effects are most noticable at the fringes, in rare or misspelled search phrases, where Google’s excellent results are easily seen on Bing.  Microsoft, for their part, responded pretty clearly:

“We do not copy Google’s results”

Strangely, given everything mentioned above, I think that this is true.  (Also, it’s clever obfuscation by Microsoft, as Google definitely does copy websites – it provides a cache of its  latest crawl in the results – which has caused trouble in the past.)

Bing collects data from its users; it is those users who are collecting the data from Google (and presumably other search engines, both global and site-specific) and passing it on. 

This is pretty straightforward, really; Bing can see that a user asks a question and gets a response, so it remembers that response for other users who have the same question.  It would be interesting to discover how much Bing cares who provides the response (e.g. is it prioritising results from Google?) but in theory any company could run the experiment that Google ran to see whether their own internal search results are being stored and returned by Bing in the same way.

So if Bing is not ‘copying’, is it ‘using’?  Well yes, albeit in a second-hand way.  But is this any worse than Google ‘using’ the content of your site to sell advertising in its search lisings?  Personally, I don’t think so.

In fact, Firefox has also lost 2.5% of the market, and IE a whopping 7.5%, while Chrome has gained pretty much the full 10% that they lost between them.  Other browsers, such as Opera and Safari, have remained fairly static (although Safari, installed mainly on Macs, did gain 1% of the market, which is impressive given that it started with just 3.5%).

It will be interesting to see if these trends continue; according to my rough projections, Chrome is on course to overtake IE in the middle of 2012 and will become the most dominant browser in Europe in Early 2013.

I think that the reasons for the shift are threefold:

1) Internet Explorer was rubbish for years; bloated and non-compliant.  Although IE8 was a huge step in the right direction, it’s hard to reverse the downward momentum.

2) People who trusted the name ‘Microsoft’ and stuck with IE now have an equally well-known name to trust: ‘Google’.

(Whether either of these corporate behemoths are worthy of our trust is a subject for another post, of course…)

3) With the proliferation of netbooks and other devices with small screens, a sleek, efficient browser makes a lot of sense.  If it weren’t for a need to use Exchange/Outlook Web Access, I would use Chrome exclusively on my netbook.

(Hat tip: The Guardian)

This was brought home to me recently when I was drawing up a proposal for a client who plans to set up a new business networking group, or more accurately, a network of networking groups.  Our M.O. involves a lot of upfront business analysis, so it was clear that the optimum solution involved much more than a simple website with some card payments for bookings.

The business model involved 6-8 groups, each with 20-30 members attending a monthly meeting.  ‘Directors’ would be recruited to run each one, in return for a percentage of the profits.  Visitors would also be welcome; the incentives to pay for membership would include a reduced meeting fee, inclusion in an online business directory, and access to a private members forum.

My proposal had the web-based software running everything, from the regions containing the groups, down to an automatic reminder when people’s memberships were due to expire.  Members and visitors would be able to buy online, and members could amend their directory listing as required.  Directors could log in and view their delegate lists, and the system would calculate their commission each month.

A ‘back-of-an-Excel-sheet’ calculation showed that if they managed to fill 6 groups with 20 members, they’d make about £38K a year after venue fees and directors’ commission.  The cost of writing the software from the ground up came to just under £12,500; a third of their profits in their first full year.  Another way to look at it; if the website convinced 40 new members to sign up, it would have paid for itself.

I’m still not sure if they will go ahead with the system as specified or will ask us to chop out a lot of functionality in order to bring the price down.  The essential elements are the member directory, a payment option for visitors, and the forum – these things directly or indirectly bring in money. 

All the other things, such as membership payments, meeting and attendee management, director access, commission reporting and  membership reminders could be handled manually.  These are the things, of course, that will help the business to scale; for example, if members can sign up and pay online, you could double (or treble/quadruple) the membership without needing more staff to proccess them.

This is where we get back to the idea that websites reward ambition, because our £12,500 system would work equally well with 60 groups, each with 30 members (profit: £540K), or even 600 groups with 40 members each (profit: £7million).

I’ve seen our WebShop software turn over £10,000 for one client and £400,000 for another; the difference in the price they paid us was negligible.

That’s why my current focus is on finding ambitious clients who put the web at the centre of their plans.  They see that a really good site may cost them nearly as much, or maybe more, than an employee for a year, but that a) they only have to pay once, and b) their site can work harder than a human ever could.

So far, we’ve found several clients whose plans we could turbo charge with a hard-working website:

• The cruise holiday specialist whose site processes 60,000+ data items every day
• The sales recruiter who needed 40+ industry-specific sites to publicise different jobs
• The global travel network who needed social networking tools to facilitate communication between local experts and travellers
• The ultrasound manufacturer who needed a multi-lingual CMS to map the different products, technologies and applications they work with.
• The teacher training company whose website takes booking and manages their trainers – and who now have three times as many trainers as they did when we redeveloped their site

If you’d like to be added to the list, and have a cunning plan that involves the web, feel free to get in touch and see if we can help.

Now I see on TechCrunch that AT&T has bought Wayport, a US WiFi hotspot operator, in a $275 million deal.  I wonder if that will prove portentous for the UK, where mobile carriers are still trying to recoup their £22 BILLION investment in 3G licenses.  If the operating costs are significantly higher than WiFi, will we see the same thing in the UK?  And if so, who are the big players in the WiFi hotspot market?

The Cloud already provides a similar service for O2 and Orange (although they levy a monthly fee, unlike AT&T), while the others are either doing their own thing (T-Mobile) or ignoring WiFI altogether (Vodafone).  If WiFi continues to grow, while being much cheaper to support than 3G, will we see the incumbent carriers invest more heavily there?

Should be interesting to watch, in any case.