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.

So the question is: is this worth doing?  Would people actually use it?

If you would, leave a comment.  If 50 people say ‘Yes’, then I’ll get started…

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)

Now I have to be honest and say that I was all set to pay my £2.  It’s a legitimate business expense, and I reckon we could manage £104 per year; I know I’d use it, too, because I currently visit The Times once a day, and often more.  However, perversely, this is what put me off.

I’ve been aware for a while that I probably spend too many work hours reading The Times and The Guardian online, and as I was filling out the order form I suddenly thought ‘hold on, if I DON’T buy it I can still read The Guardian, save £104 AND have more hours in my day’.  If both The Times and The Guardian had implemented paywalls on the same day, I may well have signed up for both; I’d definitely have paid for at least one.

Which brings us on the the game theory.  The question here is: does the news industry as a whole hope to charge online readers for access one day?  If so, then the best time for any one organisation to introduce a paywall is on the same day as their competitors, because if everyone removes their free offering simultaneously, their combined readership had no choice but to stump up some cash, or stop getting their news fix online. The other side of this idea, though, is that remaining free when your competitors start charging is likely to increase your readership at the expense of theirs.  Classic game theory: if the players work together they all win, but if one breaks the convention they stand to make huge gains at the expense of the others.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.  You have to admire a ballsy move from Murdoch and co. – however I wonder how many other people will take the opportunity to impose a bit of discipline on their online life and take The Times out of their bookmarks.

The trouble is the for some reason, when you have a Word document open, it reports a different MIME type than when it is closed, which will scupper your upload routine.  Since the type reported makes it look like an executable file (and therefore potentially dangerous) your code probably won’t allow it, and rightly so.

The solution, therefore, is for your user to close the document before they try to upload it.

I’m not sure whether this is specific to Windows/IE (I wouldn’t be surprised) but if you have trouble uploading Word docs, this could provide to solution.  (When I have time I’ll test how other document types behave…)

And you may have read this.  But did you spot this?

Williams then alerted the emergency services on her mobile phone. “I wasn’t on hands-free, but I figured I wasn’t really driving the car,” she said.

Now I know why she didn’t come forward immediately; probably getting legal advice…