Google’s earnings are in after the second quarter report was issued yesterday. While their net income is up from the same period in 2007 by approximately $325 Million (925.1 Million in Q2 of 2007, 1.25 Billion in Q2 of 2008), this is not as high as was expected – Wall Street was expecting to see $4.74 per share – actual earnings were $4.63 per share.

With the economy down on its luck Google still managed to make more than $300 Million – roughly a 35% increase over the same period last year.

Microsofts profits for Q2 are also up by roughly 46 cents a share. They saw earnings in Q2 of 2007 at $3 Billion, and an increase of 42% to $4.3 billion for 2008. These are impressive earnings, however, Microsoft’s online business did not help much in terms of this profit. Compared to 2007, Q2 of 2008 actually saw a loss of $488 Million!

Had Microsoft’s Internet division actually turned a profit, they would have achieved Wall Streets estimate of 47 cents per share, rather than their actual 46 cents.

Yahoo has not yet released their Q2 Earnings for this year. Their shareholder conference call to discuss earnings is scheduled for July 22 at 5:00pm ET.

comScore released the latest figures for search engine rankings and their respective market share Friday, and Google has actually seen a drop! For all you Yahoo and Microsoft fans out there, don’t get too excited, it’s quite small to say the least.

For June 2008 Google has shown a 61.5% hold on market share, down 0.3% from May of 2008. Yahoo also showed a 0.3% change, only in the positive direction moving from 20.6% up to 20.9%. Microsoft had the biggest leap of a whopping 0.7% up from 8.5% to 9.2%.

When comparing numbers from June 2007 with June 2008, Google has seen a sizable gain stealing users from MSN and Yahoo. In the past 12 months Google has seen an increase of 6.6% with Yahoo and Microsoft both losing, 2.9%, and 3.1% respectively.

ICANN has recently approved a proposal to expand the availability of top level domains to virtually unlimited levels – at least if your pockets are deep enough.

On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that businesses, or even individuals with money to burn will be able to apply for top level domain names using just about anything they want as the suffix.

What this means is, rather than the usual .com, or .ca extensions, companies could purchase the rights to brand name extensions such as “.google”, or “.ebay”, or if I was given a hefty raise and felt the need, I could spend a half million dollars and register “www.scott.vanachte”, (although I am not sure what I would do with such a pricey piece of online real estate).

Don’t get too excited however, according to ICANN it could be upwards of two years before the new domains are released, and with these vanity domains going for as much as a half million dollars, we are likely to only see them used by the big corporations until prices come down.

I am not sure where I have been for the past two years, but today is the first time I have heard about Windows Live Expo – today is also the day I heard about its scheduled demise.

Apparently this classified ad platform was considered to be a major threat for Craigslist, and this month, on July 31, Microsoft will pull the plug and the classified service launched back in February of 2006.

Considering I work online and spend at least 8 hours a day sitting in front of my computer, for me to have never heard of Windows Live Expo, is probably a good indicator of why it was ultimately a failure – quite simply, Microsoft just didn’t do a very good job getting the word out.

In today’s race to the top of the Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), there are a number of factors that can help you achieve those coveted spots. While certain techniques may weigh better than others based on your industry and level of competition, there is no questioning the power of links.

There are several methods, some common and some yet to be discovered, you can try out to help boost your link density and search rankings. While it would be near impossible to go into great detail on all methods (that would require a book) below I have outlined some of the more common techniques a web site owner can use to increase their site’s popularity. Read more…

Happy Canada & U.S. Independence Day to our Friends and Clients both North and South of the border.

In order to best serve our current and future clients StepForth will remain open through the two statutory holidays next week.

On Canada Day (Tuesday, July 1st), our office will be open during regular business hours, 9:00-5:00 PST with a limited staff, and being the Canadians that we are, since we do not celebrate Independence Day up here, we will operate during normal business hours, with our regular staff complement for the Fourth of July.

We wish everyone a fun and safe time with their celebrations and respective days off.

The latest numbers are in, and Google continues to dominate search – we already knew that, but by how much?

The latest figures from HitWise released this morning show Google up a little over 3% compared to May of 2007. Google was accountable for approximately 68.29% of searches performed in the US in May of 2008. Yahoo and MSN fell to 19.95% and 5.89% respectively.

Yahoo’s figures for May 2008 are down marginally by about 1% and MSN down nearly 2% compared to the same period a year ago. HitWise figures are based on a sampling of 10 million U.S. Internet Users.

Very recently my old laptop started giving me a world of problems ranging from minor software to rather serious hardware issues. For a three year old laptop it just didn’t make sense to fix it, so I decided to take the leap and buy a replacement.

I originally had hoped on finding something with Windows XP, and the only new machine I could find with XP was through Dell – my now dead laptop was a Dell, so I decided to pass and jumped over to a Toshiba running Vista.

Surprisingly thus far I like Vista, and it has only given me a few correctable & minor inconveniences. Of course, only after purchasing the new machine did I read that Microsoft has again opened the doors to selling Windows XP, and it will be made available on “Ultra Low Cost” Notebooks and PC’s. Read more…

Yahoo signed a multi-year deal with Walmart to start displaying advertising on its company website a press release stated Wednesday. The deal will enable Walmart.com to utilize Yahoo’s ad platform for presenting new offers to their customers.

“This announcement builds on our strategy to be the partner of choice for leading brands looking to engage more customers with compelling offers online,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Publisher Network. “By combining Walmart.com’s leading position as a multi-channel retailer with our industry-leading display advertising sales and ad management technology and sales force, we will be able to provide advertisers with the easiest, most effective way to deliver targeted, relevant marketing messages to Walmart.com shoppers.”

Marketers are expected to be able to start taking advantage of this partnership sometime near the end of this month.

As Google Earth advances, they have offered 3D views of several major cities and attractions world wide, but with the help of Disney providing intricate models, a 3D walk through has been created providing users with incredible detail in their virtual visit.

Information is made available on all of the parks 1500 attractions and contains videos and photos as well as booking details. Restaurant menus are also available for the many dining establishments at the theme park.

While currently the virtual tour only includes the outside of the parks buildings, a future update will allow visitors to see the inside of hotel rooms and enter the various attractions.

If you are interested in taking a break and viewing the 3D tour, ensure you have the latest version of Google earth and the “3D Buildings” layer is enabled, and perform a search for “Disney World”. Clicking on any one of the colored Mickey Mouse logos, will get you started.