Google’s market share has risen again. A recent report from the research firm Comscore revealed that Google’s share of the US search market in August was at 63%, up from 61.95% in July.

This means that it currently has over two thirds of US search traffic or nearly 7 billion of the 11 billion web searches taking place in the US.

Google leaves Yahoo and MSN trailing with 2 billion and 977 million searches respectively. The increase in Google’s market share has meant that both Yahoo and MSN have experienced decreases in their share. Yahoo’s market share decreased from 20.5% in July to 19.6% in August. Microsoft held its third position with a share of 8.3%, a decrease from 8.9% in July.

The forth position is held by Ask which really trails the pack at 4.8% of market share, but at least showing a slight increase from 4.5% in July. AOL is not far behind Ask in fifth place with 4.3% of the market share.

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Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced this weekend the formation of a new organisation dedicated to studying how the web works and expanding access to the billions of people who can’t get online today. The World Wide Web Foundation kicked off with $5 million in support from media funders the Knight Foundation.

The question is whether another organisation can really make a difference? With so many web organisations in existing there are a number of observers suffering from organisation fatigue. However, with Berners Lee standing in the industry it will be interesting to see what he can do. The Word Wide Web Foundation has an ambitious remit and if it is successful should provide a lot of benefit.

The Foundation launched with a three part plan, including:

• Web Science and Research
• Web Technology and Practice
• Web for Society

What do these actually mean? Web science and research almost involves developing a new science to explore the complex system of the web that combine the cross science disciplines incluiding social science and computer science as well as creating a curriculum for other Web Scientists to be trained around the world.

Web technology and practice involves the advancement of web standards and Web for Society has very noble aim “To learn from people in socially or economically deprived communities how the Web can better serve them.”

Concerns have been expressed in a number of camps, especially regarding the addition of more layers of problems on top of initiatives already being undertaken by a number of other organisations.

The cause has some ambitious aims for thorny issues, with the people involved and strong backing it will be interested to see the progress that is made.

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Google has surprised everyone by launching a new browser called “Chrome.” Not least Mozilla, as it was previously one of the primary funding partners of the Firefox browser. With Chrome Google has directly entered into competition with Microsoft’s IE . The browsers main focus is handling applications such as Google web based office products, video clips and online gaming.

With its own browser Google will have far more control over the compatibility of its products with the browser in which they will be used. Too high a risk was probably identified in leaving the browser market share to Microsoft, as it would be too simple for them to not fully support Google’s software in favour of their own. At the moment statistics reveal that IE has the majority market share with 58% and then FireFox with 19%. It looks like Google has set its sights on winning a large share of the browser market to go with the monopolising of the search market with its massive 64.1% share.

Google used clever marketing to reveal its launch of Chrome by publishing a comic book in one of the websites which keeps tracks of the company. You can view comic here http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html, to get an insight into how Google evolved to develop this browser. Google has always abided by its policy “Launch Early and Iterate” with the launch of the beta version of Chrome for Windows already available for download.

To try out Chrome, you can download from http://www.google.com/chrome

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