Back in 2001, Google’s reported index was 3 Billion URL’s, now in 2008 it was 1 trillion. And now that number is more close to 1.3 trillion. 2008 can be considered Google’s year; after both Microsoft and Apple took a great form bigger product launches to focus on 2009.

Microsoft/Yahoo buyout
At the start of February, Microsoft made a $44 billion dollar offer to buyout Yahoo. While Yahoo’s shareholders where in favour of it, the board of directors ultimately turned down the offer; which soon lead to a massive restructuring at Yahoo.

Microsoft got what they wanted though. Despite not getting control of Yahoo, they did a pretty good job of destroying them. On the day of Microsoft’s offer, Yahoo shares where around $29 dollars each. By November 2008 they had fallen to a two year low of $10 and have since risen to $15 dollars a share.

Yahoo got a new chief executive officer in January this year who struck a new deal with Microsoft. In return for Yahoo becoming will now be in charge of advertising for both companies, the Yahoo search will now be powered by Bing. This deal has saved Microsoft quite a bit of money, as I can’t see any other reason as to why they would want Yahoo.

Google Chrome
For a few years now Mozilla and Microsoft had been battling it out for browser supremacy. Google wasn’t happy with this and wanted to get in on the fight too, and did so with its Chrome browser. When it was launched in September 2008, it took the world by surprise as nobody was really expecting it. The digg article announcing it got well over 10,000 diggs.

What people liked about Chrome was the speed and memory usage. Unlike Firefox or Internet Explorer, Google chrome put each tab in a new process, meaning that if one window crashed, it wouldn’t take the others with it. Powered by webkit, it also came with a brand new Javascript engine, dubbed V8 which claimed to be the fastest engine available and spurred a new war aiming for Javascript superiority.

The EULA had an interesting clause in it that worried many people, and it went something like this:

That above statement just gave Google access to everything you type into each field, but was later claimed by Google to see a simple copy/paste error (wouldn’t have happened on an iPhone!) and subsequent updated versions removed this clause.

After just over a year of being available, Google Chrome has been able to grab 2.5% of the market, leap frogging Opera and its target set for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Android
Launching a new web browser wasn’t enough for Google in 2008, it also needed to release a new mobile Operating System. While Apple gave us a glimpse at what future Operating Systems could look like Google made this real with its Android OS.

Android is still in its early days and I am yet to even see the Operating System in action, but I do know that its currently in rapid active development with new features quickly being added to play catch-up to everyone else. One of these features is Multi Touch, which was disabled at the kernel level possibly at a request by Apple. This annoyed some people but has since been enabled in newer phones.