This is an excerpt from “Three Internet Trends To Watch in 2006″. Visit The Business Ledger to read the whole article.

If your site was up and running in the late 1990s, you remember The Browser Wars. They’re back. Internet Explorer (IE), the hands-down victor back then, is today’s fat Roman emperor just starting to notice that the world is changing around him. Although Microsoft is releasing the next generation IE7 sometime this year, the technology elite has been going gaga over another entry which you need to know, Firefox.

Firefox, the modern descendent of Netscape Navigator, has become an excellent alternative to IE by focusing on speed and usability. My experience with it is that it renders identical pages noticeably faster and the ability to keep multiple pages open in the same window makes browsing easier. While Microsoft has been dropping support for non-Microsoft platforms, you can run Firefox on pretty much anything—PC, Mac or Linux. Firefox currently holds about 10 percent of the market—enough to notice.

Losing 10 percent of the market doesn’t qualify IE for T-Rex style extinction. It does emphasize the importance of building your site around Web standards. A site built around common markup commands can be viewed however your visitors want to view it—on their PC or on their Mac or on their Blackberry—and that’s good customer service. If you’ve built your site specifically for IE, you’re possibly alienating 10 percent of your visitors.

Here are some interesting details on the new Google data center and algorithms scheduled to go live in mid Feb or early March.

Short version: this is likely to be a bigger dance than usual. But you can also test everything ahead of time. Simply hit one of these IPs: 66.249.93.104 or 64.233.179.104. Note: no one has said anything about these containing the exact results that will go live, so you may have more “algorithm chasing” to do.

Other posts on the subject:

• Here’s Digg’s take on the same story.
• Here’s the alleged source, Matt Cutts and his response from earlier this year. This is pretty a pretty interesting read if you have the time.
• From SearchEngineWatch.com in late December.
• SearchEngineGenie.com has a more organized review, but the content looks similar to what we see on other posts.

Apprently the other deal worth noting is that there was a big index shuffle on Dec 27th. (Yeah — a month ago. You didn’t hear it here first. ) This was apparently a significant data update with a lot of moving around. Interesting.

Jakob Nielsen just published an interesting article, “Search Engines as Leeches on the Web.” In it, he makes several great points. On line he writes is very important for all search engine dependent companies to keep in mind:

In addition to paid search listings, websites also often receive search traffic from free, so-called organic listings. These visitors are obviously no problem, except that you can’t count on them as a sustainable strategy, since organic listings can change without notice.

Pretty much every customer and prospect I talk to wants SEO–they want to be top 10. The problem is exactly what Jokob points out: it’s impossible to guarantee and should you get it it’s impossible to guarantee you’ll keep it.

Make no mistake — I want a top 10 result, too. It would be (potentially) incredibly valuable. But it is also a very risky strategy.

Nielsen’s point in the article, however, is that too much reliance on any search engine, either through organic or paid inclusion, is a risky strategy that’s prone to problems. His solution? Liberate your site from search engines. He says:

Thus, you must foster customer loyalty so that users go straight to your site instead of clicking through from search ads.

And then gives a bunch of good ideas on how. Check it out!

I’m speaking at ASID IL’s Design Summit 2006 on Thursday, Feb 16, 2006, at the Merchandise Mart. My presentation will be a how to guide for independent professionals who want to market themselves on the web. I post the presentation here, too, so check it out when you get a chance.

Here’s a great article on Nature.com: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye. The article compares individual responses made in 50ms to those made by judges during a longer exposure. One recommendations from the article? Heavy text, fewer images. Nice.

Incidentally, I found this article by watching the popular links over at del.icio.us in my Thunderbird’s RSS reader. What a great way to keep up with what’s up on the web.