Google Penalizes Itself for Paid Links About Chrome - Internet Explorer Gains Share.

On January 3rd, Google dropped the page rank for the Chrome site to zero (from nine out of 10).  This means the Chrome site no longer ranks highly on searches and displays fewer ads.

This was in response to Google violating its own guidelines against paid links.  An ad agency Google uses created paid links in order to promote Chrome.  According to Google, they were unaware of this.

In January, the upward trend for Chrome halted and Chrome lost .17% share on the desktop.  Internet Explorer gained 1.1% and Firefox dropped 1%.

The iPad's Competition - Still Small, but Growing.

The Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire are not close to matching the iPad's usage share, but are growing.  The Galaxy Tab is at .42% mobile/tablet usage share and the Kindle Fire stands at .34% mobile/tablet usage share.  The iPad maintains it lead in tablets at 23.97% mobile/table usage share.