As many of you have probably already heard, Yahoo! entered into a 10-year agreement with Microsoft today. Yahoo! will feature Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing (which must be related to the sound that Windows errors make). Despite the two companies joining forces, there is no way that they can surpass Google’s dominance in the search engine market.

Why? Look at the numbers. Google owns 67% of the global search engine market as it stands today. Combined, Yahoo! and Microsoft make up a mismal 11% of the market. Unless Google drastically changes the way they work for the worse (which I see no signs of), or if Microsoft and Yahoo! both know something that we don’t, Google will remain on top.

Sure, it’s a great marketing strategy to join forces like this. It gives Microsoft a heck of a lot more users for Bing, and gives Yahoo a better search engine than what they currently have. It makes sense for both companies. But in order to catch Google, they’ll need to do a little bit more.

I’m not sure why, but I always have a fascination with the design of wine labels. Every once in a while I’ll see one that just completely draws me in. Fresh off my trip to the amazing 2 Lads Winery in Traverse City, and with the Taste of Grand Rapids starting tonight, I thought this link was especially interesting.

The Coolist covers “30 Creative and Unusual Wine Label Designs” in their blog – http://www.thecoolist.com/amazing-wine-labels-30-creative-and-unique-wine-label-designs/

NetTuts + had a pretty interesting post recently on their blog. They discussed developing a website using HTML 5 and CSS 3 standards, which is on the brink of becoming the standard languages for websites. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are already on board. This has been a huge thing I’ve been looking towards, so I thought I’d share a few of my favorite features in regards to CSS 3.

One of the biggest things I’m looking forward to is the @font-face property. Basically, I can kiss Arial and all those boring fonts goodbye, and use something that looks much nicer and appealing to each individual website. It’ll add more uniqueness, and give me the ability to have fully integrated designs.

Secondly, border image. This will allow me to showcase photos or other images with a secondary border. Squiggly lines, rainbows, you name it. You could kinda do it before, but now it’s better. And it’s all in the code.

Lastly, and maybe this is one of the biggest features out there – transparency. Web designers have used transparent GIFs or (more recently) PNGs for years, and now this will allow us to add transparency without having to look to image editing programs to achieve the effect. It’ll be a huge time-saver, and I’m placing a bet that it’ll be the most used features of CSS 3 in 2010.

So, why aren’t I and other web designers out there using these features right now? After all, the technology certainly is there. One reason really — 46% of Internet users currently aren’t able to access the features. Why? Internet Explorer. There’s ways around that, but they’re much more difficult to implement.

Despite that single drawback, I’m quite excited to see what sites start to pop up with these features enabled. Maybe it’ll even go so far as to push people away from IE once and for all! mbqzjxdf3r