Google is now officially the number one search engine in India. Indian users performed more than one billion searches with Google in the month of June, giving the company a whopping 81% market share. By comparison, Yahoo, which is the second most used search service in the country, clocks in at only a 9.4% share with 117 million searches. Other monitored search engines include the Ask Network, MSN Search, and the India-based Rediff.com.

Google currently holds 64.1% market share worldwide. What’s interesting is that Google’s overall market share has gone down 3.8% since June. Many analysts believe this is due to the new way research firm comScore tracks web usage in developing countries such as Brazil, China, and Russia. Because of the changes in data collection, the China-based Baidu is now the third biggest search engine in the world behind Google and Yahoo, with a 12.9% share.

Matt Bacak has written a great blog post designed to help you get your members-only website off the ground. According to Barack, the key to any successful membership site is getting your customers actively involved in the creation of the site’s content. He also explains how important a “pre-release” should be, and why you should have one. This article is a great read for anyone who is running, or is thinking of starting up, a paid membership web business of their own.

Blogging resource Copyblogger has a few great tips on improving the content of your blog. In “Does Your Website Smell,” writer James Chartand states that the key to any good blog post is to provide material that could conceivably appeal to all five senses. Appealing to the senses not only helps to draw the reader in to the story or post, but also gets him or her more involved with your blog. Chartand also suggests using positive words such as “will” and “shall” to subtly reinforce the happy, optimistic message that you are trying to send to your readers.

If you’re in the mood for a weekend project, then maybe you should think about giving Ruby a try. For those unaware, Ruby is a web-based programming language that is the basis for sites such as MySpace. With Try Ruby, you can do just that — try Ruby directly from your browser window. The Try Ruby website also features two free, fifteen-minute tutorials designed to get you up and on your way. While it isn’t suited for heavy coding, Try Ruby is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to see what makes their favorite social network tick.

As many longtime viewers know, we have covered more than a few Firefox extensions in our day. While these extensions are great for many of you, those who use Opera are usually left in the cold. Well Opera fans, today is your lucky day. We here at the Free Line have compiled ten can’t-miss widgets for your Opera web browser.

Page Rank: Allows you to see where sites rank on Google.

Time and Date: Adds a highly customizable calendar and a clock to Opera.

CSS Help: This widget delivers what it promises — handy solutions to your CSS problems.

Twitter: Run Twitter directly from your browser.

Update Checker: Checks to see if your favorite sites have been updated recently.

Digg: Taps you into Digg’s RSS feed. The widget updates the feed every ten minutes

Facebook Notifier: See all the goings on in Facebook as they happen.

Y! Backlink Counter: Lets you see just how many people link to a certain site. This widget is built upon Yahoo SiteExplorer.

Simple MySpace Editor: Edit your MySpace page without actually having to go to MySpace.

Write!: Adds a Wordpad-style word processing application to your browser.