• Facts of the week
• IBP 8 beta version now available for download
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
• From the developer's kitchen
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A recent study of Nielsen/NetRatings revealed that a minority of searchers exclusively use only one of the top three search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

Which search engines do web surfers use?

According to the study, 58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, MSN Search and Yahoo, showing that even though Google's market share is dominant today, there is significant opportunity for its competitors to grow their share.

The use of multiple search engines is not limited to Google's searchers. Nearly 71 percent of those who searched at Yahoo also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, and 70 percent of those who searched at MSN also tried their luck at one or both of the other two.

"While it shouldn't surprise anyone that Google is the search engine to beat, it is critical that all of the major search players, including Google, recognize that they exclusively own only a minority of their users," said Ken Cassar, director, strategic analysis, Nielsen/NetRatings.

"This highlights an opportunity and a threat to all of the established players in the market, and underscores the importance of continued innovation in a highly competitive market that is anything but mature."

What does this mean to you and your web site?

We have mentioned it before in this newsletter: don't focus on a single search engine. To get best results, optimize your web site for all the top three search engines.

Optimize some of your web pages for Google, some for Yahoo and some for MSN Search. Both Yahoo and MSN Search have so many visitors that they can drive a considerable amount of traffic to your web site.

While everybody else concentrates on Google, it's much easier to get targeted visitors from the other two big search engines.

Google is an important search engine but others are quickly catching up. If you optimize your web pages for more than one search engine, you will get targeted traffic from many sites. In addition, you are less dependent from a single source which is important if your rankings drop on one search engine.

We invite you to participate in a public beta test of IBP 8. The new IBP version is twice as powerful as the old IBP 4 version, that's why we called it IBP 8.

We have just released the third beta version which is stable on most computers.

This is new:

• Link Popularity Improver
• Web Site Optimization Editor
• Scheduler to automate ranking checks and submissions
• Keyword Editor with special Google AdWords support
• Pay Per Click Search Engine Manager
• enhanced project management: one project for all tools
• you can work on multiple projects at once
• better report customization
• complete new user interface to support the new features
• click here to see a complete list of all improvements and what's new in the latest beta version

IBP 4 users: The new IBP 8 uses a new project concept, but it will try to import your IBP 4 projects automatically. Your IBP 4 installation will not be touched.

Note that this is a pre-release public beta test version designed to help finding problems in the new version before release. Use it only for testing the new version. Test it now!

Lycos asks Jeeves to replace Yahoo

"Web portal Lycos has selected Ask Jeeves technology for Lycos.com's search engine."

Google formally launches desktop search tool

"In response to security and privacy concerns, Google Desktop defaults to not indexing password-protected files such as spreadsheets, although users can turn the feature on. Any file that is indexed is searchable, which led to concerns that secure documents could be viewed by anyone with access to the computer where the documents are stored."

"You can get current conditions and a forecast by typing 'weather Chicago', or whatever your U.S. location is (zipcodes are also fair game)."

Kanoodle targets local content pages

"Sponsored links firm Kanoodle has added local targeting to its array of options for advertisers on content pages. The new product, called LocalTarget, will let advertisers target ads to local markets, thereby letting them craft unique creative and specialized landing pages for those audiences."

Search engine newslets

• Take a look at the Yahoo netrospective: "10 years, 100 moments."
• Google adds reviews to Google Local.
• Yahoo UK no longer offers paid directory inclusion.

Click fraud roils search advertisers

"Another audience member chimed in that his company had lost nearly $300,000 to fraudulent clicks. 'This fraud is part of doing business, because if you start suing these search engines, they'll cut off your traffic.'"

Google keeping the wolf from Firefox' door

"The Mozilla Foundation's deal with Google is playing a crucial role in helping the non-profit organisation challenge Microsoft with its Firefox browser."

Will click prices continue to rise?

"There's clearly a lot of anxiety about current prices; many marketers are already at their maximum level of discomfort, given the return on investment (ROI) or conversion metrics they'd like to hit for campaigns. [...] Either way, click prices will rise over time. The question is, how quickly?"

After 10 years, Yahoo still searching

"David Filo remembers the days in 1994 when he and fellow Stanford University doctoral candidate Jerry Yang would get together with friends to conjure up big ideas for making a business out of the Internet."

Google's secret of success? Dealing with failure.

"The technical wizardry behind Google's successful search engine may come down to a blindingly obvious insight: PCs crash."

Lower your advertising costs and make more profit

If your AdWords pay per click campaigns don't return a positive return on investment (ROI) or if you're paying too much for your PPC ads, take a look at our new Google AdWords eBook.

Find out how to lower your advertising costs while increasing your profit.

Want to be mentioned in this newsletter?

Just send us some words about your successes with IBP or ARELIS and you might get featured in this newsletter along with your web site address.

This week, we continue our series about new features in the upcoming new IBP version.

IBP 8 knows how to improve the link popularity of your web site

The new IBP version will have many more features and it will have many improvements over the current version. No other web site promotion tools offers as many features as the next IBP version.

Every week, we'll reveal another feature of the next IBP version. Among many other great new features, the next IBP version will have a Link Popularity Improver that helps you to improve the link popularity of your web site.

Of course, the new IBP version will also offer improvements in the Search Engine Submitter, the Ranking Checker and much more.

The next IBP version will be a free update to all current IBP users. It will be released in the this quarter. If you buy IBP now, you'll get the new version with many more features for free.

IBP 8 beta version 3 is now available

We invite you to participate in a public beta test of IBP 8, the new version of IBP with many improvements and new features. The beta version can be downloaded here.

• How to succeed with pay per click ads
• How to get out of Google's sandbox
• How to deal with Google's new ranking algorithm
• Do reciprocal links still work?
• How to add thumbshots to your link pages
• Is your web site dependent on Google?
• How to avoid click fraud
• View all past issues...