comScore Releases March 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, Va., April 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measurement the digital world, today released its
monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. hunt marketplace. March 2008
saw Americans behavior 10.8 billion core searches, representing a 9-percent
increase versus February.

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March 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

In March, Google Sites extended its share of core hunts to 59.8
percent, up from 59.2 percentage the former month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second
with 21.3 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.4 percent), AOL LLC (4.8
percent), and Ask Network (4.7 percent).

comScore Core Search Report*
March 2008 vs. February 2008
Entire U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0 Share of Searches (%)
Point Change
Mar-08 vs.
Core Search Entity Feb-08 Mar-08 Feb-08 Sum Core Search 100.0% 100.0% 0.0
Google Sites 59.2% 59.8% 0.6
Yahoo! Sites 21.6% 21.3% -0.3
Microsoft Sites 9.6% 9.4% -0.2
AOL LLC 4.9% 4.8% -0.1
Ask Network 4.6% 4.7% 0.1 * Based on the five major hunt engines including spouse hunts and
cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video land sites that are not on the core sphere of the five
hunt engines are not included in the core hunt numbers.

Americans conducted 10.8 billion hunts at the core hunt engines,
representing a 9-percent addition versus February. Each of the five core search
engines experienced hunt question additions during the month. Google Sites saw more
than 6.4 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.3 billion, and
Microsoft Sites with 1 billion.

comScore Core Search Report*
March 2008 vs. February 2008
Entire U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0 Search Queries (MM)
Point Change
Mar-08 vs.
Core Search Entity Feb-08 Mar-08 Feb-08 Sum Core Search 9,882 10,771 9%
Google Sites 5,855 6,438 10%
Yahoo! Sites 2,136 2,296 7%
Microsoft Sites 953 1,012 6%
AOL LLC 488 521 7%
Ask Network 450 503 12% * Based on the five major hunt engines including spouse hunts and
cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video land sites that are not on the core sphere of the five
hunt engines are not included in the core hunt numbers.

March U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the March 2008 analysis of the Top 50 places where hunt activity
is observed, Google Sites led with 8.3 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked
second with 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (more than 1
billion), and AOL LLC (891 million).

comScore Expanded Search Question Report
March 2008 vs. February 2008
Entire U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0 Search Queries (MM)
Point Change
Mar-08 vs.
Expanded Search Entity Feb-08 Mar-08 Feb-08 Sum Expanded Search 13,806 15,088 9%
Google Sites 7,390 8,267 12%
Google 5,917 6,531 10%
YouTube/All Other 1,473 1,736 18%
Yahoo! Sites 2,262 2,391 6%
Yahoo! 2,234 2,359 6%
All Other 28 32 14%
Microsoft Sites 984 1,054 7%
MSN-Windows Live 952 1,019 7%
Microsoft/All Other 32 35 9%
AOL LLC 864 891 3%
AOL 493 527 7%
MapQuest/All Other 371 364 -2%
Ask Network 452 506 12%
Ask.com 283 316 12%
MyWebSearch.com/ All Other 169 190 12%
eBay 480 474 -1%
Fox Interactive Media 337 377 12%
MySpace 330 368 12%
All Other 7 9 29%
Craigslist.org 239 277 16%
Amazon Sites 139 149 7%
Facebook.com 103 107 4%

To bespeak more than information on comScore qSearch 2.0, delight visit

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a planetary leader in measurement the digital
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SOURCE comScore, Inc.

Ask.com places privacy policy link in home page - NetworkWorld.com

Ask.com have decided to set a nexus to its privateness policy on its place page, something that search-engine challenger Google have declined
to make and that have earned it unfavorable judgment from privateness advocates.

As of Wednesday, Ask.com have a "privacy" nexus on its , as well as on the landing pages of most of its secondary land sites -- like its forte perpendicular engines for things like news
and mental images -- thus covering almost all of its hunt traffic, the company said in a statement. Ask.com have also added a "conspicuous
link" to its privateness policy on its "About" page. Don't Miss!

Ask.com is also in the procedure of creating two hunt consequences pages that volition be served up whenever people come in the queries
"Ask privacy" or simply "Privacy" in the hunt engine. These pages will incorporate information and golf course related to online privacy
in general and to Ask.com policies in particular. Related Content

In improver to distributing its statement as a fourth estate release and as an functionary blog posting, Ask.com is sending it to privacy
organisations and advocators and to the Golden State lawyer general's office.

"No 1 required that we take any of these steps. We took a expression at our webpages, and realized we could do some cardinal improvements
when it came to privateness golf course on our service. It's simply the right thing to make for the information and consciousness of our users,"
the statement reads.

Putting a privateness policy nexus on their site's place page have been an industry criterion pattern for a long clip for most Web
publishers, said Brock Meeks, a spokesman for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

Thus, Ask.com's determination is a good one, but not an earth-shaking move that is out of the ordinary, Meeks said. "Ask.com is
falling in line with industry standards," he said.

Making a site's privateness policy easy to entree by putting a nexus to it on the place page assists users do more than informed decisions
regarding whether they desire to frequent a land land site or not. "It's separate of letting the user take control of their online experience,"
Meeks said.

Earlier this month, a grouping of privateness organisations sent a missive to Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, asking that Google include
a nexus to its privateness policy on its place page.

In the letter, the organisations argued that posting the nexus on the place page is not only a good pattern but also mandated
by Golden State law, which necessitates the operator of a commercial Web land land site to "conspicuously post its privateness policy on its Web
site." 1

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Search engines warned over data - BBC News

Search engines should cancel personal information held about their users within six months, a European Committee advisory organic structure on information protection have said.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Committee and could take to a clang with hunt giants like Google, Yokel and MSN.

Google and Yokel anonymise user information after 18 months, while MSN makes the same after 13 months.

The organic structure said hunt companies were not clear adequate on information protection.

Google said its privateness policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

No-one from Yokel or MSN was immediately available for comment.

Peter Fleischer, Google's planetary privateness counsel, said in a statement: "Google takes privateness incredibly seriously; protecting our users' privateness is at the bosom of all our products.

Search engine suppliers must cancel or irreversibly anonymise personal information once they no longer function the specified and legitimate intent they were collected for

Article 29 Working Party report

"It is the ground we were the first company to perpetrate to anonymising our hunt logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our penchant cooky lifetime."

Many hunt engines currently accumulate and shop information from each hunt query, holding information about the hunt question itself, the alone personal computer computer address (known as an information science number), and inside information about how a user do their searches, such as as the web browser that is being used.

Users who make an business relationship with a hunt engine manus over more than information to the firms, including hunt history. Some hunt engines also enrich personal information held on their users with information from 3rd parties.

The study from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said hunt engine suppliers had "insufficiently explained" why they were storing and processing personal information to their users.

It said "search engine suppliers must cancel or irreversibly anonymise personal information once they no longer function the specified and legitimate intent they were collected for".

The study said the personal information of users should not be stored or processed "beyond providing hunt results" if the user had not created an business relationship or registered with the hunt engine.

The consultative organic structure also said it preferred hunt engines did not accumulate and usage personal information to function personalised ads unless the user had consented and signed up to the service.

Yokel is one of the world's prima hunt engines

The organic structure was put up to supply expert sentiment to the European Committee and to do recommendations in the countries of personal information and privacy. The Committee usually follows the recommendations the organic structure makes.

The study also said hunt engines did not necessitate to garner further personal data, beyond the information science computer address of a machine being used, in order to present basic hunt consequences and advertisements.

It added: "Because many hunt engine suppliers advert many different intents for the processing, it is not clear to what extent information are reprocessed for another intent that is incompatible with the intent for which they were originally collected."

It said hunt engines should not utilize personally identifiable information to better their services or for accounting purposes.

Personal information stored for security intents should not also be used to better services, the organic structure recommended.

The study issued a set of duties to seek engines firms, including:

Search engines should acquire informed consent from users if they correlative personal information across different services, such as as desktop search

Search engine suppliers must cancel or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal information once they are no longer necessary for the intent for which they were collected

Personal information should not be held by hunt engines for longer than six months

In lawsuit hunt engine suppliers reserve personal information longer than six months, they must show comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service

It is not necessary to accumulate further personal information from individual users in order to be able to execute the service of delivering hunt consequences and advertisements

If hunt engine suppliers utilize cookies, their lifespan should be no longer than demonstrably necessary

Search engine suppliers must give users clear and intelligible information about their personal identity and location and about the information they mean to accumulate shop or transmit, as well as the intent for which they are collected

The study also warned that if hunt engines enriched personal information about users from 3rd political parties they could be breakage the law unless clients had given expressed consent.

It said users had the right to access, inspect and right all the personal information about themselves held by hunt engines, including their profiles and hunt history.

Making your website Google friendly

When you are planning to make an online presence for your brick and howitzer business, it is extremely of import that your land site layout and content is optimised for hunt engines. Your website could athletics a very professional designing but unless it ranks well in hunt engines, it may be tough for possible clients to detect your concern on the internet.

If you are wondering why the statute title states 'Google friendly' where there be so many other hunt engines on the cyberspace (including popular 1s like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN), that's because Google have the range like no other. Most website proprietors would hold that Google alone drives 90-95% of traffic to their websites.

There are basically two ways to drive visitants from Google to your website—one, you purchase advertisements that show up on Google consequences pages for certain keywords or two, work difficult to acquire high rankings in hunt consequences (sometimes called organic traffic). While the former method costs money, organic traffic is free but necessitates attempt and apprehension of how hunt engines work.

We'll concentrate on techniques and guidelines that volition aid better the rank of our web pages in organic hunt results. And though we advert only Google, they make use to all other hunt engines as well.

Clean and descriptive titles: When people scan (nobody reads word by word) the different consequences on a hunt page, that first thing that volition catch their attending is the statute title of your web page. Similarly, if Ten is looking for 'yellow bananas' on Google, web pages that incorporate this term in the statute title are likely to rank higher. A good statute title could look something like 'Yellow Bananas/Green Grocery Shop Store, Mumbai.'

Construct keyword rich URLs: Like titles, hunt engines always favour web pages that incorporate relevant keywords in the URLs of the web page. Continuing with our former 'yellow bananas' example, a uniform resource locator like abc.com/products/fresh-yellow-bananas.htm Oregon abc.cm/products/yellow-bananas.htm will always execute better than something like abc.com/products?id=232 Oregon abc.com/products/232.html

Use Meta tags: Meta tags (keywords and descriptions) were of import in the good old AltaVista years but not anymore since they were so easy to mistreat and hunt engines devised better algorithmic rules to rank web pages. However, good verbal descriptions in meta tags can really assist convey hunt traffic because they look as short snips in hunt pages beneath your page title. If a meta tag is missing, Google could expose some other textual matter page from the web page