We posted our July numbers the first week of this month indicating a healthy growth in executed searches (see them here).

In light of Danny’s recent post, we’ve compiled our weekly U.S. executed search numbers for the last four weeks to see if there has been a plateau in Google’s searches.

Thanks Hitwise!

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Google has finally opened up the service so users are now able to sign up without jumping through hoops.

So why should you use Writely? Because your documents are available when you’re at school/work/etc, no need to worry about backing up all of your data. Also, you may not have access to your favourite office apps on a Mac vs. PC, or you don’t have the means to transfer the documents you need and use on a daily basis.

It’s not perfect but Writely is awesome, and we can’t wait for further versions and additions to come out.

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PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

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Google has been toying with the idea of implementing free municipal Wi-Fi. I’ve always believed that it began as a whim, but became a subtle threat aimed at the major carriers who are saber-rattling over tiered service, threatening to charge Google (GOOG) more for its supposed free ride on their networks…

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When we think of optimizing a website, most of us consider 3 major players - Google, Yahoo and MSN. Basically, if you can safely rank on the first page for those three engines you have 99% of the Internet search consumers covered. A recent Fortune Interactive research paper compared the differences in how some of the algorithms analyze website characteristics. The researchers chose inbound link quality simply because it could be equally compared across all three algorithms definitively.

“It turns out that it’s actually the quality of [inbound links] than the quantity that wins the day,” said Michael Marshall, VP of technology at Fortune Interactive.

At Google, inbound links rank in the following order: quality, relevance, title keyword, anchor keyword, quantity. Further down the list, site factors such as title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword, content relevance and title content weigh into the equation.

Yahoo places the most importance on inbound link quality. To a lesser degree than Google, it looks at inbound links for relevance, anchor keyword, title keyword and quantity. Further down in organic results priority are general site characteristics like title content, title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword and content relevance.

Inbound links rank at the top of MSN’s equation as well, but are ordered differently. Inbound links are looked at for quality, anchor keyword, relevance, and title keyword. Inbound link quantity is weighted, but not quite as heavily. The search engine then looks at title keyword, body keyword, anchor keyword, content relevance, and title content.

“We not only know the order of importance but also the degree of relative importance for the on-page and off-page factors in a competitive landscape,” the report stated.

Here at SimpleSEM we see Companies participate in paid search despite rising CPCs and reported increases in click fraud who are spending more of the budgets on search engine optimization (SEO) every Quarter. As CPC prices continually rise, Organic or Natural Search Optimization becomes a higher ROI vehicle for most eCommerce and Search dependent businesses.

Google may have television advertising in the cross-hairs. CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that viewers shouldn’t have to stand for tv commercials that are a “waste of your time” and says Google is planning to deliver “targeted measurable television ads.”

We just hope I can still skip them with my TiVO in a couple years

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While reporting about recent events of Google, Yahoo and MSN other search engines have undeservedly been left without attention. Meanwhile some significant changes have happen in Kanoodle. The company has acquired a famous domain name registrar Moniker.com and has separated search ads and content ads.

Kanoodle reconfiguration will take place under a parent company Seevast. So the Seevast management’s decision was to leave the search ads operate under Kanoodle brand and content-targeted ads will operate under Pulse 360 brand.

The purpose of such business division according to SeeVast CEO Lance Podell is to make a better focus on each business branch and to improve the streamline and quality of each business.

Podell considers the acquisition of Moniker to be the first move to introduction to other areas of online marketing. “You can envision a day when we either buy or build additional units,” he said.