According to Ofcom, 53% of Britain's homes are now online, with a third of those being broadband.

Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor of the web" received his knighthood from the Queen last month for "services to the global development of the internet".

T-Mobile has launched "News Express", described as a mobile newspaper.

Unhappily, Apple is suing RealNetworks over software that allows tracks sold on its online music shop to be compatible with the iPod.

Happily, iPod users can now download pPod, an interactive audio guide to London's nicest loos. The background soundtrack? Handel's water music.

Google recently acquired Picasa, Inc., a digital photo management company.

Ebookers launched a free click-to-talk facility on its website using Voice over IP.

Pfizer has taken legal action against several online pharmacies claiming to sell Viagra.

Lastminute.com has cut over 350 jobs in an effort to reduce costs.

O2 has launched a mobile video channel, funded by advertising.

eBay doubled its second quarter profits, thanks primarily to an increase in international sales.

Internet advertising in the UK grew by more than 80% in 2003 according to IABUK.

Number of words in an average search

1. Two words 33%
2. Three words 26%
3. One word 19%
4. Four words 13%
5. Five words 6%
6. Six words 2%
7. Seven words 1%

Making sense of search

There has been a significant change in the search engine and directory landscape recently. Many engines and directories have consolidated to provide just a few indexes, which now power the majority of search on the web.

With the release of its new search engine in March, Yahoo! now powers over half of web searches with Alta Vista, All The Web, Lycos and Inktomi all using the Yahoo! search technology.

Teoma and Ask Jeeves form the second significant search engine group with Ask Jeeves claiming to be the number two pure search engine and the number five overall search engine player.

Current favourite, Google remains a force to be reckoned with. The popular search engine increasingly ranks web site pages according to the aggregate importance of all the pages pointing to it. This means that for a given query, Google will choose the page that has the best reputation in terms of other “reputable” pages linking to it, over other pages with similar content but sans links.

Which brings us neatly to the directories, which are the best way to obtain those inbound links that will improve the reputation of your site. The three major directories that must be included in any search engine optimisation strategy are Yahoo! (the directory this time, not the search engine), Open Directory and Looksmart.

However, at the time of writing, Looksmart UK is in a state of flux as it has been sold to UK Directory, which is not accepting listings at present. A fourth directory, JoeAnt is regarded as a good feed for the others, and so should also be considered.

Finally, as reported in last month’s Esquared, Microsoft’s recently updated MSN Search - currently powered by Yahoo! - is set to change later in the year with the launch of its own proprietary search engine – which will mean reviewing your SEO and SEM strategies once again.

Keywords a key force in online branding

One of the biggest benefits of advertising on the web is the ability to accurately measure response rates and effectiveness via page impressions and the all important percentage of click throughs, which allows marketeers to answer the age old question "I know I waste half of my advertising budget, but I don't know which half". read more about online branding

Managing your reputation online

Still on the subject of brand awareness and image, the web and more widely, online media (e-mail, chat etc) is becoming increasingly important in raising awareness and the reputation of a brand. In fact, the web now enjoys the same media consumption as newspapers at around 14% in the UK. read more about managing your online reputation

Only on the web:

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www.wagenschenke.ch

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About:

Esquared is a regular digest of news, opinion and developments within interactive communications which we find interesting and hope you will too. If you want more information about anything that we mention, or have any comments, please call us on 01992 500990 or e-mail esquared@experience-engine.co.uk.