While growth of the US online population has slowed in recent years (projected to be 3.1 per cent in 2008), the number of the nation’s Internet users will reach nearly 200 million in 2008.

That’s according to eMarketer, which analyzes Internet information from more than 3,000 sources.

The Internet research firm also reports Internet usage in the US is becoming a daily habit. Moreover, it reports US Internet users spent 15.3 hours a week online last year.

eMarketer also projects that this year there will be 193.9 million US Internet users — two-thirds of the population. By 2012, 217 million Americans will be online, it reported.

Meanwhile, Internet World Stats, which utilizes data from Nielsen, ITU and other reliable sources, reports 215 million Americans already use the Internet — 71.4% of the US population.

In either case, those are huge numbers and worth tapping into — regardless what business you’re in.

IT search engine start-up Paglo launched beta software Nov. 19 that’s designed to help IT personnel stay on top of their companies’ computer, network and security systems.

The Paglo search engine, which the company is billing as “Google for IT,” is said to be an answer to increasingly complex hardware devices, software programs and other technologies.

The Web-based Paglo application will crawl a company’s IT infrastructure and report on a wide range of queries about the hardware and software within the systems. It will run on IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers.

The platform includes the Paglo Crawler, an open-source discovery spider that businesses download on one computer to gather IT information from all devices and software.

Users can register for Paglo’s private beta, which is slated to go live later this month.

Online competitive intelligence company Hitwise announced Sept. 19 that Google accounted for 63.98% of all US searches in the four weeks ending Sept. 1, 2007. Yahoo, MSN and Ask each received 22.87, 7.98% and 3.41% respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise search engine analysis tool accounted for 1.68% of U.S. searches.

Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key Industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories.  Comparing August 2007 to August 2006, the travel, entertainment, and business and finance categories received double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Google, whose $13 billion in revenue mainly comes from clicks on ads, plays down click fraud.

Meanwhile, the rate of fraudulent clicks was 15.8% in the second quarter of 2007, up 1% from three months earlier. Plus, Click Forensics estimates that more than 25% of all clicks were fraudulent, up from about 22% in the previous quarter.

Forbes’ Andy Greenburg talks to Google’s Senior Product Manager Shuman Ghosemajumder about this issue in the article Counting Clicks.

Google has unleashed a Local Business Referrals program to tighten its stranglehold on Internet yellow pages (IYP) companies such as YellowPages.com.

To improve its local results, Google is paying Business Referral Representatives to canvas local businesses to collect information, such as hours of operation, and take digital photos of the establishments. The representatives get up to $10 (U.S.) for each approved and verified referral. You can sign up here.

Google tells candidates: “…you’ll be helping the businesses you refer attract new customers while also making it easier for people in your community to find the products and services they’re searching for.”

Long-established directories that have been struggling to stay relevant in the rapidly progressing search engine industry may see the already significant gaps widen. Late last year, comScore reported Google garnered 29.8 per cent of local searches by U.S. Internet users compared to just 3.9 per cent by YellowPages.com.

While competitors and Internet marketers will be studying Google’s Local Business Referral Referrals program closely, one thing’s for sure: the pace of the IYP/local search race is heating up and the offerings are going to get better.

Advantage: consumers, local businesses and, of course, advertisers.

Google will begin issuing its users cookies in coming months that will be set to auto-expire after two years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users so preferences are not lost. This change is in response to pressure from users and privacy advocates. Google notes that users will continue to have control over cookies via their browsers.

Google will soon be introducing a new ‘unavailable_after’ meta tag to allow web masters to advise Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling.

For example, if you have a promotion on your website that expires on a specific date, you could use the unavailable_after tag to tell Google when to stop indexing it. The new Google tags are designed to help maintain relevant, up-to-date listings, especially for sites like eBay, so closed auction pages are eliminated from search results.

Millions of websites attempt to seduce Google and its competitors to score high search engine rankings. But what is the best path to this lucrative romance?

While there are more than a few website promotion tactics, you have two primary means to establish a relationship: court Google and other search engines with alluring web content; or simply pay to get lucky.

Pay Per Click Campaigns

This popular search engine marketing tactic can get you substantial presence in just hours or days. However, after you clear the floor of fraudulent clicks (from competitors eating up your marketing budget) and tire kickers, you might end up with less-than-anticipated conversions, if any at all.

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