Today’s Internet shoppers usually search with one of the major search engines for this advise, but a newer form of search company has set about claiming this valuable sector of the industry for itself.

Product review search engines have been around for a couple of years now, but are slowly gaining grown on their more established competion. Recently relaunched Wize Product recommendation research engine has beefed up its technology to allow users to check reviews at Amazon and BestBuy while also reading expert advice. Other competitors in the sector include ReviewGist, Retrevo and Viewscore.

Site-founder Reza Sardeha and his team developed the technology that allows users to be pre-warned if a internet search term may produce results that are “haram” or forbidden by the faith.

The search engine has two layers of filters that will either completely block results, such as sexual content or advise the user to change to another keyword.

Exposure to offensive content is a major point of contention between mainstream search engines and governments around the world. Since ImHalal was launched earlier this month it has received more than 400,000 unique visitors  and is now considering plans to develop advertsing reveune in the near future.

Although there are currently only half a million words in the Oxford English dictionary, there are about 30 million keywords in Google’s ad database.

20% of these daily queries , haven’t been seen before in the last 3 months which suggests there is still room for improvement in the method of connecting users to the relevant products and services.  “I see the keyword as an intermediary that we came up with five or ten years ago, to help advertisers target specific queries,” he said.

Google’s answer to this problem seems to be a much more integrated system where as advertisers wouldn’t plug in keywords themselves but would simply submit their ’service’ description or a product catalog and Google will figure it out themselves automatically.

Developments in search using image recognition were being made, an area that Google will most likely continue to invest in.

Google meanwhile have not been standing around with their hands in their pockets. They have an answer to the pretenders to the crown of number one in search and it currently has the peculiar name of ‘Caffine’. Read more here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8195739.stm

Search engines are able to rank websites standing based on a variety of different parameters. Search engines such as Google and MSN use their own secret algorithms in order to determine the position of a website in search results. The process of SEO is to improve websites, natural or organic search engine ranking. One of the most important parameters in this process is establishing the sites credibility through quality and high quantity of other sites linking back to it. SEO also involves on-site optimisation. This is the process of making websites content, relevant and easy to read for the different search engines information gathering robots.

PPC advertising involves a set amount of money being paid to the search engine for every click a visitor makes on an advert. This is also sometimes referred to as paid placement, search engine advertising or cost per click (CPC).

The importance of search engine marketing has grown significantly over the last few years. Spending on SEM in North America in 2005 was at $6 billion, by 2006 this had grown to $9.45 billion and is expected to be over $18 billion industry By 2011. This coupled with the massive growth of the Internet (over 7 billion searches made every month in the US!) highlights the need for companies to become involved and remain up-to-date in this important area of business.