Google’s share of search traffic rose nearly 6 percent in December from the prior year, giving the company 49 percent share of all U.S. Web searches, according to the latest statistics from Nielsen/NetRatings.

Yahoo and MSN experienced slight declines in their percentage of search share over the last year, although all three search engines had double-digit growth year-over-year. Google grew 75 percent to nearly 2.5 billion searches; Yahoo rose 53 percent to nearly 1.1 billion searches and MSN rose 20 percent to 553 million searches.

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In a time where Google is enjoying a much wider users base for its search engine, Yahoo is working to find way to attract more users to use its search services. Offering incentives to users who use its Yahoo search will be one possible way to increase user base, but not necessary an effective one. Most people have turned to Google for its ease to help users to find their require information and is extremely fast. Nevertheless, offering incentives to gain back some market share will be good move by Yahoo !!

Yahoo confirmed on Wednesday that it’s polling some Yahoo Mail users about what they would want in exchange for making Yahoo their primary search engine. The survey was sent to a random sampling representing about 5 percent of its Yahoo Mail users, a Yahoo representative said.

“Yahoo is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo their primary search engine,” the survey says. “Yahoo Mail users will be given early access to this program. You will receive a monthly reward if you make Yahoo your primary search engine. This means that most of the searching you do each month must be on Yahoo Search.”

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Google’s test of magazine ads began last summer, and involved two computer-oriented publications. Certain advertisers appeared on ad pages with the words Ads by Google and special phone numbers Google used to track the effectiveness of the test.

Google Print ADs Auction can be read at http://services.google.com/marketing/links/aw-print-pub-ads/

Google is definitley using its technology and wide client base to venture in new print AD territory

Google has blacklisted BMW.de after the carmaker violated the search giant’s guidelines by using a technique that could artificially boost its search engine rating, according to a Google engineer.

In a blog, Google software engineer Matt Cutts said that Google had removed BMW’s German site (click here to view site) from its Web index after the site included “doorway pages” that would automatically redirect visitors to a different URL.

Cutts explained that when Google’s crawlers visited a BMW page, it saw blocks of text with repeated key search words such as “neuwagen,” which means “new car” in German. However, when a user visited the listed page they would be automatically redirected to another page with less text and more pictures, which was more attractive than the page the crawler saw, but would have scored lower in Google’s PageRank system.

“This is a violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of ‘Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users,'” said Cutts’ blog.

To regain Google listing status, Cutts expects that BMW.de will have to remove the JavaScript that redirects users around the site in this fashion and then send a reinclusion request to Google’s Webspam team, which Cutts leads. BMW.de has already removed some of the redirect pages.

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