Google, Yahoo! still dominate search; MSN gains ground

"Google maintained its lead in the United States with 36.5 percent of all the searches in the month of July--followed by Yahoo! at 30.5 percent and MSN at 15.5 percent [...]

Microsoft's MSN earned the greatest search volume gain among any of the top search engines, rising 30 percent year-over-year and accounting for 744 million domestic searches."

Google stealthily monitoring clickthroughs from search-results

"There's some very subtle clickthrough tracking going on at Google. Just before you click on a link on a search-results page, at the 'on mousedown' event, Google rewrites the links in its search results with a long redirector URL that is presumably being used to track which search results are being selected most often."

Google ad display increases

"In more searches, particularly queries with commercial intent, Google now displays three paid PPC links instead of the traditional one or two."

Courts signal that Google's keyword policy is lawful

"We believe our current policy strikes a good balance between advertisers, users and trademark owners, don't be surprised if our policy evolves over time. We believe it is possible for an advertiser to create an ad that uses a trademark in a legal and non-confusing way - after all that is what comparative advertising is all about."