Although I have not used Internet Explorer 8, I hope it does not create more bugs for web developers like me. I was hesistant to install Internet Explorer 8 because I want to keep Internet Explorer 7 for testing purposes. I could keep Internet Explorer 7 on another PC and upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 on my main development PC. The cool thing about Internet Explorer 8 is the versioning feature that allows developers to emulate a previous version of Internet Explorer within Internet Explorer 8.

Microsoft has planned for the inevitable viewing problems their new software will create. Here’s a list of related web pages that might help you debug all the Internet Explorer 8 problems.

• Internet Explorer 8 Versioning
• Some Web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8
• Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility
• Internet Explorer 8: Defining Document Compatibility

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• Internet Explorer 8 Officially Releases at Noon EDT [Internet Explorer] (lifehacker.com)
• IE8 Automatic Update Starting Soon (sitepoint.com)
• Internet Explorer 8 Arriving on Thursday (technologizer.com)
• Microsoft Bids to Reclaim the Web with Internet Explorer 8 (wired.com)

The thing about Micro Niche Finder that bugs me the most is it cannot display the search counts for imported keywords from a text file. You only get search counts if you enter a search term in the search field. Other than that, sometimes, the Brainstorm and Hot Trends features do give you the search counts. I keep getting “Dig This” for my search counts. If you click on it, you will see a list of related keywords that may or may not display the search count for that keyword. This is extremely frustrating. What’s worse? Sometimes you see weird ***** in the search count column. Overall, the search count is quite pathetic and there is no reason why it cannot be improved.

Another thing that bugs me about this software is that it does not allow me to select broad, phrase or exact matching options for the keywords. You are forced to use the exact matching options by default and I do not see any option to change that.

Micro Niche Finder was designed to prevent getting blocked by Google.com. It goes slow so that you do not need to keep entering the Google captcha. That is great but it takes more time to check all fields and search them by columns and not by rows. You check the keywords you want and search for the OCI, exact count, ad cost etc. This takes a long long time to complete. You cannot just let it run and have all the stats you want with 1 click. Once 1 column has completed its search, you have to repeat that process on another column.

There is a background downloading service that claims to automate all of this but it does not seem to work correctly on mine. It takes forever to complete and I think it hangs there and does nothing most of the time.

I can verify that the search counts, OCI and CPC are correct. I verified the stats at Google and Live Search as you can see from the screen shots above. I used the keyword “acuvue” for this example. Microsoft says there is a 86% probability that someone searching for this keyword will have the intention to buy something. These stats are correct in Micro Niche Finder. However, I have no idea where the exact phrase matches come from as this data does not seem to come from Google AdWords.

I emailed the author to ask him why he could not give us the search counts. He replied and told me it was to prevent getting “Google blocks”, which could result in a temporary ban on your IP address from accessing Google’s search engine. I do not see why he could not do the same for the search counts like what he did for the OCI, exact matches and the other fields.

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Conclusion

The next version that will allow mass search counts will be 3-4 months away! I have no idea why people can say this software is great when I have found so many problems with it. I am not trying to be negative but I cannot find a lot of positives with this keyword software.