SearchMaster works by emulating a human searcher using a browser rather than simply firing many queries at the search engine URL. It supplies all the correct headers to make the engine think it is a valid human user. If you are still worried by this, you can always install SearchMaster on a seperate IP address that is not critical to you.

Having a server side rankings checker has many distinct advantages:

Speed
By running the program from an ISP, you are utilizing the full high speed internet connection to execute the queries. The only time it slows down is when it has to return the results back to your browser

Access
You can use the program wherever you have an internet connection, be that in the office, at home or even on holiday. There is also the huge advantage of your clients being able to log in to the system to see their reports without you ever having to manually FTP them to a location for them to view.

See here for more about this.

Yes and No. In reality SearchMaster can handle an unlimited amount of keywords, but there are good reasons why you wouldn't want to do this.

First off, the system would become unbearably slow to use as each time you call up the campaign properties, it has to bring up hundreds of keywords.
Secondly, when you run a report, a timeout or connection blip could stop the campaign running half way through which could cause problems.

It would be far better to spread the keywords over a number of campaigns.

Yes it is as SearchMaster is one of the few scripts to come with an automated installer. It is however still very important to read the onscreen instructions to ensure it all works smoothly.

SearchMaster relies on the Lib-www group of modules. Most ISP's and installations include this as standard and certainly the latest version of
Active State Perl for Win32 has this as standard.

For more information on this, see http://www.linpro.no/lwp/

SearchMaster supports the following search engines:

Google
Google UK
Yahoo
Yahoo UK
MSN
MSN UK
ASK
ASK UK
AltaVista
AltaVista UK
AOL Search
Lycos
Lycos UK

These search engines represent the major players in the industry and traffic from the others such as Wisenut etc is simply not significant enough to warrant inclusion.
In many cases, people are only interested in Google, Yahoo amd MSN as that is where 90% of the traffic is.

SearchMaster is 9 times out of 10 completely accurate. Many users have in fact reported that it is the most accurate rankings checker around. You can also verify the positions in the rankings reports area to check.

See here for more on this

You can run SearchMaster on a local machine with an internet connection if you like, however it will rely on having Apache and MySQL installed locally.

See:
www.apache.org
www.mysql.org