We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere.
Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information [...]

Facebook has rolled out public stripped down versions of user profiles that are crawlable by search engines, which has lots of upside for Facebook, but raises privacy issues for personal users and has questionable utility for business users. Here’s what I found when I logged into Facebook:

Here’s what you see when you click through to [...]

Nielsen asked 1,000 consumers on its new “engagement” panel if they could recall any TV commercials they had seen — only one third of them could. In contrast, 79% could recall at least one TV show. This is not the least bit surprising because traditional TV advertising creates NO value for consumers in the moment [...]

Search advertising is probably the most scalable advertising platform in the history of advertising and marketing. But ten years into the promise of the web and new media to transform advertising into an ROI-driven marketing engine, the success of keyword-driven pay-per-click text ads is the exception, not the rule.
The problem is scalability.

The New York Times asks, “Should Yahoo stop trying to beat Google at its own game?” and VC Jim Breyer says, “They should take a hard look at the search business, and it may well be the right time to stop trying to out-Google Google.” Wow, that sounds awfully familiar — probably just a coincidence.
In [...]

Traditional media sites used to recoil at the idea of linking to any content other than their own. This made these sites one-way islands in the link-driven web ecosystem, but worse is they have suffered disintermediation at the hands of Google, Digg, and other aggregators that don’t discriminate and that prioritize what’s best for the [...]

Every media company is positioning itself to benefit from the increasing shift of ad dollars from offline media to online and digital media, but in many cases ad dollars aren’t moving online in a 1-to-1 ratio. That’s why newspapers, for example, still get 80-90% of ad revenue from print, an artifact of monopoly pricing that [...]

What do offline media journalists have in common with Made For AdSense publishers, i.e. online publishers who create sites with junk content for the sole purpose of making money off of Google’s pay-per-click ads? Quite a lot it seems — Google is destroying their business models from either end of the content quality spectrum. Compare [...]

Digital media has unbundled content, disrupting legacy businesses that sell bundled media like albums and newspapers. But that doesn’t mean there is no value in bundling content, as Nick Carr observes in a lyrical deconstruction of David Weinberger’s assertion that the track is the natural unit of music.

Google announced a major change to its standard web search results — the inclusion of results from its vertical search engines, e.g. Google News, Google Video, Google Maps, inside its standard search results, which they are calling Google Universal Search. That means links from Google News and YouTube videos (playable right in the search results!) [...]

Blogging and search have been good to each other overall. Bloggers have cranked out millions of links, which drive search algorithms, and in turn search has rewarded bloggers by ranking their content high in search results, which is to a large degree a function of bloggers giving each other so many links. (Blogging platforms like [...]

“Googling a person” has been part of the vernacular for some time now, but Google’s control over identity has become so powerful that it’s now influencing baby naming choices — at least that’s the hook in this WSJ piece on Google and identity:

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she [...]

Perhaps there are good reasons why Microsoft should acquire Yahoo, but beating Google probably isn’t one of them. The reason is simple:
Microsoft and Yahoo have businesses that leverage the online network.
Google increasingly IS the network.

Microsoft released a research report about the scourge of search engine spam (via NYT).

Nick Wilson has an excellent podcast on the topic, in which he observes that Google is perversely incented NOT to clear up spam in its search results because it actually makes money off of those spam sites by supplying the ads.
Nick also [...]

There is a very real body of knowledge about how to manage search that is not fairly characterized as gaming of the system.
There are some very smart people who are masters of this knowledge base.
There are many SEOs who, in addition to possessing this knowledge, appear to be very honest brokers. (See this post for [...]

When a controversy foments to the point where both sides are shouting at the top of their lungs and can’t even hear each other, the truth is typically somewhere between the two extremes. Such is the case it seems with search engine optimization, or SEO. Jason Calacanis thinks that SEO is bullshit and that 90% [...]

We all bow down to the gods of traffic, but the reality is that not all traffic is created equal. Perhaps if you’re selling junk page views to an ad network for rock-bottom prices, it’s all the same, but for most pages on most “quality” content sites, some kinds of traffic are definitely better than [...]

Google has clearly transformed the software industry’s approach to business models, as evident in the hundreds of online software companes (i.e Web 2.0) planning to “monetize” through advertising. But Google may also be influencing the software industry in less obvious but equally significant ways, through its ethos of simplicity and its obsessive (and often hyped) [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a [...]

Poor Google — all these great vertical search options, from images to maps to books to shopping, and yet the vast major of their users still default to plain vanilla Google searching. In an apparent effort to change this, Google is testing a new search results page that pushes Google’s vertical search options (see left [...]

Having been on the fortunate receiving end of Danny Sullivan’s good will, good humor, and generosity, the reaction to Danny’s announcement that he is leaving Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference for failure to reach a deal with Incisive Media is not the least bit suprising — the booming search industry is [...]

Google is allowing local businesses to offer coupons through Google Maps for free (some details from Google here), which is pretty good from the perspective of Google’s hallowed “user experience,” but far from revolutionary. Local searchers on Google Maps will be able to see which local businesses featured in the search results are offering a [...]

The state of search marketing was on full and vivid display at the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose this past week, masterfully orchestrated by Danny Sullivan and Co. (thanks for the invite, Danny). I came away with pages and pages of notes, but here are some observations that rose to the top [...]

Om Malik took an interesting critical look at the Google deal with News Corp, which got me thinking about whether MySpace matters much at all to this deal, despite all the hype:
In a conference call, FIM executives noted that a very large number of people leave MySpace to go to Google. According to data collected [...]

The gloves came off on a click fraud panel at Search Engine Strategies this morning when Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety at Google, blindsided all of the panel members, including Yahoo, with the release of a study aiming to discredit third-party click fraud auditing (full report is here):
A rigorous technical analysis [...]

I would be remiss if I didn’t comment (along with the rest of universe) on AOL’s apparently accidental release of 20 million+ searches by 500,000 AOL users. Markus over at The Paradigm Shift has some horrifying data on homicidal and suicidal intentions mixed in with all the research and buying intentions:
This is the very data [...]

What does it say about an advertising format when an industry “council” has to be formed in order to arbitrate the problem of advertisers not knowing whether they are getting what they paid for? That’s what happened to both pay-per-click advertising and TV advertising this past week, and the similarities between these two ad councils [...]

I will be live blogging from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose next week. Should be a great event, including Danny Sullivan’s interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

If you’re going to be there and want to meet up, drop me a line.
Stay tuned for dispatches next week.

Inform.com has wisely gotten out of the Web 2.0 news aggregator business and into the publisher services business. Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 Blog has the scoop:
As readership declines for newspapers and online readership grows, every publisher faces the threat coming from the edge of the network. Sites like Google News, Yahoo News, [...]

Yahoo went live with it’s new homepage today, and when I went to check it out with my Firefox browser, this is what I found:

Yahoo clearly saw an opportunity with its tremendous homepage reach to leverage its strong portal brand to try to change users’ default searching habits. Interestingly, the pitch is not “use Yahoo [...]

Have you noticed how much spam there is in Google search ads? I was doing the periodic ego search that we all do and found this:

Click on the top ad on the right and you’ll find this:

Maybe the guy in the picture is named Scott, but other than that I can’t figure out what this [...]

The Google Operating System blog has an interesting meditation on the downside of life without Google — which of course begs for a rebuttal speculating on the UPSIDE of life without Google (Garret Rogers also has a point-by-point response):
* our mail account would still have 2MB or 4MB of storage and we would be happy [...]

With the launch of Google Checkout, Google is clearly aiming to be the world’s online shopping engine. The strategy has all the hallmarks of AdWords — Google doesn’t care what you’re looking for, what you find, or where you buy it — so long as Google can make money off of every step of the [...]

It’s nothing new.
I get this comment all the time when I’m trying to describe what I think is a (r)evolutionary change. It’s human instinct to cleave to what we already know, to hope that we can continue to live comfortably in the world that we’ve already wrapped our minds around.
Sometimes, what’s hailed as a revolution [...]

At the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, search advertising is getting slammed for its inability to build brands — and rightly so:
Laura Desmond, chief executive of Mediavest USA, which advises clients such as P&G, Masterfoods and Kraft on buying and planning media, said: “Google is going to have to change its business model soon. Search alone [...]

Search advertising was revolutionary because it created a new science of ad relevance — the old targeting tools of demographics and psychographics seem like a shot in the dark by comparison. On the face of it, the value proposition of search advertising makes perfect sense — ads are chosen based on key word relevance — [...]

As usual, Google watchers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to Google’s intersection with traditional media. Google announced the launch of Google Co-op, which clearly has one strategic purpose — destroy the opportunity that magazines and other niche media believe they have to compete with Google by creating vertical searches.
Here are [...]

Reading about Yahoo’s new search-advertising software code-named Project Panama, I can’t help wondering whether any other form of advertising can compete with search advertising’s projectable ROI and hyper-efficiency:

But as advertisers enter each bid, they will see an estimate of how many clicks they will receive each day. More important, a graph will show how many [...]

I’m with Om Malik — Google Finance underwhelms. The improvements over Yahoo Finance, like interactive graphs, are nice but not transformative. Which is disappointing, because it’s easy to imagine features that would be transformative — or at least a bigger step forward:
1. Company Memetracker
The company tearsheets have mainstream media stories over here and blog posts [...]

The discussion about MySpace on tech.mememorandum this morning is dripping with irony. On the one hand, you have the MySpace apologists, arguing that what teenagers do on MySpace is no different from what teenagers of past generations have done to rebel and be different, and that parents should just teach their children well and not [...]

I’m not sure if I’ll be the first to predict it, but search advertising is headed for a cliff. I can’t say with any certainty when–or whether–the crash will come, but the evidence is mounting.
Everyone is talking about the $90 million click fraud settlement, and the Google apologists are out in force, arguing that $90 [...]

Search advertising has been all the rage the last few years, leaving sellers of traditional display advertising to fear a slow death as Google and other search engines siphon off all of the ad dollars. But after a dramatic run-up in search, there’s evidence that we’re reaching a plateau.
I try to avoid the dangerous business [...]

Is it possible that the text ads pioneered by Google have near zero branding value and, as one search advertiser noted in a Stifel Nicolaus analyst report on Google, the “lifetime value of a customer acquired through Google for his/her business [has] approached zero”? The Stifel Nicolaus report by Scott Devitt is cited in a [...]

Google is powerful — and we all learned from Orwell that power corrupts. As to search, Google has near total power — will total power totally corrupt Google?
Ask BMW, whose SEO strategy violated Google’s “orthodoxy,” leading Google to unceremoniously excommunicate BMW’s German website from its “organic” search results. The BBC reported this action [...]

I came across Stowe Boyd’s new indepdent blog, /Message, and his plea for help in working his way up from zero on the Technorati food chain. Still near the bottom of the curve myself, I feel Stowe’s pain. Since I’ve been the beneficiary of much blogosphere goodwill in getting links to Publishing 2.0, I thought [...]