Google has combined algorithm tricks and filters, GPS technology, mobile use, and real-time search results into the creation of a truly powerful next-generation search engine.Suddenly the frustration of the daily commute to work can be reduced with the help of up-to-the-minute Tweets on traffic jams.

Living in the moment has never been so prevalent as it is right now. Social Conversational Marketing is a real-time opportunity to build business on-the-go. According to PEW Internet and American Life Project, Twitter users are more likely to consume news and information on their mobile phones than anywhere else. With over 1,578,918 followers Dell Computers is doing a great job at driving sales through Twitter.

Our world is being hyper-linked at a rapid speed. Google’s new Android mobile visual search application “Goggles” promises to bridge the gap between our physical and virtual web worlds. In the future instead of wearing earbuds for music I can see the very real possibility of sporting tiny cameras on our glasses that will enable our “own eyes” to conduct an image search and connect and retrieve information from the cloud.

Planning a vacation getaway, to purchase a new cell phone, or wondering what the hottest Christmas gift is for an eight year old? Why not turn to your social network? Social Search is being called the next revolution in search.

Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, a pioneering company in the browser market in 1994, has reentered the internet search market with his announcement to back a new startup, Rockmelt, aimed at building a new internet browser. How will Rockmelt differ from Firefox, Safari and Chrome and deliver lighting speed in a secure environment?

The partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo has inescapably altered the search industry landscape and some recent research from Comscore points to some startling future developments. Bing for one, can no longer be ignored as the growth in both search penetration and share of search result pages has seen considerable growth pointing to the importance of decision engine optimization.

Imagine our existence explained by a single algorithm responsible for the rules of physics and everything else, that boils down to a simple computational process of a few lines of code? Touted by some as a Google Killer, Wolfram Alpha is a new “computational knowledge engine” designed to connect searchers with exact information by combining natural language processing and the web’s vast amount of organized and computable data.

14.6 million small to medium sized businesses are bracing to triple their web marketing budget according to Borrell & Associates in a recent report entitled: “Main Street Goes Interactive”. While these companies had traditionally spent their advertising dollars in the Yellow Pages, Direct Mail or Coupons, they have realized they have better, more immediate and measurable results online.

Can we really build computer intelligence through tagging, data mining, and dissecting words into stems, senses, and syntaxes of senses to make the semantic web a reality? I suppose the process is not dissimilar to trying to make sense of archaic Elizabethan language for a modern day audience.

In 1965 Intel founder Gordon E. Moore predicted that computer circuit size would double every two years – exponential growth that is holding true today. That growth has contributed to the explosion of miraculous computer-enabled breakthroughs like global positioning, digital imaging, the human genome project, cell phone systems, powerful laptop computers, the IPhone, and the Internet.
Did [...]

 
Connecting with consumers has taken on remarkable new forms in the last year due to technology, the web, and social media. Ad budgets are going to look very different in 2009 as companies try to understand the changes and cope with current economic realities. Here are some trends I see for 2009.

Search and performance-based media [...]

Did you know that 13 hrs of new video is uploaded every minute onto YouTube and over a half a billion photos make it onto Flickr in a day? These staggering statistics point to a significant change in internet behavior and in how we now approach search marketing initiatives.
It was only May 2007, when Google [...]

 
 
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.
 
Digital technology has changed the conventional media [...]

Search on mobile is no longer a frustrating wait delivering irrelevant results thanks to the slick Yahoo! onesearchTM made available on AT&Ts on-deck MEdia Net portal. It is an intuitive search platform that returns not only the movie you are searching for but the show times at local theatre, reviews, news, and cast information.
Yahoo! oneSearchTM [...]

Downloading a Google Application to meet the needs of a customer is secondary in the lives of so many small businesses. It seems we all have joined the ‘App Happy’ generation who can’t get enough of these convenient applications. Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Mail, Google Talk and now there is Google Chrome. So [...]

Starting your car and doing your banking all via wi-fi? Who will be able to afford it?
According to Mediamark Research, cell-only households outnumber landline-only homes. In fact among 18-24 year olds who live alone 57% are cell-phone only. Mobile devices also outnumber personal computers three-to-one and with the approaching broadband speeds, it is inevitable that [...]

 
Semantic technologies may not be the answer to computationally complex searches but they do have value in helping us represent relational data spread over the web. As we evolve to Web 3.0 there are a number of players in this space including SearchMonkey (Yahoo), Freebase, Hakia and Powerset (Microsoft) who are all attempting a solution on [...]

 
On June 24, the search giant Google, who boasts 70% of all internet searches announced its plan to launch the Google Ad Planner. The Ad Planner is geared to media buyers and designed to provide an “easy” way for advertisers to identify which sites to buy online ads on by telling them which sites their [...]

 
 
Last April, the alpha version of the India-based Yureekah (www.yureekah.com), the first known search engine for use by individuals seeking online advertising information (and effectively organizing and making it universally accessible for free), was launched for testing. Yureekah allows its users to find out where competitors are advertising and determining the best options for future [...]

First they spurned the Microsoft merger, and now Yahoo! is ready to throw some glue. According to a report on CyberMedia News last May 8, Yahoo! India launched a new search experience named Glue Pages Beta (check out www.yahoo.in) which collates and integrates the most relevant information from across the web onto a single “visual” [...]

Can Wikipedia’s traffic ever be independent of search engines? Experience alone will tell you that they rely greatly on search engine results for their heavy traffic, with Wikipedia pages often popping up in first page if not the first results of search engine windows, especially in Google.

New statistics from a recent Nielsen Online survey [...]

Now that Google has begun offering more ways by which users can search within a particular site, certain retailers and publishers aren’t too happy. The company’s new (though controversial) search-within-search feature lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites. The search box appears when a user enters the name of certain Web [...]

Will verticals emerge as the key driver of online advertising in the near future? Most definitely, according to a new report by the Kelsey Group. Make that 2012, to be specific.
In recent years, search, banners, e-mail and lead generation have been responsible for the explosive growth in interactive advertising, but that is soon about to [...]

Is the mighty giant looking a little vulnerable these days? According to Reuters report last month, Google’s share of the global Web search market took a steep dive last February (even if its U.S. market share rose), Internet financial analysts revealed. ComScore research data showed that the search engine giant’s dominance of the worldwide market [...]

Australian mobile phone users are in for a Google onslaught. Seeking to entrench its hold on the mobile search market in Australia, Google has launched a new, more powerful version of its existing mobile search tool better customised for the land Down Under, ITwire.com reported last Feb. 27.
Google is claiming to have a faster and [...]

Recently, I wrote about Yahoo!’s widely-publicized potential tie-up with Microsoft. But its business as usual at Yahoo, despite all the juicy speculative talk over partnerships and recent layoffs.
The Gartner Blog’s Allen Weiner reported that, as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to showcase its search differentiation, Yahoo! has unveiled an “open search platform,” which gives [...]

Fears of the looming US recession have put the world’s media economy at risk, buffered only by the current elections and the upcoming Olympics. But according to a recent forecast on global ad released by Screen Digest in London, it is the Internet that will truly keep the global ad economy from sinking.
In fact, thanks [...]

Along with all the buzz over mobile, there is also a lot of talk on search engine consolidation, as Search Engine Land revealed.
According to the Yellow Pages Association (YPA)’s President Neg Norton, this was spurred by recent whispers involving the Yahoo! and News Corp. deal, a potential integration with MySpace, and whether the talk is [...]

If there is one defining characteristic of Google, you could say its their decidedly sparse and simple pages. The only busy, graphic element being their logo, which changes now and then to a particular theme or holiday. But for the most part, on their most important pages (the results of their search engine), ads consist [...]

Mobile search has been on everyone’s lips, as you may have gathered. But as eMarketer recently reported, all the talk is being replaced by action. Is mobile search finally finding its way?
The figures shed some light. The number and variety of searches on mobile phones jumped during the second half of 2007, causing eMarketer to [...]

A new year, a brand new season of forecasts for market researchers. Aside from the widely-publicized report of The Kelsey Group, Borrell Associates releases another bold 2008 prediction: local online ad spending will double by the whopping 48% in 2008.
According to Newsfactor.com, the demand for paid search and video advertising will drive the demand, according [...]

Cyber Monday, one of the largest online shopping days of 2007 (November 26), brought in over a whopping $700 million in online sales, according to Loren Baker, Editor of Search Engine Journal.
But not through Yahoo Stores (now known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions), which suffered a dramatic loss in revenue from over 10,000 online merchants which [...]

According to a Nov. 27 article I came across in Macworld.com, Yahoo is going to launch a new structured search component to their web search engine. Yahoo Search users may soon be able to do a structured search around select terms, rather than navigate through a large number of search results.
For example, if a user [...]

I came across an interesting post by Gregg Stewart on Search Engine Watch last Oct. 12. The growth of directory assistance (DA) services has spawned a new a new sub-category: voice search.
According to Stewart, voice search enables users to access name-based information and/or category-based listings in much the same way as printed White and Yellow [...]

Google Earth is taking YouTube Videos to new heights, the ClickZ Network reported recently. The search giant is now providing YouTube videos connected to specific locations within Google Earth by allowing what they call the geotagging of videos.
Although Google is hyping up the availability of videos linked to specific locations on the Google Earth map [...]

Mobile search is such a hot topic these. But an interesting headline in SearchEngineLand.com caught my eye: Why Mobile Search is Irrelevant to B2B Marketing?
According to the SEL columnist, Jon Miller (VP of Marketing for Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals improve marketing accountability), mobile search (especially mobile paid [...]

Brace yourselves, we are at the brink of a war on the mobile search front, that is. Media Post Publications reported that two new mobile search products have risen out of Microsoft and Sprint’s year-long strategic partnership: a location-aware mobile search service, and a voice-powered local search application that users can download to their phone.
Sprint’s [...]

Two weeks ago, eMarketer a great online source for market research and trend analysis on online marketing, media and emerging technologies published a report that covered the issues surrounding internet yellow pages and search engines.
According to one of their senior analysts, David Hallerman, when people use the Web to look for local retailers and service [...]

What factors truly influence online searches? That question was answered in a new study sponsored by search engine marketing firm, iProspect. Conducted by JupiterResearch in June of this year, the study revealed that 67% of the online search population is driven to search by offline channels, such as television, newspaper or radio.
More specifically, 37% said [...]

Business 2.0 has reported that Google Maps, the 3D mapping service of search giant Google, will begin paying users for taking digital photos of local shops and verifying their operating hours and payment options. The idea is to create a digital Yellow Pages to layer on top of Google Maps, the article stated.
The new Business [...]

A recent article on Search Engine Land reported comScore conducted an online survey that showed how the Internet is driving offline retail transactions in increasing numbers.
Utilizing 3,000 respondents, the survey sought to capture consumer attitudes and behavior toward traditional local media (print yellow pages) and local search. Apart from revealing the accelerating growth of local [...]

Although many Top Search Terms of the Year lists tend to be met with not a small amount of criticism mainly because certain analysts feel that search engine giants like Google are not being transparent about their filtering process it’s still intriguing to see which terms made it to the top of the heap.
Removing terms [...]

Search Engine Journal recently published an entry comparing the recently launched Google Hot Trends with the more established Yahoo Buzz Index. Both services indentify and analyze the search term behavior of Internet users.
According to the official Google blog, Hot Trends is a a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches [...]

Googling the search terms Google and sued reveals many results Google Sued Over PageRank Decrease, Google Sued For Click Fraud, Google sued over defamatory postings,  so on and so forth. It’s not the least bit surprising, given that Google is a multi-billion dollar internet company.
But perhaps the most surprising was the result that read ACCC [...]

The Washington Post wants people to start looking local. The award-winning broadsheet recently launched Local Explorer, a new service on washingtonpost.com, which allows users to get the lowdown on where you live, or where you’re thinking about living.
Local Explorer is a map-based tool designed to explore an area’s communities in granular detail. Established through a [...]

The eccentric creator of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Jimbo Wales, plans to launch a search engine that will rival Google in the fourth quarter of 2007. Those are bold predictions from Wales, but it’s hard to underestimate the man who founded the sixth-largest website in the world.
The new community search engine, which he calls [...]

When Steve Jobs unveiled his company’s eagerly-awaited Apple iPhone last January, search marketers everywhere contemplated the same question in their heads: will the iPhone be the key to finally unlock mobile search?
The phone has a sleek, impressive design and an innovative set of features, a combination that is often difficult to balance in most mobile [...]

Leading on-line text and video content producer, InfoSearch Media, recently released their financial results for its fiscal year, which ended on December 31, 2006.

It’s interesting to note that the company’s ContentLogic revenue grew by as much as 55% in 2006 to $6.0 million, up from $3.9 million in 2005. InfoSearch’s total 2006 revenue was [...]

The breaking news that Google acquired online advertising company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion from two private equity firms (Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity) was reported by The New York Times on April 14, after weeks of public negotiations played out in the media.
While DoubleClick may not be a familiar name to most people, the [...]

I recently came across a new report by The Kelsey Group (the leading provider of strategic research and analysis on Yellow Pages), which predicts a significant boom in print yellow pages, internet yellow pages, and local search from $30.6 billion in 2006 to $38.9 billion globally by 2011.
The same report by the Princeton NJ-based consultancy [...]