• The Code Of Advertising: Like Car Buying OR Home Buying?
    For a long period of time, there was "The Code": an often unspoken agreement between advertiser and advertising agency, that together, through thick and thin, each side would respect and value the contributions being made and the economic climate under which events occurred, ensuring that everyone gained in a proportionate way to their stake in the partnership. Well, at worst, that code has been erased; and at best, it's no longer a viable staple, even for those who might still recognize its necessity.
  • Summer Stories: How I Met Fredrick Marckini
    As I said last week, I'm in the mood for a little reminiscing, so today, I'll be sharing the story of my first industry event and how I met iProspect's founder, Fredrick Marckini.
  • Ten Ways to Use Search Data Beyond SEM
    Faithful Search Insider readers will know I'm a big fan of "Top Ten" lists. In the past year, I've written no fewer than ten columns featuring Top Ten lists. Today I'd like to add one more to the collection. I've always believed you can learn a lot from a query. Here are my top ten ways to use search data beyond your search engine marketing program.
  • My Father's Stroke And The Incredible Power Of Habit
    Six years before his death, my father had a severe stroke that left him, in its immediate aftermath, disoriented, visually impaired, and unable to form even simple sentences. Still, he was able to remember an important nine-digit number. That's the power of habit, in which some thought processes get so deeply embedded that it would take more than a cerebral hemorrhage to get them out.
  • Universally Accessible Web Content Cannot Survive
    This week's column attempts to wrestle with some large-frame issues that I think deserve attention, because, as we learned from the financial crisis, it's often the most basic, most obvious issues (such as whether all subprime mortgages that were being issued could possibly ever be repaid) that can blow everyone out of the water. In other words, just because nobody's talking about something doesn't mean that it's not real enough to kill you.
  • Microsoft & Yahoo At It Again
    At the time I am actually writing this column, there is no Microsoft/Yahoo deal in place; but by the time it is published, there may be. Industry experts have refused to let this potential deal go. After all, we want Google to have real competition; we need Google to have real competition. You've heard this before and you're with me, right? As a deal once again seems imminent, I have to wonder: Should we be careful what we wish for?
  • Summer Stories: How I Got Into Search
    This time of year always causes me to look backwards. My birthday is in the summer, so the increasing tally of years is hard to ignore. But it was also summer, specifically the summer of 2004, when I wrote my first Search Insider column, called "The Growing Pains of Search." That was 213 columns and about 180,000 words ago. And, finally, it was the summer of 1999 when Enquiro (then Search Engine Position) was born, so this marks my tenth official anniversary in the biz (I've been playing around at organic optimization since 1996).
  • By The Numbers: Search Share Pre- And Post-Bing
    Today I wanted to share some findings about the actual share of search traffic that our clients are receiving during Bing's critical launch period, based on data from our company's analytics platform that is utilized by 60 companies in the Fortune 1000. The data offers a different perspective on search engine market share that you don't normally see with other search share reports, mainly because this is based on all actual aggregate natural search traffic to these sites, and not a sample. While I am not submitting this data as proof of what I wrote about in my last column …
  • The New Face of Fame: Bono, Jagger, And Employee Number 4,297*
    Last week, I had the very real pleasure of attending a conference with a Googler. What struck me, over the course of the weekend, was the deference with which he was treated once people found out who his employer was. This particular Googler traced his professional roots to the music industry -- he had been an engineer, working with Dolby on advanced speaker systems -- and yet he gets more recognition for being a part of the search juggernaut than he ever did in rock 'n' roll, arguably the world's sexiest profession. So I asked him about it.
  • Click Valuation
    My fellow Search Insider Gord Hotchkiss just wrote an article on search engine market share, "The Ebbs & Flows of Market Share, " which does a great job of deconstructing what forces are driving share. Reading that got me to thinking about additional measures we can use to evaluate the search engine battleground. I have been considering click valuation; the more I look at a variety of different factors in our industry, the more I start to wonder if this should be one of our key measures.
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