A new study out of Wesleyan University explores the actual cognitive mechanisms of decisiveness. This has direct implications for search marketers, because every time we use a search engine, we're forced to make decisions. In fact, every online interaction is a branching tree of decisions. The study provides new insight into the decision-making process we use as we guide ourselves through the online landscape.

Today, Scott Hagedorn sifts through the sizzle and the steak. Scott is the U.S. CEO of PHD, a global media network under the Omnicom Media Group umbrella. Scott is a digital guy at heart with roles as U.S. Director of Digital at OMD and Chief Interactive Officer at RAPP on his resume. But, above all, he's a self-professed geek when it comes to data, analytics, and technology. In fact, he's been known to bust out 4-D factorial models on spec in new-business pitches. So, what did the wizard of biz learn from Google? Read on...

The buzz around Google's proposed settlement with the Authors Guild, designed to make out-of-print library books available while still protecting the rights of their creators, set me to thinking. One conclusion: The global copyright system is clearly broken.

The Google Content Network -- comprised of hundreds of thousands of third-party Web sites -- reaches up to 80% of Internet users worldwide. Yet many marketers don't put enough advertising dollars into the Content Network because they lack the tools to effectively measure, manage, and optimize performance down to the site and placement level. Limiting your ROI in this important channel ultimately means less budget and clicks -- which equals a missed opportunities for revenues and profits.

This weekend, the Colts and Saints will battle to determine the king of the football hill during Super Bowl XLIV. A month into 2010, there are battle lines across the search landscape that also bear watching. These battles will shape the devices, platforms and consumer experience for this year and many to come. Here's your quick primer of the battles, the stakes and what to watch for to determine who has the upper hand.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting room at Simon Fraser University, among five people looking intently at two squiggly lines on a graph in a PowerPoint slide. There was a Ph.D. and a handful of Masters degrees in Neurology and Psychology. I contributed nothing to this impressive collection of academic achievement. Still, there was something on the chart that fascinated me.

In my last few columns, I've covered the considerations for search in a site redesign, so today I want to drill down even further into how market research and, by extension, keyword research helps to inform the design and marketing process. As the title of this post suggests, and as I've stated many times here in the last few years, the days of guessing at keywords used by target audiences are done for serious enterprise marketers. We need to rethink our approach to audience research, including what language and digital triggers are used, and we need a more focused view …

I've just begun reading Margaret Wheatley's "Leadership and the New Science," which applies cutting-edge theories from quantum physics and biology to the business world. Wheatley says that, rather than a mechanistic model that can be broken down into its composite parts, "unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation." The same revolution is happening online. It's no longer about the mechanistic parts, about the data; it's about the relationships. On the search front, this means the industry's desperate scramble -- and heretofore inability -- to make sense of the social …

Lately I've turned my attention more forcefully and specifically to the idea of conversion optimization, as distinct from SEO and paid search optimization. While it's completely understandable that search marketers focus primarily on generating the click, whether in paid or organic search results, what happens post-click is under-prioritized far too often.