Last week, search geeks from around the world converged on Park City, Utah for the 10th Search Insider Summit (SIS). Here are the top 10 buzzwords from SIS last week and the tweets that best embody them:

Each month, Mediapost provides me an opportunity to offer perspective on the search industry and the evolution I see it going through. To close out 2010, I thought it might be of interest to hear not from me about the importance of search and where it is going to take us, but from some of the brands that are living this change every day. As luck would have it, I moderated a fireside chat earlier today at the Search Insider Summit in Utah with marketers from Blackrock, Kimberly Clark and SAP. The following is a portion of the conversation in …

Wow! The Search Insider Summit is in full swing in Park City, Utah and for the first time in six or seven Summits, I'm not there. I don't mind saying, it's feeling kinda weird.

While it is easy to pigeonhole and skew the search process into a sort of linear, "searcher conducts search, searcher makes purchase" type of mentality, I've long prodded Search Insider readers to consider the possibilities of search beyond the simple text box, and beyond the desktop. To the contrary, and from both a technical and neural perspective, search engines can be as complex as human beings themselves.

Google recently launched a new AdWords feature called Call Metrics, currently available in limited release, allowing AdWords advertisers to measure the quantity of phone calls generated by AdWords ads. This is long-overdue functionality from Google AdWords, having spawned multiple call-tracking vendors over the years. With the growth of mobile search, as well, Call Metrics now opens greater opportunity to effective, trackable mobile search advertising.

If you caught "60 Minutes" last night on CBS, you saw Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg talking about -- while simultaneously launching -- new changes to the social network's interface. Such is the power of Facebook: getting "60 Minutes" to agree to be the launch pad for an upgrade to your company's main product is rare, if not unprecedented.

Both Black Friday and Cyber-Monday are now behind us, but electronic retailers still have time to take actions that can influence their bottom lines. Here are three last-minute paid search tips to help you snare interest -- and orders -- from shoppers this holiday season.

Web presence is taking on a whole new meaning. I'm having more and more conversations with companies that are in the middle of redefining who they are online. In that process, they're just not sure what they expose and what they keep hidden behind the kimono. Their website started as a marketing channel, but the explosion of potential customer touch points online makes the whole idea of a website seem hopelessly antiquated. Yet, there's a limit in scope and complexity that makes websites an easily grasped online concept.

First there was Black Friday. Then came Cyber Monday. Now there's Cyber Kickoff Day?!?After analyzing the 26-day period from Nov. 4th through Nov. 29th, it's clear that consumers aren't waiting until Cyber Monday to do their online shopping. Rather, they're firing up their computers immediately after dinner on Thanksgiving Day to begin the bargain hunting. "Hey Grandma, you gonna finish that stuffing, or keep messing around on Amazon?"