More than a few ruffled feathers and changes in what defines a search prompted comScore to release a new metric Monday called "Explicit Core Search," along with the July 2010 search market report. So, the data firm will report two versions of monthly search engine query stats, a change resulting from an increase in non-traditional searches. In a blog post comScore's Cameron Meierhoefer defines the metric as "user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results." The Core Search report will include a breakout that highlights Explicit Core Search. It will not include contextually-driven searches.

It sounds a little creepy, but effective. The content on a Web site that prompts people to open their wallets and spend more than $2,500 to design a closet showcasing Jimmy Choo shoes and Tory Burch shirts should give marketers a confidence boost by providing the tools to target very specific consumers. This technology digitally records every keystroke, click, and scroll up or down the page site visitors make. While Omniture and Webtrends count clicks, Clicktale records the movement, collects the raw data, and turns it into a segmented heat map. The data becomes searchable by specific criteria.

Breanna Wigle received a heads-up from her Unica rep early this morning that IBM would acquire the analytics firm. The CRM manager relies on Unica to support marketing automation and campaign management on Military.com, a division of Military Advantage. When it comes to marketing automation and campaign management, Unica can handle processes, she says, but the Web analytics platform remains a bit new to the process.

Internet Retailer recently published its annual Top 500 Guide. The findings, which now rely on Conductor's metrics to rank, suggest Hewlett-Packard, Amazon and ProFlowers are among the companies using search engine optimization most effectively in 2010. Did I write "search engine optimization?" Why, yes. Yes, I did.

Google quietly held a gaming conference, ThinkGaming, earlier this week to show analysts and marketers its view on the future of video games and opportunities in search and advertising to drive traffic and engagement.

As Google strengthens its focus on gaming to enter the social network space through a variety of acquisitions and Android development kits, Facebook has put out a call to find an executive who can spearhead deals with game publishers and development studios.

Now that Facebook has a real-time search engine pulling in data on its 500 million members through an API built by the social network, brands will soon have an opportunity to target ads based on search terms and keywords in status updates, something Facebook execs claimed the social site would never do. Think of it as a treasure hunt for new customers.

It's not often that Google execs get so disgusted with the press that someone publicly denounces a news report of a speculative event. That's what happened Thursday on Twitter (not Buzz) after The New York Times reported Google and Verizon nearing an agreement that would allow the telecom carrier to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if that content's creators paid for the privilege.

We're not quite at checkmate, but Google made moves Wednesday that resembles a strategic chess game. The Mountain View, Calif., tech company shut down services and made strategic acquisitions in everything from social sites to development tools.

How many spam emails do you get daily? Spam emails account for approximatively 88.9% of emails sent in June, down 0.4 percentage points, sequentially. One in 306.1 emails got blocked as malicious, down 0.04 percentage points, and 17.1% of email-borne malware contained links to malicious Web sites. That's the rundown from the MessageLabs Intelligence Security Report, July 2010.