Free online video content continues to gain attention from consumers. Most want it in an instant. More than half of surveyed respondents admit to spending more time obtaining or viewing online movie and online television content than they did a year ago, but spend about the same amount of money. While consumers spend more time online viewing video content, much of that content is free, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study.

Intent matters. Search marketing execs insist that's the key to successful campaigns. Turn on personalized search in Google, Bing or Yahoo and type a keyword phrase in the search query box. Hit "enter" to search. The engine learns from the searches and serves up content it deems worthy. But do you learn from the results, or does the query serve up the same old stale content?

The Web is filled with interesting data, but for most it's not easily mined. The search engine Blekko launched a tool Wednesday that reveals coded information embedded in Web pages. It reveals patterns or strings, such as sites that discuss and review Lady Antebellum's latest album, as well as the number of Google +1s, Facebook Likes or Twitter tweets related to Apple's rumored intention to spice up MacBook for the holiday, for example.

It took the realization that not all online advertising firms could provide brands with everything for industry execs to come to their senses. So it's a good thing the Web's back-end infrastructure lends itself easily to integrating disparate platforms. Just as brand marketers are aware that technology is increasingly important to online advertising, platform companies understand what it takes to acquire the in-house engineering support to produce better-performing ads.

Creating the perfect -- or near-perfect -- search marketing campaign comes down to having the technology to analyze consumer search behavior in real-time, as well as support promotional calendars, product inventory levels and pricing information. One partnership claims to achieve that goal.

The headline might infer that the article outlines Thursday's major power outage that cut electricity to more than 1.4 million homes and businesses in California's South Orange County and San Diego County, as well as parts of Arizona. Commuters were stuck on empty at gas stations, ATM machines couldn't spit out cash, and traffic snarled to a near standstill because signals didn't flash green or red.

Adobe's acquisition of Omniture continues to influence its marketing tools. The latest involves a partnership with OptiMine Software to build out the Adobe SearchCenter+, a search marketing management system in the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The deal integrates keyword performance predictive analytics and analyzes unique characteristics of individual keywords to -- in theory -- deliver a higher return in investment (ROI) compared with cluster-based modeling, where bids are defined in groups of similar keywords.

Two-and-a-half years into her four-year contract, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz got fired. There are plenty of reasons why it happened -- from a decline in search and display advertising revenue to falling stock prices to the Alibaba fiasco that left Yahoo lacking a strong presence in Asia.

Seat belts clicked free after passing under the Old West Ranch sign that hung above the dirt road leading through Blackburn Canyon near Tehachapi, Calif. The mountain community, recovering from a fire last year and filled with deer, bears and other wildlife, became a retreat on Saturday for a little rest and relaxation.

Semantic search and extraction of data from natural language and pictures continues to be an important trend. Recently, Hewlett-Packard confirmed rumors that it would acquire Autonomy, a semantic-based tool used to extract information from non-structured data such as text.