Google and Yahoo are the favorite online brands for consumers, while young adults like MySpace just as much, reports JupiterResearch. The report took into account age, gender, online buying habits, and attitudes toward online marketing and other brands. The implication is that marketers doing co-branded campaigns or deep sponsorships with these brands should be able to fine-tune them for audience affinities, said David Card, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research.

Natala Menezes of MSN AdCenter announced on an SES panel that MSN will be offering contextual advertising for advertisers on the Microsoft AdCenter platform on many MSN properties that were previously available only to large advertisers. The ROI and quality are expected to be very high. Microsoft will turn on content network advertising by default. So advertisers using AdCenter today for a search term will automatically be included in ads on the content network after next Wednesday. This post starts off with an in-depth dive into several PPC case studies.

Jordan McCollum blogs about Google's China expansion and its new Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center designed to help AdWords advertisers report and avoid bad clicks -- as well as communicate with advertisers about click fraud. The post gets into how Google illustrates the subject visually. Google states that it automatically compensates for virtually all click fraud by using a click fraud rate it knows is too high. By creating "false positives" in click fraud, Google ensures that advertisers aren't overcharged. Google refers to this as "proactively detecting" click fraud.

Ross Dunn covers a session from SES San Jose on how search integrates with brand. Yahoo's Kelly Graziadei said Yahoo is testing various forms of universal search within results. For instance, a search on "Transformers" includes 10 organic rankings preceded by a graphic teaser for the movie trailer, reviews and show times. Scott Linzer, director of search marketing at Universal McCann, noted that taking the trouble to create locally targeted campaigns yields better results than a national approach. Lots more in this post from the session.

Barry Schwartz provides the roundup of links to other coverage of day one of SES: San Jose.

A new Online Search Behavior Study commissioned by search marketing firm iProspect revealed that 67% of searchers are driven online by offline channels, and 39% of offline-influenced searchers will go online to make a purchase. The Jupiter Research study was conducted in June 2007 using an online consumer panel of 2,322. They were asked about behaviors and attitudes as they relate to games, digital imaging, portable devices and service bundles. "Imagine what that number [of targeted searchers] would be if marketers actually made it easy for them [to find marketers' Web sites]," said iProspect President Robert Murray.

Put aside the issue of possible self-interest. Microsoft's Atlas has released new research to suggest that paying top dollar for high ad placement of branded keywords on search results pages (such as Google's) is a waste, because it's really a "glorified Yellow Pages listing." Atlas estimates listings tied to branded keywords eat up about half of search budgets. But most consumers who see them were on their way to those sites anyway. To reach its conclusion, Atlas studied 30 search ad campaigns reaching 120,000 users of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Nearly half the clicks on these ads came from …

Law professor Eric Goldman points out that American Airlines is the first big brand marketer to sue Google for keyword-triggered ads. Still, he thinks the lawsuit filed last week is a mistake because the time and money the airline giant could spend to litigate is likely to outweigh money lost to "diverted" customers -- on top of a perceived attempt to reduce consumer option. Goldman is skeptical that AA can win, based on previous litigation in this area. His blog also carries the full AA complaint.

No, not THAT Wenda. Wenda (as in wen da, meaning "ask and answer" in Chinese) is a new Q&A site in China powered by Google, in cooperation with Tianya.cn, a popular net forum in China, blogs report. It's reusing the same framework with which Google already launched a free Russian Q&A site recently. This would be Google's first .cn site accepting user registrations, but the site is using Tianya's ICP instead. The Internet Content Provider number is a badge handed out by the Chinese government to mark self-censorship conformant, legally operating .cn sites, meaning you can't use a Google account …

Serial entrepreneur Jason Calcanis, who likes to position himself as the arch-nemesis of search engine optimizers, is profiled by Adam Penenberg this month in a piece that traces the genesis of his new human-powered search engine Mahalo. Calcanis is the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and then Weblogs, Inc., which he sold to AOL for $25 million. He drew inspiration for Mahalo from his wife, who had put together a short email for friends and family with links to places to stay and things to do in Kauai, Hawaii, where they had their wedding. Calcanis wondered why search results couldn't …