Chris Silver Smith does a long, deep dive into geolocation -- just what it is, how it works, and how it's being used. Geolocation tends to be used to discuss various aspects of online marketing with location-specific components. It is becoming a vital component to the policing of fraud -- particularly credit card validation and filtering of PPC advertising clicks.

Information Week's Stephen Wellman poses the question, "Will Google Be Destroyed By Open Source Search Engines?" Jimmy Wales's Wikia stands a chance, Wellman says. It depends in part on whether a mishmash of random crawls from the Web will be an adequate substitute to a centralized effort. If nothing else, Wellman sees Wikia as the catalyst both vertical search and local search advocates have been seeking. The threat to Google, he says, will come from thousands of specialty engines and Web apps. He points to Technorati for blog search and Blinkx for video search as two upstarts that …

Information Week's Stephen Wellman poses the question, "Will Google Be Destroyed By Open Source Search Engines?" Jimmy Wales's Wikia stands a chance. It depends in part, he says, on whether a mishmash of random crawls from the Web will be an adequate substitute to a centralized effort. If nothing else, he sees Wikia as the catalyst both vertical search and local search advocates have been seeking. The threat to Google, he says, will come from thousands of specialty engines and Web apps. He points to Technorati for blog search and Blinkx for video search as two upstarts that …

Richard MacManus and readers from the Read/Write Web blog conducted an email interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, lead software engineer for personalization. Sep founded Kamvar, the search engine Google acquired in 2003. He talks about privacy, computing a page rank for every single person, and the use of Gmail-derived information to target search ads (Not happening, he says.). Sep also fields critiques showing Google personal search yielding worse results than the original.

Diane Aull weighs the pros and cons involved with renaming files or registering a new domain to get more keywords into your URL. She tries to answer the question, does the SEO value in having keyword phrases in your URL make it worthwhile to move existing pages to a new address? There are definitely pros and cons, so if you're contemplating this move, check out her analysis.

If charts and bell curves make your mornings, this post's for you. A visitor to Seomoz.org analyzes Google's change to its advertisement algorithm that makes the top ad position determined by the maximum bid rather than the highest actual cost-per-click. The blogger pegs this as a very smart move for Google's potential revenue; using charts galore, he looks at the impact it will have on business bidding behavior. This change is an important development and one anyone who cares about their search ranking needs to understand.

For fear that we skip over the basics, particularly on a Friday in August, let's remember that content is king on the Internet -- just as it's always been on TV and any other medium. But the difference is that today, content -- ads included -- is all about engaging consumers with highly targeted messages, something not intended for the masses. That's where search and social media fit in. The lesson for marketers here is to make sure campaigns reach out and grab that potential consumer with information when and where they need it. The post concludes that …

Want to make your site more search-engine-friendly? Here's some tips on how to do it from a real live case study. A Miami Beach resort needed a makeover of its online marketing, so the managers brought in a Colorado marketing firm, Blizzard Internet Marketing, for the fix. Here's how the firm redesigned the site to increase the page views: It improved the navigation and call-to-action buttons so they were easier to follow and restructured the site to make it easier to add new pages. Links were also converted to rich anchor text, which is more inviting to search engines. …

Are your ads powered by all the right search engines? Check out this post, which recommends that marketers focus on just the three biggies -- Google, Yahoo and MSN. The writer argues that you're wasting your money if you're doing anything more than that. But the post fails to mention that search is becoming more and more specialized, with more players in vertical niches. So maybe these three will not always be the kings they are now.

Venture capitalist Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners recently highlighted what he believes is the next generation of search. Speaking at the Always-On annual conference at Stanford University, McNamee said that search will become a lot more personal, with trusted friends exchanging information online about things they know something about. "I don't know where this is going, but I'm absolutely certain it will be huge," said McNamee, who likened this new-fangled search to "three degrees of separation." I don't think McNamee (yes, the same guy who invested in Forbes) has any of these kind of search startups in his …