• by Todd Friesen , October 8, 2010

Oh man, I'm worn out. This past week was SMX East in New York.  Three days of expert search marketers chitting and chatting about all things search. It's the fact so much of the conversations happen at 2 in the morning that's catching up to me in declining years (Yeah, Aaron Goldman - you'll feel the age too, one of these days). So what do you, my favorite readers, get after I've been to a conference the week my column is due? The Big Bucket of Odds and Ends, of course.

Odds and Ends #1 - The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is now largely useless. Google announced at SMX that the tool will now only provide keywords that Google deems commercial. Read that as "profitable.". The speaker from Google who delivered this news had a 75-minute session and started taking questions around the 10 minute mark. For the next hour the poor guy was basically the guy in the red shirt on the  Away Team in "Star Trek."

Odds and Ends #2 - Real-time search is blowing up. Remember the Google "Caffeine" update? That was all about indexing the web and returning results as fast as possible. One speaker reported having a blog post indexed and ranking within one minute of publishing. On top of that, Twitter is geared up to process your queries as fast as you can enter them. Twitter can process 12,000 queries per second right now. Simple math makes that 1 billion queries a day.

Odds and Ends #3 - There were a bunch of really interesting stats that got tossed around at SMX as well. Here's the best:

·       Google has 97% of the mobile browser search traffic

·       55% of queries are 3+ words and 20% of those are new queries

·       Google Instant has increased clicks on video results by 28%

·       Myspace quadrupled page indexing after reducing page load times