There's been a lot of coverage lately regarding Google's efforts to crack the mobile search nut. As the Internet landscape solidifies and more and more inventory is locked up via long-term deals or acquisitions, it appears Google is looking to the mobile frontier to extend its reach and drive incremental ad revenue.

If you were able to, in any rough sense, predict the results of the U.S. elections last week for either chamber of our bicameral legislature (and, yes, I've been waiting years to use "bicameral" in a column), then you can feel pretty good about yourself. It means you have a leg up on the search engines.

With Google announcing that it's launching both a newspaper advertising program and contextual radio ads, I'm left wondering if Yahoo will ever follow suit, rolling out a traditional media arm of its own. I'll save you the anticipation and get to the answer right away: the answer is no, absolutely not, Yahoo will never enter the traditional advertising space.

I woke up Monday morning to find it was 2001 and the bubble was bursting again. Panicked, I updated my resume, prepared to reach out to my clients to try and get to the safe haven of corporate America, and finally dusted off my good interview suit. What sent me into this tail-spinning panic? An article titled "Troubled Times for SEO Firms."

Earlier this year I predicted a showdown between search engines and consumers around privacy issues. I suspect the recent complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission about "invasive and deceptive" online advertising practices could be the harbinger of the coming storm.

On the "Linking and Optimization" panel at Ad:Tech Chicago in July, I was asked the following question by an audience member: "Which do you think is factored more heavily by the search engines--off-page elements or on-page elements"?

How do you define successful innovation? And is it possible that a new Google service could be neither wildly successful nor innovative, and yet still have a lasting impact on how people search? Questions such as these came to mind when Google recently launched its Custom Search Engine (CSE) as part of its Google Co-Op project.

Last week, Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post revived a suggestion that he had first brought up in June: Microsoft, Post argued, ought to buy Yahoo. Post pointed to reasons why Yahoo might be worth more than its current so-so earnings suggest; he also observed that a Yahoo purchase would let Microsoft gain serious search revenue, even before MSN AdCenter gets up to speed in growing its advertiser base.

In June of 2006, paid-search advertisers worldwide let out a collective sigh of relief as Google AdWords introduced dayparting capabilities to its campaign management interface. Now that we have the option, it's time to consider which dayparting tactics and strategies make the most sense for any given campaign

Of all the things that Google's lawyers have in their basket, apparently stamping out inappropriate use of "Google" as a verb is right on top of the stack. It apparently irks them no end.