Are we set for a crash in the digital media industry? That's what fellow Search Insider Mark Simon suggests, noting that it could be similar to what happened in 2000/1 when "irrational exuberance intersected with fast-talking technology optimists, half-baked business plans, immature technology, credulous analysts, and too much stupid speculative money." I won't dispute Mark's comments about those crazy years or his observations that many of these same elements are in abundance today. I will, however, contest his assertion that this bubble will burst and have an adverse affect on search and online marketing.

How much should marketers care about Twitter? Twitter's main use is for communicating; it's a hybrid of instant messaging and blogging. But what about its use as a search engine of sorts?

n May of this year, Google announced the advent of what it called "Universal Search," which blends results from a wide array of multimedia objects into what had hitherto been an exclusively text-dominated SERP. The other engines quickly followed suit and modified their SERPs accordingly, making Universal Search a genuine trend, if not an actual craze. And yet in the past several weeks, Google's SERP appears to have reverted to its old, text-heavy format. Google's defenders will certainly claim that it's merely tweaking its algorithm again, but I'd venture a guess that Google has quietly concluded that Universal Search is …

The recent flurry of consolidation in the advertising space -- including Google's intended $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, which recently launched an ad exchange, Yahoo's recent $680 million acquisition of the 80 percent of Right Media it did not already own, and Microsoft's purchases of aQuantive and AdECN -- points to the fact that ad exchanges will play an important role in the way advertising is bought and sold in the future.

It's not easy being a consumer. Current estimates indicate that the average urban dweller is exposed to between 3,000 and 5,000 advertising messages every day. That means, settling on the middle number, that every waking hour (sleep seems to be our only reprieve, and I hear they're working on that) you're presented with an ad every 14.4 seconds. That's every 14.4 seconds, every minute of every day you're alive. The frequency of this advertising barrage has doubled in the past 30 years.

Like many others in the search marketing industry, I have quite a voracious appetite for news and info to keep up with the never-ending changes in the search landscape, and on big news days I might cover dozens of sources. So in the spirit of the folks who write email newsletters about email newsletters, link to pages that link to pages about linking, or place search engine ads about search engine ads, here is my search column about search columns (or, for others who prefer the alternate terminology, my search blog about search blogs), highlighting a select group of search …

Google famously ordered the importance of Web pages based on the quantity and quality of other links pointing to each page. In this era of the Web's evolution fueled largely by social media, are there better ways to rank this consumer-generated content?

Online advertising spending is healthy, and most people in the industry seem to believe that the industry faces nothing more challenging than a few speed bumps on its way to inevitable dominance of advertising as a whole. But there's increasing evidence that the road to digital ad dominance will be a lot rougher, with a lot more road kill, than the optimists would have you believe. Why? Because the current online ad industry has many characteristics of a classic speculative bubble.

On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Yahoo and Microsoft are adding new features as part of their ongoing attempts to convince the world that they are serious contenders to the Google throne. Yahoo will provide on-the-fly query suggestions, while Microsoft is quadrupling the size of its index. Both companies are touting the fact that they will soon include links to photos and video on the results pages. Hmmm... where have I heard this before? In addition to Google's own Universal Search, I mean. Oh, yeah! Ask.com did this back in June!

This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn't really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it's another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user's point of view. To illustrate that point further I'd like to share a couple of stories with you.