Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. He furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, and still had time to pioneer developments in carpentry and life insurance. Thomas Young was the human Google of his age. Today, our world is much more complex. There's too much knowledge to store in just one mind. So, we tend to find other places to keep it for when we need it. Hence the concept of transactive memory, which I touched …

Whether you believe Google bombing still works or not, the fact is that more conventional SEM tactics such as SEO and PPC are alive and well in their power to increase the search engine visibility for various types of digital assets. While Google's January 2007 publicity effort around a specific algorithm to neutralize link bombs caused many online activists to give up on linking initiatives, many others have branched out to new search tactics, including SEO, tagging, blogging, social media optimization and Google Earth.

Since its inception more than 10 years ago, the search industry has often been compared to the Wild West. The massive land grabs and black-hat tactics that defined the industry in the early days have for the most part subsided, as now most major businesses engage in some sort of online advertising, and best practices are shared among numerous industry organizations, publications, and conferences.

Yahoo has taken a real beating in the press and the blogosphere over the past week. A casual reading of this coverage would lead one to believe that Yahoo is on the verge of extinction, or at the very least, in the words of one commentator, "a company slowly spinning down into disaster." Let's separate the panic from the reality, folks. Nobody argues with the assertion that Yahoo, like any mature company, has to make a few mid-course corrections; but the whole idea that Yahoo is about to charge into an iceberg is the looniest example of negative hype I've …

By most accounts, the U.S. economy is about to enter the 12th recession since WWII. The last came in 2001 following the attacks on 9/11 and roughly a year and a half after the dot-com-fueled stock market reached its peak and began its rapid decline through the bubble bursting. Now, we find ourselves inside another economic downturn where the housing market and the lending institutions that support them have both been thrown into upheaval. It is also the first recession since Google's rise to prominence. In 2001, Google's market share was only 12%; now it is over 60%. It raises …

In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. Wegner called this transactive memory. With it, we don't have to remember everything. We just have to remember who knows what.

Yesterday I spoke on a panel titled "Search Engine Pricing: Click vs. Action" at the Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit. Unfortunately, my Search Insider deadline was prior to the session, so I'm not able to share the outcome. Nonetheless, I think the topic makes good column fodder.

If my mom decided to have a fifth child, perhaps if it were a boy he'd have been Aaron, Joachim, or Zeke. If it were a girl, perhaps she'd have been Susana, Elizabeth, or Annera. My mom's done having kids, so I'll never know for sure, but Nymbler thinks it can help expectant parents search for the perfect name. While I couldn't imagine ever having a baby brother named Zeke, the company behind Nymbler, Icosystem, thinks it can help people intuitively find the names that will suit them. Icosystem calls it a "hunch engine" for when you have an idea …

Most serious observers of the U.S. economy agree that we're already in a recession; the question for us in search marketing is how badly we'll all be hit. Here are my thoughts as the search ecosystem goes into its first negative economic cycle.

In the last 10 years -- the last five in particular -- we've seen a flurry of activity and development in the search marketing industry. Once relegated to a niche pursuit for a small club of tech-savvy marketers, search marketing is now a key component of the marketing mix and has found its seat at the table. But search marketing innovation has lagged behind, focusing largely on tactical considerations: responding to algorithm changes, quality score management, link building tips... the list goes on.