• Recency in Real-Time Search: It's Much Broader Than Just 'Right Now'
    Having just come off a great discussion about real-time search on an OMMA Global New York panel last week, I gained a sense that my co-panelists and I are as much in the mode of educating as we are talking about strategy (which is fine given the somewhat recent emergence of the topic in marketing and ad circles). So today I want to back up and talk a bit about the new R-word in search, "recency," and how an expanded definition of what we think is "real time" will also expand the real-world marketing discussions on the topic as well.
  • Storm Clouds In The Cloud
    I've come back from getting married to find a cloud of red dust blanketing Sydney and a cloud of controversy blanketing that other cloud. You know, the SaaS one.
  • Brands Aren't Dead On Yahoo News
    If you're convinced that the search engines have it in for branded content -- including branded news -- then I'd like you to consider the new Yahoo search. Specifically, I'd like you to consider the search filtering option from Yahoo's newly launched search features.
  • Convenience Vs. Destination
    Every summer, millions of people take time off for the annual family vacation. Families take to planes, trains and automobiles in search of an escape from their day-to-day grind. Yet, during these tough economic times, many families have chosen convenience over destination. Fewer families headed to Disney's theme parks and more headed to their closest lake or amusement park. Likewise, high-end vacations such as international travel and cruises all saw declines during the past twelve months.At some point during 2010, this reality will come to search marketing in the form of the Bing-Yahoo merger.
  • Give Us Something To Talk About In Park City
    From Dec. 2-5, in the ski hills of Park City, Utah, a bunch of really smart search marketers will get together to share what's on our minds at the Search Insider Summit. The almost seven months that have passed since the spring show in Florida have been interesting ones. I've taken a quick look back at the Search Insider columns in that time to see what things we were writing about....
  • Even More On: Everything I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Google
    In my last two columns, I've offered the following 15 marketing lessons learned from Google and examples of folks applying them. More than just tidbits to maximize SEM programs, these are principles that can be applied to all facets of marketing. Of course, the irony in all this is that Google is a company that's proudly spent very little on advertising. Accordingly, perhaps the most important lesson of them all is that marketing is so much more than just advertising.
  • The Continuing Big Brother Debate
    Two recent developments once again raise the debate about the degree to which individual privacy on the Internet is under attack by publishers, marketers and their predatory algorithms -- or what is now known generally as "Big Brother." First, there's the recent settlement of lawsuits brought against Facebook for its disastrous service called Beacon. The other news -- from boston.com, the online home of The Boston Globe -- describes recent student research at MIT. Students in a class on ethics and the law undertook a project to see if sexual orientation of an individual could be determined by examining "friending" …
  • The G Spot
    I'm the first to be critical of Google and I stand by my earlier statements that they make it too hard to do business with them, but they do still have some great products. A few of which I think are on the spot and deserve applause. Fast Flip, Google Books, and the Library Project are all fantastic initiatives with strong mobile components that are well-timed to broad consumer adoption of smart phones.
  • Do We Need A Different Kind Of Search Conference?
    Something's been bothering me for the last few years. In that time, I've probably spoken at two to three dozen industry events: trade shows, summits, conferences and workshops. In fact, this week, I'm at one such event - a user summit. Throughout that entire time, I've felt that there's a fundamental disconnect at these events. And this week, I think I've finally put my finger on it: the wrong people are attending.
  • Real-Time Search Is Much Bigger Than Just Twitter
    I'm not sure why, but the phrase "real-time search" has somehow largely become associated with the phrase "Twitter search." While much of the conversation around real-time search centers conceptually on Twitter search and other engine algorithms that remix their data, the fact is that the Google crawl and many other viable contributors are critical to getting a fresh and relevant answer in real-time, though they are often lost in the discussion. Make no mistake about it, crawler-based real-time search and status-update search are both important to the successful development of a state-of-the-art robust and relevant real-time search engine.
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