Whatever the result of the legal proceedings against four Google employees in Italy, the trial will be a watershed moment for video search. For all the legal discussion, this is ultimately a search problem -- specifically, a problem for video search.

My last two columns explored decisiveness within a very defined scope: college students picking courses. I did that by analyzing an interesting study conducted by Wesleyan University, which used eye tracking to show how decisive and indecisive people differed in their processing of information. The research reminded me of a study we did 7 years ago tracking different ways people use search results.

This is the fourth in a series of columns I'm publishing in MediaPost featuring interviews I've conducted while writing my book, "Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From Google." Today is a 2-for-1 special with Paul Gunning and John Battelle. Gunning is CEO at Tribal DDB Worldwide. Battelle is CEO of Federated Media (FM) Publishing, and author of "The Search," a book that stands the test of time as the defining narrative on the rise of Google and the importance of search. So, what did these captains of industry learn from Google? Read on...

A client recently presented us with the ultimate challenge: over a short time frame (one month), show us what social media can do in comparison to AdWords. If you have any dealings at all with social media, you'll know this is nearly an impossible task....

Last week's announcement of Google's (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up founded by -- you guessed it -- a group of ex-Googlers, actually received a fair amount of buzz. Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google's release of Google Buzz. Which, of course, follows last year's buzz about Google Wave. So how are these related and what, you may ask, do Aardvark, Buzz and Wave have to do with search?

Decision-makers use two different strategies: a compensatory one where they weigh all the options, and a non-compensatory one where they start eliminating candidates based on the criterion most important to them. Indecisive people tend to start with the compensatory strategy and decisive people go right for the linear approach.

A study on SERP click rates found that the sites surveyed received more than 95% of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one results pages across all three major engines. The data included 8.9 million queries sampled over nine months, representing 10 enterprise-level Web sites in many different diverse verticals.

Exactly nine days ago, millions of viewers were treated to a world first. I'm not talking about the Saints winning their first-ever NFL championship; I'm talking about Google running a commercial. No doubt you'll have seen it already: the young man who spends a semester in Paris, forever changing his life. No doubt you've also seen the Tiger Woods and Sarah Palin parodies. Genuine or spoof, the commercials hone in on one of the fundamental characteristics of search: that search is a tool for us to hone in on the core of what is bothering, amusing, or intriguing us at …

Google's latest push into the social space is trying to address previous shortcomings by leveraging previous successes. Google has long felt pressured by Facebook (more so now with its love dance with Microsoft), and enhancing Gmail with social networking features like status updates along with photo and video sharing is a necessary step for Google.

Five days after the world premiere of a Google commercial during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, I remain impressed by Google's traditional advertising debut. Unlike Bing's television campaign that includes a creepy vampire, Google's commercial told a classic story, a love story. It made us feel warm and fuzzy inside. I remain impressed by Google today for also being the clear winner in terms of cross-channel integration of its campaign.