Why would you hire someone who wasn't as passionate as you are? For that matter, why would you work for someone whose passion you didn't share?

Though Americans get the fewest number of paid vacation days in the industrialized world, we fail to take even that (comparatively) small allocation, giving back, according to Expedia, a total of 436 million days per year. So in this column, I encourage you to log off if you haven't yet this year.

Two weeks ago, I read a provocative statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Here's an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article in which he's quoted: "'I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,' he [Schmidt] says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."

In my last Search Insider, I took you on a neurological tour that gave us a glimpse into how our brains are built to read. Today, let's dig deeper into how our brains guide us through an online hunt for information.

In my ongoing campaign to bring sexy back to search, I thought I'd take one of the hottest companies on the interweb and relate it to search marketing. Groupon is everywhere. From your inbox to the "Today Show," you can't escape the appeal of collective buying power. Here are 50% of the top 20 ways search marketing is sexy like Groupon. Note: if 100 people give this column a thumbs-up, I'll share the other 50% in my next column.

One thing that never fails to amaze me about the human race is how predictably we lie to ourselves. I recently attended a talk by Peter de Jager, a change management guy, in which he pointed out that any argument against the uptake of a new technology that involves its size or price is useless. "Nobody will ever use a computer at home because they are way too big and expensive," etc. We laugh about those statements now, and yet we continue to say similar things about newer technologies. I like the way Peter thinks, and I'm going to apply …

Value is created by the end consumer, and everything flows back up the food chain from there. This seems really simple, but all too often this gets over-thought and muddled with the confusion of one's organizational place within the food chain. History has seen it before, and our industry is rich in change and opportunity with lots of exposed risk

The problem with search is that the object of the game is not to search. Hide and Seek is a game about being found. Where search today fails us is that it is still very much about the hunt -- and not the kill.

How do we read? How do we take the arbitrary, human-made code that is the written word and translate it into thoughts and images that mean something to our brain, an organ that had its basic wiring designed thousands of generations before the appearance of the first written word? What is going on in your skull right now as your eyes scan the black squiggly lines that make up this column?

A frequent warning heard from sociologists and network theorists is that "exclusion from networks" represents one of the greatest sociological and economic threats that future global societies could possibly encounter. In light of the recent pact between Google and Verizon on net neutrality, and their combined position that somehow "wireless internet networks are different," one of the societies now at the crossroads of this dilemma is the United States.