Social search. It's become the buzziest of buzz words in the search space over the past 12-18 months. Google+, Facebook's Graph Search, and a host of other companies and signals of consumer data utilized for rankings have made this the hottest topic for discussion of where search is going.

The darling of the newest class of consumer technologies is undoubtedly Google's Glass. Sleek, beautiful, exciting Glass eyewear delivers a persistent layer of augmented reality (AR) to its users/wearers. It enhances the real world with additional metadata about a wearer's surroundings, performs a range of user-instructed functions, and introduces several means of communication fluidly across its interface. It's the type of technological advancement that could make the staunchest of Apple fan boys forget all about Siri. And it runs on Android.

A few columns back, I talked about psychological priming and how it could play out in a search environment. In today's column, I'd like to talk about a related concept: value anchoring.

An article by SearchEngineLand's Barry Schwartz recounts recent findings that image search traffic may have dropped up to 63% this past January. The decline appears to be a result of a change made by Google to the way the search engine presents images to users selecting Image Search as an option. Before January, sites containing images accessed through Image Search were loaded into the background; now they are not. So what are your options?

I have wasted a significant portion of my life dealing with BS. Mea culpa. I decided to become a marketer and it just comes with the territory. But here's the thing. Maybe it's cause I'm older, maybe it's because I'm just getting grumpier, but I'm getting less and less tolerant of BS.

While at SXSW last month, I found myself at dinner seated next to a woman who is a well-respected social media strategist. We chatted about a dozen odd topics, but when I confided that I'm a huge Facebook fan and power user, she laughed. Facebook is last year's news. The kids have moved on. So it was with great interest that I watched (perhaps through the lens of newfound skepticism) the Facebook phone announcement last week. Getting the kids to come back to Facebook could be Home's biggest feat. I see three ways this could happen:

We all have our horror stories about online customer service. Just in the past two weeks, I added two more to my collection.

You have thought about the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) from the point the customer hits the landing page through checkout. Now, for a truly seamless ecommerce experience, it's time to consider the UX in your SEM campaigns. You created your site's organization for ease of customer use, so let's extend that organization to your advertising.

It's somewhat ironic that, as a die-hard Darwinist, I find myself in the position of defending strategy against the onslaught of Big Data. Since my initial column on this subject a few months ago, I've been diving deeper into this topic. Here's the irony.

While the groundhog might have been wrong about when winter ended, there is no escaping the fact that (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) the cold weather will eventually make way for springtime. It's time for the yearly ritual of spring cleaning. Search marketers should consider this type of cleaning for themselves as well, taking this opportunity to look at their account structures, keywords, ad creative and media mix models -- but that's not the cleanup I'm here to talk about today. It's time to look at all the ad technology solutions you have assembled over the winter and do …