Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster has become the latest analyst to suggest Apple needs to build a long-term search strategy to protect the data it generates from the more than 74 million mobile devices it has already shipped.

They're not really vigilantes, but they police the SEM industry and watch each other's backs, taking matters into their own hands when outsiders do a disservice to the industry. One might consider these white-hat marketing professionals the unsung heroes of the Web's Wild West.

Is the value of an online lead greater than a traditional offline media lead? That question, debated during the Vertical Ad Network Revisited panel last week at the BIA/Kelsey conference in San Diego, Calif., appears to put search at the center of supporting online advertising campaigns.

Lexalytics added a cloud computing reputation management service to its traditional in-house platform. It gives small companies the ability to monitor buzz about them across the Web.

Garmin created a name for itself in global positioning systems. But when competitor TomTom wanted to edge its way up to the top of the product listing on retail Web sites, Jeff Gores, then with Mediaedge:cia, (he's now search director at SMG Search, New York) was there. Gores relied on a technology that pushed TomTom up from position No. 20 to No.1.

It appears small businesses have become more comfortable with paid search advertising. The average small business spent $2,149 on search advertising in Q4 2009, up 30% sequentially, and up 111% compared with the same quarter in the prior year.

"We're no more in the real estate business than we are in the restaurant business," Sam Sebastian, director of local and B2B Markets at Google, told BIA/Kelsey conference attendees Monday in San Diego. He was making that statement to emphasize the reasoning behind Place Pages for Google Maps, which initially emerged to support the real estate market.

Marketers who won't launch a paid search campaign because they find the process daunting may want to consider a recently launched marketplace that allows them to instantly jump in and swim without drowning.

Is search also behavioral targeting? Why are advertisers spending so much effort on search and not porting the keywords over and buying the audiences in display advertising? These were among the questions discussed during an OMMA Global San Francisco panel on whether the ad industry will realize the promise of precise ad targeting.

Some believe Pepsi's Refresh project has shifted the conversation between marketers and consumers from an adversarial relationship to a partnership. Yet Andrew Katz, senior manager for Pepsi-Cola Marketing, knows the company will experience bumps along the way. It's okay, he say, because that's the new world of marketing.