Marketers are concerned about the influence real-time Web results will have on their respective company's query ranking in the top half of organic search results. They believe that real-time feeds from Twitter, Facebook and others could push company listings below the fold.

Paid search, affiliate, and marketing top the list as the most desirable marketing strategies for U.S. retailers, but most companies that take ecommerce services international don't use them to their full potential, according to a Forrester Research report released earlier this month.

Allowing marketers to bid on trademarked keywords they don't own has been a bit of a gray issue for search engines. For starters, some marketers turned it into a strategy, bidding up competitor's keywords to gain the upper hand. But as the traditional business model for paid search transitions from Google into other platforms, such as Twitter, trademark infringement may become an issue for many companies.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors on Sunday, he told the crowd the industry has "a business model problem, not a news problem," according to reports. So what's the next step in finding alternatives to generate revenue? Thinkalong the lines of online video games supported by AdSense on publisher Web sites, in social networks like Facebook, and on mobile devices, such as phones and Google's tablet.

Idealab founder Bill Gross unveiled a search engine for Twitter Monday allowing people to bid on keywords that can move tweets up in search results. The platform combines a bid-based marketplace with algorithm-based triggers that consider popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters.

Now Google has real competition. That's the sentiment from most advertising and marketing executives I spoke with after hearing news of Apple's iAd advertising system.

The top 500 Internet retailers spent approximately $1.2 million per day on 88,758 keywords in Q4 2009, but only 33% of their highest-priced keywords appeared in the top 50 natural search engine query results, according to a report released Thursday by Conductor, a company that provides SEO services.

Google's Web browser, Chrome, continues to gain market share, rising from 5.6% in February 2010 to 6.1% in March, according to data from NetApplications. The research firm estimates Chrome will hit 10% market share by year's end. So I set out to determine whether Chrome's rise in popularity would increase Google's ability to target display ads.

As Yahoo relinquishes the backend of its paid search advertising platform to Microsoft Bing, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company continues to run into problems. So I'm taking the cue from my MediaPost colleague Erik Sass, who recently gave Google a little sympathy based on the Buzz privacy debacle. I'm asking everyone to pause for a moment to give Yahoo a little love. (Okay, that's enough.)

Google Buzz will begin rolling out a new privacy setting Monday for those using Gmail's social network add-on tool. People logging in to Buzz will see a confirmation screen that requires them to confirm preference privacy settings, including a list of subscribers to their feed. It's not clear if the changes come a little too late.