Search

Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them.

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

Microsoft’s plan to establish a strong footing in online advertising suffered a big blow on Thursday as merger talks with Yahoo finally, formally failed and Yahoo said it would let Google sell search ads on its site.

Engine Ready's two-year study, "SEO vs. PPC -- The Final Round," found that paid listings enjoyed an edge over organic search results. Visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something and spent about 18 percent more on each order.

With its Broadband TV platform, Blinkx adds something new to the glut of websites that feature television content. BBTV offers speech tracks for all of its content, not only providing a captioning, but clickable options to gather more information. Equally helpful, you can use search terms to jump to relevant spots in the clip. No advertising yet, but Blinkx says it's coming. Clickable and searchable, I hope.

While showing off its video search platform for the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association, Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger suggested that his company is poised for the future of online video advertising. What will that be? Chiefly, a non-interruptive experience. Right now, Digitalsmiths enables companion ads that are contextually relevant to what's being shown. Down the road, he expects, ads and entertainment will blend seamlessly together.

Recent acquisition aQuantive brings Microsoft's ad placement capabilities (display, video, text) beyond MSN to cover the remainder of the Web. It also helps Microsoft compete with Google, whose DoubleClick acquisition just became official. Microsoft's Mike Galgon believes that consolidation and other factors will cause 80 percent of the online ad placement to be covered by Google and Microsoft, while the remainder will be a fragmented mix of local and vertical ad networks.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization released preliminary findings that media budgets are moving into search engine marketing from other marketing categories, both offline and online. SEMPO gives total search marketing spends of $9.4 billion in 2006, $12.2 billion in 2007 and estimates $18.6 billion in 2011.

Despite gloomy economic forecasts, the future of advertising looks rosy, especially online. eMarketer estimates total US advertising growth of 3.3 per cent in 2008 with online spending growing by 23 per cent.

Google is the internet's unofficial simplicity ambassador. A vanilla front page, ad campaigns you conduct in two very short lines, and now a direct threat against landing pages that load far too leisurely. Google announced in its AdWords blog that page load will now impact search advertisers' Quality Scores. We've argued for months that slow-loading pages come at a cost to campaigns. Now they'll add cost to your keyword buys too.