Take a look at the Google Analytics chart to the right.

Now imagine yourself waking up one day to see your web site’s traffic taking such a dramatic drop.

Did you get banned by Google? Is your site down?

Nope! But everyone just opted out of Google Analytics–rendering your dashboard useless.

Far fetched? Not too much. Not when you consider that Google has decided to build a browser plugin that will allow web users to prevent their data being collected by Google Analytics.

Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

Say it with me: crap!

Why would Google cripple a product that doesn’t really reveal any personal information about a visitor to your site. OK, so in theory, you could track down an IP or network host and possibly string together their browsing habits and maybe figure out where they live, but does that warrant such a move?

What I don’t get is the double standards Google is displaying here. Basically, us site owners can’t be trusted with anonymous data, but Google can continue to invade a user’s privacy by keeping their search history? Where’s the plugin that lets me opt-out of Google keeping–and analyzing–my search history? Heck, there’s not even an easy way to opt-out of personalized search results!

C’mon Google. What’s good for us, is good for you. If you’re truly taking a stand on protecting a user’s privacy, let’s not keep one foot planted on a big ole rock of hypocrisy!

Mark your calendars for April 10!

That’s the day that Google is reportedly going to officially pull out of China, with the announcement coming as early as Monday.

According to Bloomberg (via China Business News) this is all based on a tip from an anonymous sales person inside Google’s Chinese office–I could make a bad joke about the game of Chinese Whispers, but I won’t.

Anyway, I really can’t help but ponder the real reason Google is pulling out. Is it because of the security issues? Is it because the search engine is struggling to dominate the search market? Surely its decision isn’t purely a stance on censorship. After all, China’s not the only country that requires Google to censor its results:

In Turkey, it’s a crime to defame the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk or to ridicule "Turkishness." So Google restricts access to videos that the government of Turkey deems illegal on google.com.tr.

In Germany, France and Poland, it is illegal to publish pro-Nazi material or content that denies the Holocaust. To comply with those countries’ laws, Google does not display links to those sites on its search results pages on the company’s German site google.de, French site google.fr or Polish site google.pl.

Yet, Google’s not pulling out of those countries anytime soon. Which makes me think that "censorship" is a nice clean–publicly supported–reason to quietly noisily shutter its China operations, without having to admit defeat.

PS. There’s one search engine that can’t wait for Google to exit China–Baidu’s shares are skyrocketing!

Yesterday at OMMA Global in San Francisco, US Cellular illustrated a unique way they were using search campaigns: to test calls to action for their print campaigns. According to MediaPost:

U.S. Cellular tested six paid-search campaigns to determine the one targeted message that would reap the biggest rewards and conversions. “The messaging is limited because you have 70 characters, so it won’t be exactly the same message, but you can see specific calls to action that might work better than others,” [EVP & Managing Director of SMG Search Jill] Balis explains.

Of course, print and PPC are two very different media—what works for one might not work for the other. PPC requires only a click to act, where print requires a lot more initiative for the consumer to take action. However, identifying which calls to action encourage users to click may help narrow down which ones are more effective at getting them to put down what they’re reading and go to the phone or computer.

Cross-medium integration is becoming ever-more important:

Balis says about 80% of online sessions begin with search and 67% of searchers are driven to search from an offline channel, followed by 37% from television, 30% from newspapers, and 20% from in-store point of purchase. Search accelerates consumers down the purchase funnel, from creating to capturing demand.

So print does have at least some power in driving people online. (I’m a little confused by MediaPost’s wording here—67% come from an offline channel not including TV, newspapers or point of purchase? Are they sure that’s not 67% of searchers are driven from an offline channel, and of those 37% are from TV, etc.?)

What do you think? Would the same calls to action work for PPC as for print?

Google is testing a new opportunity for companies to advertise in Google Maps. While the tests are only being run Down Under (Australia) it doesn’t mean that they are being secretive. The idea is a way to for companies to make their listings on Google Maps stand out a bit more thus increasing their exposure. While this would seem to be perfectly suited for mobile users it is currently only being rolled out on desktop and notebook environments.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports

Google has begun putting ads on its popular maps pages in Australia, a sign that the search engine giant wants to convert more of the high traffic to its websites into advertising dollars.

Logos for Bankwest, JB Hifi, LJ Hooker, NAB and Chemist Warehouse have started to appear on maps when users zoom in close.

Australia is the first country to trial display ads in maps which, if successful, will be rolled out across the world, the company said today.

The ads look like this

The article continues by reporting that the model will be impressions based for advertisers.

But, unlike Google’s usual advertising model where advertisers must bid for certain keywords for their ads to appear in paid for search listings, Google is reverting to a more traditional ad model of charging companies every time a web user sees their logo on the page.

And this being Google it is not as simple as a company paying for its logo to be on the maps. Advertisers must be ‘‘relevant’’ to be listed and for Google to allow their logos to appear on its maps pages.

Google is taking its usual approach by putting the user experience above all else, officially, but we all know that this is about money in the long run. This particular addition to maps could be a strong one though, because the visual cue of a logo that has relevance to a search could very well impact search behavior. People want to be led through the search process and anything that involves images speeds that process along more easily. Boy, that really says a lot about us search users doesn’t it?

Right now, there is nothing to report as to if this will ever be done outside of Australia. Of course, if there is even a modicum of success you can expect to see this on your maps in the US and elsewhere sooner than later.

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Each month we tell you about reports that have come out which talk about the fact that Google is still leading in search. It pains me to write these sometimes because there is nothing to make anyone stand up and take notice. I think we all get it that Google is the dominant search engine across the board.

Where it can get interesting, though, is just how dominant Google is in search for a major business segment online: the enterprise. The latest findings from iCrossing have been reported by MediaPost. To be fair, the author of the article I am referring to is an iCrossing employee. In this instance, though, there is less concern for results being “skewed” since there is no real advantage to iCrossing in reporting these findings (other than some market exposure, of course).

So what’s the difference between Google in general and Google with regard to enterprise search? Even more dominance. Sorry all of you bing and Yahoo folks who would like to see something else. The reality is that when people are searching for business information Google is clearly the search engine of choice. I know it is for me personally. I’ll let some pictures tell the story.

With Google having 80% of the enterprise search market it becomes a bit ridiculous to consider that bing is gaining on Yahoo and AOL lost 25% of its enterprise search traffic according to the study. It feels nearly irrelevant but considering the overall size of the market can you afford to ignore the 16% of the enterprise search market that bing and Yahoo currently hold?

So rather than ponder the “Why is this so?” questions let’s consider another angle. As marketers, whether you are working with enterprise accounts or not, what percentage of your efforts in search are focused on Google? Is it 80%? Is it higher? How do you really view bing and Yahoo as search options and how much money and effort do you direct to these engines?

Lastly, do you really see these numbers ever changing? If so, how and what might be the cause?

Google is/isn’t/might/mightn’t/will/won’t pull out of China over censorship and security concerns. Nobody really knows what the future may hold (although CEO Eric Schmidt’s forecast calls for a 99.9% chance of “something”)—including Google’s 27 Chinese ad resellers. In a letter to Google Monday, the resellers pleaded for some information.

As the home of tens of thousands of employees—a headcount they reached at Google’s behest—not to mention their clients and partners. Since Google’s announcement in January, business has dramatically dropped off (although Google has yet to make any changes). The resellers point out their dilemma (as translated by the WSJ):

There are altogether 27 Google reseller agencies for Google in China, and currently, they are all in the investment phase of Google-related business and have yet seen reasonable returns on their investment. If Google withdraws from China, then most of us will face possible bankruptcy or close-down, since up to now, as requested by Google, we have invested huge amounts of capital and efforts in our business. How will Google compensate for its resellers?

Without communication, it seems that Google’s plan may be to pay its partners with a “don’t let the door hit you on our way out.” Say the resellers:

At this moment, if Google tells us this is a business practice, and our clients, employees, and investors all should take our own commercial risks, we, as well as our clients, employees, investors and everyone absolutely will refuse to accept it!

Uhhh sure.

The WSJ notes: “Not all the resellers listed as signatories in the letter had a part in drafting it, and each has a unique relationship under different terms with Google.”

Google acknowledges they’ve received the letter and are currently reviewing it. However, they’ve been reticent to comment on the discussion that are/aren’t going on with the Chinese government, and it looks like things are grinding to a halt.

What do you think? What kind of provisions should Google make for its resellers?

Maybe I missed the point of the whole China/Google kerfluffle, but I could have sworn the reason Google was pulling out of China was because they didn’t want to obey China’s rules on censorship anymore. Apparently China has decided to conveniently ignore that fact as they remind Google to continue to obey China’s Internet rules, even if Google does decide to leave the country.

Riiight.

According to Reuters:

“On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law,” the spokesman, Yao Jian, told reporters in answer to a question about Google.

Google opened its Chinese search portal in 2006.

“We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations,” Yao told a regular news conference.

“Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues,” he said.

Yes, of course Google should continue to obey the law for remaining “issues” within the country (possibly its other services, if Google decides to only pull its search engine). However, although I’m not in favor of China’s censorship, I don’t think Google should wage a direct Internet war against the country.

China’s admonition seems a little like a parent expecting a child to keep the same curfew when they leave the house. Google is leaving precisely because they just can’t abide those rules anymore. They’re going to live their life the way they want to now.

Or, for another analogy that might hit home a bit more with the Chinese government, maybe this is more akin to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling China to investigate the hack attacks (to which China said Clinton damaged the countries’ relations, and basically she should mind her own business).

What do you think? Could China seriously expect to dictate to a company even if they won’t have any jurisdiction to do so?

Hang around any industry conference, forum or blog long enough and you’ll find someone lamenting our dependence on Google, or search engines altogether. It’s absolutely true that we as webmasters and marketers need to diversify our traffic strategies (you know what they say about eggs and baskets)—but are you willing to take the step to block all search engines from your site?

Hacker News was—at least for a little while. At news.ycombinator.com recently, the robots.txt file was changed to disallow all crawling from search engines, as theNextWeb reports. However, Paul G. at Hacker News quickly explained:

Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn’t tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now.

There’s nothing wrong with that (though you’d hope you wouldn’t forget that kind of thing!). Rather than the User-agent: * Disallow: / theNextWeb spotted, Hacker News’s robots.txt now only disallows all user agents to five selected paths.

Can you ban all search engines (on purpose and for the long term)? Sure—that’s what robots.txt is for (I’m looking at you, newspaper sites who claim Google’s stealing your bacon content). Some people do it just to keep search engines out; others do it to force themselves to develop other traffic streams. But if you do it, be sure to actually work on those other traffic streams, and to have a good on-site search capability.

What do you think? Would you ever block all search engines, for any reason?

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Yep, now you can have spam delivered in real time to your search results on Google or Twitter. This is just why we all clapped for joy when Bing and Google hooked up with Twitter for real time results, isn’t it?

Oh, no? Hm. I guess we’re not the only ones. Search Engine Roundtable noted a Webmaster World forum thread complaining about the spam in real time search results. In the SER poll, 78% (as of the time of this screenshot) felt the real time results in Google are either somewhat or very spammy:

However, this may just be their perceptions: it may be less that the results themselves are spam and more than they’re merely unwanted, and therefore we consider them spam (like commercial emails that we really did sign up for but really don’t want to get anymore—except we didn’t get the choice to sign up for this addition to the SERPs).

Twitter, meanwhile, is doing what it can about spam on its site. The “trust and safety” unit at the company now employs 22 people, making it the largest division at the company. But it’s not just the blatant tag spam and mock-celebrity accounts they’re looking at. According to Ad Age:

The dirty secret of Twitter’s war on spam? A significant amount of it emanates from clumsy marketers that just don’t know any better.

So what do they flag as spam? They have automatic filters to catch accounts that follow a large number of Tweeple, unfollow them all, and then add more followers. (Follower spam.) They also have recently set up technology to filter links and check for phishing attempts. The team also handles hacking attacks and copyright/brand claims.

But even legit accounts can devolve into spammy practices, like keyword-based autoreplies. The rule of thumb? “[E]ngage the people you are trying to sell stuff to. If you are creating a dialogue with people and not just touting things because you want to make a buck, you are going to have a network of people that value your input,” says the trust & safety unit director Del Harvey. She says they’re constantly working on algorithmic improvements to catch more spammers and reduce false positives—sound familiar?

What do you think? Is Twitter doing enough to reduce spam—including the spam that filters into Google search results? Do you think Google’s real time results are spammy—or just unwanted?

Not since the year-long courtship between Yahoo and Microsoft have I wanted two sides to just DO IT ALREADY!

What am I talking about? China and Google.

For the love of my RSS stream, either pull out or make-up–this is getting old! The latest? Google is "99.9 percent" likely to shut down its Chinese search engine–and try to serve China from outside of the country.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is sending a message that it will in no way yield to the censorship demands of Google. In fact, it’s busy telling Google’s Chinese partners that they should start preparing for Googlegeddon–aka, life without Google.

Google has a widespread network of Chinese partners that have set up their Web sites to link to Google’s Chinese-language search engine. The government’s warning was a reminder to operators that they are responsible for any content on their sites, even if it is provided by a third party like Google. Those companies could switch to services that are more accommodating to the government, like Baidu, the search engine that holds the dominant share inside China.

I’ve used the analogy the unstoppable force against the immovable object before, but this battle takes it to a whole new level. Unfortunately, Google’s fighting this fight on its back foot. I don’t see China opening up a can of censorship worms, simply to accommodate an American search engine. Do you?

I don’t often jump into the world of SEO advice–there are plenty of excellent blogs that do that–but when Google’s Matt Cutts confirms that 301 redirects do, in fact, lose PageRank, well, that’s worth sharing.

Eric Enge gets the scoop–boy, is he gonna get a lot of backlinks from this–getting Matt Cutts to confirm something that I have suspected and cautioned clients for many years: 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay. Here’s the quote:

I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

So now you know. But, don’t stop there, read the rest of the interview, you may just learn some other propaganda SEO tips.

(via)

Google has announced that a service that was previewed last December is now live for mobile devices. I’ll call it the “Blue Dot of Availability” which is stupid but it’s the best I can do. This function is just more evidence that Google is making mobile a top priority and it is giving retailers the ability to come along for the ride.

The Google Mobile blog tells us more

We’re happy to announce that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you. You’ll also see how far away the stores are from you — as long as you’ve enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

Here’s a look at it as well.

The initial list of retailers for this offering looks good and it is only going to grow as one would expect. At the end of the blog post Google puts out a request for retailers interested to fill out a form to get in the game.

My only question is why do you have to click on the More tab in order to get to the Shopping tab, which this function is under. For those in the know this will work but for the general searching population they may not know that this option even exists. I know there isn’t much room on mobile screen but a cool function that is buried may never get the exposure to make it truly successful.

But heck, what do I know?! Happy shopping for your blue dot specials.

OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter).

The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and information foragers. It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on.

Information foragers took slightly longer to turn to the real-time results: 7.39 seconds. It was the thirteen area their eyes focused on—but the first 12 areas were all just above the real-time results in the news results. (The search task here was to research a selected current news item using the search engine of choice—for 89% of all participants, that was Google.) (Side note: I’m not sure why the times in the above graph are so much higher than the numbers OneUpWeb also provided that I used in these paragraphs.)

The second search task was segmented by group—the consumers were to look for a product they were considering to buy for themselves or for someone else as a gift. Information foragers were to again look for information on a current news topic. Interestingly, in this second set, consumers were five seconds faster than information foragers to focus on real-time results.

Meanwhile, 20% of consumers and 30% of information foragers actually clicked on real-time results, as opposed to 69% of consumers and 60% of information foragers that clicked on the top 5 results excluding real-time.

I’ve long argued that real-time results will only be helpful for a very small, select set of data—and for that set, most people would know to go to Twitter or Facebook in the first place anyway. I’m not the only one. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur points to several others who feel the same way, most notably Nick Carr, who sardonically chronicles the efforts to organize the web’s information around 140-character ephemera.

And yet Google insists that this information is useful and must be foisted upon the user. Aruther quotes Marissa Mayer last summer:

We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those types of patterns emerge, so there’s a lot of useful information about real-time interactions that we think ultimately will really affect search.

Apparently users don’t quite agree yet.

What do you think? Are real-time results useful?

Last week, Chinese officials reported that Google was in talks about their threats to leave the country (or only partially) if they’re forced to continue censoring search results. Also, Chinese officials reported that Google was not in talks with the government.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt declined to comment on the state of negotiations a conference in the United Arab Emirates today. However, he did say that “we’re in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable,” although he promised “Something will happen soon.”

Google announced a hacking attempt targeted at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in January. They suspected that the attack may have originated in the Chinese government on some level, and announced they would no longer agree to censor search results. However, nothing has changed—yet.

Soon after Google’s statement, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on the matter, urging China to review the breach as well. This prompted suspicion that Google’s withdrawal threats were directed by the US government. Schmidt denied that today:

“The Google action was not in any way advanced or coordinated with the U.S. government except post-facto,” he said in response to questions. “Google’s discussions are with the Chinese government, and they do not involve the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s doing its thing unrelated to Google.”

Schmidt’s statement is pretty open-ended: “something” and “soon.” What kind of timeline do you think we’re looking at—and what do you think the end result will be?

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It’s always the darkest before the dawn.

Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards.

According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the "we’ve given up on search" Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.

The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.

I will let you in on my new system for posts. If the post title has a question mark there is good reason to suspect that it will fall in the realm of rumor. In this case, the source of the information, The Wall Street Journal, tends to report on things that are as “real” as they can be. On this one, however, there was enough evidence that while Google may be up to something it’s not ready or prime time.

What gave it away? This line in the WSJ article

A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.

That was easy. OK, now that we have that out of the way let’s talk about what Google may or may not be doing with TV search. The Business Insider tells us a little more as well

Google is testing a new TV search service with Dish Network, the no. 2 U.S. satellite TV provider, the WSJ reports.

The service lets you search TV shows and Web video, including YouTube videos
, the WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro reports. The service runs on set-top boxes “using elements of Google’s Android operating system,” and is currently being tested by Google employees and their families, according to the WSJ.

Google TV search makes sense of course because if anything can be searched then it can be better managed. Also, Dish Network is the perfect candidate for this kind of service because their battle with DirecTV is heating up. Dish has troubles because DirecTV owns the sports side of the ledger so if Dish could create a more compelling experience overall then it has something to battle with.

So what’s the net-net of this? Well, it’s apparently that Google is doing what it always does which is to expand its horizons and to get into more areas to make money. You gotta figure that not all of the 20,000 employees at the Goog are working on search right? Something is always brewing. I guess the lesson to learn here is that if you can be friends with the right Google employees you may get to be part of their informal product tests.

Google’s big talk on pulling out of China appears to be in “perpetual beta,” as AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski jokes. According to his report, the Chinese government both confirms and denies that they are currently in talks with Google over Internet control/censorship.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Vice Minister Miao Wei of told Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, “[Google] never informed the ministry that it was planning to withdraw from China, [nor has it] filed reports over alleged Internet regulation and cyberattacks to the ministry or requests for negotiations.”

And, as AllThingsD points out, that’s especially interesting considering the day before, MIIT Minister Li Yizhong (ie Miao’s boss) told Reuters they are in negotiations with Google. AllThingsD’s sources say that both are right—Google’s in unofficial, informal talks, but hasn’t made a move to file the necessary paperwork.

Surprise, surprise, given what we’ve seen thus far.

Google’s initial promises of action were predicated on the principle that the Internet is a primary source of freedom of expression, and the Chinese government had finally gone to far in its efforts to censor how (and who) used the Internet. However, those attitudes may be uniquely American, according to data from a BBC Worldwide poll.

87% of the Chinese surveyed (vs. 78% worldwide) felt that Internet access was a “fundamental right”. (Nearly half the nearly 28,000 respondents to the survey were not Internet users.) Only 35% of the Chinese felt they could cope without the Internet (compared to 55% worldwide).

Meanwhile, 78% of those surveyed worldwide felt the Internet gave them more freedom, though only 48% felt safe in expressing opinions online, similar to the 42% of the Chinese who agreed with that statement. The PDF of the data states that “Although they are less likely to agree that the Internet should never be regulated by the government (40%), Chinese respondents are much more likely than those elsewhere to cite state censorship as their main concern related to the internet (29%).”

On some level, many of the Chinese do support the government’s censorship/control/regulation (or were afraid to say otherwise over the phone).

What do you think? Will Google pull out of China if pressed, or is this all a lot of hot air?

I don’t remember what Microsoft’s search engine share was, when I left the UK in the summer of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was a lot better than the current anemic 3%.

According to the Guardian, Microsoft would love for Bing to recapture those glory days and is willing to spend the rest of its natural life next 3 months trying to claw it back.

The three-month campaign, which includes three TV ads created by the agency JWT, starts on Wednesday and uses the strapline "Bing and decide". The ads aim to show that Bing simplifies the "information overload" that accompanies the results of many searches.

The TV campaign will run solidly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and on media including social networking websites.

Three whole months, huh? Way to lay it all on the line Microsoft. You lose market share over a 10-15 year period and expect to win it all back by reaching consumers while they’re watching Coronation Street?

Of course, I know that Bing’s ad campaign won’t run for just 3 months–just this particular push–but consider this: Google achieved 90% share in the UK via word-of-mouth. Bing has been available to UK users–albeit in beta–since June. If they felt that Bing was truly revolutionizing search, they would have pushed the needle already. Right?

I think that based on the legal angle of much of the news around Google lately, we could see a service called Google Legal. I have no idea what that might look like but since the Internet behemoth spends so much time in court battles they should be able to find a way to monetize that right? They make money on everything else they do so why not?

The latest case was brought against Google by Daniel Jurin. MediaPost gives some of the details

Jurin, who sells StyroTrim building material, brought suit last year for trademark infringement, false advertising, interference with contractual relations, and other counts. The allegations all stemmed from Google’s AdWords program, which allows trademarked terms to trigger pay-per-click ads.

If you want to get a lesson in whether this kind of thing is a good idea to do, take into consideration these two results from the case. Jurin has to pay $6,000 for Google’s legal fees and most of the case was dismissed. Not exactly a winner other than getting some press that won’t likely help his business any.

In a ruling issued this week, U.S. District Court Judge Morrison England in the eastern district of California dismissed a host of Jurin’s claims, including allegations that Google confused consumers about who produced StyroTrim by returning links to a variety of companies in response to a search on the term. “Even if one accepts as true the allegation that a ‘Sponsored link’ might confuse a consumer, it is hardly likely that with several different sponsored links appearing on a page that a consumer might believe each one is the true ‘producer’ or ‘origin’ of the Styrotrim product,” he wrote.

What is probably the most interesting outcome of this whole thing is the assertion by the court that essentially says that Google sells ad space and not keywords. If you are Google that’s a nice thing to hear a court say because it could potentially take away a lot of the responsibility that many place on Google to police trademarks and more. As of now, the trademark infringement piece of the suit has not been dismissed but it is believed that the likelihood of anything coming of it is slim.

So Google continues to fight the AdWords fight in court and why wouldn’t they? It accounts for the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenues so it is worth fighting for. Of course their legal woes aren’t even close to being over.

Google is currently facing 10 trademark infringement cases stemming from AdWords. No court has yet definitively ruled on whether using a brand name to trigger a search ads infringes trademark. The one case to go to trial, a lawsuit by insurance company Geico against Google, resulted in a victory for Google in 2004. In that case, a judge in Alexandria, Va. ruled that Geico had not proven that consumers were confused when they typed “Geico” into a search box and were served with ads for other insurance companies.

There will always be legal battles for Google and any other successful company to fight especially in this day and age where unscrupulous folks look at the legal system as the the lottery system. As long as the impression is that Google is playing on the right side of the law in most instances then this whole process can just be chalked up to the cost of doing business. Hey, it is America after all.

For once, an advance in Google personalized search I actually like. They’re adding the same stars we’re so used to in Google Reader and Gmail to personalized search results. The starred results let you mark favorite sites to show up at the top of future posts—and it doesn’t appear to affect the rankings of the rest of the organic results.

As Google puts it:

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].

The stars are replacing an old feature in personalized search: SearchWiki. Says Google, “In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results.” (Which probably isn’t to say they actually disliked reranking sites, but just that they didn’t do it very much. Seriously, it just wasn’t super useful.)

Any SearchWiki notations you made will be saved in your Google Account. If you want to continue to make notations in SERPs, Google recommends Sidewiki, its browser-based, publicly-edited sidebar wiki for commentary launched back in September. Last we heard, Sidewiki hadn’t really taken off—maybe this is Google’s push to create new, passionate users.

The stars are all set to go and will be rolling out for all signed-in users in the next few days. So far, there’s no indication starred Google Reader items will have any relationship with this effort beyond the passing similarity.

One big drawback for marketers, of course, is that every step forward in personal search may mean we’re less likely to be able to rank a site universally—or even tell if our site is showing up for most signed-in users. Plus, we may have to sign out to get the “neutral” results for reporting (although if you’re starring a client’s competitor in your SERPs, “sumbuddy’s doin it wrong”).

What do you think? Do you like the idea of stars and the simpler interface to mark sites you’d want to see in SERPs again? Or do you worry about personalized search affecting marketing? Would you like to see your Google Reader starred items showing up for relevant searches?