The industry, of course, has done its best to fuel this faith. Through the years we've seen a handful of studies claiming that search really can help drive this brand impact -- from ancient research published by the US IAB to frustratingly incomplete pronouncements from the company that has the most to gain from search marketers bidding on brand terms. Even we at Jupiter have been saying since at least 2004 that you can brand with search; the problem is that we as an industry didn't know then -- and we still don't know now -- how to assign a value to the brand impact provided by search listings. And without a concrete value, marketers have no idea how to adjust their bids to account for branding.

This autumn I'm going to have a deeper look into this issue, and see if we can't start down the road of assigning concrete values to the brand impact of search. But in the meantime, I found a couple of analyses recently that touch on the bread-and-butter of search branding: bidding on brand keywords. Harvest Digital searched on 100 UK brands [PDF] and found that, two months after Google started allowing UK marketers to bid on competitors' brand names, less than 20 percent of brands are being targeted by competitors. (In fact, they found that most of the brands they searched for don't even bid on their own keywords!) Meanwhile, StraightUpSearch argues (with no evidence but great conviction) that there's no point in bidding on competitors' keywords, since the direct response ROI doesn't work out. If that's true, then bidding on competitors' keywords is purely a branding exercise.

As I said, I'll be looking at this in much more detail in the coming months. If you have any insight or case studies you'd like to share, please drop me an e-mail: n e l l i o t t (at) jupiterresearch (dot) com.

By removing the barriers to entry of massive crawling, indexing, and linking of billions of Web pages, BOSS has the potential to unleash some real creativity and energy in a sector that has been dominated by a handful of players. The expenditures required until now have made it necessary for startups to have a lot of money and a strategy that promised huge traffic in pretty short order.

BOSS is driven by the characteristics (openness, performance, and tech chops) that made Yahoo great. Yahoo still must deliver a clearer message about what it means to be a search partner, the kinds of guarantees they can make to their partners, and what the business model will be. These are not small details.

BOSS isn't likely to steal share directly from Google, but it could increase Yahoo's share of search by increasing the number and quality of search-driven services for niche markets. This is fully consistent with what we've been telling clients about the necessity of becoming a platform, and it's a great tool for publishers looking to become aggregators.

If I were a better programmer, I'd be boning up on the BOSS API myself tonight.

I was trying to remember the name of a restaurant where I had dinner the last time I was in New York, and couldn't find it in Google Maps or any of the obvious yellow pages applications. So, I zoomed in on the street view in Google Maps to get a look at the sign in front of the place.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I discovered a great, big truck sitting between me and and the restaurant's sign.

Some brands will be upset by this, because it creates a situation in which other marketers can advertise to customers via AdWords even as they are searching the brand’s site.

The article quoted an Internet consultant and former Crutchfield exec as saying, “Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search… So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.” I don't know whether Google will heed such requests.

The problem here is not Google’s unnecessary “aggressiveness,” as the Internet consultant put it. Rather, the problem is that site search is still poor on so many Web sites.

We’ve tracked this phenomenon for years. It’s still the case that for many sites, Google can find things on a site that the site’s own search function cannot. That’s one reason why most consumers say they don’t lean heavily on site search. Fewer than a third of online consumers say search is the primary way they find information or products they are looking for on a particular Web site. (JupiterResearch Quantify users can see the consumer survey question and detailed response data here.)

In the case of BestBuy, the example cited in the New York Times article, my search this morning 40” lcd on the site listed just three 40” LCD TVs on the results page (and a link to “all 24 items”), along with camcorders and TV monitors (all smaller than 40”). The same search of bestbuy.com on Google returned a whole page of 40” LCD models (and the promise of 8,100 more results, along with ads from Dell, NexTag, Newegg, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber, among others.)

The solution is for marketers to make site search better, so that consumers researching products will favor site search to Google. Helpful tactics include offering, along with the most relevant results possible, other helpful and related information such as customer ratings, pricing, faceted search to narrow results, links to buying guides and the like.

Clients who want further analysis, please drop us a line.

One of the things I focused on in the report was the integration of specialty search (e.g., image or video search, directory search, shopping search, news search) into standards results pages -- what Google calls Universal Search, and what Ask implemented as part of their 3D search results pages. During my research I found a couple of good blog entries on the topic over at Ramblings About SEO. They did the kind of thing I like to do: they tracked each engines' response to a variety of search queries to see what types of multimedia content they're integrating into their results pages, and how far up the page these multimedia results appear. You can see the results of their image webtrack here, and the results of their video webtrack here.

The bottom line is that it's early days for integrating specialty search into standard search results, and that different engines do well under different conditions. But the results are complex (and interesting), so you should go read through them yourself.

MWC is and will continue to be a technology show. The hottest tech topic this year was LTE versus Wimax. Lots of vendors form software and platform solutions are in Barcelona to demonstrate their innovative or carrier-grade solutions. Despite the mobile entertainment hall and the presence of Robert Redford, Isabella Rossellini and of many consumer brands, this is not likely to change. There are a couple of reasons for that: this is a fair trade congress not a consumer show, innovation is mainly led by technlogies and operators are still and for some time at the heart of the value chain.

Some very cool devices announced for next Autumn. Difficult to avoid the Samsung SOUL : HSDPA 7.2Mbps, 5MP, slim and the "completion" or even the "spirit" of the Ultra edition with a massive flagship campaign. Many other devices were announced since Samsung will invest significantly this year to increase its market share and n2 position (objective of 200M sales in 2008 versus 161M in 2007), maintaining its strong position in stylish and high-end devices but willing to expand in other categories (basic phones, infotainment, multimedia,...), geographical regions and form factors (bartypes).

Lots of discussions around the Xperia X1 device from Sony Ericsson based on Windows mobile. Many jumped into the conclusions that it reflected difficulties at Symbian. To my knowledge, SE is still a key shakeholder in Symbian (77M Symbian smartphones sold in 2007 alone, a 50% increase yoy by the way!) and the X1 is only one device. More importantly is the launch of the Xperia sub-brand itself alongside new devices launched in the Cyber-shot sub-brand (C702/ 902), Walkman sub-brand (W980, HSDPA, 8GB memory) or devices with a touchscreen interface (G700 / G900).

Motorola Z10 and E8 look also very promising and will be launched soon in Europe. LG KF600 and 700 as well.

I expected to see more HSUPA phones (not dongles) but none of the major handset manufacturers introduced one. Few prototypes of devices based on Android by the way, at least not presented by major handset manufacturers.

Nokia's competitors are all insisting they are not service companies and that they want to be partners for operators. It obviously did not prevent the market leader to announce amazing results (50M N-Series sold since launch among which 7M N95) and new devices: a new flagship device N96 (16GB, DVB-H, HSDPA, WiFi, 5MP,...!!!!), the N78, the Nokia 6210 Navigator (an optimized version of the GPS 6110 launched in 2007) or the 6220 Classic. However, it is clear that Nokia, as a market leader and in line with its new service strategy, insisted on its music, games and navigation services with the launch of Nokia MAPS 2.0.

I had a demo of Share on Ovi, the community service based on Twango. Pretty cool but it still is difficult to me to figure out how services will be intergrated under OVI from a brand perspective. Everybody at the show was referring to it, but I am sorry to say that beyond our small world, this brand does not exist at all in consumers' mind and still need to be created from scratch. This is a major challenge when you know the strength of the Nokia brand. One that will be tackled later in 2008...

Orange (very discreet presence this year, the company let its main booth to Chinese ZTE) has announced a MOU with Nokia but the company will launch its to-be-launched converged music store under its own brand! This agreement thus differ from those of Telefonica and Vodafone, who may still perceive Nokia as a threat but who have no interest in going against their main supplier nascent efforts.

The other key issue was the partnerships with Internet players. Nokia announced an agreement on new high-end devices with Google (they have other agreements with Yahoo!, Windows Live and local search providers) while T-Mobile dropped Google and finally ended the long-lasting industry rumor by selecting Yahoo! search solution. In the search space, Medio and Surfkitchen partnership is also an interesting deal while Jumptap was selected by TeliaSonera.

There were also a bunch of innovative services around mobile social networking sites and location-based services, not to mention Yahoo One Connect, which is an attempt to make the most of the social adress book. This inevitably led to discussions on the potential of mobile advertising. There were a couple of articles especially in the Financial Times or in the Wall Street Journal. Jupiter Research recently published a report about this topic forecasting Mobile Internet advertising (exclusively search and display net revenues) to reach 1.3 billion euros in Western Europe by 2012. The co-operation between UK operators in the most advanced digital ad European market is a very positive sign but I agree with my colleague Nate Elliott, that it will not have a significant impact in 2008/2009.

If you are a member of the press or a client willing to discuss recent announcements, please contact respectively PRESSEUROPE (at) JUPITERRESEARCH (DOT) COM or your client service manager.

So could a combined MSN/Yahoo search engine compete with Google in Europe? Well, no and yes.

First the no: we're finishing up a report right now on how European search engines can compete with Google, but the reality is that no one's going to get near Google's search share over the next few years. While Google looks pretty dominant in the US -- they claimed 58 percent of all US searches in December 2007, said Comscore -- it appers that a combined MSN/Yahoo search engine would claim around 33 percent of all US searches. That's real, viable competition. But unfortunately, even if MSN and Yahoo combine, there will be no such strong challenge in Europe. As I've previously discussed, Google has between 80 and 90 percent of search share in the key European markets. So whether this deal happens or not, it'll be incredibly difficult for anyone to compete with Google for European search share.

On the other hand, perhaps yes: a combination of MSN and Yahoo would definitely be better-positioned to compete with Google for paid search revenues than each company is now. I've heard a surprising number of Euroean search marketers say that because MSN and Yahoo each command only a few percentage points of search share in Europe, they don't even bother advertising on any engine but Google. This proposed combination wouldn't entirely solve that problem, of course -- the combined search entity would still have less than 10 percent search share in the big European markets, according to numbers I've seen from various traffic firms -- but it would at least give marketers a reason to run trials beyond Google. And that's a start in the right direction.

I'll probably have more to say on this as more details emerge and as it becomes clearer whether or not this deal will really happen -- but in the meantime if you're a client or press and want to discuss this further, drop a line to presseurope@jupiterresearch.com and we can have a chat.

But to their credit, once Google got the message that key advertisers weren't happy, they started working to improve the program, and over the years have given advertisers many of they features they've demanded: the ability to bid on contextual ads separately from search ads, the ability to run a variety of creative formats within contextual ads, and even the ability to choose which sites they want to target with their contextual ads. As a result, I've heard rumblings that the performance of AdSense ads has improved quite a bit lately; a notion backed up by a recent post on the PPC Discussions blog.

The post talks about 10 reasons why quality has improved, and all of them make sense -- but the two biggest have to be Google's purge of low-performing sites, and advertisers' ability to target (or exclude) specific sites when managing their campaigns.

Contextual ads are still a very different beast to paid search, and advertisers have to manage these campaigns separately to keep their ROI up. The PPC Discussions post points readers to a couple of guides on how to best manage your AdSense campaigns, which I'd advise marketers to read. But AdSense may finally have become what Google always wanted and needed it to be: a cost-effective way for advertisers to increase their reach (and therefore their spending) on Google.