It is a data finding from the USA market, not Australia, but a new Nielsen/Netratings report has confirmed that American search engine usage is growing faster than the overall consumer usage of the internet.
Why is that significant? It means that consumers are becoming more reliant on search engines to do everyday research than ever before.

I first predicted it nearly three years ago (man I wish I had started a blog back then so I could prove it) but anyway someone’s now actually gone and done it. Started a dedicated search engine marketing magazine, that is. The Search Marketing Standard will launch in May this year, although it will only

If you weren’t at the cricket or the tennis or having an Australia Day barbecue yesterday then you might’ve noticed something interesting on every TV news broadcast in the country: a mini-furore about Google’s decision to cede to the Chinese Government’s “restricted information” internet censorship rules. In case you missed it, Google has decided to

Civil liberatians may think this is US Government policy gone mad. According to a CNET news article, it is now officially illegal in the USA to anonymously “annoy” someone over the internet.
The CNET article claims that the legal wording of the new legislation means that any kind of internet “annoyance” - even something fairly benign

Apparently, it’s a tough world for US internet service providers right now. Competition is fierce, margins are wafer thin, capital expenditure requirements are as high as ever, and potential new ISP options (such as offered by Google) may soon open up to the wider public.
Two of the USA’s biggest ISPs, Bell South and AT&T, have

A few days ago I wrote a piece about the importance of the Christmas season when it comes to online sales. Now I’ve just read news about Amazon’s ‘05 “Holiday Season” sales results which confirm that blog post wholeheartedly.
For the ‘05 Christmas sales period, Amazon has reported that they shipped over 108 million items. Yes,

November remains the month to be seen online if you’re interested in attracting Christmas related purchases. This is the verdict from Nielsen//NetRatings, who reported that the average Australian Internet shopper spent AUD $471 online in November 2005. This represented a spend increase on the Christmas 2004 online shopping season.
Netratings reported that six (6) million Australian

The pressure on search engines to provide data about click fraud has risen further with a large US-based web host joining on the class action lawsuit currently against Google in the United States District Court.
As posted on Web Guerilla’s blog a few days ago, there is currently so little data on real click fraud rates,

Everyone knew it was coming but very few people would’ve expected it so soon: the extension of search technology into TV advertising.
In the US last week, TiVo announced it had partnered with several large media and ad agencies to allow its users to select categorises of TV ads they would be interested in receiving via

We’re certainly a little biased considering we’re in the online advertising business. But with the latest TV advertising data released in the USA, it’s virtually undeniable that big ad spending patterns are moving away from TV. And quickly.
For anyone who missed the data, here’s the key points again:

For the Sep 2005 quarter, ad revenue for