There is an absolutely fascinating article on TheStreet.com (also interesting because the URL string tracks the source): eBay Snub Suggests Google’s Big Troubles.

It’s not so much interesting because it espouses everything I’ve said for the past couple months, not the least of which include the whole ebay thing and the fact that the loss or removel of paid advertising does not necessarily impact traffic IF (BIG IF) you have the organic results in place. (BTW ebay does, both in organic listings and in product listings.)

The infinite dichotomy is whether the domain of search is a content or technology proposition.

For Google it’s a technology proposition: that’s their mandate and they adhere to that tenet with everything they do. For Yahoo, content is the play.

And despite the market value, in truth for each company, it’s a winning proposition.

Nut it down a little, to your site or my site. How you play it generally depends on the budget at hand. With little or no budget, the dependency tends towards content to garner stickiness and ranking.

With budget, it tends towards paid search and a technology play.

Do users really care that Terry Semel has left the building? Do they care that Jerry Yang and Susan Decker are the next net generation?

Do users really care that ebay has publicly stated that they won’t rely on Google Adwords with quite as much dependence having finished their ten day “test” and realized it’s a risk they can afford to take?

I doubt it.

There’s an interesting article today in Business Week regarding vertical or niche search.

And in watching everything that’s gone on recently regarding Yahoo, MSN, ebay and Google, my first thought was that Google was bullet-proof and had pretty much sewn the game up.

We always say it, the next search engine is just a click away, but we hardly ever believe it. Your next click away to Exalead may very well turn you into a believer.

Established in 2000 in France by Francois Bourdoncle, Exalead features everything a mature search engine needs and then some. Google might run away with the news headlines but Exalead had many of its newer features before Google did.

Exalead has some very strong searches such as search within results (handy!), proximity search using the NEAR operator (something Matt Cutts keeps explaining we want but really don’t need…), regular expressions, wildcard and phonetic search. To name just a few.

Hi, my name is Tom Tsinas and I’ve been a V.P. Business Development at Search Engine People for three weeks now. Being new, I should tell you about myself. I had been with the world’s original search engine, the Yellow Pages Group, for 10 years in variety of roles ranging from Marketing, Business Development, Product Management, National and Local Sales.

In the last few years, I noticed that local advertisers began asking me about search engine positioning, pay per click advertising and advice on how to improve their websites. For small businesses, their Yellow Pages team function as their chief marketing officer. As a result, I began to investigate what all this SEO SEM fuss was about.

USP. It mean’s Unique Selling Proposition. But you already knew that. You also know that having a USP will dramatically increase your business in sales, revenue and overall goodwill. But what does it mean to be Unique?

Unique means you carve out a corner in your market for yourself. Define your business as the 800 pound gorilla in it. And open your doors for business. Talk about making it hard on your competitors …

Peter Mosley demonstrated this at SES Toronto 2007 with a very unique presentation …

What’s your unique selling proposition?  It’s not so much the proposition that matters, as how it’s framed.

This was previously posted but we had a blog burp so we’re reposting it now. Cheers.

Earlier this week we had the pleasure of being the pleasure of being taken out to dinner by some Google folks up from Mountain View.

There were few surprises, but we all wound up with one unanimous and pleasantly surprisingly opinion: these were very pleasant, amicable folk.

Perhaps it’s our genteel, Canadian way, but we were, frankly, expecting alpha geeks with IQs off the charts and frankly little in common and less to talk about. Not so.

Week 4 of the contest has seen an increase in the number of submissions. And the quality … WOW! See for yourself below. We’re also seeing a number of people using social media very effectively … good ’cause that’s a compontent of the scoring algorithm.

1) ‘The Real Search Guru’ - Parody of ‘The Real Slim Shady’ by EscapeTheRake

2) ‘Dave Naylor Went Down to Google’ - Parody of The Charlie Daniels Band tune‘The Devil went down to Georgia’ by CountryCritter.com

3) ‘She Thinks My Ranking’s Sexy’ - Parody of Kenny Chesney’s ‘She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy’ by LunaMetrics

“SEO is a part of SEM”, he said. She shakes her head while he says it.

“No, SEM is a part of SEO.”

At the sound of a deep sigh they both turn their head to listen to a sage contributor; “No… no, you’re both wrong. SEO is dead…”

An industry that takes itself serious enough that it nitpicks over which abbreviation does what, why, and if the abbreviation even exists or not, is ripe for a look in a mirror called humor.

The first look looks like this:

Since we know why people link we can now move on to finding something that is worthy of being linked to: the actual content.

No matter what your speciality at this point you will think one of two things:

1. “Everything has been done already”
2. “That’s just plain common sense: everybody knows that”

Everything Has Been Done

True. Ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote Phantom of the Rue Morgue the detective story has been done, written, covered. Over with.

Or is it? Don’t the detective stories by Agatha Christie stand by themselves? Was there really no more place for Georges Simenon’s Maigret?