BigMouthMedia did an interesting survey in the UK asking “do you trust search engines to keep your search behavior private?“.

The answer is simply: no.

38% feel sure Google will keep their records private. Interestingly enough Yahoo and MSN are trusted even less: 26% and 23% respectively feel confident those engines will respect their privacy.

Unknown but not private

The survey seems to reflect fear of the unknown more than anything else. It seems as if there is something new, possibly scary, under the sun.

After yesterday’s post, my boss a friend and I had a discussion about what it all meant.

His take is that while the IAB is predicting significant slowing in online advertising in the coming year, this is just a pause so everyone can take a moment to stop and catch their collective online advertising breath.

It plays out like this, states he: The mindshare for Internet usage is give or take 25% of time and as such, the online advertising budget should be approximately 25% of the total advertising/marketing mix, not the scant 8% it currently is.

Wherever you turn it seems that personalization in regard to search engine optimization is discussed at a tone of voice as if the End Of The World is nigh here.

Personalization will change search engine results. You will see this, I will see that. No more ranking #1 for term X no matter who and where you are.

So? If there is anything to report here it is that search engines are working hard to give us organically what we normally could only get with paid search: targeting.

According to The Globe & Mail and Keith McArthur, online advertising in Canada surpassed the one billion dollar mark in Canada in 2006, and is expected to rise a further 32% this year. It also represents an 80% increase over 2005.

This is apparently about 8% of the total advertising spend in Canada, but those numbers will be confirmed in coming weeks/months.

So how does it play out?

According to the article, the lion’s share at 36% is display advertising; with search advertising at 35%; classified at 27% and email advertising at 2%.

MSNBC and the David C. Churbuck article Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads provided not only some interesting insight into the Google Doubleclick deal, but also this little nugget way, way, way, way down the article, and it’s a long article so perhaps if reading it, you might have zoned out. It is after all Friday.

I could have written “thoughts for the weekend” but decided that sounded too intense. No, let’s take this Friday to sit a moment and look over some more or less random tidbits.

Hmmm….

After a week of doing this and that in search I can’t shake off the feeling that something’s afoot in search engine land.

Different from ranking shakeup complaints, there seems to be a growing discontent, some kind of unease with Google.

Recently Google has  invited us to participate in Google Audio Ads. Here are some screenshots.

Cheers!

Sasha

On the heels of the Google Doubleclick story, and the Google Clear Channel story and the Yahoo print story and the ebay TV story and the Spotrunner tv story and the…

Well, you get my point.

Onilne advertising is only beginning to heat up. And while traditional advertisers have their eyeballs askance and their eyebrows furrowed at the antics of the upstarts, the upstart as looking at traditional advertising models with disruptive technologies in mind and rate cards in sight.

Red Herring announce today in its YouTube Lining Up Summer Ads article that pre-roll and post roll ads will become a part of the YouTube experience this summer.

Images to represent text may look very nice but they really do hurt search engine wise. Search engines don’t see, read or understand text on images at all. Just plain don’t. No plans to change that either.

So, for styling, for making that headline or logo look just the way you want, you have to resort to CSS.

Now although there are literally thousands of fonts out there, one of them closely matching the style you like, you have to keep in mind which fonts users have installed. Oh, and Mac users might have different fonts, of course.

The folks over at MSN are about to upgrade the adcenter interface. Here are some screenshots of it. (Notice how an Ad Group is called … an “Ad Group” rather than an “Order” … Finally!)

Enjoy!

Sasha