The eyetracking study cited here last March has reached fruition with the long-awaited release of the complete study data, packaged as a white paper. A collaboration of Enquiro and Did-it.com, the eyetracking study analyzes how Google users perceive the search results page, and coined the now-famous term "Golden Triangle," referring to a portion of the results page in which clickthroughs are more likely to happen. The white paper costs $149. Chris Sherman at SEW has a summary. ...

Nearly a dozen search companies, defendents in a class action lawsuit, failed to have the suit struck down in a California court, and it will move toward trial. The case was filed last August, and alleges that the search companies broke the law by accepting ads from illegal online gambling sites, causing harm to people who responded to the ads and engaged with the sites. The papers cite clickthrough rates on the ads of 12 dollars and higher; the plaintiffs are trying to recover ad revenues and gambling revenues. ...

If your ears perk up at the mention of Google's reported 3D mapping initiative, but you can't picture what the results might look like, check out this page from a Berkeley student working on 3D city modeling. (via a blog comment) Also, for the VERY technically inclined, here is a PDF research paper on the subject. ...

I never thought of this, but it makes perfect sense. I used to read my local Trader magazines all the time. Trader is a classified-ad empire that publishes over 500 local used-product books on cheap newspaper stock all over the world. Now it comes to light that Google, Yahoo!, and eBaby are sniffing around the company, and one of them might buy it. The London Times says that the deal "would see them embracing the world of "old" media for the first time" but that's not the point. Google, Yahoo!, or eBay would not be buying mounds of paper; one of them would be buying the vast customer list of local advertisers, and would no doubt begin migrating it online. eBay might seem to represent the most natural match, but Yahoo! and Google might be hungrier to bolster their local search products. Cost of acquisition? Trader is valued at 1.3B Euros, which converts to $1.58B U.S. ...

Of all the implications Google advertisers, users, AdSense publishers, advertisers, and observers have had to absorb today, the most far-reaching is that Google's new advertising program has nothing to do with search. Google can no longer call itself a search company, at least not entirely. My definition of Google has always been a keyword processing company. The core mission has been to match people with information, and buyers with sellers, by hinging a perfectly relevant keyword between them. With the Site Targeting plan, Google shockingly puts relevance (which used to be the company's most sacred principle) in the hands of its advertisers. Google is trusting the advertiser's motivation to target ads to relevant sites, but Google has never before trusted the advertiser to make that judgment. The AdWords method has always been to automatically sever the connection between any underperforming ad and its keywords, curtailing the appearance of that ad. Google's technology was the sole ...