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U.S. business-to-business search engine Accoona has been acquired by Denmark-based business-to-business search engine Masterseek. Accoona launched in 2004 and has seen much of its success in China.

“We have worked intensely for the last two weeks in order to get all of the legalities and finances in place for the takeover and there is still a great deal of work in front of us to integrate and re-launch the search service,” states Rasmus Refer, founder of the Masterseek Corp.

Accoona will be re-launched (again) with integrated Masterseek data in the U.S. and China. Then it will be launched in Europe. The target date for the European release is January 2009.

comScore released a study today that found 14.5 million people in the U.K. visited at least one blog in August, representing 41% of the total U.K. Internet audience.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director of comScore Europe said in a press release. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie,” he added.

Two of the most popular blogs in the U.K. are gadget blogs: Engadget.com, which ranked as the top individual blog in August with 243,000 visitors, and Gizmodo.com, which ranked third with 223,000 visitors. UnrealityTV.co.uk (225,000 visitors), Kotaku.com (210,000 visitors), and Metafilter.com (207,000 visitors) rounded out the top five.

According to the comScore Segment Metrix H/M/L service, which looks at online activity by heavy, medium and light users of the Internet, heavy blog users were 142% more likely than the average Internet user to visit a site in the “humour” category, a testament perhaps to the sharp wit often associated with blogging. They are also likely to be tech savvy, which can be seen by their skew in visiting technology news categories.

I’ve met a couple of “heavy” blog users in the U.K. — who weigh 38 stone between them.

Seriously, blogs are big in old Blighty. If you check out the agenda for SES London 2009, which has already been posted, you’ll see there will be a session on Feb. 18, 2009, on “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds.” And, who — you may ask — is responsible for that?

Search Engine Strategies London 2009 is organized and hosted by world-renowned search authority Mike Grehan. As you can see below, I interviewed Mike back at SES London 2008. And you can detect some of that “humour” and tech savvy that comScore just reported, although there is no way that Mike weighs more than 14 stone. But, of course, I’m just guessing.

Mike Grehan, Acronym, on SES London 2008

As soon as Yahoo and MSN started accepting gambling ads, it was only a short time for Google to join them - as their announcement this week has shown. Obviously Google did not want their competitors grabbing the lucrative advertising revenue.

Like Yahoo UK, Google requires a license to be able to advertise - but they do allow companies licensed in their respective European countries to advertise which Yahoo has yet to introduce. MSN at this stage does not require licensing.

The push to allow online gambling in the US is moving forward with former NY senator Alfonse D’Mato part of the lobby for poker sites.

Seems legendary investor George Soros, who supposedly made a billion dollars trading on the foreign currency exchange, will have some competition from Google as they are now hedging against fluctuating currency exchange rates by investments in the forex market.

Cnet reports that Google has invested over $80 million dollars in forex trading hedges to offset the strengthening dollar against the global currencies many of their advertisers are paying them in.

Given that 51% of Google’s revenue comes from outside the United States, many large advertisers are given credit in their own currency which could be worth less at the time they actually pay Google.

The value of the US dollar against the euro, Canadian dollar and the British pound has increased substantially in recent weeks, thus Google gets less US dollars when someone pays them. The actual value of the clicks is done in US dollars at the base of the calculations, so Google advertisers get to pay less than what they would if there was just one currency used in the actual bidding.

Maybe the brothers Google want to emulate Soros who was part of the Google Author series that had CEO Eric Schmidt as part of the presentation.

His Wikipedia entry about his currency speculation profits may be alluring to the Google founders who have shown a penchant for aggressive investments into a number of markets.

“On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England’s reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency.

Finally, the Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and to devalue the pound sterling, and Soros earned an estimated US$ 1.1 billion in the process. He was dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Be careful guys, it is a highly volatile market and we wouldn’t want you to lose money.

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ChunkIt is a new search toolbar that bills itself as an x-ray for search. What it does is search your choice of the “big five” search engines, and then displays results on the right and the textual content of the results on the left.

Once the results are loaded, users can click on a paragraph in the left hand side, and it will highlight the paragraph - and then load the full page in the right side.

Highlighted paragraph

Page loaded in the right hand side

I personally find this to be a great tool for search. But one issue for ChunkIt might be copyright. Google has come under fire from newspapers for the issue of copyright when it comes to indexing their pages. Their argument, which has won over some in Europe, is a poor one since Google primarily provides just links to articles.

So, I contacted Brian Cheek at TigerLogic Corporation, the company behind ChunkIt, and here’s what he had to say:

“ChunkIt! is a user-driven device that resides on the client-computer and is not a web service. All processing is handled by and all logic resides on the user’s local computer. ChunkIt! does not persist, store or cache information and does not use a back-end server to perform any of its functionality.”

Smart companies will see the value in ChunkIt’s search tool and not make a fuss over copyright. But expect a few to ignore a good thing when they see it and challenge ChunkIt, but only if and when the tool gets wildly popular.

AOL has announced that their ad-serving platform and network, Platform-A, is launching an iPhone ad optimization solution. The solution is offered through Third Screen Media and detects when web browsing is being conducted on an iPhone. AOL says the combination of the Third Screen Media mobile network gives Platform-A, which reaches 90% of the internet audience, the ability to deliver up to 75 million iPhone ads per month.

“Today’s launch is a perfect example of how Platform-A’s unmatched reach, solutions and technologies can benefit advertisers trying to reach consumers in the most compelling way,” said Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A. “We can not only help advertisers effectively reach iPhone users on WAP pages and Web pages, but we can also deliver banners optimized for display on the iPhone.”

Last month, Platform-A opened up mobile ads to third parties. In June, Platform-A was made available in Europe.

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Greenfield Online, the owner of Ciao, a European price comparison and shopping site. This seems to be in line with Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on building up focused areas of search.

Ciao also includes consumer reviews and ratings with its search results. They boast a multimillion-user-strong online community and see more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month across seven countries. So far, more than 5 million product reviews have been generated.

Ciao joins Farecast, FAST, and Powerset in Microsoft’s portfolio of search-related acquisitions for 2008.

“Ciao’s success has been led by a team of talented people who took a unique combination of intuitive technology and the insight that comes out of their passionate consumer community to become one of Europe’s leading shopping comparison sites,” said John Mangelaars, vice president, Consumer and Online, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa. “This makes the company a fantastic asset to the future of our search offer. Integrating Ciao’s capabilities into Live Search will provide a strong launchpad for our commercial search offer in Europe and enhance our e-commerce offering on MSN.”

According to an exclusive story in the National Journal Online, John McCain has outspent Barack Obama for two consecutive months in search engine advertising.

Written by Lucas Grindley, the story, entitled, “McCain buys his way to top of Google,” cites Nielsen Online data that shows McCain bought 7 million “sponsored search link impressions” in June and 5.4 million in May, compared with 1.15 million for Obama in June and 1.8 million during the previous month.

Since search engine advertising is sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis instead of cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), it’s unclear if McCain’s dramatic lead in impressions generated equally dramatic number of clicks.

It’s worth noting that one of the top five sites where McCain bought image-based banner impressions was … the National Review. However, the other five included Topix and The Washington Post, so it’s not clear that you can read anything between the lines here.

By comparison, the top five sites where Obama bought image-based banner impressions included Yahoo, CNN and MSN. Plus, Obama bought 80 million banner impressions in June, compared with McCain’s 16 million.

So, what’s all this mean to search engine marketers?

For his story, Grindley interviewed Peter Greenberger, who manages the “small but growing” elections and issue advocacy team at Google. Greenberger speculated that the Presidential campaigns were in a “persuasion phase,” where candidates might be more interested in banner advertising.

“You are not looking for that active voter who maybe knows who he or she is voting for,” said Greenberger. “You are looking for that more passive voter who is reading information but not quite ready to commit.”

Hmmm. I wonder if Greenberger has seen the new study conducted by Enquiro Research with Google in Europe that found the ability of unclicked search ads to build brand. If he hasn’t, he can click on “Digging Still Deeper Into The Search Branding Question” and read the blog post by Gord Hotchkiss, the CEO of Enquiro.

Of course, Gord would be the first one to tell you that the debate over the search branding question is far from over.

But, if I were working in the McCain or Obama campaigns, I would run, not walk, to get my hands on the latest research. Gord is a Canadian, so he doesn’t have a horse in this race. And, if this upcoming election is as close as the latest polls indicates that it is, then neither presidential campaign can afford to leave even a small amount of search branding value on the table.

As for the search engine marketers who read this blog, I would also encourage you to run, not walk, to get your hands on this latest research. As Gord says, “search can be the most important brand tool in a marketer’s arsenal, if it’s used in the right place. It’s a matter of understanding what search can do and what it can’t. And, even more importantly, understanding how to measure that value.”

Tel Aviv-based search engine marketing platform provider, Kenshoo, has announced plans to open an office in the United States. The office will be located in San Francisco. Kenshoo has a European subsidiary in London as well.

Kenshoo provides a third generation SEM platform called KENSHOO SEARCH.

“We see North America as a key market and are very happy to hit the ground running. Following our plan, we have decided to take the needed step and establish a local company. This move will help us expand our already solid base of U.S. customers while improving our service.” said Yoav Izhar-Prato, CEO of Kenshoo.

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Online Ad Spend Intact Despite Weakening Economy