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Google Merchant Search has quietly launched as a test program to compare products and services in shopping comparison engine fashion. Google Merchant Search is a test feature, apparently in the UK, and is not available for every search. You may see it when conducting some searches but not others.

Lead gen providers like Bankrate.com in financial services, one of Google’s largest customer segments, can’t be too pleased with Google offering a free service that competes indirectly with theirs.

Our friends over at SearchEngineLand had the story first with “Outing Google Merchant Search” as if GMS were in the closet.

Here’s the view from Google and their FAQ for Google Merchant Search.

What is Google Merchant Search?

Google Merchant Search is an easy new way for you to find products or services from providers who match your needs.

What products or services are supported through Google Merchant Search?

The service is currently only available for secured loans from financial services providers.

How do you choose which providers to show me?

Our search results are based on the criteria you provided in your request; we compare your request with our list of participating providers, and show those that are most relevant for you. Participating providers pay Google when someone requests a quote through this system.

How does Google connect me to the provider?

You submit your contact details and request a time to speak to the provider. A Google operator will call you at the appointed time, then connect you with the provider. Because we do not share your contact information with the provider, they won’t be able to contact you again about your request unless you decide to give then your contact details.

How much does it cost to use Google Merchant?

This service is free for the user (the person searching for services). Please note that when calling the free phone number from a mobile phone, operator or carrier charges may apply.

comScore has acquired mobile measurement company M:Metrics. The acquisition will include three measurement products:

MobiLens is a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users.

MeterDirect is an on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists on more than 280 device models.

M:Ad is a mobile ad tracking service that continuously monitors clickable display advertising.

“With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in Internet usage on mobile devices,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore’s president and chief executive officer. “Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes comScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions comScore to deliver significant shareholder value as wireless carriers, telecom equipment providers, media companies, advertising agencies, online publishers, and marketers extend their reach into the mobile Internet world.”

Related Reading:
ComScore Launches Search Marketing Intelligence Service
New Research Product Tracks from Search to Sale

Yahoo may need to fight off Carl Icahn Syndrome by Proxy today.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP) is a type of factitious disorder which appears strikingly similar to the Icahn strategy. MSP is a mental illness where a person acts as if an individual he’s caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick.

Is Yahoo sick? No. That won’t stop dissident investors, though, from acting as if the company is.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who’s invested more than a billion dollars in Yahoo, will initiate a proxy contest to oust Yahoo Inc.’s board of directors, according to the WSJ, a move designed to jumpstart the stalled MicroHoo merger.

Icahn (pictured here in a conservative blue suit) hasn’t won every proxy war he’s waged: Marvel Comics, for example, stands out as a success story after the superhero company defeated Icahn and his minions.

People with MSP assume the role of a sick person indirectly by lying about illness in another person under their care. We’re not calling Icahn a liar but we don’t think the Yahoo board is crazy for declining the Microsoft takeover bid.

In a proxy battle, Icahn would nominate 10 directors to replace Yahoo’s board before today’s deadline. The new slate of directors is said to include former Viacom Inc. CEO Frank Biondi, an Icahn proxy war ally.

Of course, the reason for the proxy battle differs from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, which is not done to achieve a concrete benefit, such as financial gain. For Icahn, it’s all about the Benjamins. In Sunnyvale, he’ll be known as the Yahooligan.

Like Baron von Munchausen, who rode a cannonball behind enemy lines then rode one back when he decided it wasn’t such a good idea, Icahn can enter enemy territory without suffering a scratch from Microsoft or Yahoo. His proxy board will wage the war for him.

Icahn has some big wins under his belt: he spurred Motorola’s decision to spin off its mobile phone business in March. He has also led a campaign by video-store chain Blockbuster to purchase electronics retailer Circuit City Stores.

If that deal doesn’t go through, Icahn has stated he’ll buy Circuit City.

No word on whether he’d buy Yahoo.

Nielsen has released data showing the popularity of social networks being used via mobile phones in the UK. Here are three key takeaway points:

Almost half (44%) of UK mobile phone subscribers belong to an online social network. Of this group, one in four (25%) use their mobile phone for social networking-related activities

• Around 812,000 Britons each month, or 1.7% of all UK mobile subscribers, visited a social networking website using their mobile during the first quarter of 2008
• Facebook is the most popular site for mobile social networking, being visited by over half a million Britons (557,000) from their mobiles, or 9% of all UK Mobile Internet subscribers

Kent Ferguson, Client Services Manager, Nielsen Mobile had this to say about the data: “Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and mobile could be the next big thing in the space. Large numbers of people are interacting with their social networking profiles while they’re on the move. There could be increased consumer demand for mobile social networking driven by the flat fee price plans offered by the leading operators that give subscribers unlimited mobile Internet access.”

So what do you think? Are social media and mobile phones colliding? Leave a comment and let us know!

Do you dream of searching Google for local information with your mobile phone without having to use your thumbs? Soon, you may be in luck. It seems that Google is working on such a feature.

A new and curious listing in their robots.txt file prevents spiders from indexing http://www.google.com/m/lcb. Go to the site, type in a city, and you can see the top searches for that town as well as browse categories. The page won’t be winning any juried art competitions anytime soon. And the results would be far more relevant if Google took into consideration your exact location, which always brings cheers and jeers depending on how freaked out you get about privacy issues.

So far, this is a bit of a slow way of doing local search, as it requires so much effort on the part of the searcher. But hey, you could just call 1-800-GOOG-411 instead.

4:00AM morning outside the New York Hilton: the city wakeup-crowd stirs pre-dawn Manhattan lights. From the 53rd St. lobby the regal doorman guides me to Kennedy International-bound taxi and deli coffee black…impeccable New York service in hand. The cab ride provides the necessary 30 minute Internet-access window to post aimClear Blog conference coverage waiting in WordPress.  Then it occurs to me: “Dude, I must be pretty screwed up to be blogging in a TAXI.”

Search marketing conference attendees seem to be the most plugged-in-public group of techno-comrades on earth. We rove in packs of iPhone and laptop-totting pied-pipers evangelizing link love, holistic patterns, authentic participation, conversion tracking, and good will. These SEMS, SEOs, PPCs, Mr., Mrs. & Ms are such beautiful people. I love the search marketing industry because ya’ll are SO plugged into the grid, running remote marketing machine empires from Blackberries.

We’re a curious and over-stimulated group, resulting in behavior that will have future anthropologists mumbling to themselves. It’s a great time to be alive and so many incredible ways to connect for business and pleasure. Here’s 13 Undeniable symptoms of total communications-grid immersion.  These are not listed in any particular order of severity.

Search marketers are modern communications channel gatekeepers, technicians, and salespersons, obsessively plugged into the grid. Millennial behavior chatter permeates our culture as SEMs have steadily become the 900 LB mainstream gorilla.

My sense of is that we wouldn’t have it any other way than total grid immersion. Farewell SearchEngineStrategies NYC 2008. &nbsp You’re still the beautiful New York lady, shining city-scene of light and global opportunity. The culture of marketing king-makers, search marketing students and communications-grid pundits rocks my world.

Footnote: Add the measured insanity of “blogging in the airplane isle whilst waiting for the aft cabin bathroom to free up.”

Yesterday at TechFest, Microsoft Research unveiled three projects designed to enhance a user’s search experience. Two projects, SearchTogether and CoSearch, are aimed at collaborative search while SearchBar assists the individual searcher.

SearchTogether is a free Internet Explorer plugin that allows groups of people searching on multiple computers in different countries to collaborate their searches. The plugin will be available for download later this Spring and installs a sidebar on the IE web browser. SearchTogether’s features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.

CoSearch enables collaborative search while users are gathered around a single computer. This is facilitated by the use of multiple mice or cell phones. For example, a person might use their cell phone to maneuver a cursor on the screen and transfer data to their phone, while another user may use a mouse to follow links on the same page at the same time.

Searchbar is an advanced search history tool that operates as a sidebar in a user’s web browser. Users can save searches in order to return to them later and pick up where they left off. SearchBar organizes the searches in a hierarchical tree format. Users can write notes to themselves to remind them of future searches or any other information they wish to remember about their search queries.

Microsoft’s projects are comparable to recent efforts by Google and social media startups to personalize and socialize search. But Microsoft could take the lead on such efforts because these projects offer users increased control of their own research efforts. With the ability to easily keep personal accounts of search queries and share and receive results from people they know, instead of being purely subject to algorithms and the opinions of a broad audience.

Yahoo took advantage of the CeBIT conference in Hamburg, Germany to announce the forthcoming launch of onePlace, a content management solution developed as part of the company’s growing mobile services. The platform works on a system of bookmarking, allowing users to categorize their favorite content (news, videos, images, emails, etc) and then view it with ease on their mobile device.

Dynamic content will be automatically updated, which should appeal to the likes of sports fans, investors, and frequent flyers. A feature called “Pulse” enables users to view the latest changes to their content collections.

The success of onePlace will depend on its ability to aggregate content to meet the demands of the mobile user. Small screens and connectivity issues require mobile content to be organized and presented in a more streamlined manner than for desktop browsers.

The launch of onePlace is expected to take place in the second quarter of 2008. It could coincide with the expected Q2 launch of Yahoo’s mobile phone service, oneConnect.

This news comes on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement of a partnership with T-Mobile in Europe for its oneSearch mobile offering. Yahoo seems to be staking out its territory in mobile search as Google attempts to grab a piece of the mobile pie by strengthening its ties with Apple and AT&T earlier this year.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• You Must Be 21 to View This Site: Yahoo Searchlight Award
  The third annual Yahoo Searchlight Award winner: “Partay” the whitest boys in the room hip-hop video promoting the responsible consumption of Smirnoff Raw Tea by search marketing firm Outrider.
• Yahoo OneSearch T-Mobile vs Google vs Nokia
  The players change partners as the mobile phone is fast becoming the gateway to the Internet, Wireless Web and local search.
• Find Your Dream Job with the New SEW Job Boards
  If you’re reading Search Engine Watch, it’s likely that your skills are in demand, or soon will be, if you’re just starting out. To help you make the most of your search marketing skills, we’ve launched the Search Engine Watch Job Board.
• SEW Experts: High Performance SEO Requires Fast Load Times
  Many large companies assume that site speed isn’t very important to the overall user experience, but they’d be wrong.
• SEW Experts: Microsoft Responds to Yahoo: a Micro, Who Cares?
  Who wins or loses the Microhoo battle won’t change the mission of most search marketers: helping clients or employers acquire leads and customers, and generating online sales.
• SEW Experts: SEO Outsourcing: Don’t! Until You Read This
  One basic rule in life: it’s difficult to buy things you don’t understand. SEO can be difficult to understand, especially for marketing folks who’d rather put the search budget into PPC campaigns.
• One basic rule in life: it’s difficult to buy things you don’t understand. SEO can be difficult to understand, especially for marketing folks who’d rather put the search budget into PPC campaigns
  CNN will soon launch iReport.com for citizen journalists. News sharing is a natural next step, because people already send far more videos and images than CNN could ever show online or on air.
• Microsoft Won’t Take “No” for an Answer
  Microsoft made it clear that it would continue with its plans to acquire Yahoo, one way or another.

Click to read the rest of this post…

While the Google vs. Nokia global battle escalates (GPS-enabled Nokia phones vs. Google Android-driven handsets), the mobile phone is fast becoming the gateway to the Internet, Wireless Web and local search.

You can imagine the frantic calls lately between Silicon Valley and Redmond:

Steve: “Jerry, have your people call my people.”
Jerry: “Frack off, Steve.”

Yahoo announced a strategic partnership today with T-Mobile in Europe. Yahoo! oneSearch will become the exclusive mobile search service for T-Mobile’s 11 European markets by the end of next month. Yahoo! oneSearch is designed for mobile phones to deliver relevant results and instant answers without navigating through a sea of blue links.

A number of Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships have been announced in the last year. Since introducing Yahoo! oneSearch in early 2007, Yahoo! has signed partnership agreements with more than 29 mobile operators covering more than 600 million mobile subscribers worldwide.

In a statement, Marco Boerries, execute vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo, said, “When we created Yahoo! oneSearch, we had a belief that mobile search was not the same as PC search. A fundamentally different approach was required, one that included different usage models and results filtering. Most importantly, we believed there was no guarantee that success in PC search would automatically translate into similar success in mobile search, creating a real opportunity for those who innovate.”

Recent strategic Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships include AT&T (United States), a global framework agreement with America Movil (16 countries across Latin America), a partnership with Rogers Wireless (Canada), partnerships with 16 operators (Asia Pacific Region), and an agreement with Telefonica (portals in 15 countries in Europe and Latin America). Yahoo! will be the exclusive or preferred mobile search service on the carrier portal.

Yahoo! oneSearch has added Flight Tracker, movie reviews (critics and UGC), and movie trailers (select carriers/handsets), along with Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. If you’re lucky enough to read this at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Yahoo will discuss its strategy for the local mobile search ecosystem.

Or, if you’re in New York, join the Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Strategies, and ClickZ teams at the Yahoo Search Spotlight Awards.