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The standards debate may be in full swing in our industry - but the decisions may be soon taken out of our hands if the FTC continues to define allowable advertising practices.

MediPost has a good overview of the developments of behavioral targeting and how they can be used. “Ad industry players are urging the FTC not to impose any new regulations — and also argue that the proposed voluntary guidelines are too restrictive,” they reported.

Where this gets close to our industry comes from the people seeking greater regulations. “Privacy advocates, on the other hand, want to see rules that will require companies to honor Web users’ preferences about whether they wish to be tracked online and to receive targeted ads,” MediaPost notes.

If this occurs then search is on the horizon of these groups. And we better be aware of them if consumer advocacy groups are claiming they “want to see new rules, rather than rely on voluntary compliance with trade groups”.

MediaPost quotes both Google and Microsoft at the end of the article and they have opposing views.

“Google, meanwhile, is especially concerned that the standards could affect search ads. In comments to the FTC, Google said it’s testing personalized search results, and argued that search ads shouldn’t be considered “behavioral” even when the ads displayed to users are based on their search history.

“We are currently experimenting in our Search service with providing ads based on both the current query and the immediately previous search,” Google wrote. “For example, a user who types ‘Italy vacation’ into the Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or affordable flights to Rome. If the user were to subsequently search for ‘weather,’ we might assume that there is a link between ‘Italy vacation’ and ‘weather’ and deliver ads regarding local weather conditions in Italy.”

Google rival Microsoft, on the other hand, said it supports the FTC’s goals and that the proposed guidelines should be extended “to include the full array of online advertising activities.”

Funny about the Microsoft position given I have been in a pitch for increasing our budget where they used competitors advertising information to suggest other terms and ads….. anonymous of course but not hard to reverse engineer.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer says that social search is one avenue Google is pursuing to improve relevance in future iterations of its search engine. The algorithms could incorporate search history from a searcher’s Gmail contacts, or input from human experts, as startups like Mahalo, Search Wikia, Collarity and Eurekster are doing (in different ways).

Some ways to incorporate social data into search results that Mayer mentioned include:

1. Labeling or annotating search results, similar to the way social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon let users add comments and tags to sites they find.
2. Show results from “users like you,” the technique used expertly by Amazon.com to help shoppers discover new products they may not have even known they wanted.
3. Using aggregate search histories of friends (or Gmail contacts) to influence search results

When asked what Google will look like ten years from now, Mayer replied, “I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It’s hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn’t advised by those things.”

Social search is expected by many to define the next generation of search. According to search historian Danny Sullivan, search 1.0 used on-page elements to rank pages, search 2.0 added external linking, and search 3.0 is the current state, with universal search and blended search. Search 4.0 will incorporate these social factors.

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:

Who’s Google Taking On with Knols?It seems Google’s goal with Knol is to take back some of the traffic that Wikipedia is [...]

My latest interview is with Google’s Sep Kamvar. We talked about the personalization algorithms currently in use by Google in detail. Sep spells out in detail for us:
The two signals that we use right now are the search history and the location. We constantly experiment with other signals, but the two signals that [...]

Ask.com launched its AskEraser service across all of the search engine’s products, where people can opt to erase their search history with a single mouse click.
If the usual 18-month limit to Ask.com’s search data retention seems too long, searchers can slice that down to a few hours. The AskEraser service announced in July debuted on [...]

Want to make sure your search history is not being recorded? Ask.com has developed AskEraser a tool that will allow you to wipe your search history and will be launching it in the near future, according to their press release.
“Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. [...]

Ask.com will take its research with privacy advocates at the Center for Democracy & Technology into a new product for their search engine.The AskEraser product offers a straightforward way of keeping one’s search history from being retained by Ask. AskEraser will arrive in the wake of a number of privacy-related events related to search, such [...]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google’s planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, according to the New York Times.
The outcry of privacy experts and competitors made an investigation all but inevitable, according to the report.
Because the FTC is handling the investigation instead of the Justice Department, which shares [...]

There is a reason why Google keeps 18-24 months of search information before anonymizing it - three reasons, actually - and the company discussed them through the Official Google blog.The mechanisms behind Google’s operations seem surreal to people who have been on the Web since Tim Berners-Lee turned it loose over a decade ago. A [...]

A new feature from Google goes beyond the search history it can retain for people; their Web History option would keep track of every page a person visits.

Probably everyone has run into a moment where they know they saw something on a web page that could answer a question right now, but they can’t remember [...]