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comScore today released its first report on the U.K. search market from its enhanced comScore qSearch 2.0 online search measurement tool. The service, which was first launched in the U.K. in September 2007, has been updated to include several local market properties where search activity occurs, such as Rightmove Sites and Bebo.com.

I discussed how this expanded definition of “search” changes the landscape in the U.S. back in March in an article entitled, “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing at SES New York 2008.”

In the U.K., Google Sites continued its reign as the leading search property in April with 74.2 percent of all searches. eBay ranked second with 6 percent, followed by Yahoo! Sites (4.3 percent) and Microsoft Sites (3.4 percent).

Two U.K. properties, Rightmove Sites (0.8 percent share) and Bebo.com (0.7 percent share), ranked amongst the top 10. Popular social networking property, Facebook.com, claimed a 1.8-percent market share in April.

Yes, people conduct searches at social networking sites. It’s not your father’s SEO.

Google co-founder Larry Page was in the nation’s capital making the case for white spaces when the conversation inevitably turned to Microsoft-Yahoo. According to several news outlets, Page said, “Now, if you put 90% of communications all in one company … that’s really a big risk, especially one (Microsoft) that has a history of doing bad stuff. So if you want to have good products you need to have some degree of openness.”

There are obvious problems with Page’s statement. One is, why is Page acting threatened? Google more than dominates search engine queries and advertising.

Another is, if a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would produced closed products, and if good products require openness, then what in the world is Page worried about?

Besides rethinking his logic, Page may also want to do some number crunching. USA Today pointed out that comScore predicts that a Microsoft-Yahoo deal would combine to have 70% of email and instant messaging market share in the U.S.

During the same speech, Page said that a Google-Yahoo ad deal would pass the antitrust test. Together, Google and Yahoo dominate 80% of the search ad market.

Google was the only one of the “big” search engines to experience month-over-month growth in April 2008, according to U.S. search engine rankings released by comScore. Overall, searches by Americans declined by 2%. Core search engines received 10.6 billion of the total searches, with Google seeing over 6.5 billion, Yahoo 2.2 billion and Microsoft 961 million. Here’s the stats:

Related Reading:
Nielsen Online Releases April 2008 U.S. Search Rankings
ComScore Places Google Sites Ahead of Yahoo Sites for First Time

Nielsen Online has announced its April 2008 search share data for the U.S. Let’s dive right into the numbers:

Google - 62% market share, up 35.4% year-over-year
Yahoo - 17.5% market share, down 3.4% year-over-year
MSN/Live Search - 9.7% market share, up 30% year-over-year
AOL - 4.3% market share, down 5.1% year-over-year
Ask - 2.1 % market share, up 35.8% year-over-year

Google saw an estimated 5.1 billion searches, while Yahoo saw 1.4 billion and MSN saw nearly 800 million.

Related Reading:
Nielsen Releases March 2008 U.S. Search Data
Wikipedia Traffic Grows 8,000% in 5 Years Due to Search Referrals
Google, Nielsen Establish Strategic Relationship

Internet advertising revenues reached an all-time high in 2007, totaling $21.7 billion, which is 26% higher than 2006. The data comes from internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007 Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Keyword search leads the field when it comes to types of internet advertising. Here’s the breakdown of ad types:

David Silverman, partner, Assurance, PricewaterhouseCoopers pointed out that the data defied economic woes: “Despite the current state of economic uncertainty, 2007 was another record year and the 13th consecutive record quarter. Interactive advertising is not just the future, it is the here and now, as it represents a meaningful and growing component of U.S. advertising and marketing spend.”

What are your thoughts on 2007 internet ad revenues? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Related Reading:
IAB/PwC Reports New Heights, Slower Growth in Online Ad Revenues

The U.S. government charged a mother who allegedly used MySpace in a deadly hoax that drove her daughter’s 13-year-old classmate (pictured here) to suicide with conspiracy.

Missouri resident Lori Drew, after her daughter’s schoolgirl fights with neighbor Megan Meier, 13, created a fake MySpace account to pose as a boy and flirt with Meier. When Drew began using her online identity to taunt Meier, the girl hanged herself.

The boy Megan had been corresponding with on MySpace unexpectedly began calling her a fat slut. He wrote “the world would be a better place without you.” It turns out he was a hoax created by the mother of a former friend.

Drew was indicted today for conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to inflict emotional distress. She faces 20 years in prison, the maximum penalty.

“Any adult who uses the internet or a social gathering website to bully or harass another person, particularly a young teenage girl, needs to realize that their actions can have serious consequences,” Los Angeles federal prosecutor Thomas O’Brien, who brought the charges, said in a statement.

The case was filed in California, where MySpace is headquartered.

The suit goes a long way toward establishing and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable and illegal behavior on the Internet in general and social media sites in specific.

Who won Survivor last night? Powerset doesn’t know.

Okay - maybe that’s an unfair question for Powerset since the aptly-named Parvati Shallow only won Survivor Micronesia last night. It might be easier to ask “Who is Parvati? The answer: in Sanskrit, “parvati” means “Mountain’s daughter” one of the names for Shiva’s wife, the Universal Mother.

So what is Powerset? That’s a much more intelligent question to ask.

Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)

That doesn’t mean natural language search or Powerset can kill Google, or even commit assault and battery on Google.

Powerset launched with a smart concept: better search results than Wikipedia’s own search box. So the play is a “non-Google Custom Search Engine” for Wikipedia. Let’s see about what Powerset can can do..

“What is Powerset?” we asked. Powerset separates results by combining the primary keyword (Powerset) with related verbs and nouns from Web pages and Wikipedia. Here’s the answer we weren’t looking for from Powerset itself.

Factz from Wikipedia: we found the following about Powerset
Powerset opened : community and Powerlabs.

Results for Powerset opened community

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset opened Powerlabs

Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.

Results for Powerset displayed advertise

Powerset (company) (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)

Results for Powerset searched language

Powerlabs Let’s roll, is a prerelease of Powerset’s general natural language search.

Wikipedia Articles: results 1 - 10 of 78

1. Powerset (company)
Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
2. Power set
In mathematics, given a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written , P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set.

6. Powerlabs
Powerset Applications Currently, Powerset has released two applications: Powermouse and a beta of its search engine.

Only when you click on the expand snippet (powermouse) miniviewer button, do you find the answer you’re looking for (sort of):

Powerset (company)

Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

The company’s stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user’s questions, as opposed to keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter “Which state has the highest income tax?” at Powerset, as opposed to “state income tax” at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks

Powerset is limited by the poorly-written Wikipedia entry. The comparison to Google doesn’t work. If someone’s searching for the state with the highest state income tax, they’ll type in “highest state income tax.” No one would type in “state income tax” in Google if they’d type “Which state has the highest income tax?” in Powerset.

At this stage in beta, Powerset can be considered a search engine survivor.

But unless the technology yields better results — and fast — people will think of Parvati and Powerset as “shallow” contestants.

Internet-based ad agency Spot Runner has secured a combined $51 million in funding from Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), Grupo Televisa, Legg Mason Capital Management and Groupe Arnault/LVMH. Spot Runner CEO Nick Grouf said of the funding, “These strategic investments serve as a strong validation of Spot Runner’s technology-driven advertising model, as well as the results we have generated for advertisers and media owners. This further accelerates our momentum as we expand into a broader spectrum of online and offline media, both domestically and abroad.”

DMGT is a large media company based in the U.K. with operations in Central Europe, the U.S. and Canada, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. The company has interests in a variety of media channels including national newspapers and related digital operations, local media, business and financial information, exhibitions and radio.

Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world. Operating four broadcast channels in Mexico, Televisa maintains interests in pay-television network production, international distribution of television programming, direct-to-home satellite services, cable television, magazine publishing and distribution, and radio broadcasting.

Luxury products group Groupe Arnault/LVMH boasts a portfolio of over 60 prestigious brands including Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Sephora and TAG Heuer.

Louis Vuitton communications head Antoine Arnault said of Spot Runner’s funding, “The global media landscape is undergoing a sea change. For advertisers to be effective, they will need to completely shift their thinking about how media is targeted and distributed, and how creative can be versioned for multiple audiences. Spot Runner is the clear leader in this area. As one of the largest advertisers in the fashion category, we’re very enthusiastic about the prospect of working with them to capitalize on these transformations.”

Earlier this year, Spot Runner acquired local online advertising provider, Weblistic.

Yahoo has teamed up with McAfee to develop SearchScan, a new safe search service. Here’s what you need to know:

• Provides always-on alerts to users for “risky” sites with security concerns including spyware, adware and other malicious software
• Identifies sites that have shown bad email practices such as flooding user in-boxes with spammy emails
• Available for Yahoo! Search users in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain

“The new SearchScan feature from Yahoo! Search makes searching the Web even safer than ever before. No other search engine today offers this level of warning before visiting sites that can damage or infect a user’s PC and cost them valuable time and money,” said Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Search. “Through this partnership with McAfee, we can offer users a safer search experience and drive more users to make Yahoo! Search their starting point on the Web.”

Google TV Ads have been in private beta since last summer, but now they’re groomed and prepped and available for U.S. customers. Why in the world should a search marketer such as yourself care about TELEVISION? I’m so glad you asked.

Offline advertising prompts online searches. Last summer, iProspect released study data suggesting that 37% of TV watchers are prompted to conduct a search based on a TV ad. I can attest to the validity of this statement as I’ve seen these results in the marketing analytics of a Fortune 500 company I previously worked with.

Because of this, integration is crucial. If your TV people aren’t talking to your Web Marketing people, then you’re not maximizing your marketing, plain and simple.

And then there’s the future. Expect TV advertising to become more and more interactive, so that it’s not just marketing campaigns that are integrated - but the actual ad is a mashup of TV + Web.

Whether you go with Google, engage in a local TV campaign or hire an ad agency, Google’s announcement today is a great reminder of keeping our marketing eyes on the big picture.