One thing is certain: Bryan Eisenberg is delivering the SES Toronto keynote on May 18. What is less certain is the topic. It's classified information, says Eisenberg .

Andy Beal tells it exactly how it is : Google trends just "took a small baby step towards being something of value." Actually, if you're doing broad keyword brainstorming and seasonality research and you don't want absolute counts, Google Trends is the best available tool. It gives you real Google data )though not absolute(, is very handy in terms of presentation of historical data,

Thinking things over, I've come to the conclusion that Canada has comparative advantage in a few areas )not quite as many as she might think(: Smugness Gay Marriage Blackberry Universal Health Care )only compared to US( Diamond mining not in a war zone Oil sands French people not from France We also have some fascinating thinkers and poets nonpareil: Marshall McLuhan, Têtes à Claques , Leonard Cohen, and Funnyman Bobby Bittman .

Since Barry Schwartz has escalated his Search Engine Roundtable post to a post over at SEL about Google's - wait for it - new favicon , I thought I'd provide a 10-of-you-need-to-know tidbit of my own, and unlike the lower-case favicon )which Barry doesn't like(, it's been something I have been waiting on a long time. For AdWords advertisers and agencies who have an MCC )My Client Center( multi-account dashboard,

Henry Blodget's post on the impending crisscrossing of lines on Google's and Microsoft's core businesses is timely. In 2009 sometime, Google's search ads business will be l arger and more profitable than Microsoft's core Windows operating system business . )If Microsoft is lucky, that won't be the day Google launches a hostile takeover bid for Microsoft, a development Sergey Brin slyly alluded to several years ago, when such talk could easily be dismissed as a joke,

This list of the top 100 Techmeme sites of all time )the site itself only factors in the past 30 days( is interesting fodder for tech meme junkies. What strikes me in particular about the list is the prevalence of people like you and me )that is, if you and me were prolific a-list bloggers(. There is a professionalism to many of these writers, but that said, they don't directly represent enormous news organizations.

Time out to publicize a good cause. Ross Rader, an associate who works at Toronto-based technology company Tucows )and therefore a client; Ross was a co-founder of the company(, sent around a message about his upcoming epic ride for children's cancer charities. He's given me permission to reprint the message in its entirety. Without any further ado - take it away, Ross. - Hello - sorry for the interruption )and the lengthy message to come!( As you may know,

Going back over some posts on Marc Andreessen's fantastic blog, pmarca, I came across this post that places market )and granular product-to-market fit and timing( ahead of "team" and "product per se" as a determinant of eventual success. In other words, a good product with an average team can still win if the market "pulls them along." I always thought of AOL as a company like that. You can probably think of many others. )Some in my field will say GoTo.

Rich Skrenta finds an interesting bug in Yahoo Search : unlike Google and Microsoft, which return search results, a search for "0" on Yahoo reloads the blank search engine box. He also thinks Microsoft's result is biased. Given the difficulty in figuring out how to handle this pesky query... why not just rank Page Zero at the top? Can't we all be friends?

News organizations made a big deal out of comScore reporting a slowing of Google's paid clicks )at least according to its projections( recently. Yet somehow Google blew out earnings again. Was Google reproaching comScore in today's earnings call ? I don't think so. comScore has already warned that its data should not be misinterpreted. Why Eric Schmidt would bother referring to "certain third parties," I can't say, but best not to overthink.

Google must really be having a hard time getting a read on my email thread today. In this one, I was *not* talking about Mike Grehan. But there he is.

OK, so I don't want to rain on the parade of the domain registrars who have a national newspaper campaign running to encourage Canadian companies to register a ".ca" . But here's the thing about the messaging )"Get the domain name you really want" - "Avoid getting lost in the dot com shuffle."(. It's kind of a load of hooey. Personally, I have a real problem with the .ca. It reinforces the tendency of Canadian businesses to think "provincially." Much of the time,

Because there have always been more professional SEO advocates and amateur SEO junkies than paid search practitioners and advocates, many have come to assume that organic search somehow "performs better" than paid search. In one ugly distortion of reality, an analytics vendor we like continues to give truncated examples showing that bounce rates )or very short visits( on paid search are higher in many cases than they are for organic search.

So AOL acquires huge social network Bebo . Sort of reminds me of when Overture acquired two search engine companies prior to being acquired by Yahoo. Bulk up when in reality you're planning your exit. A bargaining chip, if you will.

As some in the advertiser community had advocated, Google has decided to sell off the Performics division that came along as part of the DoubleClick acquisition. This would have put the agency in a conflict of interest position. Next on the agenda... Ahem. Microsoft? Don't you own ... [Here's the official Google post . Hat tip Techmeme .

The following went out to the Traffick Occasional newsletter list a few days ago. Here's the reprint. - Hi all, As usual, it's been awhile. So our industry is at something of a crossroads again. This watershed moment is the will-they or won't-they merge Yahoo into Microsoft to form a giant online powerhouse. My main take has been that consolidation in the paid search platforms currently operated by Microsoft and Yahoo would make life easier for us marketers day-to-day.

All other candidates are conceding. Marc Andreessen's post of last month on the New York Times Deathwatch contains a scathing indictment of the lack of Internet expertise on its very large board. The concluding sentence encapsulates the whole mean mess in a compact format: "So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller,

Google has just released a post indicating that they're poised to incorporate landing page load time into Quality Scores . What does this mean? Well.. it means they're about to incorporate landing page load times into quality scores. [As a side note, much like quality-based bidding itself, it's possible that they've already been testing the inclusion of such site performance variables. After all, they gave the thumbs-down to popups years ago.

On the subject of Ask.com's latest restructuring, we have the following guest post from Holly Buchanan, of Future Now . Take it away Holly! - So Ask.com is now going to focus on married women . OK, they have my interest since marketing to women online is my focus. "With the shift, the Oakland -based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children's homework, entertainment and health." Um -ok.

Ask.com is gradually sinking... like the Titanic. Danny Sullivan proffers this detailed obit . I worry for Lisa Barone's health in that she is "intensely angry" with Barry Diller. It's stunning to note that share is king and that differentiation is hard to achieve. Nothing has changed, really, since I riffed on this here 4.5 years ago . Google is winning. Everyone else isn't.