On Friday, comScore announced that Google retained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted in June 2008. By and large, the press coverage focused on the fact that Google's share of core searches was down slightly from May, while Yahoo! and Microsoft's share of core searches were up slightly from the previous month. But, farther down the comScore press release was data on the "expanded search queries" for June.

Well-lnown New York Search Marketer Avi Wilensky went to an interesting office launch that looks at the search space on the web, in terms of "a few large multibillion dollar players dominating the space. It's an exclusive "billionaires club", with a single player that has more market share than its 3 main competitors combined )Google at almost 60% according to latest Comscore data(" Wilensky noted.

Matt Cutts has now earned international film star status. Google Webmaster Central in Germany has created an SEO video with excellent production values - particularly by YouTube standards. They've even translated Matt into German : Hallo an alle User aus Deutschland! Ob ihr nun User, Webmaster oder ein SEO seid - ich freue mich, hier die Gelegenheit zu haben, ein bisschen mit euch zu sprechen. Ich hoffe, dass ich bald die Möglichkeit finde,

In April, before Microsoft's ultimatum for Yahoo to accept its bid came to pass, Legg Mason threw its support behind Yahoo . Now the investor group is continuing its support of Yahoo and plans to vote for the current board at the upcoming August 1 shareholders meeting . However, Legg Mason did advise Yahoo and Carl Icahn to bury the hatchet by the time of the meeting.

To pass the gclid or not to pass the gclid, that is the question. At least, if you're trying to tag your AdWords URLs in Google Analtyics it is. On the Google Analytics blog , they're talking about using auto-tagging in Adwords in order to facilitate easy viewing of info in Analytics. But problems may arise if you've got some URL redirecting going on. Basically, auto-tagging inserts a little snippet of code into destination URLs. But if you have several redirects,

Google is looking to extend its global ad reach with its purchase of a Russian ad agency. Rambler Media has sold Begun advertising agency to Google for $140 million. Begun serves up contextual ads. Rambler will also contract search technology from Google as part of the deal. "Google is very committed to giving Russian users, advertisers and partners the best possible service and experience," said Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director Emerging Markets, Google.

Google wasn't the only one reporting second quarter revenues yesterday. Microsoft also dished, though they label the same period as their fiscal fourth quarter. The software giant made $15.84 billion last quarter, up 18% over the same quarter last year. Annual revenue was $60.42 billion, which was also up 18% over the year prior. The growth rate is not good enough for Wall Street, however, as the stock was down nearly 5% at the time of this post.

Google revenues topped $5.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2008, an increase of 39 percent compared to the second quarter of 2007. That's also an increase of 3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008. But those numbers still disappointed investors who basked in the glow of Google's growth and perhaps lingered a little too long in the sun. The big news? Weakness in key sectors such as real estate,

Seems GoDaddy is having some problems with their just launched .me domains. People were applying left and right for them and obviously GoDaddy seemed to have a "box office" hit with the new domain extension. But as SEW moderator Discovery details here , everyone seems to get an initial you got your domain only to find out a little while later that the names have already been assigned to someone else.

We often take the mainstream press to task for not understanding the value of search engine marketing and search engine optimization . So it's a welcome change when a national columnist gets it right. Today Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com wrote a column titled, "Get on Google's Good Side with SEO." With Matt Cutts' recent endorsement of "white hat" SEO, it's great to see small business embrace search engine optimization. Strauss writes,

In the latest installment from Google about search quality , the topic du jour is user intent. Google Fellow Amit Singhal is at the helm of the Official Google blog again and wrote about efforts Google makes to help searchers find what they're looking for. Singhal writes, "Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want ." I guess that depends on who you ask. Perhaps the search engines have approached it this way,

Efficient Frontier has released search advertising market data for the second quarter of 2008, and it showed Google growing 2% over Q2 2007. For every new dollar spent on search ads in 2008 over 2007, Google received $1.10, while Yahoo lost $0.09 and Microsoft lost $0.01. As a result, Google enjoyed 77.4% of total search engine spending in Q2 2008, while Yahoo fell 2% to 17.8% and Microsoft came in at 4.8%.

In a letter that is likely to believed by almost no one, Yahoo regurgitated much of the same old statements about Microsoft and Carl Icahn - and then slipped in something about selling the entire company for $33 a share. Of course, that's only "if Microsoft will negotiate a transaction that delivers certainty of value and certainty of closing. This is the simplest, most straightforward way to maximize value for you.

Online reputation management just became much more crucial. Google has enabled reviews and ratings for businesses, restaurants, etc via mobile. Now people don't have to wait until they get home )and have time to cool down on the way?( to write a review after a negative )or perceived negative( experience. On the flip side, you could encourage your customers to write a review if they had a positive experience.

Canadian Business Magazine has an excellent Q&A with Google's Tim Armstrong. Here are some choice excerpts that show where Google's headed and why. Canadian Business : What are some other emerging trends you're seeing in Internet advertising? Tim Armstrong : Social networking will be a big part of online advertising in the future. There's also going to be a lot more analytics beneath Internet advertising.

Beginning tomorrow )July 17(, GoDaddy will offer .me domains in open registration. The registrar and hosting provider hopes that people will sign up for two reasons: 1. to have their own name as their domain and 2. to have more control over their email address. "'I want my name as a domain name' is something I hear often from Internet users," said GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "DotME not only gives everyone a chance to register their own name,

Google recently announced Ad Planner , its new media measurement tool. The tool is designed to help media buyers in their ad campaign spend planning. Though the tool is currently in private-beta, anyone is welcome to attend two upcoming webinars introducing the tool. Both webinars are free of charge. You must register to attend, so check out the links and info below: July 16, 2008 )TODAY!

Currently being tested by over 20 companies, DoubleClick has an electronic propsal exchange platform in the works. In a 2007 survey, 70% of DoubleClick's ad agency clients said that a publisher's use of an automated proposal tool would have a positively impact on their decision to send that publisher an RFP )Request for Proposal(.

Microsoft has released an update to its servers and new enterprise search features are included in the mix. The update )which is a series of three bundles( affects: Office SharePoint Server 2007 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Search Server 2008 Search Server 2008 Express Office Project Server 2007 and Office Project Professional 2007 The new enterprise search features include: A federated search capability,

A new report from AdGooroo shows that, generally speaking, for short keywords it's not profitable to bid your way into the high positions. These types of keywords actually lose money in the first and second positions, but longer keywords can do well near the top. In today's Web analytics and ROI column, " When Being First Isn't Worth It ," Eric Enge shows that by testing this idea on your campaigns, you stand to create more profitable PPC campaigns.