It's been a long while since anyone fully believed in the old, innocent "Don't be evil" image of Google. The last 28 or so times I checked its quarterly financials, it appears to be running a business. And how! Part of Google's mission in "running a business" has been optimizing the PPC auction - and indeed, the entire search results experience - to maximize revenue. Doing that has often meant considering the user experience as well, to be sure.

As a consumer, the more experienced you get, the more rituals you see played out, the more often you develop a certain set of convictions about what is truly "throwing your money away," as opposed to paying for convenience, style, or a true indulgence. Most of us have stored up some variant of George Costanza's scornful "Get my car repaired at a dealership? Why don't I just flush my money down the toilet!," to be applied in familiar situations.

Google and its stock were hit with a triple whammy today, with a below-forecast earnings performance and more chatter about "declining average costs per click" coinciding with an unfortunate leak of their 8-K earnings statement and the need to prematurely release earnings in the middle of the trading day. For a business of its size and age, Google is still showing amazing revenue growth. Growth in aggregate paid clicks is amazingly robust year-over-year, at 33%.

Seth Godin wrote The Dip about the scary transition period when you really need to re-engineer something fundamental about life or business, and in the transition, your day-to-day results are almost certain to be worse for a time, before you )ideally( ultimately re-emerge on a higher plane. There is no more literal view of that 'Dip' than when you watch the search referral graph in your Analytics following a move to a new company name or URL. Down you go.

I once ran into a starving freelance tech journalist at a Google press briefing by Eric Schmidt. There was very limited seating in the room, so this journalist began questioning the "purity" of some of those who had been invited. She seemed taken aback that in the online marketing specialties, many of the "thought leaders" were also practitioners who worked on campaigns for clients, for pay. Then why are you here? she said, unabashedly,

Logging into campaign settings, you might be surprised to see four ad rotation options now. Two "optimize" settings, one "rotate for 90 days, then optimize for clicks," and now, "rotate indefinitely". In other words, the setting that was the only and original setting in AdWords, and for a long time was one of the two main settings people used )though the optimize for clicks, or "performance" setting soon became the default(.

It keeps coming back: the meme about Yelp being a form of "extortion" driving small business owners out of business, "shaking them down" until they advertise, etc. Some observers " on scant and selective evidence " allege that there is a pattern. That Yelp calls you up to ask you to advertise, and then when you don't, favorable reviews start going missing . Kind of sounds like a mob protection racket, right? Exploding bakeries burning to the ground,

I've developed a slightly mystical belief: there is no free lunch. Or call it instead the Free Stuff Karma Syndrome. Better yet: Maybe You'll Do Me a Favor Sometime. To sum it up, if you're an end user, and you cherry-pick all the best online content and services without ever paying a penny for them, and do your best to avoid engaging with the ads'well, you might be OK.

Blog comments " and by "blog" here, I really mean blogs with commenters plus the )probably more numerous( mainstream press articles online, with commenters " can be a curious manifestation of free speech at best, a depressing spectacle of barely legible misanthropy at worst. In the middle of a major election, it's tempting to be lulled into the assumption that we're in the midst of a conversation " at times heated " among )or between( opposing world views.

This was going to be a little post that basically said "Hey! Have you guys seen the National Car Rental commercial where they actually mention improving ROI through SEO?" I've been loving those commercials, actually, since shortly after they started. I think I was hooked when the third character came along " the woman whose "core competency' is COMPETENCY.

The tech world is littered with tales of cage matches between perceived underdogs and huge overdogs, the latter of whom don't realize at the time that they're even in a cage match. )Oftentimes, they're still gradually figuring it out to this day' until, even, their dying day.( That's one of at least 1,000 deep insights buried in the Walter Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs . "You know Steve, he has his own agenda,

If you've heard of Hugh MacLeod's sex and cash theory , and you've been wondering which category your day job managing paid search accounts falls into' wonder no more. I'm here to tell you: compared with the orgiastic goings-on over on the SEO side of the search marketing game, PPC is' well'not sex. [As it turns out SEO also merely seems sexy, but isn't quite "sex" in the strict sense of MacLeod's theory,

Over the past few years, there has been well-founded speculation on whether Twitter will go public, whether it will be acquired, or indeed, whether it can survive financially at all despite being a popular service. We jotted down some thoughts about Twitter's suitability for monetization via ads, way back in April 2010. Today, Sarah Lacy has an excellent piece about the tug-of-war in the world of analyst and VC opinion about Twitter. Broadly speaking,

Hey @marissamayer , It's become a great tradition around this blog. We've gone through several bouts of know-it-allness here when it comes to Yahoo's fortunes, and we've structured little lists of things to do for Yahoo CEO's. We were especially interested in Jerry Yang's to-do list . After all, he founded the darn company. You would have thought there would be some sense of urgency when he returned to the helm.

Sometimes, it seems that time is going backwards in our industry. Marketers' instincts when it comes to divining and profiting from the deepest, darkest corners of human frailty and desire seem to be diminishing even as we collect more and more data that should shine light on them. "I don't think people like to think of a mouse in a hotel" )to Conrad Hilton, on his homemade print ad creative( " detail work for Don. That, he can do in his sleep.

For those of you who weren't fortunate enough to see it this morning: SES Toronto keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik laid into a host of Canadian companies for their unwillingness to execute the most basic of user experiences in their online commerce presences. Rogers, Canadian Tire, TD Bank, and numerous others were torched; in most cases, the outrage was justified. )After this,

Google has announced that after years of sending free traffic to many retailers through a feed-based product listing system, it will consolidate that feed-based product listing service into a single, pay-per-click service similar to what has already been running since 2010. People unfamiliar with how business actually works appear shocked. Over at Search Engine Roundtable, we hear that some people called "webmasters" are "feeling hurt" by the change .

There is a saying in advertising: "Clients change agencies like they change {keyword: socks or underwear}." The reality is a little less volatile, given that familiarity and relationships often prevail in business, usually for the right reasons. A better analogy - when things are going absolutely awry - is tectonic plates crunching together, or ice caps melting in the North: disaster may not happen today or tomorrow, but there is a certain inevitability to the outcome.

Advertisers being the curious, hypercompetitive lot they are, many of them can't resist typing in "their" search keywords to see where they stack up visually against the competition. The problem is, that can be both time-consuming and misleading. To feed this desire, tool makers provide similar functionality at scale, offering competitive intelligence reports by keyword or by competitor URL. The problem with that is, it generates a lot of automated queries to Google.

If you ever make the mistake, as I recently did, of reading Twenge and Campbell's The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement , you'll have more than a few "whoa! that's scary!" moments, when you begin recognizing vivid examples of the shift they've documented as they happen in slow motion in day-to-day life. Scary, as in "they really got that right." This study of the rise in narcissistic qualities in the general )especially,