This August brings the world's top search marketers to Silicon Valley's doorstep at Search Engine Strategies San Jose on August 18-22, 2008. Register today and get your search marketing questions answered by attending the search marketing training classes and talk directly to search executives from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Conference highlights include:

• 70+ sessions
• 150+ exhibitors
• SEM Training
• SES Awards
• Domain Auction
• Google Dance
• SearchBash

For more info go to the SES San Jose website.

Explore some of the most in-demand sessions:

• Universal & Blended Search
• Maximizing SEO Returns With User Generated Content
• Global Search for the B2B SEM
• Successful Tactics for Social Media
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Search Around the World

For a complete conference agenda, click here.

This post is sponsored by SES San Jose.

For a professional network, it makes perfect sense to bring ads that target a particular profile. LinkedIN is setting out to do just that with the launch of its DirectAds Targeted advertising program.

An excerpt from SearchEngineJournal

LinkedIn DirectAds is a grownup and more professional version of Facebook Ads, with a CPM (cost per impression) model instead of the cost per click. Given LinkedIn's dominance of being a career related social network, and the amount of recruiters who already use LinkedIn to build relationships of aggressively headhunt, expect ads to be very direct and targeted, and recruitment or team building firms to take full advantage.

The details of the program are:

Limit your ads to people based on location Target people based on position, age, salary, industry. Easy sign-up for just $25

The program should add more value to LinkedIN and perhaps it would be looking to set itself free from dependence on other ad networks such as Google's AdSense.

Sergey Solyanik has an interesting post on his blog on his experience working for Google and why he decided to come back. Its a good read on the perspective of an insider. Prominent in the post is the points he highlights on how Microsoft provides a clear career path and how at Google the emphasis is on 'coolness' rather than reliability.

An excerpt from the blog post

Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.

Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).

All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.

This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly. I've shipped 3 major features (a lot of spell checker and other stuff in the latest Gmail release, multi-user chat in Gmail, and road traffic incidents in Google Maps), and was busy at work on my fourth project in just a year. You can turn really quickly when you don't have to build consensus between 3 disciplines as you do at Microsoft!

I think this reflects only on one perspective of a developer. There are many out there who would probably love to code some cool stuff than essentially work on code that results in monetary gains.

Google has its own Android initiative but there are other statistics that suggest the there is more love for the iPhone. Recent statistics have shown that the access to the search engine from Apple's slick device is huge.

An excerpt from SearchEngineLand

...they found that 1.3 million searchers conducted 6.9 million searches for iPhone-related search terms in April 2008 alone. Of those 6.9 million searches, 88.4 percent came from Google, which is 33 percent higher then Google's market share would account for...

Google has its feet in all waters with further enhancing the search on BlackBerry as well. Surely, they have a well spread out strategy that would do well even if Android fails to impress.

ReadWriteweb has a post on the new trends that have been shaping up at the search front and those that could possibly challenge Google's dominance in the future.

A summary of the list

1. Outsourcing of crawlers 2. Targeting single proven sources like Wikipedia 3. Peer to Peer search 4. Core search is still getting funded

Over all the article lambastes the approach to using natural language as users have more or less come to expect the machine to respond to queries where the difference in the terms is stark. Among these the use of P2P for search does look very interesting. It does solve one big problem with search - scaling to the size of the web.

The more fundamental aspect is the inertia to change. Even if there are engines that provide distinctly better search than Google, perhaps there will be no en-mass switching over unless Google itself deteriorates in quality.

SearchEngineWatch's Kevin Ryan has a great post on the fallout of the recently announced partnership between Yahoo and Google. The deal that is supposed to have spurned the takeover bid from Microsoft is bound to have a large impact on the emerging market for internet advertising.

An excerpt from the article

Partnership is a lovely term as it covers all manner of good and evil while saying exactly nothing in the process. Agency managers I've spoken to recently are still struggling with Google's arguably one-sided advertising terms and conditions.

Maybe the negotiations will go better once Google is the only place to buy search ads. Maybe Hillary Clinton will get back into the presidential race as well. I hear the American dollar is about to mount a giant comeback against the Euro, too.

It does seem that the only outcome of Microsoft's bid was to hurl Yahoo into Google's arms. The recent exodus of talent from Yahoo also stands out as a bad sign of things to come. Yahoo does seem to exude the impression that it is not looking towards search as the frontier for the next growth. It may be right in attempting to add a social layer across all its web properties and perhaps think about Search Advertising once that is done. But in the meantime, the advantage that comes to Google may make a comeback in the future almost impossible.