I’ve suggested before that you should think of each search as a question.

Paid search ads are run in an attempt to raise your hand and deliver answers.

Today Google noted that they are monitoring over 1 trillion URLs, for use in finding the organic rankings which are delivered on search result pages. Wow.

But I was glad to see how they characterized the reason why they’re doing all this work:

As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.

Came across a great post from Chris Zaharias at Omniture today, bemoaning Google’s Automatic Matching option, which I lampooned in an earlier post.

Chris makes two very interesting additional points (Beyond the great name “laziness tax”.)

Advertisers typically set higher daily or monthly AdWords budgets than they want or expect to spend, simply because setting a budget equal to what they actually *expect* to spend would result in Google throttling back on delivery of their ad as the advertiser approaches the budget limit. So what you have is a scenario where a strong double-digit percentage of Google’s customers currently have higher budgets set than what they expect to spend, and an automatic matching beta that wrong assumes the advertisers actually *want* to spend all that budget.

And

Keep in mind that even should you opt out of “automatic match”, you will likely still feel its effects. If the history of AdWords new feature rollouts is any indication, 30-40% of advertisers go with whatever new features Google suggests. Were 30-40% of Google’s advertisers to use “automatic match”, I’d expect the increase in coverage and competition in Google’s ad space to result in keyword inflation as bad as the rising gasoline and food costs we are now experiencing.

Two great points. The Automatic Matching Option helps Google and nobody else.

Turn it off. And complain to your Google Rep.

Another lawsuit aimed and preventing the use of trademarked keywords was dropped this week. This time it was American Airlines who had filed a lawsuit against Google for allowing other to use their name to trigger the display of competitive ads.

According to Bloomberg:

American claimed Google violated its trademark by allowing competing airlines to bid on keyword searches that generate “sponsored link” ads on search-results Web pages. The ads take advantage of the American brand’s popularity, even if the name isn’t used in the ad, the carrier said.

Google settled similar suits by other U.S. companies before the untested area of trademark law could be addressed by a judge or jury. Foreign lawsuits still pose challenges to the advertising practice, part of Google’s AdWords program.

Courts in France have held Google liable for allowing advertisers to select trademarked terms as keywords, according to U.S. regulatory filings. Google, based in Mountain View, California, said it is handling or recently resolved similar cases in Germany, Israel, Italy, Austria and Australia.

Google had argued that its “invisible” use of trademarks isn’t technically “trademark use” under U.S. law. Google compared the program to practices such as placing generic drugs next to name brands in pharmacies and buying billboard ads next to those of competitors.

This last point is the reason I’ve never understood the merits of these suits. Trademark law is designed, in my very simple understanding, to prevent one company from confusing customers with a name that is similar (or identical) to another company.

Does buying a trademarked term as a keyword provide one company benefit from the name and reputation of another? Certainly. But isn’t that why all the car dealers rent space on the same block? Doesn’t it happen when magazines review all the products in one category together?

Every company in the world wants to steal customers and prospects from their competitors. Their efforts to do so yield better features, better pricing, and loads of other consumer benefits.

Using trademark protection to limit confusion benefits consumers. Using it to try and limit consumers knowledge and awareness of competition harms consumers, and should itself be illegal. Great to see a lawsuit go the right way.

After first passively and then actively squandering a business and technical lead, running Yahoo into the ground over the past few years, destroying and rebuking billions in shareholder value, and sending his entire executive team heading for the exits, it is worth a moment to consider what Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has done to you, the paid search advertiser. And what you should do in return.

George Michie covers this topic over at SearchEngineLand today, and discusses the fact that with Google campaigns running on the Yahoo properties, there is a clear economic problem - your bids were set based on the value of Google search and search network traffic. And for the vast majority of companies that value is not equivalent to the value of Yahoo search and search network traffic.

In other words, you’re now paying for steak but getting served hamburger.

Your two choices, as George points out, are to accept this fact or cut bids which drives down your Google results. Nice choices, huh?

I’d like to suggest a third option. Google needs to de-couple the Search Network from the Google Search bidding, like they did a few years ago with the Content Network. In other words, we should be allowed to separate campaigns/ad-groups and bid to the value of the network and not be forced to buy it bundled with Google search.

Making this change puts advertisers in line with Google on this and any major network ad-distribution agreements. Ultimately, allowing us to opt in and out of individual distribution channels, and get click-level reports on performance is also necessary.

It took them a while but Google did the right thing on the Content Network, and has made incremental improvements in these areas since the first step. All these moves were driven by advertiser feedback and demands. Time to start speaking up on this one.

Jerry has cost enough people money and heart-ache. It shouldn’t have to cost all of us.