People don't just search on search engines. Think about it -- when was the last time you bought something online simply by searching for it and going straight to a site to buy it?

Traditional search engines offer "reference search." The user experience in reference search starts outside of the search engine. You know about a topic, and you want to find additional detail.

Unfortunately, some clients can unintentionally limit or harm the work you're trying to do on their behalf. It's frustrating. They're usually ambitious for their Web sites, but lack any real understanding of SEO methods.

Market Motive faculty Bryan Eisenberg has a great list of 69 really killer tools for making your website better. Since I’m a big tool fan myself, we’re planning a future Market Motive panel to discuss our favorite tools for website. It should be truly awesome - if for some reason you don’t know Bryan - you’ve been living under a rock, and are missing out on one of the true top level experts on conversion optimization. This guy literally wrote the book on the subject (in fact, several of them). Check out Bryan’s awesome list of tools to make your website better, and keep an eye out for our upcoming webcast on MM on all our favorite tools in the web marketing arsenal.

There comes a time in most businesses where manufacturers look around at various opportunities for growth and struggle with them due to channel conflict. According to Wikipedia, channel conflict occurs when manufacturers (brands) disintermediate their channel partners, such as distributors, retailers, dealers, and sales representatives, by selling their products direct to consumers through general marketing methods and/or over the internet through eCommerce. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_conflict) In the case of Ad Words, Google is the manufacturer and as you can see below, they are now also the advertiser who is in the business of re-selling mortgage refinance leads.

If you are Barry Diller and you know that Ask.com has been running at a distant fourth place against the third major search engine, would you sell out your search engine? Apparently, that seems to be what Barry Diller of Ask.com is contemplating on right now especially with the unshakeable stand that the three major search engines have waged upon in the search engine market. Diller was quoted with the following statement: