Danny reported that Google is moving away from listing news articles in a OneBox, and instead places news results directly in the search results. In the past these pages would require building up significant trust criteria (linkage data, etc.) before being considered for a top organic ranking, but now their editorial inclusion in Google news is giving them a free pass to a top ranking for relevant search queries. This helps Google in 4 major ways

• Google is far from being the top news site, so this allows them to arbitrage the value of the news vertical using their core search results, while still keeping the search results relevant.

• This allows Google to put ads against their news products, which they have yet to attempt at News.Google.com.
• This allows Google to funnel more traffic to trusted content sources, and thus help subsidize the content creation costs, while making those sources more addicted to Google's traffic.
• Overrepresenting fresh trusted editorial content sources in the organic search results gives the organic search results an informational bias, allows Google to start working to depreciate their weighting on fresh blog stories, and lowers the value of small focused commercial sites (unless they are of a high enough quality to get press coverage).

Webmasters owning niche or seasonal sites that enjoyed temporal exposure will discover there are fewer traditional top 10 results that are open for the taking, because fresh news stories will fill in a few more slots.

In Addition, Google just announced web history, which allows you to search through documents you viewed in the past. Web history will help improve search personalization. If web history also directly becomes part of the organic search results then sites which can afford to spend a lot on advertising will also have another advantage over smaller sites.

Rumor has it that eBay just bought the web 2.0 toolbar company StumbleUpon, which helps users stumble into new and interesting pages based on the votes of friends and others with similar interests. THE SAME DAY that rumor came out Google added a toolbar feature which recommends websites you might be interested in based on your recent search queries.

Competitive Intelligence & AdSense Funded Startups

Google's biggest advantage over their competitors may not even be the cheap computer cycles. It is probably consumer trust. StumbleUpon only had to raise $1.5 million in funding before being bought out, largely due to low cost structure, but also because they turned stumbles into unmarked ads, offered a sponsorship based model, and published AdSense ads on their site.

Google can buy out or clone any service that threatens their ad market and media dominance.

Asset Pricing & Public Relations

Since StumbleUpon was an AdSense publisher, Google saw their growth rate, and had better market data as to their value than eBay possibly could have. As soon as they started talking about sales, Google could make the best offer, or decide if it was just cheaper to clone something in-house, then overshadow competing news by adding the feature to the Google suite ahead of the buyout news.

Advertising leads to exposure, which leads to more exposure, which leads to market dominance. Now Google is recommending content. Maybe those same content sites chose to advertise with Google from time to time, or maybe they syndicate Google's ads and convert well. If you were Google, and you were recommending ads and content based on earnings wouldn't that lead to recommending biased content that converts?

Trademarks & the Sketchiness of Relevant Recommendations

Google maintains that they are legal with their keyword based ad targeting. Judges struggle with the cases:

"The large number of businesses and users affected by Google's AdWords program indicates that a significant public interest exists in determining whether the AdWords program violates trademark law," Fogel wrote in his decision.

Maybe they are legal, but when you get to content websites or contextually targeted ads you can't be certain why Google is displaying an ad. Is it site targeted? Page targeted? Geographically targeted? Automated based on a keyword and trademark in the page title, or personal character flaws, or conversion data?

Arbitraging Your Brand One Click at a Time

With pay per action ads Google turned the link into a virtually unmarked ad unit. They will likely control distribution based on how much revenue an ad makes Google. If you buy distribution from lead aggregators, and they buy Google CPA ads, their ads may be automatically targeted by Google against any media mentioning your company, at first you will think these aggregators are doing a great job, and you might even pay them a higher commission. But then you may start to notice fewer direct inquiries.

Upon further inspection some of these lead aggregators use domain names similar to your brand, like VillanovaU.com, and their ads appear on just about any content related to Villanova. Eventually you realize that you are best off brokering a deal directly with Google, so you do.

Introducing Google Tax

This is how Google will kill many mid market players and get a piece of the action for most large businesses. They will keep automating recommendations and arbitraging against your brands and trademarks until you decide to broker an ad deal directly with Google, and if you don't give Google a big enough cut they will just recommend an arbitrager, some high converting currently hot scam, or a competitor of some sort.

Affiliate marketers funded search and showed business the value of search before getting pushed around by ad quality scores. The lead aggregators will show businesses that they can just work directly with Google. Off the start the numbers will look great, and they will keep doing well until direct inquiries gradually decline as the Google Tax is applied.

I think Werty was the person who coined Google Tax, while he was between paintings, working on his garden.

Ideas come up in the news over and over again, and when they do category leading sites gain self reinforcing links. In industries where many competing sites are viewed as sleazy it is easy to build an industry leading site by playing the industry from the other side. DMOZ loves to list Allegedly Unethical Firms, and so does the media. I just bought a domain name off SnapNames for the $60 minimum. Other bidders must have thought it was worthless because the name matched a scam. It does, but if I create an advocacy website then I have a self reinforcing authority that is a clean link source which can branch out in scope as it gains authority.

Every market and every idea is something you can build up or arbitrage against. Sometimes arbitraging against a scam helps reinforce the feeling of self worth in a group of powerful people. As long as you are comfortable with the position, don't be afraid to bet (and build) against scams.

If you wanted to enter a new market one of the easiest ways to get ready to enter it is to start a blog or editorial content site about the topic. An editorial site has the following advantages over a straight commercial site

• It is easier to link at an informational site. There is a huge pool of links open to bloggers that is not open to purely commercial sites. There are people out there who WILL NOT link to commercial sites but will link to content sites.

• It is also easier to trust a commentator as an unbiased industry source than a person building a new company.
• If you write things that are link worthy they will spread much more quickly than if they were hidden away deep inside a commercial site.
• When you write you create connections and gain exposure and trust, all of which can be leveraged to help push your ideas or get feedback on your ideas.
• If you seem like a fan of your topic it is far easier to access people with competing business interests, before they even think of you as competition.
• By studying and tracking a topic without committing to any business model, you learn the topic and then can build a business around opportunity.

Via Marketing Pilgrim, Google now offers a Placement Performance report, which shows what pages and sites your content ads are displayed on, and which ones are converting. Here are tips Google offers on how to use this data:

• If your goal is to increase conversions such as purchases, page views, sign-ups or leads through your ads, reassess how you're tracking your conversions. Make sure you've implemented conversion tracking so you can understand how individual sites are converting for you. Please note: A low CTR reading on a site does not mean your ads are not performing well. This is because users behave differently on content pages than they do on search sites.

• Use the site exclusion tool to exclude sites that are not converting for your campaign.
  Refine your targeting. If you find that your ads are not showing up on sites with a particular theme that you do not find relevant, try using negative keywords

• Adjust your bids. Enabling our content bidding feature will allow you to bid separately for the content network. Learn more.
• Identify sites that are converting particularly well for your campaign and take steps to increase your exposure on those sites. We recommend enabling our content bidding feature to bid more aggressively on those sites, or targeting them through a site-targeted campaign. Please note that site targeting utilizes cost-per-impression (CPM) bidding.

While those tips generally revolve around track your ads and spend more, they could be a bit more altruistic and useful. Thus, here are my tips on how I might use the data:

• If you are using CPM site targeting on a large site, but find only a few pages convert, consider just targeting those few pages.

• Find sources to buy ads from directly, and buy all their ad inventory. Maybe you can even broker a custom ad deal involving presell pages.
• Find link sources...if they are already selling AdSense it doesn't take much more work to buy ads directly, especially if they are a smaller player and are not making much from AdSense.
• View what TYPES of content converts and search for other content that matches that intent which you may want to advertise on.
• View page content to see what keyword phrases the converting content covers. Create content covering the same keyword groups.