So WMW has a subscriber only thread titled Expert Claims to Have Beaten Google Sandbox. The best info is in the free Matt Cutts on the Google Sandbox thread. DaveN mentions a site that was quickly out of the box. His main tip?

don't think like an SEO
build site go get links from ...... <- seo

Dave also showed some encrypted logfiles showing that he was getting decent traffic from a couple sites outside of search engines.

RAE also offers up

IME it is more accurate to go *after* traffic and not links.

When I recently interviewed Matt Cutts he stated that many companies at the Web 2.0 conference were powered by AdSense. Kevin Burton hopes to take AdSense one step further, using it for angel funding for TailRank. Some others are already donating their AdSense.

Recently when ads were disabled from Google AdWords they also were disabled from the content network, but that is no more.

Why do 'inactive for search' keywords remain active for content?

The Google AdWords system uses all the keywords in your Ad Group to help match your ads with relevant content network sites. In some cases, keywords which have proven ineffective when triggering your ad for search turn out to be very effective when triggering content impressions. In other cases the keyword is simply useful as context in helping the system determine the overall subject areas of your ads.

How they can have such a large network and then just randomly announce that effective now things are changed?

Some advertisers who do not log into their accounts in the next few days may come back from their holiday break to see a ton of formerly disabled overpriced content clicks killing their ROI.

Right before Black Friday Google unveils a new local shopping tool. Froogle now mashes up with Google maps. According to a Silicon Valley article:

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company developed the free tool to help consumers avoid the frustration of traveling to a store that no longer has an item on their shopping lists, said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer products.

Froogle, a comparison shopping site that Google launched three years ago, will continue to give visitors the option to buy the merchandise online. Google receives a commission for the online referrals.

I am not sure what they meant with that Google receives a commission bit. Is that just for the ads near it? In 2003 when Mike Grehan interviewed Craig Nevill-Manning, Craig said:

BUT - the bottom line is - they are unpaid listings, they're unbiased. They're the best results we can find for those products online. ... It'll be free forever.

The New York Times made it sound as though the Silicon Valley article was misquoting or overtly vague in their description of how this service will make Google money.

The service will be freely available to merchants in the United States, Ms. Mayer said. Google, as it frequently notes, plans to gain revenue from the new Froogle service by placing relevant text ads on the same page as the local results.

The company also believes that it gains revenue when users employ Google more frequently as its services become more useful.

The Silicon Valley article also stated:

Initially, Google is depending on a contractor to pull the inventory information from several hundred major merchants. The search engine hopes to make the service even comprehensive by encouraging stores to submit their own customized merchandises list to the newly created "Google Base" - an information clearinghouse for everything from family recipes to scientific formulas.

What vertical search site is safe?

A while ago Battelle had a highly related post about comparison shopping called The Transparent (Shopping) Society. The New York Times made it sound like the eventual goal of this launch is spot on with what John was describing:

Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y., said that if Froogle delivered up-to the-minute inventory updates from retailers, "consumers will finally know whether a trip to a store is worthwhile."

Google wants to be the default inventory information clearinghouse. Users love defaults. I am guessing the value of being the default shopping search site is worth far more than any value they would extract by charging for the feeds, at least off the start. Just like with regular search, there will be incentive for merchants to spam this service. Any idea how Google will fend off spam if they aren't charging? Or are they charging?

John points at an Economist article that mentions The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines, which is based upon a thesis that search engines tend to send more traffic than expected to lower popular sites.

The study is under scrutiny, but it is a bit counter to the commonly held thought of the rich get richer effect of linkage often mentioned in the SEO sphere.

It is a bit hard to isolate any one factor to determine how search interacts with it. You also have to consider the effects of most popular lists and how those build more linkage at things that are already popular. You know it is getting out of hand when their are aggregators like Diggdot.us that mash up the most popular items from different bookmarking channels.

I believe that as you go to more competitive fields generally competition scales faster than profit, and there is great value in being in a number of smaller niches. Perhaps the single best reason to have a high profile site in a competitive market is to make it easier to launch other channels.

When starting a new website it is cool to look at the power laws that guide the web and try to understand them and use them to your advantage, but I think it is far more important to:

• see how they apply specifically to your sector of the web

• think of other sectors near your topic that may be able to give you broader coverage
• pick topics that would be easy to dominate
• learn how to become an exception to the rule