According to a screen-shot on Philipp Lenssen’s outer-court.com blog Google have been considering delivering search returns broken down into functional categories, like “Review” and “Reference” and “Stores”. It brings the prospect of functional search that much closer.

Being number one in natural search is important, we kind of knew that.

But just how important we probably couldn’t have said. The answer is hidden away in a Wikipedia entry about click through rates. Wikipedia links to Red Cardinal’s definitive analysis of click-through rates based on Search Engine ranking. They base as their work on data inadvertently leaked by AOL. It turns out that the number one position is hugely important. It brings almost four times more click-throughs (42.3%) than number two (11.9%).

And if you are not on page one, forget it. Result #11 has 80% fewer click-throughs than number 10.

TV executive Andy Duncan yesterday pointed out that if Google continues to generate the same proportion of its revenue from the UK (it generated a massive 15% here in the first six months of its current financial year) it will net $1.57bn this year alone and will overtake ITV as the single largest recipient of advertising dollars within two years.

These numbers are extraordinary given the slenderness of most brands’ investment in internet marketing and advertising.  Online is still the poor relation of TV in terms of resources.  Teams are small, and budgets are spent on a combination of banners, promotional microsites and paid search in patterns that have changed little since 2001.  Perhaps this is the wake-up call UK corporations have needed to put more of their resources into online.

Microsoft’s Live Search team have come up with a really cool piece of code (a search macro, in their terminology) which allows you to search a sub-group of sites all of whom are linked from a particular site. (A similar piece of code already allows you to track sites that link to a particular site) This is a very useful tool for a director of marketing or communications who wants to track the progress of an idea. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest writes it up. Really useful stuff. Kudos to Microsoft.  As Joseph Hunkins pointed out, this is out-Googling Google.

It resonates with a lot of the interesting work we have been doing here at Market Sentinel. One of our observations is that a series of contextual links create what is, in effect, a focus group on a specific issue. Not a normal focus group, but an opted-in focus group, a focus group of experts.

The effects of this are very intriguing. For example we did some work recently looking at developments in social search. We found that we could look at the sites that were being disproportionately linked by the stakeholders in this topic - and realised that they were consistently identifying cutting edge technology developments ahead of the mainstream media. If I was working for a VC, or a technology company on the hunt for acquisitions, this would be information that would be of great interest to me. via John Battelle