Digital technology of today is adding new meaning to Moore’s Law. While we can expect technology to get smarter, faster, and smaller just about every 18 months, never did I think that would mean giving a machine human-like quality.

Now, when most of you first read the title of this post, I’m sure one of two things came to mind. If you’re a movie fan ‘The Sixth Sense’ film may have been a first thought. If you’re a Techie, then the wearable gestural interface created by Pranav Mistry and his friends over at the MIT labs, may have been top of mind. Either way, the concepts and ideas drawn from these two very different media formats are similar to the logic behind Wolfram Alpha. The idea of having the ability to formulate, process, and obtain information that is beyond the normal human allowance, a sixth sense, is the premise for both the movie and the science lab experiment, and now it has moved into the world of Search.

The Wolfram Alpha web resource has been created, neither to replace or compete with Google nor to become the next new BETA engine to flop. This new search property was conceived to help expand the scientific and computational capabilities of people. Wolfram Alpha is best suited for a user wanting to know how to compute the circumference of a circle or understand quantum physics, not for someone looking for the best deal on red shoes.

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The presidential race in 2008 was a very exciting time that drew the attention of many in the United States and abroad. The election process is meant to invoke a certain level of ownership and power to the masses. Vote and have your voice heard; don’t vote, and you can’t complain about not having the opportunity to change things.In this case, it was our time to elect someone new to lead the country.We were hiring our new CEO, if you will. However, when you have to pick sides, that can be a bit polarizing also.Politics has always been that way. There are two sides to almost every issue discussed and debated in politics (we do have to acknowledge those rare occasions of agreement). Those disparate views are easy to see at the national level, but are just as common at the state or local level. When those views do not align, and there is little room left for compromise, we end up with prolonged debate (and little action) on subjects like healthcare reform, solving the social security riddle, immigration reform, how to effectively doll out $1 trillion, etc.

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This year I was lucky enough to attend the Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Florida, for two reasons.  One, this conference is one of the best (though I do find it a bit incestuous) out there for Search and Online integration – it completely delves deeper, and I believe, provokes thought more than say a SES.  Two, it was in Florida’s high 80 degree weather and on the beach, and not in NYC’s rainy low 60 degree weather.  I attended most of the discussions, and a common theme of attribution became prevalent by the end of the conference.  Attribution in the Search world, for those of you that don’t have your buzz word dictionaries handy, is summed up basically by assigning value to all of the media that a consumer partakes in before they become a conversion, not just the last click.  Currently, most companies are using a Last Click Attribution Model.  This attribution theme was all over the place, but centered around these main themes; ability to track an attribution model that moves away from the last click, politics on that model and guidelines on the weights that model will bring.

The first theme of having an ability to track results based on a model other than the last click are there, but just hard to find.  Marion Software and Atlas are two that have the capability, or are driving the solutions that will allow us to do this sort of tracking seamlessly.  I admit, I have not worked with either in this capacity, but have been involved with Atlas as they were working on this model over a year ago.  The need or major push to work away from last click attribution just has not been there yet, and this brings up the next theme, politics.

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Once upon a time a company called America Online (AOL) provided their customers with access to the internet, email, desktop wallpapers and some of the first social tools (chat rooms) through a simple portal.  Their web pricing model was “by the minute” and later became unlimited web plans.  AOLs’ most prized feature to users was easy access to the internet.  Users were presented with interesting sites to visit, their email was all in one place, and they could chat with friends on IM or in chat rooms.  In comparison to today it took longer to find what was desired on the web due to slow dial up speeds and pc equipment, lack of tools to find information, products and etc.  AOL was able to build a successful business around helping non text savvy people discover new content on the web, providing an internet starter kit, so to speak.  Later down the road the technology advanced, web content rapidly increased, users became more aware of the web’s potential, and pricing to access the web became more competitive.  These evolutions created the necessity for web browsers which allow users to move easily about the web and discover new areas on their own terms. Thus, the launch of Netscape and Internet Explorer in the mid 1990s made this concept of browsing the web a reality.   At this point user behavior started to evolve into what we see now, search engine navigation.  Starting from the mid to late 90s Yahoo and Google stepped in to assist users in finding the information they were accustomed to finding in libraries, newspapers, magazines, and etc at their beck and call (search query).

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This post was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and published in MediaPost’s Search Insider, Friday, May 8, 2009

A guy walks into a search pitch meeting and says, “Thank you for inviting me here today. But I’m not in — and you don’t want someone in — the search marketing space to be your search vendor.”

Now the punchline to that could have been the guy ends up on a barstool in about 15 minutes because he was thrown out on his ear. But it wasn’t. In fact, the reality was a two-hour discussion about the change that is taking place which has its roots in search, but transcends our business entirely.

Most people in the search space have spent the past five years desperately looking for ways to get into the “grown-up” conversations. Big agencies, which puff up their chests and tout their TV buying revenues and the power they wield in shaping the opinions of consumers through 30-second commercials, have been the power brokers that search could only dream to be

And while a few companies have evolved or attempted to distance themselves from the search-only business through PR devices and VC-based means, the majority of search agencies are now either subsets of larger chest-thumping media groups or, still in a very search-centric, solutions-based world that remains stuck talking about bid management technologies and keywords.

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