In yet another in a series of dizzying announcements in the search world, Yahoo! introduced a "contextual search" tool, Y!Q, that allows users to conduct a secondary/search within results by highlighting text on a page. The current offering (in beta, of course) is arguably not set up for widespread consumer adoption. But the concept is right and, directionally, this is the future of relevance.

It's not going to matter how big your index is anymore. It will only matter if you can get me to the results I want quickly and effectively. AOL is trying some similar things with Vivisimo. And FAST is doing some pioneering work in the enterprise space with contextual relevance.

As many have commented, Y!Q's capabilities would enable AdSense competition. Blinxx also has a contextual search capability.

Chris Sherman has a nice write-up of the Y!Q details.

Earlier this afternoon I was on a panel at the iMedia Connection Summit about the "future of search." Moderated by the humorous and ever-insightful Kevin Ryan, the panel ran the gamut of topics from search-ad agency relations to adjunct targeting mechanisms and likely search product developments.

Also on the panel with me were Bob Visse, Director of Marketing, MSN Search; Ron Belanger, Vice President, Search Engine Marketing, Carat Interactive and Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Media Smith. The panel (and especially Bob Visse's comments) got me thinking that a metaphor for the future of search is MS Office — an integrated suite of applications that work together and reinforce usage because of their comprehensiveness and compatibility.

Okay, so that's not such a revelation. But it makes sense from my point of view.

Beyond Web search itself, I think those elements probably are: desktop, local, personalization (although this could simply be "umbrella" functionality), community/social networking and maybe shopping and video. Mapping falls under local. They all work together and they're all integrated. My belief is that consumers want simplicity, convenience and efficiency, not 10,000 vertical sites to address disparate needs.

The presentation of those elements will vary from provider to provider; but those, I believe, will be the basic "modules" (essentially what Google appears to be doing with "fusion," at least conceptually).

On a related but separate note, one of the challenges that search faces, which the panel also discussed, is disambiguating user intent and determining where the user is in the buying cycle. My thought is build a "shopping engine" or modify an existing one so that the consumer provides the information him/herself and there's no question. Why not have several tabs or links that correspond to the various phases of the purchase funnel: research and reviews (both community and editorial), browse and compare products/prices, offers/coupons and buy online or locally.

Those may not be precisely the right categories or pairings (that's for the focus group). But the idea is that the user will indicate where s/he is in the cycle and that not only creates the opportunity for much greater relevance in the information presented, it creates different ad inventory at each stage — branding at the research stage, coupons (if applicable), PPC at the price comparison/buy stage and maybe pay-per-phone call opportunities at the buy offline/locally tab.

If I were running product-review engine Become.com, I would implement a better version of this idea. I would also add alerts as LiveDeal has done to push product information and offers to users.

That kind of buying-cycle architecture would be interesting and solve a lot of problems with divining user intent from a couple of keywords. Anyway . . . just a thought.

In something of a coup for small business portal AllBusiness.com, the company landed Peter Horan as its new CEO. Horan was the CEO of About.com until it was acquired for US$410 million by the NY Times.

Horan will bring instant credibility to the site, which has been around, and through various owners since 1999.

I was one of the original editors at AllBusiness before it was sold to NBCi, which subsequently sold it to a B2B auction site called BigVine, which subsequently went under (old URLs never die, they're just bought by someone else for pennies on the dollar).

Horan relieves Richard Harroch, who was the founder of the site in 1999 and whose Small Business Kit for Dummies formed the core of content that launched AllBusiness. Harroch was a lawyer and partner Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in San Francisco and is now a partner in VantagePoint Venture Partners.

The site was founded as a content site for entrepreneurs and small business and as a channel for larger entities, service providers and brands to sell to SMEs. The problem was the site was ahead of its time (as were many back then). There weren't enough SMEs who yet cared about the Internet to make the site truly viable. All that's changed now.

Smartly, Harroch bought back the URL and other assets (for not much I'm sure) from BigVine and with money from his new firm VantagePoint has relaunced the site with the help of original marketing VP Michael Mimeles (who understands the vision and has lots of history with the company).

The site is doing some interesting things with blogs/community, SME services and content distribution (with Yahoo!, About.com and the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, among others). AllBusiness is providing a lot of the content for Yahoo!'s new merchant solutions content resource center.

AllBusiness will be one to watch as a channel into the SME market and as a general hub and resource for SMEs. The community aspects are especially interesting to me and could help make the site a very vital and persistent SME destination.

As opposed to the early days when I was with the company, and the market wasn't ready, it may well be that the stars have finally aligned.

The social networking arena is poised for a shakeout. Consider the fortunes of two sites: The Facebook and Friendster.

The Facebook, a popular college social networking site, just raised $13 million for expansion from 800 to all 1,400 four-year colleges in the U.S. Friendster, the site that arguably defined the space, just fired its CEO Scott Sassa who was touted as bringing entertainment credentials and a business model when he joined only a year ago.

Taek Kwon, the former EVP of Citysearch, is going to be the new CEO. (Kwon joined Citysearch only a year ago.) Unless he's a genius and/or Friendster does some radical things, the site appears to be sinking.

According to Nielsen, Friendster, which claims to have 16 million members, had less than 1 million uniques in May, whereas MySpace, which competes for the same youth demographic, had more than 8 million visitors.

In social networking, critical mass is crucial. In this fickle youth market, there's something of a herd mentality. And where Friendster is concerned, it appears the herd has moved on.

Over the weekend, Chris Gaither wrote an interesting and entertaining piece in the LA Times about the role of the Google Maximizers. These are the folks who help (mostly large) advertisers improve their campaigns and CTRs on Google.

At the SME end of the spectrum is Google's Jumpstart (beta) program, which hasn't really been promoted.

Taken together, among other things, it appears that Google has or is building the internal resources to be, effectively, an agency for both its large and, potentially, small advertisers.

As the company's graphical AdSense and other likely rich-media ad vehicles roll out, creative will become more a part of the Google advertising mix and balance the economical copywriting that drives most of the clicks on its network today.

This is also interesting: Google is seeking a creative director. Is this position exclusively to help generate and manage Google's external marketing efforts or to manage client campaigns on the Google network — or both?

Big news, harbinger of more to come across the industry.

Let's start with sports. As any golfer knows, Tiger Woods' streak of making 142 consecutive cuts stretching back to February 1998 was broken last week at the Byron Nelson Championship. (Mr. Nelson's 11 consecutive wins on the tour is similar to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak in that neither will ever be broken.)

And how about Katie Brownell? The only girl and an all-star since she was nine in her upstate New York little league., Katie pitched a perfect game, striking out 18 straight opponents. That's a more perfect game than Don Larson pitched in 1956, and he wasn't batting .714 like Katie is.

So our client asks a good question and an important one. The easy answer is Yes. Yellow Pages publishers, like newspapers and broadcasters, are most certainly losing revenue because people are turning to the Internet for their directional media needs. But please don't ask me to be too specific because all we can do is estimate.

Next week our Global Yellow Pages report: The Kelsey Group's Outlook and Forecast is going to be published. (Major pieces of it are already available to customers.) That report has over 500 pages of very detailed information presented in both a macro and a micro approach. That is, we cover markets in the aggregate and we provide specific details about every major company in the Yellow Pages community. Compiling the numbers is hard, and we are pleased to showcase the Tiger, Joe, Byron and Katie of the Yellow Pages industry.

The harder part is the direction and the velocity of change. Sports analysts have to live with their predictions til the next game. We hear about our forecasts for years. We'll accept the accountability.

Danny Sullivan pointed to a very interesting thread on the Webmaster World forum about Google advertising in the Kansas City market for Google Local.

I had heard a rumor about this from an Advertising Age reporter a few weeks ago. I've requested a Google briefing. We'll see if they want to comment about it.

Google rarely does anything that could be considered "advertising" and is testing a radio and print campaign, apparently, to build awareness and usage of Local. In addition, this suggests to me that Google is very serious about developing Local and wants to accelerate that process — or at least is testing whether traditional media advertising (ironically) will do that.

From the forum:

I live in the Kansas City area in the US and for the last week or so I've been hearing advertisements on the radio for Google local search. The ad talks about Google's intuitive search and how it helps the commercial's "subject" find a "window fixer" because she doesn't know what that type of person is called. The thing that really grabbed my attention was an advertisement in the Kansas City newspaper this past Sunday which was also advertising Google Local. It was an 8.5" x 11" laminated insert talking about Google Local. I thought this was interesting as I've never seen any push with conventional advertising for Google.

Actually, the advertisement in the paper was a really good ploy for the not-so-computer savvy person. The Google ad looked like a blank page from the yellow pages. The letter tab was E, page number "522 Everything". In the middle of the page, in the size and style of a yellow page listing, "Everything you're looking for locally" appears with the listing below saying: Google Local ………………… local.google.com.

The back of the page says "Keep this handy reference card near your computer. Use it to find stuff in your neighborhood. (Or, if you're in desperate need of a placemat, we're good at that too.)"

Very intreresting. If it plays in Kansas "middle America" City, it should play everywhere.

This week both the WSJ and NY Times ran articles on the dynamics of "traditional media" competing with "new media" (the Internet) and the likely impact of the latter on the former (Neal Polachek blogged about it below). I'm usually the guy in the Chicken Little suit warning people that the sky is falling — and in some respects it may well be for viewership/readership of traditional media.

But I have to say that there's little chance that the Internet is going to mortally wound TV, newspapers or radio (at least not in our collective lifetimes). It's almost a cliche to say "TV didn't destroy the movies," and so on.

That's not to say that traditional media can be complacent in any way. What's very clear is that the Internet is a disruptive force and that audiences are fragmenting and often choosing online at the expense of offline. But the paradox is that even if every major advertiser in America wanted to pull all their money out of TV and other traditional media tomorrow and shift it to online, they couldn't. There wouldn't be enough inventory — let alone quality inventory — to buy. (This is one of Lincoln Millstein's points).

MSN's Bob Visse and I were discussing this two nights ago at this iMedia conference. He buys media for MSN Search and he was saying that the best reach (and the cheapest) is still broadcast TV. It was something of a surprise to hear a search/online guy say that. Following that line of argument: Until online and search can develop more inventory (and raise the quality level) there is a theoretical limit on how much money can flow from offline into online media.

From an advertiser perspective, and in theory, online and offline media can and should learn to work together for their mutual benefit. On the consumer side, however, it's not as clear.

For example, what happens if 18-34 year olds abandon newspapers, Yellow Pages and TV for the Internet and there simply isn't a way for the corresponding ad dollars to follow those audiences? Are those advertisers somehow compelled to continue to buy traditional media (or shift into DM and outdoor) because that's where most of the inventory remains? Or do they decrease their spending or find totally new ways to advertise (e.g., product placement in video games, etc.)?

Here are the results of the WSJ's readers poll on which traditional medium would be "obsolete" in 25 years:

• Broadcast TV: 1031 votes (24%)
• Broadcast radio: 695 votes (16%)
• Printed newspapers: 2476 votes (57%)
• Printed books: 157 votes (4%)

What can probably be said with certainty is that in 25 years many of these industries will look quite different than they do today, much like the cars of the '30s and '40s don't resemble the cars of today. Cars are still very much with us, though they're more technologically sophisticated and look very different. Crude though that analogy may be it suggests the point: newspapers, TV and radio will continue to exist.

They'll have to get smarter, more sophisticated and maybe leaner to effectively compete, but they'll still be around.

Google confirms its local Kansas City-area advertising on behalf of Google Local.

Thanks to Blogdigger's Greg Gershman for pointing out the post on, of all places, Google's own blog!