Seattle-based Marchex, which is the parent of TrafficLeader, the SEM/SEO firm behind several YP (and newspaper) simplified search marketing programs, has announced the roughly $30 million acquisition of IndustryBrains, which operates a vertical/contextual ad network.

At the end of April, Marchex acquired most of the assets of Pike Street Industries. The deal was reported to be worth $16.5 million in cash and $3.5 million in stock. Pike Street owned the Yellow.com and WhitePages.net domains, which reportedly had two million monthly unique visitors. Just two months before that, Marchex bought Name Development Ltd., which owned a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. Some of those domains are “generic” and/or “dictionary terms” to which people directly navigate.

Quality is a big issue with second and third tier search networks and getting access to quality leads has become a focus of many in the search and IYP industry.

The motivation behind the IndustryBrains acquisition is undoubtedly to bring more quality and vertical targeting into Marchex's proprietary search-distribution network. IndustryBrains has distribution deals with marquee publishers such as BusinessWeek, USATODAY, Ziff Davis Media and CMP, among others.

The classifieds aggregator Oodle announced the integration of Google Maps into its housing category listings. Here are two bedroom Santa Cruz, CA vacation rentals, for example.

One of the nice things you can do is drag the map and see the available listings in an adjacent geographic area. So you could literally follow the coast north or south to find additional rentals.

Had a good chat with Oodle CEO Craig Donato late today about a range of subjects. He believes maps are central to all things local and said Oodle's integration of Google maps is still being tweaked, and that bugs will be worked out in the coming weeks. He also said that maps will be added in other sections across the site.

As widely reported, Yahoo! bought desktop software maker Konfabulator (what a great company name!). Local search and local apps (weather, maps, etc.), among other things, can be taken beyond the browser onto the desktop.

Nothing new there conceptually. But unlike some of the cludgey desktop-based search tools that have come before, this is a much better user experience and much more interesting. If you're a Mac user you already know. (The company currently offers widgets for the PC, but PC widgets aren't yet widely used.)

It's sort of like the toolbar on steriods — sort of. There are lots of potential competitive implications to explore. (Here's a radical one: Maybe one day the browser goes away.)

These widgets are really cool and useful. And to the extent that people download and use them, it could be a leverage point for Yahoo! For example, if I've got search on my desktop in the form of a widget, that's better than a toolbar in terms of immediacy.

We'll see what happens.

The would-be meta-social networking tool, GoingOn, was covered last week by a few folks (mostly the Mercury News and blogs). Advocates said nobody wants to fill out more profiles; skeptics questioned whether the existing social networks would want to play.

Michael Bazeley at SiliconBeat now reports that Yahoo! is opening up 360 to third-party content, including your other blogs (got more than one?) and social-networking content. This generally mirrors what Yahoo! did with HotJobs and may also reflect that people aren't adopting/populating 360 as fast as desired.

An alternative way to read this is as another implementation of Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy — in this case "expand." The move clearly makes 360 a more broadly useful tool (and more like MyYahoo!) and may be a pre-emptive strike against GoingOn-type apps that seek to address the too-many-networks, too-many-profiles problem.

From Yahoo! 360 news:

Now you can bring it all onto your Yahoo! 360˚ page to share with family and friends. Display updated posts from your blogs (Live Journal, Typepad, Xanga, and Wordpress), your Netflix movie queue or movie recommendations, and much, much more. You'll find the new "Feeds" module by clicking "My Page."

What gets really interesting is when Yahoo! brings MyWeb, 360 and MyYahoo! together. (And where does Konfabulator fit in?)

It's an overlay, a pre-browser entry point for these apps. Right now search is a widget, but 360 could be accessed via widget and there are widget RSS readers. I don't know if widgets will catch on widely, but I'm really having a great time downloading and playing with them.

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Related: Charlene Li's ideas re why Konfabulator is about more than just 'widget' propagation.

More about GoingOn and the meta-social network

I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move (ad managers throughout the Bell System saw their three-martini lunches and football tickets disappear), AT&T brought all long-distance advertising into headquarters so that users all over the country would hear a single message as part of a coordinated marketing effort. As a result, long-distance revenues went up dramatically.

Ken Clark, in a recent YP Talk piece, decried the fact that Yellow Pages was not mentioned in an article that discussed every other major media. I think we all agree that it is incredibly frustrating when people who are writing about the media leave Yellow Pages out. Too many people who should know better just don't think of the Yellow Pages as a medium.

As Ken wrote, "Yellow Pages is currently a faceless media with brands that do little to stir anyone's passion. We don't have a pubic image that excites our users, the media and even potential advertisers."

The YPA does an outstanding job with its public relations budget as exemplified by Neg Norton's memo today about feature articles in important vertical publications, but this is just not enough. The industry needs a broadcast advertising campaign, aimed primarily at the advertising community to support our sales people. Yellow Pages has a tremendous ROI story to tell both in print and electronic. Advertisers need to get this message not just from the person coming in selling an ad, but also from the broadcast media.

Major obstacles to implementing an ad campaign include the need for a near-unanimous agreement by the major publishers to spend money; the sour taste left by the Jon Lovitz/Get An Idea fiasco; the lack of an existing advertising plan that people can buy off on; and the fact that the individual publishers each believe they can serve their own interests better than trade organizations can.

Ken Clark showed how Lyle Wolf is advertising Yellow Pages in China. With all due respect to my friend Lyle, I can't think of anyone more associated with yellow than Lance Armstrong. Imagine if he were riding for the Yellow Pages team instead of the Discovery team!

Stephanie Hobbs, vice president of marketing for the YPA, told me that they have approached the Lance Armstrong Foundation several times to enter into a partnership with the YPA, but to date they have been unresponsive. I'd settle for a walking fingers logo on his shirt, but it would be even better if Lance would tell the world that he uses Yellow Pages.

I know this is an uphill battle, but let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that we do a consumer advertising campaign, but rather one aimed specifically at advertisers, the investment community and other media. Corporate budgets are being determined now. In fact, it may already be too late for 2006. But we have to start somewhere and I hope our industry leaders can convince their boards that there is tremendous upside with a coordinated advertising campaign.

MSN's Answer to Google and Yahoo!'s dynamic Web-based mapping tools, Virtual Earth, went live this morning. Needless to say it works better with IE than Firefox (the browser I typically use). It doesn't have the "wow factor" of Google Earth, which is a client-side application — that's really an apples-to-oranges comparison. However, it does have some nice features (e.g., "scratch pad," saved locations, map size, proximity/layered searches), which I haven't had time to fully explore.

It's definitely a welcome addition to MSN's local search capabilities. Intensifying mapping competition — MSN told me they will have an API too — will mean further innovations for consumers going forward. I'll play around with it more and write more later.

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Related: Chris Sherman's lengthy discussion. Here's more from SiliconBeat and the press release.

An article that has received a good deal of attention, from yesterday's NY Times, is "How Effective Is This Ad, in Real Numbers? Beats Me." The piece cites marketers' inability to determine which of their ads/campaigns are actually effective and delivering the best ROI.

Yesterday I participated in a meeting hosted by SEM firm iCrossing for its clients. I was there to present on Local Search. During the day-long meeting there were some very strong presentations, including by Frank Lee of Yahoo! Search Marketing and Brian Sevy of ClickPath, that essentially answered the questions in the article.

The technology and methodologies to determine real ROI and ad performance already exist; it's just a question of marketers adopting them and developing greater sophistication about their overall strategies.

Frank Lee talked, among other things, about how search can partly be used to track the performance of TV/online display ad campaigns and how marketers need to take a broader and closer look at how search can be better leveraged and integrated into the overall marketing mix.

At general advertising conferences search is often "ghettoized" or treated as a silo or separate (and threatening) animal. The reality is that search marketing is a valuable adjunct to traditional advertising. (This leads into a lengthy discussion, which I'll avoid here.) And the majority of marketers don't think about using it as a tracking/performance-measurement tool for the rest of the campaign.

Brian Sevy talked about using calls/800 numbers to close the loop between online and offline campaigns and to track ad performance (whether on billboards, print, the Internet) — and gave a demo that offered mind-boggling precision.

Marketers need to leverage the Internet, 800 numbers and related tools as part of a holistic strategy that takes advantage of the existing technology, which can today answer marketers' questions about ad effectiveness.

But do they really want to know? That's another question entirely.

Let's put aside Yahoo!'s FUSE (Find, Use, Share, and Expand) strategy for the moment and look at what the company is doing with vertical and horizontal search (horizontal search being, well, search).

Yahoo! recently launched a specialized Travel site to go along with its other vertical sites and content plays. Also, the HotJobs meta-search/vertical search expansion got a lot of coverage. In fact, that gray-blue box near the top of the Yahoo! home page is a list of verticals. And Yahoo! just launched a bunch of health blogs.

Some would also consider Local a vertical, but it's only a vertical if vertical means specialized content (which means almost everything other than general Web search is a vertical).

Through its verticals, Yahoo! is building lots of content depth and feature richness around that content. Yet that isn't an alternative to a general or horizontal search strategy; it complements it. (Very few folks can play in the all-too-competitive general search arena, which is partly why there's a boom in verticals.)

People who know that Yahoo! has Real Estate or Travel or Shopping verticals can go directly to those areas of the site. But Yahoo! can also plug that content into search results where appropriate.

Comparing search and the vertical experience — in the comparison shopping context for example — Kelsey Group-ConStat consumer data from March of this year show that search engine usage is much farther away in time vs. shopping engines from the transaction (which indicates where the consumer is in the buying cycle when using the sites). From a direct-response standpoint, that's why verticals matter. Although highly effective branding certainly can occur in a vertical environment — think cars for example.

Accordingly, the parallel market trends toward meta search/aggregation and verticalization (to provide more targeted inventory, leads closer to the transaction) is mirrored within Yahoo! and in the HotJobs move in particular.

Notwithstanding all the hype surrounding verticals, I continue to believe that verticals will not take over from the main search engines. That's because consumers fundamentally don't want to go to dozens of different sites — as information proliferates, they want reliability and convenience. This augurs well for the big search players (one-stop, trusted brands). Traffic data would seem to bear that out.

But to now speak out of the other side of my mouth: If a vertical directory or search provider can establish a solid brand, backed up by a great user experience, consumers will go there directly.

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Related: Danny Sullivan's analysis of new Nielsen search market-share data.

Very briefly: Here are the NY Times' earnings release and Dow Jones/WSJ's. Online products (including the About and MarketWatch acquisitions) gave a boost to these newspaper titans, while the traditional pubs struggled. This is consistent with the bump that Scripps got from its Shopzilla acquisition.

More revenues information from MediaPost.

According to a widely reported new survey by PEW, Americans don't know the technology terms "RSS," "Podcasting" and others. So what's the take-away? Use the technology; don't use the terms.

Awhile ago, before the launch of Backfence, I spoke to co-founders Mark Potts and Susan DeFife. They said, "We are going to use blogging and wiki software platforms," as the foundation for their user-generated content site. "But of course we won't use those terms."

The PEW findings don't suggest anything about technology adoption or its potential. People will respond to the technology and its capabilities, but they're befuddled by and intimidated by terminology. Case in point: Think about the difference between "RSS reader" and "MyYahoo!" It's fundamentally a marketing challenge.