Study after study confirms what we’ve known for a long, long time: Consumers do research online but make the overwhelming majority of purchases offline. This article in MediaPost, profiling a study done by comScore for Google, offers yet more evidence. From the comScore press release:
comScore Networks today released results from a new research …

Cairo is a local shopping aggregator that was crawling ShopLocal’s content as one of its sources. ShopLocal sued and yesterday a settlement was announced:
Cairo agreed to an order of the court preventing it from making further robotic or other automated access to ShopLocal’s computers or websites, and Cairo has acknowledged ShopLocal’s proprietary rights in …

Here’s the press release.

If you want to see something pretty cool, go to Loki.com and download Skyhook Wireless’ new Local Search toolbar. It’s the first toolbar built around Local and it’s got a bunch of really useful features:

It can automatically locate your position so you don’t need to enter it when doing a search (you can change locations …

Google Finance, an impressive collection of tools, news and resources, was supposed to launch at 12:01 a.m. ET on Tuesday. However, it’s 12:27 and the site isn’t yet up. Because I only got a sneak peek and wasn’t able to "play" with it, it’s not entirely clear to me how it lines up against other …

Neil Steinberg, a columnist at one of my local newspapers, has a peculiar obsession with Yellow Pages. You might find his take amusing. It begins down the column a bit, after his brief take on the Iraq war (which I will resist commenting on).

According to this piece from CNET, Microsoft is seeking to buy Vexcel. This deal appears to be about a range of things all of which point to enhanced mapping (including 3-D mapping), which is where Erik Jorgenson said (at last fall’s ILM:05) Microsoft was headed.
There’s a ton of horsepower in this company and, if …

Word from Italy is that Seat Pagine Gialle, Italy’s leading directory organization, is not interested in buying Telefonica’s 60 percent stake in Telefónica Publicidad e Información, Spain’s top YP publisher. TPI is on the market to raise cash for Telefónica to pursue other acquisitions in the mobile space.
Seat was one of the companies rumored …

Here’s a Hollywood Reporter piece about the challenges of social networks (a lot of rehash but a good general overview). The new bit is the mention of GoingOn (we did a quick post in July), which is a social networking "aggregator," in the same way that Meebo tries to give you one log-in for multiple …

AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre seems to be intent upon pursuing access fees for high-bandwidth sites/networks. This article discussing his keynote at the TelecomNEXT show in Las Vegas quotes him as dismissing the torrent of criticism that has come his way on the issue.
Net Neutrality will be one of the themes we explore on the …

U.K.-based KinderStart.com, a "search engine" for parents of young children, has sued Google on the basis that its organic search ranking apparently declined in March 2005, allegedly because it was unfairly "penalized" by Google. According to this Reuters article, the site lost "70 percent" of its organic traffic when it was "downgraded." The lawsuit seeks …

The Mercury News is a daily newspaper that publishes in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was Knight Ridder’s "hometown" paper and one of its flagships. Now it’s being sold by McClatchy. SiliconBeat alerts us to the "Save the Merc" campaign, which contends that the potential sale of the paper will have disastrous effects …

The N.Y. Times’ Bob Tedeschi profiles (reg. req’d) Microsoft’s classified marketplace Expo and explores how and whether it will compete with Craigslist. Garry Wiseman, the product manager behind Expo, will be speaking at Drilling Down on the panel "The Ultimate Mashup: Classifieds, Local Listings and ‘Social Search’," which should be one of the more interesting …

According to this WSJ article (sub. req’d), cable companies and telcos have stopped trying to resist muni Wi-Fi and have jumped on the bandwagon:
AT&T Inc., the nation’s largest telecom provider, put in a bid March 7 to build a wireless Internet service for Michigan’s Washtenaw County with roughly 325,000 residents. Among cable providers, Cox …

So I’ve now scanned the complaint (reminding me of why I left litigation). This case appears to be substantially about lost AdSense revenues:
On March 19, 2005, Plaintiff KSC's Website kinderstart.com suffered a cataclysmic fall of 70% or more in its monthly page views and traffic. Thereafter, KSC.com's monthly average of page views for the last …

Joga.com is an invitation-only social networking site from Nike and Google for soccer/football fans (you first need a gmail/google account). It’s MySpace for soccer and it may be a "template" for other corporate promotional/vertical social networking ventures for Google and partners.
Here’s more from BusinessWeek and Search Engine Journal.

There’s lots starting to happen in the newspaper industry. One example of newspapers stepping out from their traditional model into something more interesting and daring is Enterprise NewsMedia’s "WickedLocal" online network. This is the "local search" portal for several Enterprise papers in the greater Boston area and obviously quite different from a newspaper site. There …

It appears next week is the deadline for initial bids on the Spanish publisher Telefonica Publicidad e Informacion, and there are reported to be five suitors: PagesJaunes (France Telecom), Yell Group and three private equity consortia.
Saw this today on Bloomberg News:
"France Telecom SA may be active. Europe’s second-biggest phone company and Yell Plc are …

The Google 10K and Yahoo! 10-K are out and people are poring over them for insights and interesting information. I don’t yet have time to give either of them a careful look. But PaidContent has summarized some of the highlights of Google’s filing here and Yahoo!’s here.
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Related: Per Search Engine Journal … Google AdWords …

Following the footsteps of Topix … Yahoo! Launches a Local News Beta. Here’s an example of San Francisco; here’s New York. In New York, Yahoo! gets its news from myriad sources, not just newspapers: New York Times, Newsday, WABC 7, WNBC 4, WCBS 2, New York Daily News, WBGO-FM. In San Francisco, there are many …