“Googling” may have become a verb in its own right, but that isn’t stopping other search engines from trying to steal the Internet giant’s crown.

Yahoo and Microsoft, which handle 20.4% and 8.2% of all Internet search queries respectively, are both on the cusp of unveiling new technology that will enable their results to be displayed in relevant groups rather than a list of links. Microsoft’s new search engine is rumoured to be called Bing, and will replace the current search engine Live. Not much is known about Bing yet, although Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is due to speak at the All Things Digital conference later today, so he may soon reveal more. A search for “web copy writer London” (we’re sticking with the industry we know!) via Bing may display information about how to write for the web, alongside details of copy writers local to London, and web copywriting blogs. Such a search on Live.com currently generates a list of links related to copy writing – some relevant, some not - that users have to go through individually in order to find what they’re looking for.

Yahoo’s strategy is similar: the company aims to display images and answers from databases instead of a series of links. It is no surprise, then, that Yahoo and Microsoft are in talks to tackle Google by collaborating with each other on search. In fact, Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst with Collins Stewart LLC, thinks there will be a Microsoft-Yahoo search deal by the time the companies report their quarterly results in late July.

If competing search engines think Google is resting on its laurels, however, they could be in for a shock. New improvements are being made to the Google Suggest tool which was recently introduced to give users more control over their search results. Suggestions will now be provided when users make additional search queries from results pages whereas previously they were only offered when making a query from the Google homepage. Relevant past searches will be displayed when users have web history enabled, so they can repeat some of the searches they carry out most frequently. Sponsored links will also appear in the list of suggestions, which could help companies who want to target users most interested in their products and services with search engine marketing and pay per click ads.

Two American professors have released the results of a study which challenges the notion that the top Google Adwords positions are necessarily the most profitable for the advertiser. Could the nature of keyword analysis be about to change?

Google Adwords works on the premise that advertisers who pay the most amount of money per click receive the largest volume of traffic through to their website. [It is not always so straightforward: the algorithm also takes into account factors such as CTR (click through rate)]. The research paper “An Empirical Analysis of Search Engine Advertising: Sponsored Search in Electronic Markets,” by NYU Stern Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang has built a quantitative model which aims to help advertisers undertake more targeted keyword analysis to determine the most profitable keywords for their organisations.

Ghose and Yang are experts in Web 2.0, user-generated content, keyword analysis, online advertising and e-commerce; and understanding household purchase behaviour and market competition respectively. Their study is based on a six-month panel dataset of several hundred keywords collected from a large nationwide retailer that advertises on Google.

Amongst the key findings were:

• Even though the more prominent positions on the search engine results page experience higher click-through or conversion rates, they are not always the most profitable ones. In fact, profits are often lower in the top positions than those in the middle positions due to the aggressive nature of bidding that increases the total advertisement costs (given the high click-through rates).

• The value-per-click to an advertiser decreases with each position down the search engine results page, meaning that clicks from more prominent positions are more valuable than clicks from lower positions, because conversion rates also decrease.

• Search engines are accounting for both the current period’s bid price as well as prior click-through rates of the keywords before deciding the final rank of an advertisement in the current period, but the current bid price has a larger role to play in determining the final rank than ‘Quality Score’-related factors like prior click-through rates.

• An increase in the landing page quality score of the advertiser by one unit is associated with an increase in conversion rates by as much as 22.5% and a decrease in advertiser cost-per-click.

The American keyword analysis study is the first to quantify the impact of keyword type and length, position of the advertisement, and the landing page quality on consumer search and purchase behaviour as well as on advertiser’s cost-per-click and the search engine’s ranking decision for different ads.

We’ve put together a little survey for UK businesses in order to find out who’s blogging and how often they’re doing it.

The survey has been designed to help inform us about people’s views on business blogging. We want to know whether UK businesses see blogging as an important part of their search engine optimisation or PR strategies. We’re also interested in finding out whether the size or industries of the businesses who respond to the survey make a difference to the way blogging is viewed. The results so far are looking pretty interesting: many of our most enthusiastic business bloggers are in the professional services or marketing industries, and most are small businesses (fewer than 6 employees).

Plenty of studies have issued depressing findings about the number of abandoned blogs floating around in cyberspace, but based on the responses so far, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that in fact small businesses are well aware of the benefits of having a blog. Early results from our survey suggest that the only thing stopping small businesses from maintaining their blogs as often as they would like is time - very few people are of the opinion that a blog wouldn’t be beneficial to their business. In fact, even amongst the people who haven’t yet got a blog, the most common reason is simply that they haven’t yet found time to set it up. Of the people who do have a business blog, 70% said they update it less frequently now than they used to, because of time pressures – this certainly tallies with the most common reason people give for using our corporate blogging service!

We’ll be releasing more results as and when the number of respondents rises. If you’d like to take part, go to our online business blogging survey and fill out the ten questions on the form. It will take no more than five minutes of your time. Please feel free also to post your views about business blogging on this thread.

Will the e-reader become to books what the iPod is to CDs? The bookshop Borders has rolled out its new ebook service in the UK and Amazon has released a supersize version of its Kindle DX e-reader, just three months after the original release. The new larger Kindle has a 9.7 inch screen and can store up to 3,500 books.

Borders, which has more than 1,000 stores around the world, said it had been waiting until enough digital content was available to launch its ebook service in the UK. (The service has already been established in America.) Meanwhile, the British Library is coming close to the end of a two year project to digitise more than 100,000 books from the 19th Century.

Films, TV and music can all be downloaded online and watched on portable devices, so it’s logical that books should follow. The difference, however, is that people enjoy browsing in bookshops. The iPod may have killed the CD, but it seems unlikely the printed book will suffer the same fate at the hands of the e-reader. Julie Howkins from Borders told BBC News today that “Publishers are beginning to take notice [of ebooks] but I don’t think we have reached the music iPod moment for books at all. You would never get the same experience browsing through the shelves and being able to see books that you didn’t know existed. I can’t see Borders being a huge bank of computers, that’s not the way it’s going to go.”

That said, internet giant Google is about to make its foray into the e-book market with Google Book Search, a project that will dwarf the British Library’s efforts. The firm is currently in negotiations with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to obtain a court agreement to allow Google to scan books that may still be in copyright.

At the moment, the printed word has a substantial cost advantage over the ebook: not only do e-readers cost several hundred pounds; the ebooks themselves can often be more expensive than their paper equivalents. Nevertheless, when prices come down and ebook content becomes widely available, we may yet witness the decline of the printed word.

Could web writing soon be transformed by a plethora of new terminology? For example, if I were to publish an online article in which I claimed to be a “nonebrity” would you know what I was talking about? Apparently it would mean I had celebrity status for no apparent reason. We can now all point at Katie Price a.k.a. Jordan and shout “Nonebrity!” the next time we see her. She, of course, might point back and shout “Nomophobe!” which is a person who fears being out of mobile contact.

More than 100 new words and expressions entered the English language last year, from the now-commonplace “credit crunch” to the rather more obscure “moofer”, which is an acronym for a mobile out-of-office worker. The most popular word from 2008 was, however, the dated expression “cripes”, which became Boris Johnson’s trademark expression of surprise as he campaigned during the London Mayoral election. Those who object to 2008’s most popular word being an old one might take comfort in learning that they themselves are known as “doomers” - a brand new expression to describe pessimistic individuals.

Next month we can all look forward to reading masses of web copy about “glamping”: the term refers to the luxurious form of camping undertaken by “nonebrities” such as Peaches Geldof at Glastonbury.

Online publishers are starting to think Rupert Murdoch was right: the “free” web is dead. The global recession has caused advertising revenues to dry up and publishers of SEO content are having to stretch their brains to think how they could make a charging model work.

Writing web content has never easily translated into earning money. Some kinds of online content (mainly porn and music) has always been chargeable, but punters are used to getting their online news for free. Until now, publishers have made do with advertising revenue, but that’s not looking sustainable in the current economic climate.

So how does the online publishing industry convince the general public to start paying for their online news? The answer could lie in micropayments, the basic principle of which is to charge a price that is so small it won’t put off customers, but will accumulate sufficient revenues, via mass sales, to keep the publisher in profit.

Frank Fisher, a website writer for The Guardian suggests that the Google Adsense technology could be reversed in order to establish an industry standard for taking SEO content micropayments. Google Adsense was designed for publishers to earn money from small ads which they would include on their website. Every time a customer clicks on a Google Ad, the publisher earns a tiny amount of money. Once a month, the publisher receives a payment for all the clicks their ads received.

Fisher suggests that, in order to apply the technology to a charging model for SEO content, “individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They’d have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they’re allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider’s account for every item they read.”