The evolution of Google Base has definitely progressed from the stage of "Searchis Betas" to "Classifiedis Verticalus". With the "discovery" of Google's real estate vertical, it's officially game on with craigslist and the classifieds business.

The vertical searches for real estate, recipes, event tickets, jobs, podcasts, vehicles, etc, can be broken down by location, with Google Maps plotting the results. The granularity from voluntary tagging will likely make Google Base a more streamlined search than from Google or classified sites. For example, real estate can be broken down by price range and type of house, events by venue, and cars by make and model.

This will lead to a new strain of SEO focused specifically for Google Base. For example, if you search "movie reviews Solaris" under Base and reg'lar Google, you get a different set of results. So how best do you optimize?

Yes, vertical search engines and classfieds such as craigslist will continue to exist, but the tagging feature makes Base more competitive in a hurry.

BTW, can someone do a mash-up where one search will generate results from Google, Base, and Directory, in parallel?

I posted a link to a report yesterday that had rumors of Google putting out bid management software for Adwords but while we wait for that to come to fruition Adwords has given us 'Positioning Preference Bidding'. A lot of people are mistaking this for a bid-to-position model like Yahoo uses. When it is merely just a position filter.

For example if your metrics indicate that your best profitability is at position #3 for a given keyword (X), then you set the position preference to #3 for this keyword. You still have to maintain the proper 'Quality Score' and maxCPC but your ad will only show when it fits the requirements for the #3 position.

You can read more about 'Position Preference' on the original SEW post and see my response here
Yahoo Search Network? No. Yahoo Content Network? Nope. It's the Yahoo Spyware Network! Ben Edelman uncovers how some spyware programs have Yahoo Search Marketing ads in them, and auto click on them, without the user's knowledge. There is a WWW forum thread which Ben is participating in here

The official Adwords blog continued their 2 part series are targeting the right customers.

Indirectly related to PPC, the official Adsense blog posted an annoucement that advertisers will get $20 for everyone they refer to Adsense. Which in turn means, more people will have put Adsense on their site, and probably click on their own ads costing us advertisers money. Just one reason not to use the content network.

Congrats to the bloggers who have discovered Google Real Estate. In other news; WE LANDED ON THE MOON! Apologies to Lloyd Christmas.

While the existence of the tool is certainly not a surprise to anyone, it is intersting to see the actual product.

While Google continues the testing of real estate and auto search sites built on Google Base and Google Maps, real estate startups have to be concerned about surviving Google's foray into real estate.

Equally unsurprising is the exclusion of the Google Base logo from both Maps and Real Estate Search, pointing to the launch of Google entities separate from Google Base.

The folks in Chevrolet's marketing department decided to riff on The Apprentice by giving a prize to a webizen who creates the best commercial for the new Tahoe SUV on its website.

But the company probably didn't expect that many folks with anti-SUV fever would use the online tools to create disparaging ads that trash the vehicle for trashing the environment, and that the negative ads would get lots of press.

Ah, the travails of not being careful when facilitating user-generated. Here's a link to some of the dissenting voices.

Looking to cash in on the MySpace hysteria, book and music company Bertelsmann is planning on a community website for older folks.

"People are getting older...and older people are getting lonelier and they will need communities where they can share their interests" Chief Executive Gunter Thielen told Reuters.

"Thielen said Bertelsmann had been studying the demographic trends of the Western world, which point to a future with aging populations, many of them likely to have no or few children and larger disposable incomes than before."

What a great demographic, sad saggy spendy seniors who chat online because their kids are too busy to call them. Maybe the site will provide a service where people pretend to listen to them over VOIP for a few dollars a month.

So Bertelsmann wants to build senior centers around its Random House and Sony BMG music clubs. There could be a discussion area called "Wheezer" but it wouldn't be about music.

Here are some possible names:

LookAtMyGrandkids.com
LotteryNumbersSure2Win.com
WhatTheHeckWasMyPassword.com
ThatRayRomanoIsFunny.com

Last Friday I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of SuperTour Jim Schoonmaker. Jim gave me a guided tour, pun intended, through the Super Tour website as well as a good lesson in strategy every entrepreneur should know.

Jim Schoonmaker's Background
Well first off he's an MIT business school grad (Sloan School of Management), not too shabby. He's a self-confessed serial entrepreneur and Super Tour (Mok3 Inc.) is his latest effort. Jim's got a solid understanding of business. Let me expand on that a bit. He was most recently the President / CEO of Liquid Machines. Prior to that he was President / Founder of NerveWire. Prior to that he was the President / Founder of Intersense Incorporated. Rather than going through what each of the companies did I'll let you guys dig a bit for yourself and give you a golden nugget I picked up from my conversation with Jim.

Revenue Per Square Foot
This single statement symbolizes so many different variables that it's almost impossible to explain in a post or in any form of text. I had asked Jim about why SuperTour had decided to start their local hotel and area virtual tours in Miami and Las Vegas. When he began explaining how they arrived at those major metropolitan areas he summed the next 10 minutes up in a single phrase. Revenue per square foot, and I instantly got it.

What he meant was that he knew his company's business model would initially revolve around providing the best virtual tours of a location. But in order to monetize their service as quickly as possible they had to decide which locations & what property types would enable them to do so. They realized hotels account for a huge amount of revenue per square foot and then they just had to figure out which areas in the US had the highest density of hotel rooms per square foot... The answer was Miami and Las Vegas.

Instead of going into details about the conversation I'll follow up this post, later in the week, with a Q & A of Jim Schoonmaker. Lest I get excited and exaggerate the facts. I'll also expand on exactly what they do and how they plan on making money in the Q & A so Stay Tuned!

The Google Analytics team has officially opened Conversion University, where they provide eight strategy articles on increasing conversion rates for paid search. I've only skimmed them, but they seem useful enough where they deserve at least a once over.

SEOmoz.org has an interesting article on click fraud, Is click Fraud Really that bad? (Part 1). Its the first of a click fraud series that explores the ins and outs of the different types of click fraud.

*edit* as I posted this, SEOmoz just posted part 2

The official adwords blog talks about the importance of targeting the right customers. This is something that is important to a successful PPC campaign and everyone should consider, especially with more of the major search engines following MSN's lead regarding demo-graphic targeting.

SEORoundTable is reporting that Google will introduce bid management software for its Adwords Advertisers. The bid management software will replace, to some extent, tools such as Atlas OnePoint, KeywordMax, BidRank, and BidHero. They also found supporting evidence in a WebMasterWorld thread. It is not stated if this will be part of the Adwords Editor or some other application. I'd guess it would be free for a limited beta, get too many users, become unstable and then close off sign-ups for an undisclosed amount of time. The usual Google dance.

PS- One of the major search engines will be adding demographic targeting functionality to their management console soon. For now, I'll let you guess as to which engine it is.

Sometimes (as with zombies)it's better to let things that are dead stay dead. EarthLink decided to unearth the name of a 90's ISP to roll out a new voice-over-IP service.

Yes, nothing says hip Skype/GoogleTalk competitor like the word "MindSpring." If the name wasn't good enough to keep around after you bought the last century, it sure ain't good enough to use to attract a new generation of Net savvy users.

Perhaps Earthlink will have an ad campaign using Clara Peller and Mr. T talking on their PC's.

Nostalgia may work for lining the walls and ceilings of Friday's restaurants, but not for promoting emerging technologies.