The Olympics is over and US advertisers should be pleased with the results. Not only did we take home a lot of gold from athletes, this Olympics brought record web site traffic - and an experiment in online video advertising. The two weeks long Olympics was a test in how video advertising would play out. According to eMarketer - NBC - the lead sponsor of the games, gets a bronze for their work. They brought in $5.75 million for running video ads.

Very often, especially with huge dynamically driven or user-generated websites, you might feel you have some indexing problems, i.e. Google doesn't seem to dig your site as deep as you want it to.

Stale news, but interesting: Jeremy Toeman received a notice from UMG regarding his posting of a video on YouTube that included copyrighted content (U2's Beautiful Day) in the background. The offer from the copyright owner, facilitated through YouTube, basically said, go ahead and leave the video up if you wish, but we'll be showing advertising on it. To some this might sound heavy-handed; to others, a nice compromise. I tend to think the latter. As Toeman writes,

With the Democratic National Convention starting today in Denver, I thought it would be prudent to see which search engine is handling the highly anticipated event the best. Of course, Microsoft rocked the Olympics and outpaces everyone in mapping Georgia , but who's got political game? Microsoft proved again that it's on top of current events, but it's AOL that takes the cake in my book. First, AOL makes use of its design as a portal to serve up content on the homepage,

by Stoney deGeyter Since it seems everybody does their own recaps of the sessions they attended at Search Engine Strategies , I like to take a different approach. Last year I ran a two - part series covering just a handful of the session speakers. I looked at how well each branded themselves in the search results of Google. First of all, I hope nobody takes these as an attack. I don't know your personal story, whether your dog died recently or if your business is two days old.

I asked a couple of people to draw the Google homepage with their eyes closed during the whole drawing process. Here are the results: Brinke Guthrie's minimalist approach. Pascal of the German GoogleWatchBlog created this one. He says that "...schland" ended up on the table. Google's Matt Cutts created this one with eyes closed... ... and this one with eyes opened, but from memory. To my defense,

Real estate search engine Trulia today announced three new features to assist home buyers, sellers and agents. Personalized news feeds, mobile applications, and a blogging platform are now available to those in the home buying and selling process. The personalized news feed can be found on Trulia's homepage and includes new property listings, home prices changes, upcoming open houses, median sales price trends, recently sold properties,

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good; After the Yahoo Shareholder Meeting; Google Translate Goes Live with Human Translators; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion:Link Building with Customers; Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Millenniums; Google to Update Content Network; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Has Mobile Local Search Finally Arrived?; Look Out PageRank, There's a New Algorithm in Town; Universal Thoughts on Local Search; and more.