While many of the search marketing leaders were busy at SES NY this past week, Google launched a couple of products that showed a major move into the behavioral targeting realm. There were many posts and comments on the two new features in Adwords - Search Funnels and Ad Retargeting . Click to read the rest of this post.

One of the reasons marketers went to SES New York 2010 was to see new products. And they weren't disappointed. Click to read the rest of this post.

No, the photo above wasn't taken last summer, before Apple and Google began their duel for the mobile Web in earnest. This pic of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt was taken outside Calafia in the Town and Country shopping center in Palo Alto, Calif., Friday afternoon and sent to Gizmodo. The pic was taken after Apple rejected Google Voice as an iPhone app in July, invoking the Federal Communications Commissions' scrutiny. But a lot more has happened since then.

Here are this week's headlines from the search engine scene. The main focus has been on Google leaving China. Google had said that it would leave China if the government did not allow it to publish uncensored search results. As we have argued repeatedly, the Chinese government cannot agree to this, as it desperately tries to keep its own citizens in the dark regarding its own political repression. When Google did announce the threat,

Last week, .Fox Networks (pronounced "dot-fox") and comScore unveiled the findings of a ground-breaking U.K. study at the Advertising Research Foundation's 2010 conference in New York. The study found that video and display advertising are effective at driving significant uplift in site visits and advertiser search queries. Click to read the rest of this post.

There is rising concern about web privacy in general and search privacy in particular. Web searchers are waking up to the fact that most search engines store private data like your IP address, which site you came to the search engine from, your search terms and which links and ads you have clicked. If you don't want private data to be stored, there are options.

A quarter of children in the UK aged 8-12 who use the Internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, although the minimum age is 13, according to new research from communications regulator Ofcom. The majority (83%) of these children have their profile set so it can only be seen by friends, and 4 percent have a profile that can't be seen.

The Facebook folks are definitely up and about these past few days, preparing one new feature after another.  You might have read about the Like button and the auto-connect feature that it plans to launch.  And now the latest Facebook feature that might soon hit us all is the new Facebook toolbar. The Facebook toolbar is not your ordinary toolbar that goes away with the page that you just left. Instead, this will be a persistent toolbar,