With Google dominating the US search industry popularity contest, it’s easy to forget about lesser-known search tools and enhancements.  For example, here are a few that regularly make my life easier and my search experience more useful:

1) Google Preview (Firefox plugin)

Google Preview, despite its unilateral name, works for both Google and Yahoo search results. This little plugin inserts a thumbnail screenshot image of the search result page, making the results list dramatically easier and faster to scan. Here’s how it looks in Google:

It also adds in a “popularity rank” bar, which draws on Alexa ranking data. I largely ignore these rankings, and they can be turned off entirely in the Google Preview preferences.

Here’s the link: Google Preview Plugin for Firefox

2) Showing more than 10 search results per page in Google

(Read the full article…)

Question: What do web users and professional athletes have in common?

Answer: They both make fast decisions about their next action based on limited information in the blink of an eye.

This thought occurred to me as I was reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It’s quite an amazing book. I say that because it’s a book about brain science and psychology (ooh, gotta get me some of that) and yet it’s really fun to read. Seriously.

The thrust of the book is that the traditional model of how human beings make decisions based on either a rational or emotional basis is flat wrong. Instead, the author’s position is that we make decisions using both our rational and emotional minds simultaneously.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But Lehrer weaves in such compelling and well-written stories that otherwise dry subject matter really comes to life. I was reading a passage about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s decision-making ability on the field when the similarities between his thought process and that of a new user arriving at a site for the first time hit me.

Here are the lessons I took away from the first part of the book:

Read the full article on Search Engine Land >

If you are managing PPC across the three major search engines, I would guess that your budget allocation looks very similar to many of our clients’ –  ~75% to Google, ~15% to Yahoo and ~10% to MSN.

And honestly, that’s being pretty generous to the latter two, unfortunately.

Truth be told, as happy as I am with Google (no seriously… minus some frustrations, I really am), for the sake of diversification I would very much like to see our spend more evenly distributed.  Similar to investing for retirement, it is worrisome to have too many eggs in one basket.

But, alas, I don’t see any major shift in spend among these three Tier 1 engines happening anytime in the near future… if ever.  The search volume from Google, combined with the ease of their platform, the robustness of their reporting tools among other pluses leaves us pretty much addicted to Google.

But what about the 2nd tier PPC engines, comprised of platforms such as Ask.com, Business.com, 7Search and others?  Is this a source of diversification worth exploring?

Results from Tier 2 engines are mixed as you can see from PPC Hero’s recent survey that asked ‘Which second tier PPC search engine has generated the best results for you?’.  31% of advertisers have never tried a 2nd tier engine.  16% of advertisers said that none of the Tier 2 engines have ever worked well for them. But there are some bright spots like Ask.com and Business.com that are producing results for some:

Until 1/2 year ago I would have been among that 16% who had tried 2nd tier engines, but not seen good results.  Recent experience, though, lands me happily in the purple piece of the pie.  We have actually seen some great results for some of our B2B clients on Business.com and are excited about the unique features this platform provides!  If you are a B2B advertiser and you have not yet explored Business.com, now is the time to do so for a number of reasons.

Reason #1: Data Speaks.  Here are last month’s PPC results for one of our clients.  As you will note, Business.com is the 2nd highest campaign for lead volume and the cost per lead is $22 less than Google:

Reason #2:  Cool Features. Business.com has some unique features that make this a pretty sweet channel to include in your marketing mix.

For starters, you get a WHOLE 60 characters for your headline and 150 characters for your description!  Holy PPC, this is like Christmas for those of us who are used to squeezing in 95 characters total into an AdWords box!

Second, it is not a blind auction.  You can actually view the top 5 bids to help make judgments about what to bid yourself.  There are pros and cons to this, but I have to say that I personally find this to be a nice mini-vacation away from the blind auction/quality scoring black box.

But what I like best about Business.com, is the option to include ‘Multlinks’, or multiple landing pages/calls-to-action as such:

Reason #3:   New Conversion Tracking. The clincher.  For those of you who have steered away from Business.com in the past due to their lack of conversion tracking, those days are gone.  Granted in beta, you can now track your listings to conversion and ROI data:

So will Business.com work well for all B2B advertisers?  Absolutely not - among our clients, the results have been mixed thus far.  As with any channel, you’ll need to test, track, analyze and refine to determine if Business.com is a viable marketing channel for your organization.

Best of luck if you decide to diversify and venture down the Tier 2 path - Business.com or otherwise.  Feel free to share your experiences, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

One of the coolest parts of being an author is receiving unannounced foreign language copies of your book in the mail. Last week we received the Polish version, which they apparently named “E-Business.” So watch out, Czech Republic; Poland just gained a competitive advantage.

Sandra is upset about a minor color shift in the cover design. And that button label is way too long! But otherwise it looks very nice - great job on retaining the page layouts!

For the English version and related freebies, visit http://www.WebDesignForROI.com.