Well, apparently there is. Engineers from Google’s branch in Seattle put their idea of a new master plan on a couple of local busses (see photo above, more pictures).

Turns out – this is ‘advertising in motion’ and part of Google’s effort to make young web geniuses check out its job listings. Definitely a creative way to recruit new talent! We’ll see if G’s Seattle branch (funny website, btw) will make more headlines soon…

P.S. The erased original Google master plan has a great shrine on Picasa. 

Yes, it’s true that young people are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are “expert searchers.” In fact, the report calls this “a dangerous myth.”But these are some truths about the “Google generation”, according to the report:

• They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
• They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
• They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”

Does that mean they don’t care about copyrights, get easily bored about lengthy investigative magazine articles and suffer from ADD big time?? Well, somehow I expected a little bit more. Good news: We, the “older people” (meaning over 30), still have some chances to compete in the digital age….

Like many others who love L.A. I get shocked when December approaches and I become aware that this city doesn’t have a official Christmas tree. But one can still hope…

Google’s universal search (meaning the inclusion of any keyword-related results, such as pictures, books, news stories etc.) for “New York Christmas” not only lists nice pictures of Christmas trees in the “Big Apple”, but also news stories about Billy Joel’s anti-war Christmas single.

And some New York residents actually OBJECTING a public Christmas tree!

What about the “Los Angeles Christmas”? Oh my, the search results paint a sad, sad picture. No L.A. related Christmas photos, no YouTube videos, no relevant books. Nothing. Zilch.

The only Lala Land relevant Christmas ‘universal’ search result is a news article about “24″ TV star Kiefer Sutherland who will spend Xmas in prison for his second arrest for drunk-driving!

Depressing – but so L.A.!!

- With 20 billion to 35 billion worldwide searches in 2006/2007, search growth is as strong as ever. (Via ClickZ)

- Google remained in the top spot for search queries in the United States, accounted for 64.49 percent of all searches (Hitwise)

- More than $14 billion has been spent online during the holiday season-to-date – a 17 percent gain compared with the corresponding days last year. (via MarketingVox)

- Nearly 400 million Google search referrals are to its own multimedia properties. (via ClickZ)

- Local search is expected to grow from rougly $2.5 billion today to $5 billion in 2008. (via SearchEngineLand).

- In the third quarter of this year, more than one of four clicks on ads running on content networks like Google’s AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network was fraudulent. (via Mediapost)

- The caches of major search engines are still providing a safe hiding place for malicious code. (Computerworld)

- Google will very soon begin treating subdomains not as separate domains, but the same as subdirectories. (via Webmasterworld)

- Search Engines can help you to find a “dead” spouse. (via SearchEngineLand)

- And last, but not least: Larry Page, the world’s only remaining bachelor Google billionaire, is getting married today. (via ABC News)

Congratulations, Larry! Hope your first child will have cute googly eyes!

• Internet access across the EU is increasing, with 54 per cent of households having access of some sort, compared 49 per cent last year.
• The highest proportions of households with internet access were recorded in the nordic countries: Netherlands (83%), Sweden (79%) and Denmark (78%).
• The UK, usually know as internet savvy and technologically advanced, is trailing the Nordic leader with 67%.
• 57% of individuals had used internet search engines.
• 50% had sent e-mails with attachments.
• 30% said they kept viruses and spyware off their computers.
• 25% of individuals had taken part in chatrooms, newsgroups or online discussions.
• 15% had used the internet to make phone calls.
• Peer to peer file sharing for exchange of movies and music had been used by 13%.
• Only 10% had created a web page.

Despite the fact that most of these numbers are lower than the ones in the United States, this study proves that internet access is gradually extending across the 27 states of the European Union – especially broadband connections have risen sharply.

• Three quarters of U.S. Internet users, or about 120 million people, have used engines, searching an average of 38 times a month.
• As a business, search brought in $4 billion in sales last year, and will become a bigger cash cow as its power and influence grows.
• Microsoft found that people search an average of 11 minutes before they find what they are looking for.
• The first search engine was created in 1990 by a college student in Montreal and named “Archie” — a variation on the word archive. There wasn’t even much of a Web at that point, and Archie was mainly used to dig through public file-exchange sites.
• Google is the most popular engine today, home to 35 percent of Web searches. It receives hundreds of millions of requests every day.
• Google hit the $1 billion quarterly sales mark in 2004, just five years after its official launch.
• Search engines are going after more eyeballs by adding their own content, and now offer users street maps, phone numbers, weather forecasts and even answers to algebra problems. Many also offer separate search-based shopping and news services.
• Web users add more public information daily. A group of University of California researchers estimated the size of the public Web at least tripled from 2000 to 2003, when it contained 167 terabytes of data. That’s equal to about 560,000 sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Experts say the search technology will jump digital boundaries from the browser to other platforms. Its next stop is the cellphone; in the future, television.

According to the data, just 4 percent of all unique search queries made up more than half of all site searches. For e-commerce sites, the number of unique queries fell to just 2 percent. (…) “Marketers should be thinking about site search with the ‘80/20 rule’ in mind, and pay attention to the areas where they’ll get the most bang for their buck,” Steve Kusmer, senior VP and general manager of WebSideStory’s search and content solutions division, told ClickZ. “They should address site search tuning by looking at the top keywords first.” (…)The site search box itself is a tremendous gift to you from your customers: they are telling you exactly what they want, in their own words,” writes Aldrich, who provides a five-step plan for site search improvement in her report.The importance of guiding site search users is magnified because those searchers are 2.7 times as likely to convert than the average site visitor, according to Kusmer. That is in part due to the nature of site search users, who are in effect pre-qualifying themselves as users interested in finding something very specific on a site. A well directed user experience created by good site search results also leads to increased conversions, he added.(Via ClickZ)