The Pew Internet Project has released a report detailing the search habits of Americans, and they confirm what many of us already know: Internet search has become a part of daily life for many people, to the point that it is challenging the dominance of Email, the web’s longstanding killer app.

According to the study, nearly 50% of internet users use search engines like Google or Yahoo on a daily basis - substantially more than the number of people who check news (39%) or the weather (30%). While search still falls behind Email use, which holds steady at 60%, it is showing significantly more growth. In the six year span between January 2002 and May 2008, search use increased by 69%, while Email use grew only 15% during the same period.

It’s important to note that this data pertains only to usage on a “typical day”. 90% of web users use a search engine at some point over the course of a month - a figure that has held relatively constant over the years. But as search engine accuracy has improved, more people are turning to them for their day to day information instead of traditional tools like bookmarks and homepages.

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Ever since Google closed the DoubleClick acquisition, it’s been trying to sell off Performics, a unit of DoubleClick that does search-engine marketing and optimization. The business presented a conflict of interest for Google because its services are aimed at getting better placement on Google’ search results for its clients. Google announced today that it sold the business to France’s Publicis Groupe.

The French advertising giant will absorb the 200 “search marketing specialists” currently working for Performics. It will fold the business into its VivaKi Nerve Center (sounds scary). The purchase price was not disclosed.

Now Google can leave the SEO and SEM to others. It can spare the crumbs.

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Mloovi is a new tool which will translate RSS newsfeeds into 24 languages. It does this via Google Translate but the process is utterly seamless. You just put an RSS feed’s URL into the box and that’s it. The service is going to be of great use to bloggers (who can also download a widget to have their blog automatically translated). The translations are not perfect and images and formatting are removed, but they do give you the gist of the article. With the Olympics coming up it should be especially useful to track all the chatter from the myriad of nations attending. The basic service is free, as mloovi inserts one advert into the feed and a premium account which removes ads is planned.

Read the rest of this entry on TechCrunch UK

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After about four months in private beta, social travel site TripSay is now open to all travelers. TripSay combines travel search with user-generated travel guides and ratings. When you enter a city or place, it comes up on a map, along with recommendations from other TripSay users that can be sorted by restaurants, hotels, bars, beaches, transportation, sights, and other categories. I described the service in my initial review:

TripSay combines social recommendations with a travel search engine that auto-suggests cities, pubs, hotels, and the like as you type them in. They appear as icons on a map, with a photo (pulled from Flickr) and description on the side, a tag cloud below, and minifeed of all the places you and your friends have rated or recommended. The detail page for each city shows other TripSay members who have visited, tips from members, the most interesting Flickr photos tagged with the name of the city, links elsewhere on the Web, and a list of the top-rated places shown on a map.

Since then, the site has added a few more features, including better editing tools, ways to collect and save your favorite tips, group message boards, and the ability to filter recommendations by groups. And, of course, it’s kept its signature rating system, which goes from smiley face to a full moon. TripSay competes with Dopplr, Driftr, and many other social travel sites, but it is worth a look.

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Yahoo’s retally of its shareholder votes shows the deep-seated anger among shareholders and how close CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock were to being ousted from the board of directors. The votes had to be recounted after one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, Capital Research and Management, questioned the initial results. (The miscount was the fault of Broadridge Financial Solutions, the proxy processor—their credibility is shot now). Half of the “No” votes for Yang and Bostok were initially never counted. Instead of the initially reported 15 percent and 21 percent of votes withheld for Yang and Bostock, respectively, the true “No” votes were double that: 34 percent for Yang and a whopping 40 percent for Bostock.

Those numbers are dangerously close to what would have been needed to kick them off the board. And it raises the question of what would have happened if Carl Icahn had decided not to back down from a full proxy battle. While it is doubtful that Icahn would have been able to overturn the entire board, he might have been successful removing Yahoo’s chairman and CEO. Between himself and other allies such as John Paulson and T. Boone Pickens (who ended up selling his shares at a loss), the Icahn contingent controlled at least 10 percent of the votes. That could have been enough to get rid of Bostock (depending on how Paulson voted his 4 percent stake). And keeping up the public pressure could have won over enough votes to kick Yang off his own board as well.

That’s too close for Yang & Co. to feel too secure about their standing with shareholders, in case they had any doubt before about what investors really think. Based on the recount, other board members that shareholders want to fire include Ronald Burkle (38 percent “No” votes), Arthur Kern (32 percent “No” votes), and Gary Wilson (28 percent “No” votes).

All together, that’s half the board within striking distance of being replaced. Did Icahn miscalculate when he backed down? Or are the three board seats he now has in hand better than the five in the bush he could have had a shot at?

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Sotheby’s, Space Station Isis 9, 2113:
Next up for auction is Armin Heinrich’s “I Am Rich” circa 2008 manufactured digitally for the Apple iPhone, a device popular with turn-of-the-epoch intelligentsia and predecessor to our own popular iSuppository. The work of art originally sold for $999.99 and was a scathing commentary on that era’s consumerist culture on the eve of the Great Browning. We quote from the artist’s original mission:

The red icon on your iPhone or iPod touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.

It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all.

The artwork is fully functional and it has been tested and approved by the Federal Recording Industry Association of America and is also approved by the TSA Provisional Authority for use on and around airports, cities, restaurants, and bathrooms. We begin the bidding at 5 million Nebraskan Euro. Do I hear an initial bid?

[Thanks, Dave]

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I’m going to take some criticism for this, but I think it’s something that needs to be said: We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed.

FriendFeed and Twitter are different than normal social networks because they don’t require two people to mutually agree to become friends. Instead, you simply choose to follow someone and see the content they produce. That person is notified that you are following them, and can choose to reciprocate or not.

So far, so good. The idea is that you shouldn’t be pressured into following/subscribing to another person just so that they can read your content. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.

And for the most part it works. But there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

Here’s the problem, though. When you follow too many people the service just becomes unusable. On Twitter I follow just 466 people that I find interesting, but the content stream is far too much to consume. On Friendfeed the problem is even worse because it aggregates so much other content (Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, blogs, etc.).

On Twitter I generally only monitor messages specifically directed at me (@techcrunch must be in the message), and I sort of peruse Friendfeed a few times a day to find interesting stuff. But what I really want to do is have a core group of friends that I watch.

That means Twitter and FriendFeed need to let me group friends somehow and let me watch just some of them if I like. Or a simpler approach: give me a Fake Follow.

The Fake Follow looks like a normal follow to the other person, but to me it’s like I didn’t follow them at all. This solves the ego stroking issue (and related problems) that so many people have, and it keeps the content stream clean and usable.

Eventually we’ll evolve online culture to the point where people adapt to these new systems (just like today people aren’t usually offended when an instant message isn’t returned, well, instantly). But until then we need to find a way to keep things under control, and anger at a minimum. And since Twitter and FriendFeed will become far more usable with it, it’s in their best interests to adopt it.

I asked Evan Williams at Twitter about this a few weeks ago and he said they may adopt different friend types to deal with the problem. FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit says they are releasing new features in the coming weeks that will “make it easier to separate the people who you really want to follow from the rest.” They may not call it a Fake Follow, but we’ll all nod and wink when the features roll out. Thanks in advance, Paul.

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Google has just written a blog post introducing “Insights for Search”, an extension to its Google Trends and AdWords products that allows users to track keywords across different verticals, geographic locations, and time periods. According to the post, the new service is designed to help advertisers and marketers get a better understanding for user search behavior. You can access the Insights to Search homepage here (you’ll need to login to your Google account).

Insights for Search bears more than a few similarities to the recently updated Trends site, but with a few additions. The new service allows users to more thoroughly analyze search volume patterns by introducing a number of new filters. Users can now specify what category their search term falls under (for example, you can distinguish between Apple the computer company, or the fruit), and you can generate a heat map detailing where search queries are originating from.

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Y Combinator startup TicketStumbler has launched today. The Boston based company is an aggregator for the secondary ticket market, collecting tickets from brokers like Stubhub and Razorgator into one searchable database. Think of a kayak.com for sports tickets. The service essentially aims to spare users the trouble of searching through different secondary ticketing sites to find specific seats and prices. TicketStumbler has landed partnerships with several ticket brokers, and is working to expand their repository. They currently have 1.5 million listings representing 7 million total tickets.

TicketStumbler, founded by Dan Haubert and Tom Davis, is looking to take the forefront of the market by providing precise search options and solid user experience. The company’s main competition comes from Tickex, who also extends their service to concerts, but for the most part the space has relatively few contenders.

When comparing search results between the two sites it is clear that TicketStumbler provides a less cluttered interface without ads, ebay listings, and extraneous add-ons. Search results can also be viewed by seating location, allowing users to navigate through different sections to find the prime combination of price and location.

TicketStumbler hopes that by aggregating ticket listings they will spur competition between brokers and decrease transaction prices. They believe the service can further drop prices by driving traffic to brokers’ web sites, making them more willing to sell cheaper tickets. Depending on the broker, they will be taking 6-15% of the ticket sales that are conducted through their site.

The founders claim that the next steps involve pulling from more brokers and extending the service to cover more professional and college sports, with concerts and other types of events in the distant future. Secondary ticketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, so the revenue source is clearly there. Attracting users may well come down to having the most extensive ticket listings rather than the most user friendly service.

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The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has tapped MySpace to create an online portal for the upcoming election season that will include live streaming video and real time polling. The site, called MyDebates.org will be open to anyone (you don’t need to create an account), and will launch as we get closer to the first debate on September 26.

The CPD is charged with organizing the four “real” debates leading up to this November’s election (it is unaffiliated with the dozens of primary debates we’ve seen over the last 18 months). The partnership with MySpace marks the first time the organization has included any kind of real-time participation.

Visitors to the site will be able to watch the debates stream in real time. A team of employees working behind the scenes will monitor the arguments made by each candidate, and will pose questions to viewers that will be displayed in tiny popup overlays. In this way, the site will be able to collect an endless amount of polling data in real time, allowing users to immediately see how the public responds to each question. The site will also be involved with the town-hall debate on October 7, which will feature questions drawn from a pool of submissions from MyDebates.org.

At MyDebates.org, users will be able to create widgetized “Issue Cards”, which can be embedded in their blogs and webpages. While there are a number of sites that offer similar widgets, this one has a trick up its sleeve - during the broadcast of each debate, these Issue Cards will fold open to reveal a miniature video player.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tie-ins between debate organizers and online sites - last year we saw similar cooperation between CNN and YouTube, with disappointing results. But the primary debates pale in comparison to those leading up to the general election, and MySpace and the CPD seem to be taking a new approach.

Television changed the election process forever, bringing the candidates into the living room of every American. The web is clearly the next frontier, but it has yet to live up to its potential. If MySpace can create a site that is both intuitive and informative, it stands to actually enhance the democratic process by engaging and motivating the millions of apathetic Americans who might not vote otherwise.

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