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Well I'm back from yet another rushed round trip to Brisbane. This time we took the computer shop's wagon and I've never been so glad to get back into my own car in my life - after 600 kilometres I now know which vehicle has the most comfortable seats.

At least while we were on the way there and back Steve and I were able to do some brain-storming about search engines. Thanks to my iPhone and great coverage by our service provider we were able to look a lot of what we were thinking about on my mobile phone.

It's interesting to see how some sites look really good on a tiny screen while others looked terrible. Even some of those that were important to travelers rendered very poorly on a small screen.

One thing that Steve commented on while we were down in Brisbane was the increasing numbers of commercial vehicles driving around the city displaying the URL of their business. If you live in America that's probably quite common but it's only just taking off in our state capital and here, in the town where I live, there are probably only 20 or so vehicles that display business URLs.

Google knows your websites
While we were driving around brainstorming it seems that there were some interesting things happening on the search engine front and there has been a Search Engine Marketing Expo happening in Seattle too. One of the interesting things to come out of the first day of the Expo relates back to another search engine conference last November.

Back then Matt Cutts was giving a review of a website and he mentioned that he had access to other sites that the owner of the website under review also owned. At that time it appeared that what was a perfectly legitimate sales website was being reviewed in the light of the other sites the webmaster owned. Some of those were not quite as squeaky-clean as the site being reviewed and that was commented on by Matt Cutts.

Ever since then webmasters have been wondering just how much Google does know about individual webmasters and how capable Google is of identifying other websites they might own. There has also been some thought given to how Google grades good websites that belong to webmasters who also own 'bad' websites.

Well it seems that we're still in the dark on the exact amount of negative impact 'bad' sites might have on 'good' ones but yesterday Matt Cutts indicated that Google did tend to give less importance to sites that were owned by webmasters that Google had identified as owning spammy or less legitimate sites.

And you still believe that Google does no evil? Before you begin to jump up and down and wave your arms around to tell me that Google is doing nothing evil by assessing one site against others that might be owned by the same person just stop and think about it for a while.

Baidu takes the Chinese experience to Europe
Earlier in the week I talked about the way people from different ethnic backgrounds viewed websites and I mentioned that Google had failed to gain much traction in China. In that country Baidu - a uniquely Chinese search engine - was the big player. Now there are some reports going around that Baidu is about to make a move into Europe with a younger target market in mind. Just imagine a cross between MySpace, Google and a Chinese grocery store and perhaps you'll begin to see what we might expect.

Local search
Once again here's another area of the Net where people in the US, Canada and perhaps even Europe have the lead on us here in Australia. Over here there is nothing like the local search experience that you guys have. Here you can't hit up Google and ask for directions to all the Pizza shops in your area but that doesn't mean savvy search engine people aren't preparing websites for inclusion in local search when it comes because we certainly are.

However, just what that local search experience will look like when it does arrive here is still a matter of some conjecture so a call by some search engine specialists in the United States for a standard format for local search listings is certainly worth watching.

Could Microsoft be building a secret new search engine?
If Techcrunch is to be believed then there is a small dedicated group within Microsoft that is working on 'the next generation 'horizontal' search engine'. The matter was raised at the Search Engine Expo in Seattle but the Microsoft representative there is said to have denied that any work like that is being done.

Universal Search
And finally how are you adapting to Universal Search? This week we've noticed that for two search terms videos that we've posted to YouTube have ranked higher than the optimized page on our clients sites that they relate too. So now we're off to learn more about optimizing for YouTube.