Sports content and statistical analysis company, Stats, is now working with Google to provide the search leader with its worldwide sports information through Google’s search and sports gadgets. Stats, which is jointly owned by the Associated Press and News Corp, has exclusive relationships with the NBA and NFL.

These “gadgets” are “mini-applications that support rich markup language (XML, Flash) and enable a wide array of visual effects and animation,” according to the news release.

Stats will provide Google with real-time scoring, schedules, standings across all major sports worldwide. But this isn’t just for you baseball and hockey fans. As part of the agreement, Stats is expanding its coverage to include 111 more sports including billiards, camogie and sumo wresting.

Stats recently announced the formation of Stats Middle East and Stats Europe. It currently has 15 corporate offices around the world.

Consumer organization US Public Interest Group (US PIRG) is officially opposing the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership. According to Reuters, the group sent a letter to the US attorney general, Michael Mukasey, saying the agreement could harm consumer privacy.

The US PIRG argues that because Yahoo and Google will control over 80% of the search ad market, advertisers will be forced to garner more information on those surfing the web because they would not be able to compete on price.

The US Department of Justice is still reviewing the partnership after a deadline extension earlier this month.

Yesterday, Nielsen Online released its September 2008 data for the Top US Search Providers.

Google came out on top with 59.7% and Yahoo came in with 18.1%. MSN garnered 11.8%.

This normally wouldn’t have come as a surprise except for the fact that I recently learned that ComScore’s September results differed as much as 3 percentage points. In its results, Google had 62.9% of the market share, Yahoo had 20.2% and MSN had only 8.5%.

I’m currently looking into the differences between Nielsen’s and ComScore’s methodology. More to come…

There has been much confusion and press lately about the Google-Yahoo partnership. What does it mean for advertisers? What does it mean for search engine marketers? What does it mean for the search market in general? Well now Google has attempted to spell it out with a new microsite devoted purely to these questions.

It includes a slideshow presentation as well as sections devoted to the voluntary delay for regulators, why the deal is good for competition and frequently asked questions. The site shoots to give straightforward answers to curious consumers (and, I assume, journalists) and clear up “misconceptions” according to a google blog posing.

This week I spoke with Covario’s VP of marketing and product management, Craig Macdonald about the interactive marketing analytics firm’s partnership with Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Worldwide’s search marketing division. The companies work together with clients like Intel Corp and Adobe Systems to optimize and manage global search. Neo works on search strategies and Covario provides the technology to monitor the initiatives across various languages, business units and product lines. Craig discussed the challenges facing global search.

Craig said that the trick to launching a new product globally is combining online and off-line campaigns. “Consolidating and monitoring search programs is very complex,” he said. “You need to be able to track performance on all of the different platforms, both paid and organic, to see how you can drive additional performance.”

“With global campaigns, many assume that 50% of the total resources would go towards data aggregation. That’s not an insignificant amount of money,” Craig said. “You’ve got to be as automated as possible.”

He also said that data collection, as of late, has been “pretty atrocious.” He said, “Having different formats and information coming from various sources is a problem. We need to identify where something isn’t working, whether it’s the landing page, the creative or something else.”

He continued, “With search, you need to maximize the speed in which we get the performance information back to the client so you can see where you’re doing well or poorly within 24 hours and then adjust strategies your strategy accordingly.”

It feels like a seismic shift in the world of Internet searching — how could any topic beat porn, the longtime champ? But according to Reuters, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer says porn has been dethroned. In his new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why it Matters,” he says social networking sites have surpassed pornography in terms of what consumers search for. Tancer told Reuters that he conducted his research by analyzing 10 million consumers’ Web search habits. He said searching for porn had dropped to about 10% of Web searches from 20% a decade ago, while the top searches are for social networking sites.

Last week I wrote about trends in mobile search. This week I read about new comScore M:Metrics data that has been released that says mobile search is, not surprisingly, on the rise in both the US and in Europe. Mobile search in the US was up 68% in June compared to the same period a year earlier. It was up 38% in Europe.

It was also reported that 9.2% of US mobile customer used search, while only 5.6% used it in Europe. The highest percentage was the UK which had 9.5%.

It comes as no surprise that Google leads the market share in mobile search with 63% in the US. Yahoo trails with 34.6%. This is expected to continue with Google’s upcoming launch of its Android operating system-powered phone later this year.

This week Google said it would cut its data retention period from 18 to 9 months. The new policy is in response to concerns by EU privacy regulators, according to a company blog post dated September 8.

“While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows,” Google said.

Presidential candidate and Senator John McCain has taken some blows lately–what with Paris Hilton calling him a “wrinkly white-haired dude” and the media criticizing him for not knowing how many houses he owns (well, how many his wife owns).

But when it comes to search marketing McCain —or at least his staffers—are landing the blows instead of taking them.

According to a Wall Street Journal article published today, McCain is “outsmarting” Senator Barack Obama with this savvy search marketing tactics.

According to the article, on Wednesday a Google query for “Joe Biden” and “Biden” yielded pay-per-click ads linking to McCain’s Web site where people could watch a video showing Senator Joe Biden criticizing Obama during the primaries.

The article’s authors note that Obama also bid on the same keyterms, but his ads appeared below McCain’s.

Using the Internet to drive consumers into local stores has long been a goal of multichannel merchants. This week, the industry moved one step closer to realizing its goal.

Local search engine Krillion, which has been around since 2006 and until recently limited in scope by the fact that it covered relatively few product categories, has added 96 product categories to its Krillion Localization Engine. As a result, it now offers location-specific inventory information for 20,000 big-box retailers across the US, encompassing 155 product categories, 900 product brands and over 1 billion SKU’s.

I recently conducted searches for several different items – laptops, printers and oven ranges – and almost every SKU I clicked on was out-of-stock in the various stores near where I live. In some cases, the items were available online or for site-to-store delivery. The only item I could find in a store was a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet D1520 Printer, which is available at three different Wal-Mart’s near me.

The frequent out-of-stocks could be because retailers are keeping such lean inventories in these tough economic times. But with so many retailers offering site-to-store pick-up these days, and consumers looking for these types of conveniences, this looks like a viable way to drive consumers into stores.