Just when I thought it was safe to go outside, a new Google killer has been reported to be on the loose. Monday morning, start-up search engine cuil.com was launched, accompanied by a rapid fire of cheerleading, speculation and, ultimately, ridicule. Search experts around the globe threw five to 10 queries at the engine before declaring Cuil a failure.

For the average consumer, online product research is a double-edged sword. While Web 2.0 platforms have facilitated the creation and distribution of user-gener­ated reviews, sorting through these articles and comments can be a daunting task for the consumer. The very same technol­ogy built to improve the Web has actually made the Web a bit more unwieldy.

What exactly happens when one invites the cast of an Italian opera over for a soiree? Endless discussions of Wagner? A tribute to Pavarotti? Debate over Deborah Voigt's weight loss? Surprisingly, a baritone introduced Google to the conversation early in the evening. From hashing the ads that appear in Gmail to relaying how Google Maps on an iPhone saved the last performance, we spent a good hour discussing how search has transformed society.

Ignore the fact that we are in the thick of summer; the fall recruiting season has officially started. Just as sweaters and tweed skirts adorn department store windows, job requisitions are populating the inboxes coast-to-coast. Recruiters with a front-row seat to this fashion show are reporting a common trend: Search has returned as a must-have for Fall 2008.

Last week, a marketer asked me what her rights where when terminating a relationship with a search engine marketing agency. Her incumbent agency refused to pass over anything but ad copy. No keywords, no historical performance, nothing. I am sure there are other absolute horror stories out there, but my gut says that this is not typical of most SEM agency-client relationships.

Ten years ago this September, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were about to set up offices in a garage. Their Web site, Google.com, delivered results for 10,000 searches a day. By 1999, that figure had jumped to 3 million. Today, Google processes hundreds of millions of searches each and every day. If this is a staggering number, consider that behind each and every search query is a set of consumer data, and it is access to this data that puts Google into a league of its own.

Starting a business is, no doubt, a massive endeavor. However, something larger looms ahead of the young start-up: scaling the business. It is frequently said that moving from zero to $10 million in revenue is easy; it is the step from $10 million to $100 million where the real sweating occurs.

The mobile Web presence is to 2008 what the Web presence was to 1998: an absolutely essential component of the marketing mix. Mobile media measure­ment firm M:Metrics, recently acquired by ComScore, states that mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and page views have increased 127%.

It was a big week — make that a very big week — for search engine marketing announcements. While most are obsessing over the Yahoo/Google partnership, plenty of other news was released. Dear readers, here are the best bits.

When we talk about next generation search, thought leaders assess better means of indexing images, video and audio. Talk moves to searching from devices beyond the desktop, from cell phones to TV remote controls. But rarely do we ever go beyond the online constraints to understand the most valuable of all search data: the offline search.