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Close to nine in 10 U.S. search marketers now measure campaign return on investment (ROI), according to iprospects' "Search Marketer Measurement & Performance Study," done by JupiterResearch.

Study participation was regulated to search marketers who out sourced the management of their search engine optimization campaigns and used paid search advertising.

The study revealed that 86 percent of search marketers used metrics to gauge their campaigns.

Half of search marketers had their performance based on total sales, while close to half were based on ROI and 42 percent were based on return on advertising spending (ROAS).

Robert Murray of iProspect said, "What search marketer wouldn't rather have their performance evaluation based upon what their efforts actually netted - such as an additional $3 million in sales or 20% increase in ROAS - than an additional 20,000 visitors a month?"

On the YouTube blog they described the new feature as "fun to play with and lets you discover new, related videos without leaving your site. Just hover over the video after pressing "play" and watch the magic unfold..."

YouTube also gave users the control to not use the new feature, "If for any reason you don't want this option turned on, you can modify the video URL by attaching a rel=0 parameter to the video. i.e. http://www.youtube.com/v/&rel=0."

Since the roll out YouTube has changed the feature so that related videos appear only when you click the menu button. This was most likely done because of negative user feedback.

Here is a sample of what some YouTube users posted in the comments section of the blog. "This is really not a good feature. The best thing about adding videos from youtube to our website was to actually select ourself the related videos and place them on our site. Please next time be carefully when adding such ideas. "

"Congrats to you YouTube!!! You've developed a truly unique function that viewers hate, and one that webmasters, web developers, and bloggers hate as well."

The initial word of Baidu's growth was actually less rumor than report - two writers at the Telegraph stated, "Chief financial officer Shawn Wang is expected to outline the group's expansion plans in London later this month, when the company attends its first Nasdaq investor day since listing on the exchange in 2005."

But in the week or so following that article's publication, a number of reasons have been brought up as to why Baidu might fail in Europe. And aside from logical and factual issues, some onlookers bear the company a bit of a grudge - its censorship in China has arguably been more pervasive (and certainly longer-lasting) than that which has been employed by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

You have to wonder if all the naysaying changed Baidu's mind, but the company's not about to admit to such a thing. Baidu issued a statement saying, "Recent rumors alleging that Baidu.com is expanding into Europe are groundless." Credit goes to Sumner Lemon of the IDG News Service for relaying that statement.

So it looks like the Chinese giant will stay within the Great Wall (and Japan's borders) for the time being, and the imagined search engine free-for-all in Europe will not take place. Oh, well. Maybe some other time.

This follows the company's momentous name change from Yahoo China to China Yahoo a few days ago.

oneSearch was first launched in North America at the beginning of this year as one of the biggest programs of Yahoo. It was later introduced to Europe in early May and now it will be brought to China in early June. Some local media report that Yahoo may make large big adjustment to the service to suit the Chinese market, but China Yahoo has not made any comment on this.

Hitwise's Bill Tancer released a report showing the change in visits to the search engine company's top properties; while some went down, others went up. Google Maps and YouTube were among the lucky ones, showing improvements of 20.34% and 8.26%, respectively.

Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz explains why. "Google Maps saw a 20% increase in traffic because prior to Universal search, Google only displayed map results for a very limited set of queries," he writes. "Now, Google Maps results are far more common and take up to three of the seven web search results."

Similarly, "Prior [to Google Universal Search], YouTube videos were not shown in Google's web search results."

But other Google properties weren't so lucky; visits to Google Book Search went down 19.44%, and Google News's numbers decreased by 7.84%. As for Google Image Search, Schwartz notes, "Image search took a 7.22% dive, most likely because the image one box results were no longer guaranteed to be displayed at the top. Image search results now can be found at the bottom, middle or top of the results."

I think it's likely that most of the world is indifferent to Google Universal Search. But within the Googleplex, certain teams have almost undoubtedly noticed these big changes due to its launch.

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