Within moments of shouting "You lie" at President Barack Obama during his speech last week to a joint session of Congress regarding healthcare reform efforts, Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, became the latest hot topic on the Internet. Almost instantly, the relatively obscure Congressman became the top search on Google, Yahoo Search and Bing. His even less-well-known political opponent, Democrat Rob Miller, an Iraq war veteran who is running for Wilson's seat in the 2010 election, got his own online impact:

One of the things that makes paid search a challenge is the degree to which minor changes in any given campaign element can add up to significant differences in the health of a given campaign. For example, positional changes (say, moving from #3 to #1 on a SERP) create enormous, sometimes exponential differences in click volume. Subtle changes in ad copy, keyword (positive and negative) selection, match type settings, landing page design, and call to action language can create large improvements (or declines) in campaign profitability. This is why obtaining optimum campaign performance requires search marketers to practice a regime …

There's a new frontier opening in the display advertising landscape, in which small and medium-sized businesses can execute effectively and deliver results that are, if not as effective, at least as compelling as those generated through search. And given the interplay between display advertising and search activity, these businesses should be able to use this new opportunity to better scale their already effective search campaigns.

Some time ago, I wrote a column saying the fallout of the economic crisis would be a rapid evolution in marketing practices, speeding the transition from the old way of doing things to a much more dominant role for digital. In that transition, search would play a bigger role than ever. In the past few months, I'm seeing exactly that come to pass. People are serious about search, from the bottom right up to the top corner office. This isn't playtime in the sandbox anymore; we're suddenly moving front and center.

In my last column I laid out 10 lessons I learned about marketing from Google. The response from the Search Insider community was, to borrow a phrase from Gaylord Focker in "Meet the Parents," strong-to-very-strong. I received some great feedback and all sorts of suggestions for other golden Google rules. Today, I'll continue the thread around marketing lessons learned from Google

The degree to which SEO efforts can succeed directly correlates to the quality, power and impact of any given Web site. Now, I love our small and growing business clients -- love them. But I must confess to one overriding concern that grows with each new Web site I encounter: Too many business owners have built sites that are to some degree unprepared to conduct business on the Web.

Recently it crossed my mind to start asking prospective clients why they think their particular Web site deserves to be No. 1 on Google or even in the top ten. I feel the answers could be very telling. Everybody seems to think that they deserve to rank at the top of Google for the products and services that they sell -- but the reality is that most often they don't. Let's face it. There are only 10 spots on the front page, and hundreds or even thousands of Web sites that sell the same product for roughly the same price.

Rob Griffin's thought-provoking column on "The Death of Search" started by poking fun at my summertime nostalgia, likening it to Bryan Adam's lyrics. But here's the thing. Rob and others talk about search as an industry, a channel, a technology. All these things are way too limiting: search is a verb. Search is something we do. And, as such, it reaches past technology and channels and even Google.

The company I work for recently completed a detailed test and analysis of the impact of online display ads for both paid and natural search metrics, and concluded that search traffic does indeed increase through the brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand preference aspects of display campaigns.

I remember once reading that of all the challenges humans encounter throughout a lifetime, change of any sort is among the most anxiety-producing. Last week, two events in San Francisco, one by the SEMPO Bay Area Working Group and the other by the local chapter of the American Marketing Association, highlighted the degree to which those of us working in the field confront change each and every day. From the sound of things, it isn't always pretty.