This Week in Search: August 19

The week started off with a bang with Google’s newest acquisition but turned out to be a slower week for search news. But we still have a nice round up of what happened this week around the web, from Groupon’s money troubles to Bell Media’s new mobile media survey.

Google Purchases Motorola Mobility for $12.5B

Google made a big splash early in the week by purchasing Motorola for $12.5 billion. An interesting move that has 3 objectives:

• Protect themselves from intellectual property claims from Apple and Microsoft
• Achieve deep integration between Google products and Android
• Create a direct pipeline to the mobile industry supply chain

I’d file this acquisition under “smart but costly” considering Google is paying a 63% premium to last Friday’s closing price but it was a necessary move after losing out on the Nortel patents.

Google+ Public Shares Are Now Active in Searches

Google has finally started to implement parts of Google+ into the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is one of the many necessary steps Google is taking to converge search and social. It’s expected that, soon, Google will start pulling public posts from Google+ into its real-time search (once it is brought back to life).

Google Brings Back the 12-Pack

Google officially announced the expansion of organic Sitelinks to the “12-Pack”, which includes a full size URL and text snippet from the site. These site links dominate the space on the SERP, making optimizations geared towards Sitelinks more important than ever.

Bell Study: Mobile Drives Brand Awareness

Bell Media recently did a study on mobile advertising in Canada with some positive results for the category and key takeaways, including:

• 82% of people say mobile media is a good way to learn about products and brands
• 65% of people say mobile media would influence their purchase

Groupon Low on Cash

After postponing their IPO due to not-so-accurate “accounting practices”, Groupon is actually starting to run low on cash which may force them to seek another round of capital from private investors. Right now, Groupon owes $392 million to merchants from old Groupons, which totals more than the $225 million of cash they currently have on hand. It’s not an ideal situation that a company, in a highly competitive space, is struggling to be profitable.

Linkedin Tweaks Social Ads

Linkedin has been working hard to increase the advertising offering on their social network. Enter the introduction of social ads, which pull connections into an ad once those connections have interacted with the advertiser. To mitigate privacy concerns, they have opted not to include pictures and names in the ads, unlike other social networks.