I was asked to contribute to a fascinating article in the National Journal, a leading US political magazine, on Friday in response to the initially surprising news that John McCain is actually outspending Barack Obama on Google. Figures released by Nielsen Online show that McCain’s campaign purchased just over 7 million impressions via Google AdWords in June, compared to just over 1 million for Obama.

However, the really interesting stats are for spend on traditional banner advertising, where Obama is trouncing McCain. Obama invested in over 80 million impressions compared to just 16 million for McCain. Nielsen’s analysis shows that Obama’s banners have been deployed on popular portals such as Yahoo! and MSN and news sites such as CNN. The campaign also bought almost 2 million impressions on allrecipes.com, perhaps in an attempt to reach more of the women who voted for Clinton.  McCain, who is still distrusted by much of the Republican base, seems to have focussed his banner spending on conservative sites such as the National Review and Lucianne.com.

As pointed out in the article, the discrepancy in the investment between banners and search advertising by the two campaigns is most likely a result of financial expediency rather than deliberate strategy.  McCain has fewer resources and is therefore focusing these on more targeted and cheaper ads on Google. It’s difficult to tell from the outside the real degree of targeting by the Obama campaign in its use of banner advertising. It could be various ad-networks are being paid millions of dollars to simply get as many eye-balls as possible.

What is true is that the Republican campaign had had to play catch-up in effectively using the Internet as a campaigning tool and is learning fast.  McCain’s recent adverts portraying Obama as both Moses and a blonde bimbo and the now famous response by Paris Hilton, has meant McCain has overtaken Obama’s lead for YouTube viewers for the first time.

Analysis from Tubemogul.com shows McCain’s videos attracted more viewers than Obama’s for seven days in a row last week, and on 11 of the previous 14 days.  Maybe it’s time for Will.i.am to pen another ditty…perhaps featuring Paris’ much under appreciated musical talents?

Google’s surprise decision to change its trademark policy will effectively remove protection brands have from rivals, or impersonators bidding on their trademarked paid search terms. It’s also expected to have an impact natural search, but that will, naturally, take longer to be felt and may not be quite as obvious as you first think.

Google has justified the move as simply reflecting users’ behaviour, and that it will give the person searching access to far more choice, thereby improving the overall quality of results. However it will present a new brand protection nightmare for companies already facing more, evolving online brand threats than they can shake a stick at.

Having worked with a number of companies, specialising in various aspects of the online brand protection picture I can see a major similarity in what Google is allowing to what has existed in the ICANN governed domain names industry since year dot. There are currently over 150million registered domain names around the world and estimates I’ve heard suggest that around 25 per cent of all those registrations are speculative or opportunistic (by cybersquatters, domain name warehousers and those engaged in kiting). If that’s the scale of the threat, you can only imagine the scale of defensive registrations being made by brand owners where easily more than two-thirds of your portfolio of names could be purely to stop a rival or speculator acquiring it and doing your brand damage.

The domain names industry is that way for a reason - and that’s the relatively loose ‘first come first served’ principle of registrations (for search read: ‘highest bid, first listed’) but until now, with one very major difference - in domain names there is very little practical or enforceable protection for brand owners beyond being first up, whereas in search there was always Google’s common sense.

While Google’s move may help address the slow in growth of clicks on paid Google ads, perpetrated by the search engine’s bid to ensure more relevant, better quality results, it could all too quickly degenerate into the free-for-all model of the domain name industry.

Marketers are already struggling to keep rising paid search costs in check and if this plays out the way many fear it might then likely two things will happen:

1. The current increased interest in natural search will swell dramatically and impact investment in paid search - after all an increasing number of voices are joining the chorus that natural search delivers better quality leads at a fraction of the CPA

2. Major brands will need to agree a code of conduct between themselves to avoid needlessly burning budgets trying to outbid the other’s trademarks and instead focus on dealing with the far more serious threat posed to their brand value by counterfeiters, cybersquatters and impersonators who won’t think twice about taking advantage of the new system.

The bidding for Yahoo!’s future took another twist today when it emerged that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was trying to work with Microsoft to find a way they both could get their hands on Yahoo!.

Yahoo!’s rejection of Microsoft’s $31-a-share-offer earlier this week did not please a number of Yahoo!’s investors. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster asked 20 of Yahoo’s Institutional investors their opinion and the majority said they would prefer to deal with Microsoft on that offer, than do no deal at all. The growing feeling among Silicon Valley investors is that a deal will be completed in the next 3-4 weeks.

What that deal will be and what good it will be to whom, remains to be seen. Google is remaining omimously quiet although, Yahoo! is about to turn over three per cent of its US search queries advertising inventory to Google in a two week trial - clearly a little detail that - if you were cynical - might say is being done to annoy Microsoft during its pursuit.

Difficult as it is to keep up with all the twists and turns - Jemima Kiss over at the Guardian has summarised key events here in a neat timeline.

Yahoo! has responded bluntly to Microsoft’s three-week deadline to accept its $42 billion offer via a defiant open letter issued today saying the offer did not represent good value for Yahoo! shareholders, but that the company would be open to a better deal.

So why is Microsoft so keen on Yahoo still? Well its stock price has slipped more than 15 per cent since the start of the year an in a tightening market, search is one particular sector that is still thriving.

So that’s why the sector is so interesting - but what about Google, and if Microsoft and Yahoo! get together, do they really stand a chance? According to the latest stats from Nielsen, Google retains a 59 per cent share of all searches compared with 18 per cent for Yahoo! and 11 per cent for MSN.

Just because on their own, Yahoo! and Microsoft have failed to take make any impact on Google’s dominance, does not mean that if they get together they will miraculously make inroads. In fact, the cultures of the two companies are so vastly different that any alignment of the two businesses will take a long time to achieve and will struggle to become seemless. The real benefits of Microsoft and Yahoo! coming together will be beyond search, in terms of all the content and other services the two companies own, but that doesn’t address the sweet-spot that is search.

We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft’s next move is, and if a hostile takeover attempt may be on the cards. Regardless, in the search sector both Microsoft and Yahoo will continue to struggle against Google. The secret to Google’s success has always been its simplicity and the fact that it was always a search engine and everything else has been built around that core, winning formula. Hard as they may try, Microsoft and Yahoo will always be coming at search from the perspective of a portal and content owner and making search the core of what they do is far easier said than done.

Google endured a second straight month of poor growth in paid search clicks, and that has brought out the usual scaremongers (the same that were predicting the end of social networks earlier this year when traffic growth plateaued) are saying it’s bad news for the market and showing that fears of a recession have truly hit online revenues.

Lets take a look at the facts:

1. The actual figures from Comscore show a 3% year-on-year rise during February in paid search clicks. The slowdown comes after Google began implementing a new system to cut down accidental clicks on paid search listings

2. Google’s move to stamp out irrelevant clicks is good news for the long term as it will increase the relevance of paid search and make it an even more efficient format.

So is the (non)recession having an impact? Well, traditionally in a time of recession marketing spend gets cut back to tried and tested methods that deliver strong and measurable ROI, such as direct marketing. Search marketing falls into that same category and certainly many of the people I’ve spoken to in the first quarter of this year can see certain aspects of their budgets being cut if times get tighter, but search isn’t one of them.

But beyond what Google has done, and all the scaremongering, there are still some changes afoot. Paid search costs continue to inflate and speaking to some search marketing firms, they are beginning to find - and some scared to find - that clients are looking more seriously at natural search, and increasing their investment in search engine optimization.

There is an ongoing threat to the paid search market - not to its existence, but to the way it’s used - there has for some time been a growing school of thought that natural search delivers better quality leads to your site and Google’s latest moves can be seen, in part at least to be a clear attempt to arrest that movement and safeguard the quality of clicks on paid search. The short-term blip is nothing to worry about - a blip is all it is - and if there is a recession, it’s not search that should be worried about budgets.