awall19 - 12:46 pm on Feb 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

I was writing a story about this and was happy to see this thread. Whatever is happening is not influencing all brands but certainly there is something brand oriented or brand-like going on.

If you use a tool like RankPulse (freely available) and look up keywords like
- airline tickets
- auto insurance
- boots
- diets
- health insurance
- online degree
- watches
you will see that all of them had some big brands appear starting January 18th. Also some brands that should rank (but didn't until recently) started ranking...for example...
- Hallmark ranking for gifts
- Radioshack ranking for electronics

In addition to his recenty branding comment, in the most recent conference call Eric Schmidt mentioned something about semantic search and word relationships.