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Speaking as someone whose last meal was the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut in Victoria, Diana Janicki's blog Growling Belly is a glimpse into a magical fairytale land where food is lovingly prepared and eaten with proper relish (and where relish does not equal bacon bits).

As I salivated over the "foolproof" recipe for pavlova with fresh summer berries I did worry that even my pizza-enhanced frame might struggle with the combined calorie load of meringue, whipping cream and sugar.

And astonishingly Google's content matching algorithm agrees with me - dropping in a banner for a weight-loss product into the recipe.

Hmmm.  Good thinking Google!

Of course if you really did want to lose weight, in the words of the old Irish joke, you wouldn't want to be starting from here!

Today’s launch of Firefox 3.5 is the latest shot in the long struggle for domination in the browser market. 

The data below – from AT Internet Institute - shows that Firefox has steadily been growing its market share in Europe, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer.  Disappointingly for Microsoft, Internet Explorer’s market share actually dropped in March, coinciding with the long-awaited launch of IE 8.

The same AT Internet research, from April 2009 shows the stark differences in the popularity of Firefox around Europe.  Of the five major European economies, the UK shows the lowest penetration of Firefox with 17% market share – compared with 30% in France and 42% in Germany.

This competition is driving some genuine innovation in the browser market, which is great to see.  Compare and contrast with the situation around email, where Microsoft is lazily exploiting Outlook’s monopoly position to resist innovation and ignore web standards.

At my session at SES this year I reviewed the current legal position of trademark bidding and made the confident forecast that this one will run and run. 

Seemed like a safe prediction - and for once I was right!

According to Outlaw, the case between Interflora and Marks and Spencer has now been referred to the European Court of Justice for a final ruling, where it joins a bunch of actions from other European brands.

Meanwhile there were a couple of interesting things from the summing up of the High Court judge in London:

1. It’s pretty strange that Google is running a different set of rules on trademark bidding in the UK and Ireland to the rest of Europe, given that ultimately we are controlled under the same set of laws.  But the reason is that trademark laws are quite different here to mainland Europe.  And hence any judgement in Europe may not really clear up the situation in the UK.
2. Interflora has quantified the loss it has suffered from the introduction of competitive bidding.  According to the High Court ruling: "Interflora's bidding costs for their keywords during the nine days leading up to Valentine's Day increased from 2p per click in 2008 to 23-28p per click in 2009. Interflora estimate that in total their costs will have increased by about $750,000 in the year from 5 May 2008."

Given that this case will definitely drag on and may not even clear up the UK situation, it’s well worth brands doing a similar calculation of the material loss they believe they may have suffered.  There’s always the possibility – however slim – that the case will finally be settled, will go against Google, and that compensation will be paid. 

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions.  It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.

Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off.  As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting.  So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.

Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May.  Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece.  The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey. 

I’ve published my slides from a presentation I gave yesterday at the Financial Services Forum looking at the impact of insurance aggregators from a search/media perspective.

Most surprising thing for me was the rise in searches for the term “compare car insurance” alongside a down trend for “cheap car insurance”.  The rise of aggregators like Go Compare really seems to have changed searching behaviour.

I'm speaking at Search Engine Strategies in London later on today as part of the IAB's workshop on search marketing best practise.  on the racy subject of trademark issues and pay-per-click search marketing.

This is a subject that has generated a huge amount of excitement since Google removed the restrictions on brand bidding last May.  As I'll point out today, there are two cases going through the European courts and one in the UK courts that could yet challenge the status quo.

I've reviewed the small print of what Google has said on the subject - it seems to me that they have never said that they explicitly approve of trademark bidding.  Instead they say that after the 5th May they will no longer challenge brands that engage in trademark bidding.

This one could run and run!

We had quite a chunky piece of research written up in Marketing Week last week looking at the ongoing impact of Google’s decision last year to allow competitive brand bidding.

In a nutshell, we found that aggressive brand bidding is only really happening in two sectors – travel and finance.  And in the case of finance, aggregators like Money Supermarket are doing most of the competitive bidding.

Aggregators are particularly well placed to benefit from brand bidding because they often have very relevant content on their sites.  And the word ‘competitive’ is a bit of a misnomer here – aggregators are an important partner for many brands, especially in the insurance sector.

Of course, it’s ironic to find a company like Direct Line, which has had a very public anti-aggregator stance, being targeted by aggregator advertising.

One thing we did spot is that companies like Tesco Insurance seem to be using affiliates to dominate the vital first page of search results.  By contrast, Norwich Union seem to restrict affiliates from bidding on their brand terms – and as a result, their first page of search results features seven or eight direct competitors.

Conventional wisdom used to be that affiliates shouldn’t be allowed to bid on brand terms – but in the light of competitive brand bidding, that’s a strategy that should be reconsidered.

Google's results for the fourth quarter of 2008 came out yesterday and look typically impressive overall.  

Google's green light allowing brands to bid on competitive trade marks was one of the big stories in UK search over the past six months.  We've conducted research at Harvest Digital that suggests that the result has not been the free-for-all that some predicted.  In fact many big brands are not even bidding on their own brand, let alone competitors.

"In the UK, we believe that where a search engine allows a trade mark to be used as an trigger to generate a competitor's sponsored link, that would amount to an infringement by the search engine of the trade mark. Such use is likely to affect the essential function of a trade mark and take unfair advantage of that mark."

There I was in a post-Chrome haze thinking warm thoughts about Google, when the FT spoils my mood by reporting on the first major attack on the advertising alliance between Google and Yahoo.

"a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90% of search advertising inventory and states ANA's concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

The alliance will also impact on UK advertisers.  My view is that the alliance will particularly drive up the price of niche terms on Yahoo!, which are something of a bargain at the moment compared with the same traffic on Google.