In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit-forming as well.

Cognitive Lock-In

The scarce Nintendo Wii ranked as the most searched-for item during the holidays, while Ugg boots drew the most luxury item queries.

Websites in the health & medical and the travel categories received substantial traffic driven to them from search engines in November 2007.

Google picked up more than 65 percent of the US search market in November 2007, while Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all ceded a few tenths of a percent each in share.

Ask.com launched its AskEraser service across all of the search engine’s products, where people can opt to erase their search history with a single mouse click.

Searchers represent a valuable commodity to search engines, and the keen-minded technologists behind the algorithms want to make search sites as useful as possible, no matter what the query.

The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) debuted today as a set of improvements to deficiencies seen in the robots.txt protocol currently observed by search crawlers.

Media continues to mesh into an amalgam of all kinds of content, the latest example coming in the form of a deal between AOL’s Truveo video search and CBS Radio.

Turkey queries and Black Friday deal searches rate among the places Ask believes its search engine can help the typical person around the holidays.

Schoolhouse Rock or corporate strategy? Microsoft wants to achieve online advertising goals with its businesses, while measuring success with a 10, 20, 30, 40 yardstick.

Search queries that engines like Yahoo’s rarely see can be problematic for the technology, and frustrating for the searcher who doesn’t receive a relevant response.

A sample of a spam message making the rounds demonstrated how someone used a Google URL, with advanced search operators, to send people to a fake retail site. It could be much worse.

Search & Media performed well for IAC, but the continued troubles in the housing market reduced the impact of Ask’s gains.

Truveo, owned by AOL, has expanded its reach into international video content by sealing a deal with Kewego to index videos from major European producers.

The GOOG spent a brief time over the $600 mark, putting it in some pretty good company for a few minutes.

August figures for search engine share as recorded by Compete found Google with two-thirds of queries made during the month.

The Central Intelligence Agency launched CIA Wire, a service that will help users of the Library of National Intelligence sift through available information from participating agencies.

At SES San Jose, representatives from the big four search engines talked about the persistent threat of click fraud, and how they are fighting back to protect their advertisers.

Search sites measured by comScore under their new qScore 2.0 methodology will benefit from the hosted and affiliated search traffic they send back to the main search engine. It’s a scenario that offers Google a heaping helping of share by comScore’s reckoning.

Session talkers at SES San Jose 2007 bounded around the topic of the search landscape: what’s popular, and who’s the most used among the major players in search.

Four days of the search industry’s biggest gathering starts in San Jose, where attendees can learn the finer points about marketing effectively and ranking well with the drivers of search-related traffic.