… and it’s getting local and becoming mobile.

A survey by WebVisible and Nielsen/NetRatings found that most consumers are becoming increasingly de-tuned from traditional advertising media and are instead relying on search engines and other online sources to find products and services from local businesses.

A majority of consumers apparently associate the trustworthiness of a business with the quality of its website. User-generated reviews, local news sites and social networks are other key influencers of consumer perceptions.

Consumers are also starting to use web-enabled mobile devices to access location- and time- specific product information. Such mobile access looks set to become an important driver for local commerce.

This particular survey was conducted in the USA, but a similar survey in Singapore would likely reveal similar trends. Anecdotal reports from many of our own small business contacts echo the increasingly important role that a strong web presence plays in a firm’s marketing effort.

Click here to download the full WebVisible report from GetEntrepreneurial.com (2.11MB PDF).

Firefox 3 is to be imbued with new and improved search capabilities according to Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation – the browser’s developer. This latest version of the Firefox browser is currently undergoing beta testing.

One innovation will apparently be a tighter integration of the search function with the browser’s bookmarking tool to provide more relevant search results. The browser is also set to get more powerful offline features to buffer against patchy internet connectivity on the go.

These targeted improvements reflect the fact that search is the “number one activity” when people seek information online. The enhanced offline capability also mirrors the rise of Web Applications that can retain their functionality even if continuous internet connection is not possible.

You can find more details of the planned new features for Firefox 3 here.

Harvard University’s faculty of arts and sciences will start posting its professors’ academic papers online . This content can be crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and can be freely accessed by anyone with an internet connection.The ostensible reasons for this move is to give academics more control over their intellectual property and to circumvent the spiraling costs of academic journals which traditionally disseminate such scholarly knowledge. One side-benefit, though, is that it will further enhance Harvard’s online presence as this vast knowledge repository will undoubtedly be a powerful search engine magnet.Your business need not be an Ivy League institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment fund to take a leaf out of the Harvard playbook.

As the de facto front page of the Internet, Google has tremendous power.

Research suggest that 97% of users will never look beyond the top 30 results for their search. Google keeps the exact formula they use to rank results is a secret, and it’s constantly being modified. But when they answer over 3 billion queries a day, the difference between a high and low Google ranking in the results can be the difference between an IPO and chapter 11.

Consequently there is a constant battle between spammers (and site owners) who desperately crave the traffic of a high ranking, and Google who want their results to remain as relevant and useful as possible. And because Google is constantly modifying their formula, what worked brilliantly last month to boost your rank, might get you removed completely from the results now. And for as long as googles algorithm remains a secret, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), isn’t a science, but something halfway between an art and superstition.