He says today user is much more ruthless and selfish, pointing to the single minded behaviour when going online to complete a task. They don’t want promotions, widgets and content designed to distract them from the task at hand.

All this seems to point to a more sophisticated user, who’s increasingly going online to complete a specific task, and unlike in the past where they were expecting to ‘discover’ how to do it, today they ‘know’ exactly how to do it.

The most important finding which is no big surprise to any search marketer is the way people get to the information they seek. Only 25% of people go via the home page – the vast majority get straight there from a search engine.

The general takeaway for me is that most websites are still built by shopkeepers – all ‘front’ and every effort to control that customer journey. User centricity or rather user driven approach to usability is a long way from our regular web experience.

Last week a friend asked me about lijit – a kind of social search engine based on Google custom. So, I started reading about it and the next thing I know I’d installed it on my sidebar. Wow! It was like a spiritual experience in user experience. I was reading one minute bought into the whole idea the next and a couple of clicks later I was there.

So how does it work – lijit enables you to search this blog and if what you seek is not here it’ll pull in content from other places I’ve contributed – Digg, delicious etc… If it’s not there, it’ll then look at the blogs I link to and the places they’ve contributed. You can even upload an RSS reading list. Fantastic!

The principle is based on ask a friend or friend of a friend – and relies on mutual trust within these mini circles. The depth of search is limited to your immediate friends, but things could get more interesting if this caught on with more people installing it creating deeper searching.

And unlike the doomed Wikia search launched last month, this doesn’t require me to do anything different, other than install it and carry on with business as usual.

Might not be a Google killer, but a simple idea well executed and I’m finding it more useful than a regular blog search box.

Nice one!

The massive impact to link equity from social networks has also reduced the impact of manual link campaigns. Sending a few link requests and purchasing links can not compete with the volumes offered by social networks (rel=nofollow or not).

For me this doesn’t all equate to a return to on-page factors like keyword-density and h1 tags, but good content and optimising for the user is more important than ever.

As broadband adoption takes off in a big way (BT just reached 10M customers in the UK and plan to upgrade their lines to offer 24MB next year), we’re heading towards zero second penalties for switching from one site to another, and if you haven’t sorted out your creative on the search results and usability on the site, you’ll be missing out on a whole load of customers.

Brian at SEOMoz argues that usability and designing pages for conversion has partly been driven by PPC campaigns where conversion has always been the holy grail. With the release of Google Website Optimiser and AB testing on creative, there really shouldn’t be any reason for bad creative or unusable page design.

“The critical takeaway from this research is that online shoppers not only demand quality site performance, they expect it,” said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing at Akamai. “Four seconds is the new benchmark by which a retail site will be judged, which leaves little room for error for retailers to maintain a loyal online customer base. Site performance becomes even more critical as retailers add more dynamic content and applications to their site.”

This may not come as a huge surprise to many in the web industry, as Marisa Mayer confirmed the need for speed by sharing Google’s findings on download speeds at the Web 2.0 conference last week. On a 8 week test where searches were shown 10 and 30 listings on the results page – The longer page with 30 listings underperformed in traffic and ad revenue by 20%.