Henry Blodgett explains the dotcom bust  as a necessary precursor to the industry’s growth today.

In Web 2.0, acquisition is the new metric. But a new study conducted by Yahoo! and comScore, sheds some light on search:

Search driving offline purchase – 92% of consumers (eventual purchasers) who performed a search online for consumer electronics did not buy online. (Granted, consumer electronics lends itself to this trend.)

Latency – Only 15% of all purchases as a result of a search actually occur in that same search session. And 40% of purchases occured 5 to 12 weeks later.

Generic terms – Generic terms ("TV," "Plasma," etc.) accounted for 70% of search terms, and brand names accounted for 20%, leaving the remaining 10% for specific product terms.