According to comScore Video Metrix, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

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Word-of-mouth marketing, feedback and testimonials have been a big part of every successful business long before the Internet even existed. Remember comment cards?

But today, user input and user reviews are more important than ever. Consumers can provide feedback for other users about your product with a single click (clicking a star to rate a product, for example), or reach thousands of people with a single comment – perhaps with a Tweet, Facebook update or a two-sentence review on Yelp.com. Users don't even need to write their own review. There are any number of ways to repurpose another person's review that echoes one's own sentiment – a retweet or 'share this review via email,' for example.

Not only are user reviews becoming easier to generate but also more numerous and prevalent, meaning that others are keenly aware of this resource. A quick search on Compete.com shows traffic increases year-over-year for three important consumer review resources: AngiesList.com (+ 34.3%), Yelp.com (+ 7.46%) and Buzzillions.com (+ 21.97%).

Speaking of Buzzillions.com, it's reported to have increased its total number of reviews on the site by more than 12 million, or 39% year-to-date. The site is also owned by PowerReviews. PowerReviews, in turn, recently cut a deal with Google to provide user reviews on the search engine results pages. And forthcoming is OnSite, a partnership between PowerReviews and Facebook.

"Facebook OnSite goes beyond the 'Like' button by bringing the Facebook experience to the retailer’s site," said Cathy Halligan, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PowerReviews, in a recent press release. "This opens up new opportunities for retailers and brands to leverage the Open Graph to drive customer loyalty and sales." 

Facebook and Google are two of the most visited, highly-trafficked websites in the world. And both of them see the value of user reviews. Now, do you?

There's no doubt that consumers are turning to each other for their purchase decisions. Mostly, becuase they trust each other. It is clear that consumer reviews are becoming a vital – if not involuntary – part of doing business online, and in online marketing. The importance of monitoring feedback and soliciting consumer reviews and responses cannot be overstated.

Don't forget the old adage about how a dissatisfied customer will tell 10 of their friends about their experience while a satisfied customer will tell one. (Or something like that.) Now, multiply that effect by 100. Or 1,000. Or maybe 10,000 – it depends on that particular customer's sphere of influence.

Find that poor review or dissatisfied customer and work to change his or her mind. At the very least, pay very close attention. They're out there and they are talking about you.

According to comScore Video Metrix, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

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First spotted at Webmasterworld, BingBot arrived yesterday, and Bing later confirmed a staged rollout is underway a couple days ahead of schedule.

Bing noted that you’ll continue seeing traffic in your server logs mostly from MSNBot, but will transition to (and be completely replaced by) BingBot traffic (Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) over the next few weeks.

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When Google Instant launched earlier this month, the relatively indifferent reactions from the Yahoo and Microsoft camps came as no surprise. No one expected Google’s competitors to come out and say that the world’s dominant search engine had just changed the industry forever.

Instead, executives from both companies suggested they’d each been working with real-time search technology for some time, and that their own visions of the future of search did not equate to what Google had given us with Instant. Predictable responses at the time, but now after three weeks of consuming Google Instant, we need to explore just what is the future of search.

On Thursday, Google announced some new features for Instant as well as the fact that it is now rolling out into 12 new countries in Europe and North and South America. Until then, it had been available in seven countries around the world.

Among the new features are a keyboard navigation desktop functionality that allows users to scroll through the search suggestions to find more instant results. Instant search has also been added to the Blogs, Books, Videos, News, Updates and Discussions options, but not yet to Images, nor has it been released for the browser or mobile yet.

The new features come a day or so after Google received criticism for perhaps being overly cautious in compiling its “blacklist” of potentially offensive words and phrases that are rejected by Instant. It seems that some of the phrases that wound up on the blacklist are hardly offensive, but I suppose Google will continue to update the list and should know by now that it will never completely satisfy everyone no matter what it does.

However, overall, I cannot say that Google Instant has dramatically improved my search experiences the past three weeks, and I suddenly find myself having a renewed interest in hearing what those executives from Yahoo and Microsoft had to say about their own solutions, wherever they may be.

Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi told an audience on Wednesday that both Google and his company “are focused on improving search performance for people. Where (the two companies) are different is that for (Microsoft) it’s about speed to task completion. It’s about getting what you want accomplished, not about getting a lot more results.”

Which is exactly what I’ve been finding in my Google Instant searches – a lot more results to sift through, which actually slows down the process. That’s not what I anticipated or hoped for when it was launched three weeks ago. Where Instant may save me time is by shortening the length of my queries, but what advantage does that serve if I spend more time looking for the results I want?

For Yahoo’s part, a senior VP of search products, Shashi Seth, was recently quoted as saying that Yahoo owns several patents on real-time technology and has been working on its solution for five years already. That solution, he said, will ultimately give users what they are looking for in real time, not – as in the case of Google Instant – more and more continuously updated search results.

That, it seems, is the challenge that real-time search technology faces – in accurately predicting our queries, not necessarily in how fast it can deliver and update the results.

What makes this a lot more interesting is the fact that Microsoft’s search engine Bing, now in alliance with Yahoo, is moving its way up the market share ladder with a bigger head of steam than most people expected. The idea of an actual showdown between Google and Bing was rather laughable as recently as six months ago, but not anymore.

As far as a real-time search solution and what it will mean for consumers, Web professionals and the future of search, it appears that the race is still very much on.