Google

When asked if I think I am remotely similar to Dan Firger, my response is yes, I am addicted to using google and spend about 8 hours a day at least on my computer. I rely on google for everything, I use google analytics for my business, google webmaster tools, gmail, google website optimizer, igoogle, anything that google has out I pretty much use on a daily basis.

On the topic of what I know about google advertising, I feel that I know quite a bit about it just because with my business I am having to shift my strategies according to google's changes. For instance, if google is starting to not count the links in blogs as good content and a good way to build links for my site I have to adjust and start using adwords"a way to advertise with google, so you can get some hits to your site, PPC.") Even though google is constantly spending around 600 million a year to operate they are also not doing bad for themselves. They make a ton of money on "PPC", another neat thing with google is their Adsense program. They will pay you depending on how many clicks you get on your website.

When being asked if google is "aptocratic" I can simply answer yes in no time. Google only hires good well rounded people, why would they waste their time on someone that isn't worth while, they would rather pay someone a ton of money to get their absolute best work rather than pay someone little next to nothing and have them slouch at their job.

As far as yahoo, well they get about 12% percent of the online traffic for e-commerce shoppers, so by knowing that they have fallen off a ton, they used to be the big dog until Google came around and took them out of the competition, however they have merged with Microsoft"Bing" and will get approximately 24% of the traffic, so this is something to watch out for. I predict that in a couple of years bing will make a huge push and try to take over google, I don't think they can outdue google though.