As I write this, Google’s stock dropped down to $273 — over 62% off of its 52-week high. In the same period, the Dow has only lost 44% of its value. In other words, the market’s assessment of Google — in theory a bright star for the new new economy — has been far more punishing than for the overall state of the economy. Whether you agree with Google’s valuation at either extreme, there’s no denying that the current economic crisis is a major bump in the road for search marketing.

But that might be a good thing.

Google and search marketing have both risen together, starting in earnest right around the end of the dot-com bubble. (Although I miss the pets.com sock puppet, I’m happy that William Shatner has nostalgically kept dot-com campiness alive for Priceline.)

By the time Google went public in 2004, the core of their business — AdWords — was firmly established. Despite all the cool things they’ve released since, not much has changed about their core economic engine. Google makes the far majority of its money today the same way it did 5 years ago, and they’ve clearly been reluctant to mess with that golden-egg-laying goose. Search advertising is essentially the same as it was 5 years ago.

Search marketing has largely been unchanged for the past 5 years too. Many of the best practices that are promoted today are about the same as they were in 2004. There have been incremental improvements, to be sure, but not many big innovations in the industry. Especially when you compare it with all the feverish innovation that’s been happening elsewhere in the Internet, especially the social sphere, search marketing looks like it’s largely stood still.

To quote a U2 song, search marketing seemed to get “stuck in a moment” circa 2004.

The ~3% conversion rate from paid search ads that was common in 2004 got locked in people’s heads as the acceptable number. Landing pages and the overall relationship between pre-click and post-click marketing developed to a point — “you should have a landing page” — and then plateaued. Search marketing, as it was, was good enough. Tremendous untapped potential was left on the table.

Herein lies the silver lining to the current economic cloud: it’s a powerful motivator to restart the forces of innovation around search marketing.

For both Google and search marketers across the industry, it’s time to pick up from 2004 and pursue bold, new ideas in search marketing. Certainly there’s incredible opportunity in what happens after the click: landing pages 2.0 and the unexplored creative territory between landing pages and microsites. But the overall strategy and tactics of search marketing are equally ripe for new ideas. See Justin’s post about 120 ads with 532 landing pages, all produced in 10 days, or consider some of the underdeveloped dimensions of the search marketing maturity model in your organization.

As a fun example, take a look at this:

The promotion of the upcoming apocalyptic movie 2012 gets kudos for an innovative use of search marketing by distributing a shocking but mysterious trailer in theaters that ends simply with the directive for people to search for “2012” in Google. Check out the ad and their corresponding landing page.

The strategies and tactics of 2004 search marketing are no longer good enough. You have to be more competitive, more imaginative, more effective.