Paying the patent police, Google has agreed to settle litigation with “patent consortium” Rockstar. Late last year, Rockstar sued Google for on infringing seven search-related Nortel patents. “Rockstar, which counts Apple as an investor, outbid Google and paid $4.5 billion in 2011 for thousands of former Nortel Network Corp patents as the networking products supplier went bankrupt,” Reuters reports. 

Elliot Lant tells us that keyword length performance impacts smartphone paid-search strategies. Marketers often question the differences in how shorter queries perform versus longer queries. And with that data, what changes marketers can implement to improve performance in our accounts. Lant takes us through some of the processes and best practices that marketers need to consider.

Cyrus Shepard provides a simple framework for on-page topic targeting to make optimizing easy and scalable while producing better content for Web site visitors. He takes us through keywords and relationships; position, frequency and distance; links and supplemental content; and entities and semantic search.

How do dynamic parameters work for ad copy in Google AdWords? Randi Lucius explains that Google offers a Sales Countdown Script that automatically update ad copy with a countdown. AdWords Scripts are a way to automate actions in accounts by entering JavaScript code. This script allows marketers to update numeric values in text ads without pausing and recreating ads.

An update for the official Amazon app in Google Play now allows shoppers to browse Amazon goods on their Android Wear smartwatch. The app enables shoppers to browse and search through millions of digital and physical products in Amazon’s catalog. Amazon also lets users turn on one-click shopping. Consumers can find a product while browsing on the wrist device and instantly purchase it.

Google is adding Auction Insights to Shopping campaigns allowing advertisers to compare campaigns against competitors and use that information in bidding strategies. The Auction insights report provides three metrics: impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share. Google explains.

Google is expanding Merchant Promotions from the United States to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and India. The Mountain View, Calif. company made the move after participating U.S. retailers saw improved performance from their Product Listing Ads. Christina Ilvento points to Venus as an example. The company's PLAs with Merchant Promotions had a 7% higher click-through rate (CTR), a 2% higher conversion rate, and an 11% lower cost-per-click (CPC) than their standard PLAs.

Researchers at Google and Stanford are working closely on technology that can make sense of complex images. “The research is potentially very promising from an application perspective,” GigaOm reports. “Models that can accurately assess the entirety of a scene rather than just picking out individual objects will deliver more accurate image search results and content libraries.” One day, the technology may even help Google’s with its driverless car ambitions. 

Google is quadrupling of the prize money for the A.M. Turning Award, which some call the Nobel prize of computer science. The endowment, $1 million, announced Thursday by the Association for Computing Machinery is intended to elevate the prominence and recognition of computer science. The New York Times reports that the Turing Award had carried prize money of $250,000 and was jointly underwritten by Google and Intel until the later decided to stop funding the award.

Tom Capper explains how to quickly and effectively take Google Analytics across multiple domains. He believes that out of the box the analytics platform does a poor job across multiple domains and subdomains, but it's easy to fix. Depending on the scenario, one or more simple steps could fix the problem. Capper walks through the steps such as cross-domain linking and how to use separate tracking IDs.