It's been two months since the Wall Street Journal reported that Google has been considering a "Buy Now" button on Google Shopping. The rumored feature would transition Google from a custom search engine to a marketplace, more directly challenging Amazon's "one-click" ordering feature and dramatically changing the customer experience on Google Shopping. The "Buy Now" button sounds great in theory -- but here are four major challenges that may delay or completely derail this new feature.

It's been a long time coming, but the fight among Google, Yahoo and Bing is worth discussing. Yahoo is making an effort -- and a big prize, the default search engine in Safari, is up for grabs. And for the first time since 2009, a search engine besides Google might get more than 20% market share.

There's been a bit of brouhaha lately about how Yahoo is stealing search share from Google, and the numbers back it up. To be sure, we're only talking about a couple of percentage points -- but they do equate to billions of ad dollars. Indeed, Yahoo is making noise on a number of fronts as the company strives for reinvention and relevance in search and beyond.

One more quick look back as we begin the second month of a new year: 2014 was a tumultuous year for search. While SEO didn't die, even with the loss of keyword data within Google Analytics, we did say goodbye to several other things: Google Local Carousel, Author Photos within search results, 70-character title tags, phone numbers in paid search ads, and visits in Google Analytics.