Social is poised to join search as the top two successful media for online advertising, and will command the majority of a marketer's ad budget. Need proof? Facebook crossed into the top 10 comScore Web properties for the first time in January 2011 with a 72.3% reach, ranking No. 4 and accounting for 153,020 million visitors. Want more? Nearly 1 in 4 online page views in the U.S. occurred on Facebook.com during the week ending Nov. 13, 2010 -- representing 24% of the total market share and accounting for almost four times the volume of YouTube.com, the No. 2-ranked Web …

Apple's dominance on tablets and smartphones presents a threat to accurately measure and optimize the performance of paid-search marketing campaigns. Search firm Marin Software published a white paper Tuesday based on findings and unanswered questions surrounding Apple's iOS platform. The report identifies Safari, the primary browser for iOS devices, as a major challenge.

I've been writing a lot about search marketing companies designing and launching social advertising tools. One seems to complement the other, so I believe we're going to see more often Facebook and paid-search campaigns intended to feed off the other, though rules for the former are much more stringent than those for the latter.

The topic is a little geeky, I realize, but it's a trend in online advertising, including search marketing, that marketers may want to follow. It's not clear whether I'm paying more attention to this particular technology, or the ad industry has finally realized the pace of innovation cannot take months. It must take days. Marketers don't need to know how to code in specific languages, but at least they should become familiar with the terminology and know the product exist.

Microsoft has begun layering into Bing search results from Facebook's social graph. It allows people who log into Bing through Facebook to search and find relevant pages based on "like" authority with help from a social algorithm layered on top. In other words, your friend's likes influence search results. That's according to Dave Williams, cofounder of search engine marketing agency 360i. He says that's quite different from feeding information into the search engine results based on information friends share.

Ready? Aim and fire. Blekko reported Tuesday banning more than 1.1 million spam-laden domains that support millions of pages from queries using the search engine's technology AdSpam, a machine-learning algorithm that examines pages for spam signals. The move blocks hundreds of millions of Web sites filled with ads and thin to no editorial content from serving up in its search engine results pages. Previously, the search engine had banned nearly two dozen sites such as eHow, owned by Demand Media.

Someone may want to tell tech companies and venture capitalists investing in startups that analysts expect California and the rest of the country to have slow economic growth in the near terms. Maybe that's why they have begun to invest more in tools. Retailers also have been upping budgets for paid-search ad campaigns, and investing more in online advertising.

While search engines for mobile app stores give consumers a means to find applications, advertisers gain a direct connection to target audiences by intent. Mobilewalla launched an app search engine Monday, followed by Opera Mobile Store, to find the hundreds of thousands of apps for Android to BlackBerry to iPhone to iPad to Windows.

Google, Bing and Yahoo brought social media into search, but what if marketers could predict the impact on search engine optimization? Having the perfect tool to optimize social media would surely help. SEO firm BrightEdge released a platform Monday that does just that. It analyzes the content of tweets and Facebook Likes to pinpoint the areas in social media that can boost SEO, and offers actionable recommendations to increase activity and measurable return on investments (ROIs).

Most consumers with a smartphone, even those a little less techie, reach for their mobile device to check email several times daily. Analyst firm eMarketer points to stats from Merkle indicating that 32% of U.S. mobile email users age 18 or older with an Internet-enabled phone check personal email via a mobile device between one and three times daily. Compare this with 31% checking four or more times daily, 26% once per week or less, and 11% two to six times per week.