Did Ask.com's renewed search agreement with Google, mobile voice search application, and its latest ad campaign help to revive the ailing question- and-answer (Q&A) site? Ask.com picked up momentum on its latest ad campaign through a series of messages that ask lots of questions. The company elected to opt-out of airtime during Super Bowl Sunday and run a steady stream of ads in select markets -- Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

"The Wall Street Journal" and other publishers are not the only content producers to put up a wall between their content and aggregators and search engines pulling information from their Web sites.

Searches across google.com continue to rise, identifying a "love connection" between brands and consumers. Valentine's Day-related searches rose 35% so far this year compared with last. Web searches and campaigns will influence about half of retail sales this year, according to Google, and about 86% of buyers who purchase items in the store will find them through generic searches online.

Sarah, meet Joe. You both used the same keywords in a post on Twitter, so the two of you must have something in common. Rather than allow you to find each other on your own, I, the socialbot, will connect the two of you through keywords tweeted. Well, something like that.

Wall Street analysts looking for Yahoo to go on the offensive and reposition the company for long-term success had mixed thoughts after the company announced earnings Tuesday. Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson stressed that there will be a new Yahoo under his leadership, but analysts want more proof before jumping off the fence either way.

A conversation Monday with Mike Barbeau, SVP of sales North America at SocialVibe, a digital advertising company, sparked an interesting discussion. With display ads increasingly becoming more social, could search queries on engines link directly to ads rather than landing pages where the ad may reside? Social continues to change the definition of the word "ad."

Revenue of the U.S. television ecosystem in 2012 will reach about $165 billion, estimates Needham & Co Analyst Laura Martin. The recently published research points to estimates from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggesting that contributions to subscription and license fees paid to cable, satellite and telephone companies will reach $85 billion, along with approximately $80 billion from TV advertising.

Paid-click growth came in strong for Q4 2011, but the cost per click (CPC) from Google's google.com and AdSense properties fell 8% year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Susan Wojcicki, Google's senior vice president of advertising, told analysts during the Q4 earnings call Thursday that the company continues to see improvements in ad quality, and when modeling financials they need to understand that more clicks can often lead to decreases in average CPC, and vice versa. Making quality or format changes can impact CPCs and paid clicks.

Rogers Communications should help digital marketing company Yodle reach a $100 million annual run rate as the company exits startup mode and heads into adolescence. Yodle CEO Court Cunningham said the Canadian data-and-voice phone services company will become the digital marketing firm's value-added reseller (VAR) of search and social services.

Ask.com, Citysearch, and Urbanspoon will join the likes of Google, Mozilla, Reddit and Wikipedia in a widespread protest to raise awareness of two anti-piracy bills pending in Congress known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP (PIPA) Act.