Searching the social network Facebook has been a less than positive experience for most. Microsoft helps to power Facebook search, but members have complained of slow and irrelevent query results. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that Lars Rasmussen now leads about two dozen Facebook engineers in a quest to rewrite search for the network in a goal to help members better sift through the volume of data, videos and articles.

A e-Dialog and ClearSaleing study found that conversions that occur after exposure to a brand on social media deliver more than $280 per order, compared with less than $100 for those driven by natural search, according to David Moth. He tells us that efforts to increase conversion rates must focus as much on the consumer's journey before they reach the site as the on-site experience. Moth also shares other interesting insights across several media channels.

The deep sea has become a place of exploration for cinema and tech titans. We witnessed it recently when Director James Cameron dove alone in a submersible to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean floor. Now Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to search for the F-1 rocket engines used in the Apollo 11 space flight in July 1969. He is drawing up plans to retrieve one or more of the engines to put on public display, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Planning on launching a mobile ad campaign in the U.K.? Search on mobile continues to grow, contributing to the rise of mobile app use. The IAB and PwC released U.K. ad spend numbers for 2011. The study found that app increased in popularity, with 54% of all mobile ad spend now coming from apps in the U.K. WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said on average, marketers spend about 17% or 18% of their budgets on mobile campaigns.

Change a word in a headline in an article and it slightly alters the URL. Typically the search engine will redirect to the new URL, but Everett Sizemore tells us a lot of things can go wrong when changing most URLs on a Web site that supports thousands or millions of pages. Sizemore's story chronicles how FreeShipping.org relaunched with a new design and updated site architecture. He tells us that while the company had expected some lag time and temporary loss in ranking, it became much worse quickly. Traffic declined dramatically immediately after the relaunch, and a week later it …

Inspiring stories, stories of sucess or failure, and those waiting to be told. Google shares how voice search can support those with disabilities that make it daunting to sort through query results. For example, Cheryl taught Morgan how to use the Search by Reading Level feature on Google Search. Did you know one exists? Addressing the difficulty Morgan faces with typing, Cheryl introduced her to Voice Search to speak her queries -- a topic we will discuss at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit in April.

Google has introduced a free tool called Account Activity -- an activity tool that allows users to look at their monthly activity sent to them in an email, such as Web history or number of emails sent and received in the past month. Google believes that knowing more about your own account activity can lead to better online protection of private data.

Google has revised the way that publishers can develop and test code with the DoubleClick for Publishers API. Paul Rashidi describes the tools that now give publishers the ability to test networks in fewer steps -- as well as access the new test and production networks through the normal login screen -- and tells us how to set up a Google account and client library.

Alex Cohen tells us how to filter out bad paid-search clicks and prospects. Adding negative keywords isn't enough, he writes. Marketers need to understand the ways to exclude potentially bad prospects, along with the level of targeting, such as in campaigns and ad groups. The most efficient way to add negatives across accounts is through keyword lists, he writes.

Google I/O officially sold out in a little more than 20 minutes, Vic Gundotra wrote in a Google+ post. One analyst put the price of each ticket at $900. Servers experienced 6,250 qps load at 7:01 a.m. Overwhelmed with the response, Google will stream the keynote live, along with key sessions. All session videos will become available online within 24 hours. Let's put this in perspective: Elton John's concert sold out in 20 minutes for a hall seating 6,000; all 5,000 tickets for 2011 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference sold out in about 12 hours; and Paul McCartney's concert in Montevideo, …