Walmart.com recently anounced a new site-search engine. Now OfficeMax said its new search engine on OfficeMax.com should increase accuracy for product search and recommendations. In the first month the company has experienced an increase in conversion rate and customer satisfaction around site navigation, and more than a 60% increase in average revenue per visit.

The devaluation of low-quality links increases the need for better content marketing, but search engine optimization professionals need to tweak strategies to accommodate the shift. Kieran Flanagan provides tips, suggesting that marketers focus on attracting links, rather than building them. Share free valuable content to attract potential customers -- but the strategy will differ depending on where the campaign resides in the funnel, he explains.  

Google released information about Spanner, a database system to distribute data globally. The distributed database and technology aims to enable applications to read and write data without latency issues. Jack Clark explains that the software helps the system replicate data across countries and continents, while offering extremely fast read times. The applications use Spanner to quickly identify the bits and bytes scattered on servers throughout the world.

The FairSearch coalition said Poland-based Allegro Group, Finland-based Nokia, and U.S.-based Oracle have joined the movement to toward what the group calls Google’s anti-competitive search and business practices in desktop, mobile and Web services. The group, which also includes Microsoft and adMarketplace.com, aims to put an end to anything that can "harm consumers by curbing innovation and choice." 

Google+ users could present a pseudonym as their name based on the choice of using something other than their real name. Bill Slawski describes this patent, recently granted to Google. He tells us the patent describes the ability for some people to see one name, and others to see another, based on preset preferences. This type of feature would also enable sharing options.

Conducting analysis to understand the impact of the content on Facebook brand pages is a critical factor in determining the impact on page visitors. But as Nathan Linnell explains, it's easier described than actually done. Linnell describes strategies for top-level segmentation and metrics categories that explain exposure, consumption, engagement and negative feedback. All metrics are accessible through the Facebook Insights export feature.

Twitter has rolled out a header for mobile apps on the iPad, iPhone and Android, as well as the desktop, so the same consistent image will appear on all devices. The new design allows users to upload the header photo, which appears above your Tweets. The company also rebuilt the app for the iPad.

Google has acquired Nik Software, which develops desktop and mobile software and technologies for professional digital imaging and consumer photography markets. The application won Apple's iPad App Of The Year award in 2011 for its multitouch photo-editing interface. In a Google+ post, Vic Gundotra explains that while Google+, now 400 million users strong, is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a social destination that serves up amazing images to tell the story.

Tom Anthony believes that during the next 10 years there will be a huge decline in the number of users visiting Web sites, and that APIs and structured data will play an important role in that shift. Helping marketers understand that thinking, he provides screenshots and images, and describes the evolution of the Web during the past 20 years. He believes that eventially marketers will pay more attention to where marketing content gets stored to push out the information or allow it to get pulled, and give less attention to where customers interact.

Rick Chavez, GM of the Online Services Division at Microsoft, tells us that Microsoft Advertising plans to open a design-led collaborative studio in San Francisco called Solution Studio 415 that looks to pair brands and advertisers with Microsoft researchers and technology. Solution Studio 415, a 18,000-square-foot space, could become the first of Microsoft Advertising's centers worldwide.