Russell Holly calls our attention to Google's communication chat utility problem and discusses how the company plans to address it. He writes that Google is working to integrate several messaging platforms under one the company will call Babble. Makes sense after reading Hunter Walk's LinkedIn blog post about LeChat, a chat utility created by a couple of former Googlers who left the search engine in hopes of developing their own chat tool.

Attracting potential consumers with more content seems the mantra for 2013. Mackenzie Fogelson tells us how to tap into "foundational" content describing the company without making it all about "you." For example, in Patagonia's foundational content, the company focuses the message on the broader concerns of their target audience, not just on how cool the product looks or functions. Read the article here.

When I'm searching for information on a local company, I pick up my iPhone, click on the Google voice app and speak my request. It serves up information on the company, including phone number and address, faster than if I keyed in the words into a mobile search engine or went to my desktop and typed in the keywords. Since most searches on mobile devices reveal someone looking for a local company, the best way to optimize Web sites for mobile searches isn't the same for desktops. Read this article for tips when optimizing for local searches on mobile …

Many search engine marketing experts began using long-tail keywords to lead searchers to Web sites years ago. As the SEO strategy matured it slowly began to dissolve into the background, but Jayson DeMers wants to remind marketers that long-tail keywords still work. And they seem to work best with the growing competition around core keywords. Read the article here.

Google's cloud-based office suite of apps -- Google Drive -- faces sporadic outages, according to Boston.com. Early this morning, Google acknowledged "a problem with Google Drive affecting a significant subset of users," which were unable to access Google Drive. Depending on the frequency, this could put a black mark on the cloud-based laptop Chromebook.

Most traditional search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing are not optimized to serve up information on medical problems, although people have come to rely on them to answer a variety of questions to educate themselves on diagnosis. Radu Dragusin and others at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a search engine to find medical results. It crawls a set of curated  databases on rare diseases. 

Will the search engines Bing, Google and Yahoo allow the Medical Cannabis Network to run ads on their engines? The launch of the service, MarijuanaAdvertising.com, by the Medical Cannabis Network, will allow "safe" medical cannabis dispensaries to advertise their brand. The group said it will provide more transparency and search engine visibility while utilizing attractive design principles to increase traffic, conversion rates and patient referrals.

Facebook is working to incorporate hashtags into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites "people familiar with the matter." The service could allow Facebook users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events as the company strives to become the best source for news and information.

Facebook chose Unicorn as the fundamental building block of its search engine. Sriram Sankar talks about how it works and the technical processes used to identify and rank Graph Search results in Facebook. He explains that launching Graph Search gives Facebook insights into the popular queries and the need for optimization. Sankar takes us through the "life of a graph search query," giving marketers insight into how they should think about Facebook search optimization. 

Tops Products' conversion rates rose 400% through a well-thought-out SEO strategy. it starts with ensuring that site visitors have a consistent and smooth path to their Web site. Courtney Eckerle tells us about the challenges the company has faced, how it identified the problems and corrected false links, and how it reduced its bounce rate by 39%. Read the article here.