Google Ventures made 75 new investments this year and supported nine company exits. Initial public offerings include RetailMeNot, Silver Spring Networks and Foundation Medicine. In its year in review, the firm reveals it collectively backed 225 companies in the past four years. This year it invested 28% in mobile companies, 18% in commerce, 18% in consumer Internet, 11% in enterprise and data, 6% in life science and 4% in energy. 

Google started a mantra suggesting that brands use paid-search ads to raise brand awareness. Now AdGooroo has released a study looking at consumer product goods companies that suggests the same. Jessica Lee takes us through the report, looking at a variety of categories, from toothpaste to beer. Read the article here.

Adam Singer, Google's analytics advocate, walks through some important metrics to watch when building and running a mobile app. He believes it's just as important to measure people's interaction with the apps as it is to measure their interaction with the company's Web properties. Read the article here.

Google announced the judging panel for The AdMob Student App Challenge. The six judges have either built apps or advised developers, and between them have accumulated hundreds of millions of downloads. Google recently announced mobile app content open exclusively to students. The challenge to students who love to code or have a great idea for a mobile app is to build a great app, and learn to make money from it with AdMob. Read about the judges here.

Search marketers know brand match targeting well. Now Twitter offers the feature. It will allow marketers to target conversations about topics in other ways, and the same intent can be expressed by using synonyms, different spellings, or Twitter-specific lingo. Read the article here.

Sam Owen describes what he believes are 16 changes coming to Google paid search in 2014, starting with the fact that ads will become more obvious to the casual observer with little orange-yellow buttons that read "Ad." The search results page will become more colorful. We've seen it in several new formats that incorporate images. Product listing ads will become more important. They might even provide a way to develop a new hybrid paid-search ad that eliminates the blue links. Read the article here.

Brad McMillen gives marketers a guide that will help to improve paid-search results without reverting to "bid-pumping" tactics. He takes us through examining the digital space that specific products compete for, what prompts the ads to serve up, and specific steps that marketers can take to compete in AdWords by starting with eye-tracking and heat maps through ad rank and quality scores. Read the article here.

A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing reveals that Yahoo gets a higher percentage of search revenue from its 10-year deal with Microsoft than first believed. The deal means Microsoft Bing handles the Web crawling and ad placement, but Yahoo remains the page designer. The news helped push Yahoo's stock price above Microsoft's by Thursday. Yahoo, which had previously revealed that the deal comprised more than 10% of sales, said the pact generated 31% of revenue in the latest quarter, according to Bloomberg.

Moz Founder Rand Fishkin has handed the company reins to Sarah Bird. In a note to employees, Fishkin writes that the change stems from his personal passion around contributing more than managing people and wanting to spend more time focusing on what he believes are his strengths -– marketing, products, evangelism, and less on what he believes are his weaknesses -- organizational development, financing, and board/analyst management.

Microsoft's search engine Bing now allows Google OS users running Android on their phones to update wallpaper once daily. The feature was in Windows Phone 8, and is now available for Google's operating system. Voice search is available from the home screen. Bing for Android users also allows users to search for images and videos. The update also fixed some bugs that caused the search engine to crash. Read the article here.