Microsoft's search engine Bing will attempt to predict the winner of The World Cup, after successfully forecasting the results of American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and The Voice. The data will require a different approach. Factors that help to predict the winner will take into consideration the teams' records, strength of schedule, margin of victory in past matches, and whether the location gives a particular team a home field advantage, along with weather and type of playing surface.

Adidas and YouTube today launched The Dugout, a series of exclusive live shows to broadcast from Rio to a worldwide audience of millions of fans on YouTube. The sports maker will promote the live shows throughout June with YouTube TrueView advertising. Along with interviews with major names from the world of football and crowdsourced questions from fans, The Dugout will include tournament debate, features and behind-the-scenes action from Brazil.

Rand Fishkin explains how to achieve better rank with competitive keywords in search engine queries, even when marketers think it's not possible. Fishkin provides examples that can help marketers rethink the strategy. He calls it "barnacle SEO," where the brand attaches in some way to these sites and pages that already perform.

Marie Haynes has put together a cheat sheet for Google Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird. that will help marketers understand each to keep better taps on the effects these algorithm can have on Web sites. Haynes guides us through each, with examples and blog links, provides insight into how to recover from the changes, and includes links to other content that can help marketers identify unnatural links on their site.

Andy Taylor suggests that Google's paid and organic search AdWords report might be a bit deceiving -- and that it does not compare apples to apples because Google does not filter organic data by targeted regions. He highlights a report released last August that provides traffic metrics at the query level for both paid and organic search where Google segments the data by showing only when an ad serves up, when both an ad and organic link were shown, and when just an organic link served in the search query request. Taylor explains.

App developers miss a huge opportunity to capitalize on data, per Keith Petri. He explains in a podcast the types of available data to developers and how to leverage it. He believes marketers need to connect paid media investment across multiple channels to build an accurate depiction of a campaign's performance, and  explains how to access the data to get the job done. He estimates that 95% of mobile developers do not collect or house their own user data, which presents an enormous missed opportunity to improve user experience and decrease costs as well as to establish other revenue streams …

One of China's largest e-commerce portals, Alibaba, has purchased the remaining shares of UCWeb in a cash-and-stock deal. Reports peg the UCWeb as one of China's most popular mobile Web browser. Alibaba already owned 66%. The company said the valuation surpasses Baidu's acquisition of 91 Wireless last year as China's biggest Internet deal.

Luke MacLean takes a deep dive into AdWords features that might have become old news to some paid-search marketers. He believes Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a tool that is often overlooked in the sea of new features. MacLean believes this feature can make a drastic and immediate improvement to paid-search account performance. He explains how in a case study.

Robert Brunner, founder of industrial design company Ammunition Group, designed the Beats headphones, although Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine marketed the electronics. MIT spoke with Brunner to ask how a company convinces consumers that a gadget can become a fashion accessory -- not just headphones, but other wearable devices like Google Glass or iWatch.

Google is considering adding an alert at the bottom of each page where it has removed links after the ruling by the European court of justice (ECJ) on May 13, allowing European citizens the right to demand that information about them in certain circumstances be removed. The Guardian reports that Google has received 41,000 requests to take down sensitive material from people in Europe since the ruling.