Rand Fishkin made a few predictions on big trends in SEO and Web marketing for 2015, but says he only allows himself to make them if the predictions made for the previous year score above a certain percentage. (I guess he scored well.) Two of the ten predictions for this year include: Amazon will not take considerable search share from Google, and mobile search will not harm Google's ad revenue substantively (It's not clear what "considerable" means); and mobile search, mobile devices, SSL/HTTPS referrals, and apps will combine to make traffic source data increasingly hard to come by.

Google has been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to open unused sections of the radio spectrum for years. But Google is pushing for the FCC to open up the rarely used 3.5GHz band, not the 600Mhz to 700Mhz band, which has far less range and is unsuitable for running a national network. The catch: the wavelength is capable of carrying significant amounts of data, making it viable as a possible alternative to Wi-Fi in urban areas, reports Business Insider. Bytes for thought.

Google announced Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show two developments that Neal Mohan, VP of Video & Display Advertising, believes will help turbocharge the future of video advertising. More than 30 mainstays of video advertising -- broadcasters, premium publishers and major brands -- have joined our premium video marketplace, Google Partner Select, and YouTube will role out viewability reporting across its ad platforms. Mohan explains.

Google said it will retire developer tools and updates, officially shifting its attention to Android TV. Existing Google TV devices and all of the features of these devices will continue to work, and so will the apps for the Google TV platform, but a small subset of Google TV devices will update to Android TV. Most Google TV devices won’t support the new platform.

Israel's Birthright program offered a trip during the winter holidays it called #DigitalIsrael, designed for social media managers, master of digital communications, bloggers and digital journalists. Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, director of social media for Lubavitch.com, designed the trip, per Haaretz. He brought the idea of the trip to Levi Margolin, director of marketing and recruitment for Maayanot, a company that brings more than 100 groups to Israel annually.

Microsoft is looking for help to take common and complex queries and present them to users to answer the question, which sounds similar to what Ask.com has done in the past. The user will then provide the result, which can be integrated into Bing results, reports Neowin. The product, dubbed Distill, aims to bring humans into the search equation. Answers are vetted. 

Google Capital and Tiger Global have led a $70 million funding round for Glassdoor, the site that allows employees to anonymously rate their companies' work environment. It brings the company's total funding to more than $160 million. Other participants include current investors Battery Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Torrent Freak has compiled all of Google's weekly transparency reports into one study that looks at the uptick of privacy takedowns in 2014. Overall, copyright requests rose 75% compared with the prior year. In 2008, Google received only a few dozen takedown notices during for the entire year, but today it processes more than a million reported "pirated" links daily.

Google is bringing the same technology behind its Chromecast dongle to speakers, soundbars and A/V receivers, allowing consumers to cast audio wirelessly from Android and iOS devices. Google Cast for Audio announced Monday in tune with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas tells us hardware markers LG by Denon, HEOS, and Sony are among the brands committed to producing Google Cast-ready speakers. The speakers will work with Deezer, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Pandora, Rdio, TuneIn, and more.

The French startup Qwant wants to become an alternative option to Google for Europeans who want to search the Web. The founders want to turn "Europe’s anti-Google sentiment into a successful business," per The New York Times. It sold a 20% stake to Axel Springer, the German publisher, in 2014 for roughly $6 million, mostly to buy European servers. Citing the new stakeholder, the NY Times reports Qwant made about a $1.8 million profit last year, but will post a loss for 2014 as the company expands into new markets like Germany.