Google faces new questions regarding the way it handled subscribers’ private information to the feds and why it waited so long to tell WikiLeaks. A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the company’s policy was to tell people about government requests for their data except in limited cases, like when gagged by a court order.

Conductor announced it has secured $27 million in a Series D round led by Catalyst Investors with support from existing investors FirstMark Capital, Matrix Partners and Investor Growth Capital, as well as new investor, Blue Cloud Ventures. This funding brings the total raised to more than $60 million. Catalyst partner Tyler Newton also joined the company’s board of directors.

Baidu's fourth-quarter revenue was 14.05 billion yuan, or $2.26 billion, missing market forecasts of 14.12 billion yuan. The company also forecast revenue for the current quarter well below analyst expectations. and the revenue miss was the result of more users switching from PCs to mobile devices. It appears that Baidu became caught in the same dilemma Google felt as more of its users switched. At Baidu in December, search revenue from mobile surpassed that from PCs for the first time.

Similar to search, Facebook has jumped into relevance, showing scores to ensure that people see ads that matter to them. The scores show as a visible metric in its ad reporting tools. Facebook says advertisers tell us how the scores work and why it matters, as well as how to use the scores and how to get started.

The app search engine Quixey is close to getting $60 million in funding from several investors, including Alibaba Group, Twitter, and SoftBank. The funding, which has yet to close, would value the startup at $600 million if and when it is complete. Re/Code reports that other participants in this round include an investment arm of financier George Soros, Goldman Sachs and GGV Capital. Both Alibaba and GGV are existing investors, along with Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

Dump the passive voice and ditch the "i think" verbiage. Search professionals need to sound and assume a more positive role when it comes to communicating with clients. After all, search professionals are the experts when it comes to search engine marketing. Not all know how to communicate with authority. Isla McKetta tells marketers how to put assertion back in their writing and how to write with a clearer, more persuasive voice.

Saying goodbye to one of its brightest search scientists, Google is losing is Udi Manber to the National Institutes of Health. At the search giant since 2006, Manber most recently joined YouTube late last year. Leading the online-video hub’s search efforts, “Manber had been a high-profile addition to YouTube that [Google] cited amid departures from that unit,” The Wall Street Journal notes. 

AdGooroo ranked the top 500 jewelry-related keywords based on desktop text ad spend on U.S. Google AdWords from Jan. 1 to Feb. 5, 2015, and found no specific mention of Valentine’s Day in any term. To double check, the top 20 keyword rankings in the research suggests business as usual in the category, with top keywords including general terms such as "engagement rings," and "wedding rings" -- even "diamond." The research suggests that Valentine's keywords are not that important to consumers searching for gems. While jewelry advertisers spent from $133,000 to $3 million sponsoring the terms found in the top …

Mimi Onuoha is working on a project for the Fulbright-National Geographic fellowship that requires her to use people's personal data to create maps of relationships that extend across online and offline. The project's underlying focus suggests the data trail can teach previously unknown or unconsidered things about ourselves and our relationships. Here's the work in progress.

In honor of its tenth birthday, Re/Code is looking back at the history of Google Maps. “When it was born, it was a paper atlas in living form, with no pages to turn,” Re/Code recall. “Instead of online mapping leader MapQuest’s printable list of directions, navigation routes were overlaid on top of the map itself.” Ten years later, Google Maps boasts more than a billion users, and stands as Google’s second-largest property after only its search engine.