The New York Times takes a look at the aggressive hiring tactics of fast-growing tech startups, and their impact on more established companies. Specifically, “For the last year, Google’s work force has increasingly been under attack from a herd of unicorns,” it writes. “The unicorns, a class of hot start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, are all aggressively pursuing the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley."

Google wants to capitalize on a new feature in Google Maps that encourages users to share pictures of food, specifically from restaurants, by posting the photo to Google Maps. The food photography feature in Google Maps is initially available only to Google’s Local Guides. For now only Google Local Guides who have received a status of "Level 3" or higher, which means they wrote 50 more more reviews, are being asked to participate, reports the Android Police. 

The BBC reports that Google was ordered to remove nine links to news stories by the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under the "right to be forgotten." law because details of a minor criminal offense was referenced. The media wants to report on the details as part of freedom of the press, but having access to the information by searching for the complainant by name constitutes a breach of the Data Protection Act, according to the ICO. Google has been ordered to remove the links within 35 days.

Rand Fishkin suggests how much repetition is optimal in campaigns when targeting specific keywords, and how often to use that in the front and back ends of my page. It may seem like a basic question, he tells marketers, but advancements in the past few years have turned this black and white question-and-answer into many shades of gray.

Leo Laporte interviewed Matt Cutts, who joined the video show This Week in Google from extended leave at Google as spam guru and webmaster. The two spoke about Google's holding company Alphabet and why Google cofounders decided it was time to diversify. "Larry is fantastic at seeing five year trends," Cutts said.

Google Ventures made an investment in Carbon3D, a company that uses algorithms to help train its 3D printers to make better prints. Joining Google Ventures in the funding round are Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner along with Reinet Investments S.C.A., as well as previous investors Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, and Northgate Capital.

Amit Goyal and Hongbo Deng explain that one of the most important features in a search engine is query auto-completion (QAC), the service through which users interact with a search engine to input their search intent. In 2014, global users of Yahoo search saved more than 50% of keystrokes when submitting English language queries by selecting QAC suggestions or autocomplete. A research paper -- adaQAC: Adaptive Query Auto-Completion via Implicit Negative Feedback -- analyzes the implicit negative feedback during QAC user interactions. The two explain the findings in a post.

Google has launched automated extensions for product listing ads in Google Shopping. The extensions are displayed alongside PLAs. They use existing information that marketers provide in Merchant Center settings and data feeds to automatically show free shipping and price drop information.  

Tessa Wegert tells marketers why analysis of more than 100 million articles with between 3,000 and 10,000 words receives the most social shares, even though publishers are producing 16 times more short-form content than long. Blog posts may take more effort to produce, but they're effective, in demand, and can have a major impact on consumers.

Max Prin takes marketers through the basics of locale-adaptive pages and provides a simple testing tutorial in this video. Google in January began crawling locale adaptive pages URLs with content based on the Accept-Language HTTP request header or the perceived location, which it gets from IP address. Merkle RKG's SEO team developed a locale adaptive testing tool to help SEO professionals and webmasters assess and troubleshoot Web pages to take them international.