The European Commission has been asking companies that filed complaints against Google for permission to publish some information they previously submitted confidentially. The EU will use the comments as fodder to charge the U.S. Internet-search giant in a five-year-old investigation that has stalled three times and sparked a political firestorm. Shopping, local and travel companies are among those that have been contacted, The Wall Street Journal reports. Aside from search, the EU has been investigating whether Google has been scraping content from rival sites, and unfairly restricting advertisers and software developers who do business with the search giant.

Google Chromebit could potentially lead the way to a Google-branded cross-device platform to support the Internet of things, with Bluetooth and WiFi managing Internet connections. Android hardware manufacturers like Samsung and Sony have their own solutions for platform management, but they generally support the enterprise market, not consumers. Juniper analysts believe this could go either way for Google. Chromebit could either give a warm and fuzzy feeling about the adoption of smart homes -- or it could cause a fragmentation, one barrier to home-automation adoption.

Rand Fishkin offers details on how spam scores are calculated. Moz released a feature called Spam Score that helps to analyze link profiles and weed out span. He also tell marketers which flags to look for, and reveals how marketers can benefit. He starts by explaining the 17-flag system, and goes on to analyze correlation and causation, and tell how to apply the Spam Score metric.

Google made a list of the top 10 tax questions that people queried since Jan. 1, 2015, and the states where people queried the most tax-related questions. The type of answers people search for online are puzzling. The No. 1 question: What is income tax? The No. 10 question: Who has to file income tax? The questions between 1 and 10 are just as worrisome. Maine, Ohio, Arkansas, Delaware, and Louisiana are the top five states.