Microsoft is losing EVP Qi Lu, and, in turn, reorganizing its team. “Lu has been heading up the Applications and Services Group -- the unit that has encompassed the Office applications team and the Bing search team,” ZDNet reports. In an email, “CEO Satya Nadella announced Lu was leaving so as to recover from ‘health conditions caused by a prior injury.’”

Google just added a Neural Machine Translation system to its Translate language translation service. “The system is already in use 18 million times per day with the notoriously hard language pairing of Chinese to English,” 9To5Google reports. Compared to the previous phrase-based production system, [the system] reduces translation errors by 55% to 85% on several major language pairs.”

Marketers trust Google to give them the best cost per click, but recent findings from Merkle data suggests marketers may not want to go into a campaign with eyes closed. Bid headroom, known as the gap between the price marketers bid on keywords, and the actually price paid, can differ. Joseph Shoemaker provides the lowdown on testing bid headroom and whether the AdWords process leads to higher CPCs for an advertiser's brand keywords.

Apparently Google has many birthdays, but on Sept. 27, 2016, the company is celebrating its 18th. Yes, it sounds a bit confusing, but how one calculates the date of its birth depends on which event constitutes its arrival. Is it the day the founders incorporated? Or the day it received funding from investors? The Independent reports that all that confusion led Google founders to admit in 2013 that they really didn't know the company's true birthday. Even more interesting, Google's Doodles seem to complicate matters more. The first official Doodle posted on …

Link and media mentions can boost a campaign, but most high-authority links don't receive a lot of social shares, according to Kelsey Libert. "Authority" is one of the main signals when it comes to search engine query rankings. She writes that most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites that readers will share the content. In a recent study, even the majority of links on the sites with high domain authority (DA) didn't get social shares. In fact, 52% of links with a DA over 89 received zero shares, 50% of links with a DA over 79 …

Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric will lead live streaming coverage of the presidential debates alongside Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga and National Political Columnist Matt Bai. The coverage will feature streaming of all debates with pre- and post-show analysis, as well as a new live daily politics show, interviews, feature pieces and more. Yahoo will live stream the debates with pre- and post-show analysis will become available across desktop, mobile, and on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Xbox 360 devices. The event officially kicks off Monday night.

Google last week began rolling out an update to a signal it calls Penguin, one of the more than 200 unique pieces in the algorithm that allows individuals to search for answers on google.com. The signals identify words that appear on Web sites or recent content rather than content that is two years old. Google announced the update of Penguin, which first launched in 2012, in all languages.

Microsoft announced the release of Bing Shopping Campaigns in Bing Ads Editor v11.4 in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Germany. Advertisers can now manage Shopping Campaigns, Product Groups, and Product Ads. Prince Bajracharya, Bing Ads engineer, wrote in a post that advertisers now can add the Campaign Type attribute to the Campaign entity, which lets the user create either Shopping campaigns or Search and Content campaigns. There's also a new Shopping tab in the editor pane to Store ID, Country/Region of sale, and Campaign priority.

For your perusing pleasure, Venture Beat has put together a list of fines and financial penalties that Google has racked up around the world. “The issues cover taxes, competition, and privacy, but the result is that more and more investigators feel emboldened to take on the U.S. tech giant,” VB notes. This summer, for one, the EU hit Google with a $3.4 billion fine for antitrust violations.

Google have been reducing access to Keyword Planner data for some accounts, according to Sam Nemzer. And while this is a separate change from the volume grouping, the main focus of his blog post, the mention provides valuable insights into Google's recent change. Since Google now groups keyword volumes for similar keywords in Keyword Planner, Nemzer began digging in to determine whether or not the change has an impact on the pages that rank for similar, grouped keywords. Because Google associates keywords closely to group their volumes, per Nemzer, the search results should also be similar. Here's what he found.