It seems that Alphabet is having a bit of trouble balancing innovation and its core business -- search advertising -- according to the latest cover of BloombergBusinessweek, although there have been rumors that Alphabet might spin off its Moonshot business into a separate company.  The biggest question is whether it can survive alone. It's no secret that Google's advertising business carries the financial burden of Alphabet's Moonshot business.  Other Bets, the line item in Alphabet's quarterly financial statements, once referred to X and other business divisions not named Google, lost about $3.6 billion in 2015, roughly twice what they had lost the year before, according to …

Google is removing its "In the news" section from the top of desktop search. In its place, the search giant will feature a carousel of "Top stories,” Business Insider reports. “This move had been planned for quite some time, and is being rolled out globally,” it notes. “The removal of the word ‘news’ will, hopefully, help draw a sharper line between Google's human-vetted Google News product, and its main search product.”

An update to the Google App, formerly Google Now, on Android devices now puts a focus on news. The Verge reports that the Google App home screen is split into two parts, with the right side alerting the user of upcoming events and the left side serves a list of "personally relevant news," which now includes a section called “Feed” dedicated to news that Google thinks the user will have interest in based on search history. The update will roll out starting today, Tuesday, in the Google App on Android in the U.S., but other regions and iOS will come …

Starting 2017, Google says it will run entirely on clean energy. “Alphabet’s Google is on track to purchase enough renewable energy to cover all its global electricity consumption next year,” Reuters reports. “Google expects its purchases of wind and solar energy will be enough to cover its data centers and offices worldwide starting in 2017.”

Microsoft released Remarketing in Paid Search in Bing Ads Editor version 11.7 for Shopping Campaigns. Prince Bajracharya writes in a blog post that marketers can modify and delete audience associations from Bing Ads Editor. Marketers can associate one or more ad groups with one or more audience lists and then adjust bids on specific Audience association to maximize the chances of targeting ads to a specific audience. 

Bing said it's increasing the size of sitemaps files and index size from 10MB to 50MB to accommodate the growing need for additional space in content.  Webmasters can still compress their Sitemap files using gzip to reduce file size based on the bandwidth requirement, but each sitemap file once uncompressed must still be no larger than 50MB. Fabrice Canel explains.

While President Obama is still in office, the White House is pushing to get deals for Google and GE to begin doing business in Cuba, reports The Wall Street Journal. The business agreements are expected to be announced in the next few weeks. The WSJ reports that "White House officials are unsure how Mr. Trump, the president-elect, will approach Mr. Obama’s Cuba policy." Earlier this week, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a 501(c) project that uses research to expose misconduct in public life, released a report detailing Google’s support for Hillary Clinton.