The U.S. Department of Justice criminally indicted ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski on 33 charges of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. The announcement, made at a press conference in San Jose, alleges that Levandowski took confidential information from Google to Uber.

Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMinds co-founder, has been placed on leave after controversy over some of the projects he led. The Google-owed subsidiary focuses on artificial intelligence. Suleyman runs the applied division, which looks for practical uses for health, energy and other fields. The company did not give Bloomberg specific reasons for the leave. 

Microsoft Advertising on Wednesday announced support for the Domain Connect open standard that will allow webmasters to more easily verify their site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Domain Connect aims to make it easy for a user to configure a DNS for a domain running at a DNS provider such as GoDaddy. It will help those responsible for keeping sites up and running to find indexing and ranking issues faster. It also provides additional reporting. 

Bidding complexities continues to rise. In 2019, about 80% of digital marketers spent time on manual tasks like bidding, while only 20% is spent on strategy, according to Emilia Lingwood, citing Google data. So, in a blog post, she details four main Google Ads Smart Bidding strategies designed to maximize conversions and one to maximize traffic. She explains how marketers can apply each and highlight the benefits as well as the potential pitfalls. Each describe a goal, benefit, condition and warning. 

Google Search Outreach Vincent Courson explains Google’s search indexing problems and how developers fixed them and the lessons they learned. He summarizes in a blog post what happened and describes how the company plans to communicate issues in the future to keep everyone up to date. Courson also wants to bring clarity to the ways that Google's systems work, the complexity of search, and how technology can sometimes "break." 

Google Play now lets developers add tags to their applications to determine where a listing appears. "Add tags," a tag feature, aims to help developers describe their apps, similar to the way content management systems allow users to tag articles and content. This is an extension of a list of categories that will help app developers build descriptions in app listings.

Based on a 2017 lawsuit, Google will pay Pixel owners who experienced problems with their phone’s microphone up to $500 each. The lawsuit alleged that Google intentionally sold Pixel phones with microphone issues, but Google claimed it affected less than 1% of Pixel phones. The phones had a hairline crack in the solder connection on the audio codec. The amount the phone owners will be paid is based on the number of failures they experienced and whether they reported the audio defect.

Google’s search job listing tools have caught the attention of several rival job-finding services that say they produce anti-competitive behavior. They say it has cost them users and profits. Some 23 job search websites in Europe sent a letter Tuesday to the EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager to temporarily order Google to stop playing unfairly while she investigates anti-competitive processes.

Audience-based targeting, an area where search had traditionally lagged behind other channels like programmatic and social, could see a change. Microsoft Advertising combined technology from Bing into LinkedIn to help B2B marketers buy across professional audiences in a way that Google can’t provide, according to Anthony Tedesco. Now the audiences based on information such as title, industry, and company size in LinkedIn profiles support ad targeting. Despite Bing’s smaller share of the search market, the highly targeted nature of the professional audiences can become what Tedesco calls "a game-changer for B2B" marketers. He explains how. 

A recent Microsoft survey found that more than 80% of large companies worldwide are adopting IoT solutions. The study, IoT Signals, shows that 94% of businesses will use IoT by the end of 2021 in one capacity or another. About 80% think it's critical to their company's overall success. Some 38% said there are technical challenges and issues involving complexity, and 29% point to a lack of budget and staff resources.