Twitch just sold for $1 billion dollars. That's not really news. We've become inured to the never-ending stream of tech acquisitions that instantly transforms entrepreneurial techies into some of the richest people on the planet. No, what's interesting about Twitch is if we slow down long enough to think about how this particular start-up managed to create $1 billion in value.

Late last week, the Wall Street Journal broke news that Amazon is "gearing up to more directly challenge Google's dominance of the online advertising market, developing its own software for placing ads online that could leverage its knowledge of millions of Web shoppers." What we have here is a race to the Zero Moment of Truth.

Have you ever been catfished by a paid advertisement when you were innocently Googling something? Maybe you were trying to get live support for your new Android phone but found yourself deep in scam territory. In July 2014, six global tech support scam artists had to pay over $5 million after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found them guilty of search fraud in 2012. Each scammer had the same MO: act as a rep for a random big technology company, tell consumers their computers were riddled with viruses, then get paid handsomely to "fix" something that wasn't broken.

Travel is just one of the markets that technology has made more perfect. And when I say "perfect," I use the term in its economic sense. A perfect market has perfect competition, which means that the barriers of entry have been lowered and most of the transactional costs have been eliminated. The increased competition lowers prices to a sustainable minimum.

When IBM's Watson won against humans playing "Jeopardy," most of the world considered it just another man against machine novelty act, going back to Deep Blue's defeat of chess champion Garry Kasporov in 1997. But it's much more than that. As Josh Dreller reminded us a few Search Insider Summits ago, when Watson trounced Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011, it ushered in the era of cognitive computing.

Many pundits predicted that 2015 would be the year of mobile. This prediction may have been too conservative, as mobile surpassed desktop Internet use earlier this year, according to data from comScore. Search marketers have been aware of the substantial growth of mobile search (98% increase in mobile paid searchQ2 2014 vs. 2013), and Google and MSN have been rapidly improving their mobile products to ensure that they're keeping up with consumers. As mobile continues to grow at a significant pace, here are three mobile search considerations that marketers need to address:

Anybody who has been a regular reader of my column knows I very seldom write a column exclusively about search, even though it runs every Thursday under the masthead of "Search Insider." I've been fortunate that Ken Fadner and the editorial staff of MediaPost have never restricted my choice of subject matter. But the eclecticism of my column isn't simply because I'm attention-deficit. It's because the subject that interests me most is the intersection between human behavior and technology. Although that often involves search, it also includes mobile, social, email and a number of other channels. I simply couldn't write …

I tried to put on both my agency and my client hat and come up with some guidelines to make the agency-potential-client dance as graceful as possible. Here are my rules of the road for agency SEM audits: