The stakes for Microsoft are enormous. It's not really about taking better pictures of documents, whiteboards and business cards. It's about visual search. It's about integrating Bing technology into other platform to serve marketers. It's about widening Microsoft's network of ad targeting platforms or even developing new applications in which to reach potential business customers.

Fail often to learn quickly seems to be an understated mantra at Google. When something doesn't work as planned or doesn't live up to the company's standards, Google retires it and moves on.

Analyst firm CB Insights estimates Google has made nearly 200 acquisitions since 2001. When the company reorganized and renamed as Alphabet in late 2015, the new structure refocused on non-advertising businesses, such as Calico (healthcare), Google X (self-driving cars and robots), and Nest (smart home).

Oath, the Verizon division that combines AOL and Yahoo, has released source code from Vespa, a tool that Yahoo acquired with the acquisition of the AlltheWeb engine. The technology crunches data and is used to power Yahoo search services.

A series of studies has found that user intent may have a much greater impact on ad revenue than traditional user experience metrics.

The underlying technology, Object Detection Model, finds and identifies objects in an image and determines the category of the object that has been detected and its precise location and area occupied within the frame of the complete image.

Fashion search engine Lyst has teamed up with Pinterest to predict what everyone will wear this Halloween. The report analyzes searches, pins and saves across a combined 180 million monthly users worldwide.

Advertisers spent about $78.1 million for desktop search ads based on 157-related keywords for addiction treatment and rehabilitation from Sept. 2016 to Sept. 2017, according to data released this week.

Google announced the search tool in a tweet on Twitter. "Calling all U.S. bookworms! Now you can take a look at what e-books are available to borrow at your local library, right from search," per the Google tweet.

The boom in credit card use may be due to banks' willingness to offer people with the highest credit rating more money or consumers who feel better about the economy and would rather use plastic than PayPal or some other form of direct cash payment service.