When Jason Cieslak, Siegel+Gale's managing director based in Los Angeles, first heard the news that Google would acquire Motorola Mobility, he assumed the move became a "knee-jerk reaction" in response to losing the Nortel patents bid by a consortium of heavyweights such as Microsoft. There's actually more to the buyout found in set-top boxes and Internet TV.

Boosting the economy could become as easy as googling or binging something from a Web browser. It turns out there are clear and measurable benefits to searching on the economy. Search technologies accounted for some $780 billion of the global economy in 2009, equal to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Netherlands and Turkey, according to a report from McKinsey & Company. The U.S. search-related revenue accounted for 1.2% of the nation's GDP.

Opposition against Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility began to surface Monday morning shortly after the company announced its intentions. Levi & Korsinsky will investigate the Board of Directors of Motorola Mobility Holdings "for possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law in connection with the sale of the company to Google," according to a press release.

Google+ gave its more than 25 million users another reason to stick around -- and perhaps lure some of Facebook's 750 million members to jump on board. The social network, launched in June, introduced a casual game platform the same day rival Facebook moved to update its casual game and developers support.

The fundamental concept behind the Human Genome Project to identify the approximate 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA has spurred numerous successful businesses. Take Pandora, for example. The founders of the Internet radio company conceived it from a similar idea -- the Music Genome Project, which set out to identify nearly 400 attributes to describe songs and create a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

Month-to-month fluctuations in search engine query market share don't mean much, but sequential or year-over-year ups and downs could identify the beginnings of a trend. Yahoo became the big winner for July. Search query market share rose to 16.1% in July from 15.9% in June, according to comScore. Did the Bing and Yahoo search alliance contribute to the change?

Social signals from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter used in combination with inbound links to optimize Web sites and pages may have more influence on SEO rankings than first believed. So, how many "+1," "like," share," and Sponsored Tweets are paid for by advertisers indirectly through social media sponsorships?

Small plastic cards dangling from lanyards around the necks of kids wearing little to nothing became the status symbol at this year's Nike U.S. Open of Surfing competition in Huntington Beach, Calif. The fashion tips pointed less to Beach Bunny bikinis and Hurley board shorts, and more toward the credit-card-size piece of plastic enabling the holder to get free stuff.

Earlier this week I took a car ride to Office Depot with my boyfriend to get his two high school kids supplies such as notebooks filled with college-rule paper, pens, pencils, white out, and two USB drives. He's thinking about back-to-school clothes, but I'm not absolutely sure that the thoughts have turned into online searches looking for stores with the best prices on kids' pants, shirts, shoes, socks, and dresses. I do know he searches and researches all options online first before walking into a physical store.

The Meltwater Group generated more than $100 million in revenue last year, serving more than 20,000 customers. The social media and news monitoring company said Thursday that it has acquired IceRocket, a real-time social search engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.