Forrester Research estimates that brands will increase search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, and email marketing, and social media budgets will near $77 billion and represent 26% of all advertising by 2016.

Inflections in a person's voice provide hints of intent -- even more so than a click. But would an engine turn voice into text before matching verbal commands to textual keywords? How much will location-based services and social signals come into play when matching searches with paid-search ads? And will voice search introduce us to radio-like ads, rather than textual -- similar to those on Internet radio Pandora?

Amazon rolled out CloudSearch Thursday, a beta service for cloud computing and app developers that capitalizes on its core technology. The tool, a "search service in the cloud," supports scaling for data and search traffic.

Ophir Tanz, founder at GumGum, thinks his company's in-image video advertising platform can monetize photos on Pinterest Pinboards. Through agreements with publishers such as U.S. News and World Report, Orbitz travel site Away.com, and Daily News, GumGum can serve up expandable video ads in still photos on the sites. He believes the image recognition and targeting technology can do the same for Pinterest.

Forrester Research created the "Facebook factor" to identify how much more likely Fans are to purchase a brand's products or services. The method, based on logistic regression modeling, requires brands to ask four questions around these themes: being a Facebook fan of the brand, likelihood to purchase, amount of money spent in the past 12 months, and probability to recommend.

Marketers will spend nearly $33.8 billion in 2012 for search engine marketing -- up from approximately $29.7 billion, according to a study from GroupM released Monday.

Google has published a YouTube video that answers some long-overdue questions about Google Places for businesses, a tool to help manage local listings on Google. The video answers some tough questions about how businesses can best use the tool, describes how to add business information and how users can help keep information up to date, and answers questions from viewers, which start at 22:50 in the hour-long video.

Descriptive information about a company exists in social sites and apps, but pulling in the information to a database that serves up in local search queries on mobile and desktop will rely on technology rather than manual labor. Automation would make it far more cost-effective, according to Jeff Beard, president at Localeze, a Neustar service.

Finding human connection means bringing together technology and products to make that connection, which can lead consumers to jump from Twitter, Facebook and other social sites to make a purchase. But brands don't seem to view Facebook's ad offering -- Sponsored Stories -- as a tool to connect with consumers. While some advertisers and marketers might consider the offer a connection because the messages in the ad directly reflect consumer sentiment, a survey from Social Fresh estimates that only 55% of Facebook advertisers use the tool.

A shift by consumers to use multiple devices to research and make purchases continues to add complexity for advertisers and retailers who thought they understood the path to conversion for their product lines.