Take a picture of an image or upload one to a site and the technology can identify and return results. It's a feature that search engines have been working on. Wolfram Alpha launched their version Wednesday. Imageidentify.com identifies the picture and returns results, complete with data behind the visual such as weight, height, origin, and more. Wolfram Alpha is the company's flagship product, which they refer to as a computational engine, and ImageIdentify is just one of thousands of functions built into the Wolfram Language.

In the spur of the moment when you need to know something, most people pick up their smartphone and search for information. This often requires going to a video site like YouTube to find how to complete the task. This trend requires marketers to become more spontaneous when it comes to executing search advertising and content marketing campaigns. Here's why.

Google took steps to temporarily shutter its Map Maker Monday after pranksters used it to draw the Android icon peeing on an Apple Logo and other spam-type acts of vandalism. The tool shut down as Google rethinks its approval process. It appeared in April 2015. The edits now go through a manual review process, but that could take weeks as requests mount.

Consumers have become reliant on mobile devices and more comfortable with emerging technologies. The two, along with emerging markets, play a major role in a company's growth. Google, for one, benefits from the trend, but not as much as Facebook. This year ZenithOptimedia recognizes Facebook as the fastest-growing media company, with 63% growth, compared with the prior year. The company took the title of being the tenth-largest media power, attributing consumer behavior and the move toward mobile as the growth driver.

Facebook this week extended its deep-linking capabilities for App Links in mobile app install ads, following steps taken by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. The hoopla is about a piece of code that helps advertisers send individuals directly from one page or piece of information to another. The code used to deep link the content also provides a tracking attribution tool. Inanimate objects will also see a form of deep linking. The coding has become one of the most important mobile tools for search experts in the evolution of marketing.

Google announced a cloud service Wednesday that runs off the same database that drives nearly all of its largest applications. The service -- Google Cloud Bigtable -- is a managed NoSQL database service that runs through an open-source Apache HBase API. Yes, a bunch of tech speak. The most important thing to remember is that it has power. Many Google projects store data in Bigtable, including Web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. Here's why.

DoubleClick Search users can now extend their reach into China through Baidu, adding to the ability to manage advertising campaigns across multiple search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo Japan.

Beauty care products including cosmetics, fragrances, hair and nail care, along with spa and relaxation products, are popular around Mother's Day, but for this category shoppers need more research time before committing to a purchase, giving brands a little more reason to coddle consumers on retail Web sites.

The mobile algorithm that many businesses feared would send them plummeting in search rankings might become the very reason that Google will see some up-and-coming niche competition this year. For Vurn, it takes common queries like restaurants and movies and groups them into information snippets to show their related actions. Technology like this continues to attract venture capitalists. Similar to Google, VCs see the future in mobile search. In fact, VCs financed 27 search companies in 2014 and 33 the previous year -- the two most active years on record, according to CB Insights.

Adapt. The world sits on a learning curve with Google's mobile algorithm change, wearable devices, and apps that backlink to Web pages or other apps. The maze of data and information that programmatic systems (a fancy buzzword for automation) will connect within the next year boggles the mind -- at least my mind.