Microsoft reported good news during its fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday. The search business saw revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, rise 21%. Its latest operating system, Windows 10, created increased usage for the deeply embedded search engine Bing and companion Cortana.

Paid-search spend continues to decline. Some would rather hear that "growth continues to slow." Although that's a true statement, some of the marketing budget that historically would be reinvested into search continues to find its way into more personalized media such as email and display.

Kantar Media's search marketing intelligence company AdGooroo launched Local Insight Tuesday to give advertisers a view into the types of paid-search campaigns competitors run in local markets.

When the Accelerated Mobile Pages Program (AMP) launches on Google search in February, it will include basic functions such as the ability to traffic ads with ad servers of your choice and will provide support for multiple demand sources and formats like native ads as well as control of ad placements, and viewability measurement. It also includes integration with more than 20 advertising technology vendors.

Imagine looking at a hologram of real-time Bing search queries projected in thin air or against a wall. A point of your finger or the wave of your hand enables you to scroll through the rankings of nearby businesses. It's not far off. In fact, Microsoft's Room2Room augmented reality makes me believe we're one step away.

Microsoft pledges a commitment to putting cloud computing in the hands of the public, so earlier this week the company committed to donating $1 billion to public cloud computing resources during the next three years. The funds will go to support 70,000 non-profits and non-governmental organizations worldwide.

In a sign of how brands and their media agencies need to start thinking about campaigns, a series of patents granted to Google this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show a thread weaving through search, email and social media.

Hidden in the text of a press release announcing an extended partnership, AOL revealed Wednesday that it plans to take an equity stake in Taboola to cement a "close collaboration on this long-term strategy."

How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution impact search advertising and marketing? Infosys, an Indian consulting firm, commissioned a study of young adults in nine major economies. The study had nothing to do with search, and everything to do with the jobs and the skill that will become more important across the board, impacting search advertising and marketing.

Searching for the correct answers isn't always easy -- especially when you're given a chance to ask one important life-changing question of the three 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. Would you have asked something different?