Conversations used as quality signals to better optimize paid-search advertising have become more popular, especially through click data from mobile devices. Mobile searches generated 30 billion calls to businesses in 2013, and will drive about 73 billion more by 2018, according to BIA/Kelsey.

It's a moment that not only summarized the growing debate around immigration, but became a reminder of how so many Americans get their information from search engines.

Some 70% of companies participating in a survey spent more than $1 million on their ecommerce Web site and 30% spent more than $2 million.

Those who optimize products and services to serve up in search results have a complex and difficult task. Being successful means continually thinking about how consumers search for the product and the phrases and the keywords they use. Most owners of small and medium-sized businesses still cannot take the time to learn the strategy -- and they do not have the budgets to hire an agency.

If actor Charlie Sheen did one positive thing in the past year, it was to heighten awareness of HIV after the actor disclosed that he was infected with the disease. A study released this week shows the influence search engines have on news, and news on search engines.

Advertising agency execs say Google's decision to eliminate paid-search advertisements from the right rail of search engine query result pages creates more pressure to create and optimize great images and content, and ties the two together with display, video and other media. Here's why.

Your refusal to allow Apple to help the U.S. government gain access to data in one of the iPhones used during the San Bernardino massacre puts U.S. citizens at risk of meeting the same demise as others who died at the hands of terrorists.

For all the remarkable progress that Google, Bing -- and yes, even Yahoo -- have made in mobile search and display advertising, there's so much more that advertisers can achieve from having a direct link to consumers.

Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced Tuesday that Google Ideas, the New York City-based Web and policy think tank, will become a tech incubator named Jigsaw.

It may seem simple, but having the ability for a wearable head display mounted device to detect whether someone is wearing the gadget without an on-off switch or to perform a function based on a signal will help move the search for information into the next phase of queries. A Google patent application explains how.