Search will account for 57% of the local-targeted mobile ad spend by advertisers in 2016, falling to 42% in 2020. It will become the only market segment to decline, yet continues to hold the largest share, according to data released Thursday by BIA/Kelsey.

Criteo is preparing to roll out a search platform this year, although the company has been deemed a potential acquisition target.

Perhaps lost in the hoopla of Microsoft committing to acquire LinkedIn, and Apple releasing Siri and Maps to third-party developers, Google said Monday it would introduce two new cloud services for customers of its Google Apps for business.

Microsoft and LinkedIn quickly glossed over benefits for Bing and Bing Ads when they announced the $26.2 billion deal on Monday, but industry insiders see the agreement as having far-reaching benefits for the two services.

During an off-the-cuff conversation about what Apple might announce this coming week at its developers conference, Fluent CMO Jordan Cohen said he hopes to hear about flying cars. "I've always wanted one," he said. Cohen might get his wish.

Not long after Apple said Wednesday it would give app developers a sweeter revenue-share deal along with the news of forthcoming Search Ads in the U.S. App Store, reports surfaced that Google would jump in and provide a similar revenue split.

Advertisers will have plenty of opportunities to bond with consumers online and offline as global IP traffic from desktops, smartphones and other Internet-connected devices push data connections to 194.4 exabytes per month by 2020 -- up from 72.5 exabytes per month in 2015, according to Cisco Systems. Just as opportunities become plentiful, competition for the ability to reach them will become fierce. Here's why.

Dark search or disappearing data continues to plague the search industry, making it increasingly difficult to quantify campaigns and create a clear picture when reporting search engine optimization performance. And it will only become more difficult as the use of voice search services continues to rise.

When Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion in 2014, the company wanted Tony Fadell, head of Alphabet's Nest Labs unit, to oversee and build an Internet-connected business based on consumer hardware, where the recently announced Home and virtual assistant would become the hub and Android the operating system. But things didn't work out that way.

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week announced its engineers are building an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to understand the meaning and sentiment behind all of the text entries that its social media members post.