"Fitness buffs" are 49% more likely to have a household income of $100,000 annually, 95% more likely to pay attention to ratings and reviews posted online by other consumers, and 94% more likely to follow their favorite brands or companies on social media, according to data released Thursday.

The white paper, released this week, details findings and analysis on content relevance, backlinks, mobile, bounce rates, top-level domain names, site speed, and URL length.

Only 31% of marketers say they optimize the search channel to enhance the customer experience, according to a survey published this week that suggests companies will put experience at the top of their to-do list of improvements in 2017

Google and Microsoft are building artificial intelligence into their respective ad-creation tools and serving technologies that can tweak algorithms without human intervention in order to get at the core of intent and better manage campaigns.

With a flood of data sources available, search marketers need to understand the types of metrics required to run successful campaigns. Not all marketers do, according to a discussion Thursday at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit in Deer Valley, Utah.

Google released the Penguin 4.0 update in September after promising that no others would follow. This update, probably one of Google's most important final updates, weights links to sites in real-time. As Google bots crawl the Web and discover links, the algorithm evaluates and stores each, creating a database of information that it can draw from to make decisions.

Will the next phase of search reduce the stress of keeping track of too much information? A study released Wednesday from Pew Research looks at how people deal with the volume of information they track.

It's not about walking into any grocery store and using technology to purchase anything without going through a checkout line. It's an Amazon branded grocery store. And it's not just any payment system. Amazon has created a payment method that combines traditional point-of-sale systems, online payment technology like PayPal, and mobile apps like Square.

Google and Amazon use ambient voice signals before wake words to determine what to serve searchers. Signals like these will help Amazon, which plans to release a screen with Echo next year, serve increasingly accurate content- - sometimes with help from Microsoft Bing.

One analyst expects the Request a Quote feature in Yelp's Paid Leads Product, which the company plans to roll out in late 2017, could give small and medium-sized businesses the incentive to start buying more ads on the company's platform.