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You know Google controls North American search engine market share. Yahoo! and Bing combine for more than half of Google’s share. Don’t ignore them. Even Ask had 500 million searches between Nov 1 and Dec 31. 
Meet Facebook Sports Stadium.

The social media giant promises to provide live scores, statistics, and play-by-play information. They will mix that with posts from sports journalists and the teams.  So far it sounds like ESPN, right?

They will do all this with posts and comments from your friends made directly in Facebook. And you access the center by searching for the game inside Facebook.

Just in time for March Madness too. 

The feature is only available on Facebook using an iPhone in the U.S. and will spread to other devices.

Pinterest calls its recent blog post their “battle of the sexes“. 

A better phrase might be a treasure trove of marketing information even if you and your organization have no interest in using the social media site. 

Included are lists for top topics among males, females, and a list for both. There is a lot of good trending topic information in this post, including minimalism in both food and travel, men’s luxury accessories including pocket squares and watches, and women on apparel, budget travel and more minimalism.

Google paid Apple ONE BILLION DOLLARS in 2014–allegedly to be the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. Why should you care? Because it shows a substantial marketing deal between the two continues to exist. The deal was detailed in another case’s testimony and has since been sealed.

And the Apple CEO’s criticism of Google ad model? Hard to consider it anything but bluster when Apple took that much money using the same model.

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google ranking
This may be the best insight about Google’s update published in the last week. The complete answer isn’t here, but the author makes a compelling point about “brand-based” keywords for Google ranking.
Yahoo! announced it released search data for 20 million “anonymized” users for academic purposes. AOL did EXACTLY the same thing in 2006. It took the New York Times less than one week to begin to identify individuals from their searches.
Advertising spending on Facebook increased 11 percent in the fourth quarter. Why? Because they work. The “click rate” of those ads has reached a Google-like level, making the ads more profitable. 
So how would you like to tweak some of the types of ads you see on Facebook?  Have a look at this easy-to-use guide on changing Facebook advertising choices by Kristen Goldel of Search Engine People.
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Microsoft’s Bing solidified its #2 position in US search engine market share by expanding its deal to provide search and ads for all AOL platforms worldwide.
Many organizations discounted Facebook Messenger for a long time, but the app now has 800 million monthly users just 14 months after reaching 500 million. Ad Week takes a look at 2016’s features.
Watching gaming videos is a real thing. That is, people are going online and watching uploaded videos of other people playing video games. It’s so popular that 47% of the audience have children of their own. Take a look at the in-depth study from Google.
Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post digested a well documented sociology study about how all those “not true” things reach your Facebook feed with people swearing by them. Dewey’s story is here. The peer-reviewed study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is here (PDF).2