Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin on Tuesday announced his new company SparkToro, a technology platform in the influencer and audience intelligence marketing space. Fishkin left Moz in July 2017 after stepping down in as Chief Executive Officer in in 2014. He still plans to participate in Whiteboard Friday, a video series that helps the Moz community, and others, learn new things about search. 

Google will launch its augmented reality system ARCore with new features, and plans to make its Lens visual search tool part of Google Photos on all phones, according to The Verge. Citing Google data, the report suggests 100 million Android phones currently support the platform. It also would seem feasible to move this Lens-style visual search beyond phones into cameras, such as Google's VR180.

A new search feature on Bing will bring up trending information on some websites in a click-through carousel format. Jennifer Slegg writes that it appears after the sitelinks or, in some cases, after the sitelinks and site search box. She explains that the carousels contain ten blog posts or stories, though not indexed by date.

Another former Google employee, software developer Tim Chevalier, hit the search giant with a lawsuit alleging that it unjustly fired him for speaking out about left-wing politics. He claims the dismissal in November 2017 came after he spoke out in support of diversity. The lawsuit Google filed Wednesday alleges he was wrongfully terminated and that Google violated the law by allowing a "hostile work environment," according to one report. 

It has been a challenge since the search engine was born. Microsoft named its engine Bing, rather than Microsoft Search, similar to the way Google named its engine Google Search. Now Chris Matyszczyk wonders why the company just doesn't rebrand the engine. Frankly, we're all wondering. As he suggests, the Microsoft brand has become much stronger under Satya Nadella's leadership. Perhaps it's time. Here's why.

When Google was ordered to stop giving its own comparison-shopping service an illegal advantage and fined $2.7 billion, Adam and Shivaun Raff, who was in the midst of doing battle with the search giant, couldn't have been more relieved. The two had developed a vertical search engine they felt was as good or better than most anything else seen online. But the fledgling company couldn't survive in the shadows of Google and the company spent more than a dozen years fighting the battle. The New York Times runs through the story of a decade-long fight and how the Raffs finally …

Google added a new category in its vulnerability bug rewards program that could result in the theft of users’ private data, information being transferred unencrypted, or bugs that result in access to information in protected app. The reward is $1,000. The company paid out nearly $3 million to researchers last year in rewards for vulnerabilities found in its products and services. 

Agencies managing several accounts running on Bing Ads can now use one username and password to access multiple brand accounts with the ability to switch between different clients and add customers at any time.

Google joined a group of companies working together to promote the use of styluses that can work with a variety of tablets, phones and other touch screens. The group, Universal Stylus Initiative (USI), aims to create an open, non-proprietary active stylus specification.

Google's parent Alphabet, and the Saudi Arabia state-owned oil company Aramco are in talks to build a large tech hub to the region, according to The Wall Street Journal. Alphabet would help Aramco build data centers in Saudi Arabia. It's not clear whose data the centers will house.