Facebook is opening up Instant Articles, the tool that lets news publishers create articles that load up to 10X faster than standard mobile web articles. The company has announced that the Instant Articles program, previously open to a limited number of publishing partners (numbering in the hundreds), will be available to “all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world” starting April 12 at Facebooks F8 conference. This early announcement is seen as a counter move to the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages, an Instant Articles competitor, and also in response to concerns that smaller publishers weren’t getting access to the benefits of Instant Articles.

A recent study on how consumers search for products and services shows that while Google is still the 800-pound gorilla of search, consumers are using more information sources these days to make buying decisions. Local Search Unleashing Opportunities for National Advertisers, authored by International Data Corporation (IDC) on behalf of YP Marketing Solutions (formerly YellowPages.com), found that: nearly half (49%) of consumers surveyed conducted four or more search activities when looking for local products and services nearly a quarter (24%) made six or more searches nearly two-thirds (63%) completed their local searches in under an hour The most telling indicator was that over half (64%) of local searches for vertical-specific offerings started at a specialized...