They must be busy down at Mountain view. Barely a day seems to go by when they don’t launch something new. I feel like the number of times I write ‘here’s a new service from Google’ has gone off the scale. And we haven’t even talked about Google Wave yet!

Well… predictably… here’s a new service from Google…

In its never ending quest to provide ever more relevant search results, Google has launched a ’social search’ service.

In a nutshell, this allows you to search for stuff; the search engine results pages (SERPs) are populated just with information posted by those in your social networks.

This might include information that people in your social networks have posted on Facebook and Twitter. But it might also include any entries they’ve made on blogs, forums, or other services such as Picasa.

At the moment the feature is only available in Google Labs.

Let’s say for example that you’re looking searching for a place to eat in the West End. Wherever a friend or colleague has made a comment or recommendation about a restaurant, their entries will be displayed in the SERPs.

The service is able to identify posts made by those a social network by making use of users’ Google profile. We wrote previously about how to set up your Google profile. The Google profile allows Google to link up services such as Gmail, Twitter, Friendfeed and LinkedIn.

Google are anxious to stress that they will only surface publicly available information, and not data and information from private or secure services.

“All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web - you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant,” said Murali Viswanathan, product manager at Google.

For information about how it all works, here’s a video by the mighty Matt Cutts that describes what’s going on:

As we’ve mentioned before, personal recommendations are the most likely reason to buy a product. Social Search makes it more important than ever to try and get recommendations from your customers, since these recommendations will be more likely to be read and followed by those in their social networks.

Can you see a future of social search? Are you interested to see the search results populated with information provided by those in your social network? Leave us a comment below.

We’ve talked plenty about how to effectively use Facebook and Twitter to effectively market your website. There’s no doubt that as a website owner these social networks offer a fantastic channel to reach out to new website visitors.

But what has been nagging at the back of every business owners’ mind is how much employees using social networking websites are costing them every day.

A survey from IT service provider Morse has tried to answer this question, by polling 1,460 workers on their use of social media during work hours.

The survey found that a whopping 57% of people spend 40 minutes every week on Facebook and Twitter whilst at work. Whilst we website builders want them to be using their social networks to market the company website, in actual fact its all for personal use. The estimated productivity lost from this has been put at £1.4bn a year.

And what are companies doing to plug this leak? The answer is ‘not a lot’. More than 75% of UK businesses have not issued guidelines on social media use.

Quite apart from the work time lost, unregulated use of social media by employees is also a potential brand accident waiting to happen. We’ve all ready about big company employees ridiculing ‘problem’ customers on Facebook, not realising that others could listen in to their conversation.

“Social media can be good for business, helping to extend ties with customers and employees, but organisations don’t seem to understand that it’s not being used predominantly for business but for personal use. This is a massive productivity black hole,” said Philip Wicks, a Morse consultant.

“Companies need to reinforce a corporate usage policy to ensure that people use their PCs responsibly and predominantly for business purposes.”

Do you think that this is another example of corporate Britain trying to stamp on the personal activities of employees? Have you any experience of social media indiscretions when discussing company issues? Leave us a comment below.

A couple of months ago we talked about the ‘Real time’ battle being played out by Google and Microsoft. The emergence of Twitter has a search engine that can tell you what people are discussing right now, made both Google and Microsoft to develop their own angle on ‘real time’

Whilst Microsoft’s Bing opted to include Tweets from prominent Twitters within their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), Google decided to rapidly index and promote blog posts and other recently added online content.

Both major players have now elected to try and beat each other at the Real Time game by… doing exactly the same thing. A couple of week’s ago they announced that they would feature live Tweets from the full Twitter index.

This is how Paul Yiu from Bing put it: “Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous… Working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with.” The service is currently only available in the US.

And on the same day, this is what Marissa Mayer from Google had to say “We have reached an agreement with Twitter to include its updates in our search results. We believe our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

Bing is already starting to include Twitter results in the US. In the UK we have to wait; and everyone has got to wait a while for Google,

Seeing as they have decided to do exactly the same thing, the winner will probably the search engine that chooses the most effective integration. Twitter produces a lot of ‘noise’ – irrelevant or irreverent Tweets that people may well not find useful to see in the SERPs.

As for what it means to website builders and your social media strategy, this means that is going to be more important than ever to make sure you are effectively using Twitter to communicate with your website visitors about your website. If you use Twitter as a customer service and communication tool, more people than ever will witness your customer care. As we discussed previously, the SERPs for your brand searches influence a lot of potential visitors to your website. More than ever they need to see that yours is a website that they want to interact with.

As we discussed back in our Google the innovator series, Google Squared is where Google attempts to answer your search query with a table of facts, rather than a list of websites that might contain the actual answer.

Google Squared is good when the answer to your question may lie of many different websites. Google tries to extract all the meaningful information and present it in a clear way.

For example, a search for ‘US presidents’ gives you a table where each row represents a president, and each column contains facts about him.

Here’s what it looks like:

The first update is that the square now contains up to 120 facts, whereas previously it had just 30.

The information is better quality too. The table is ranked based on relevance and whether Google squared can find enough high quality facts. For example, previously there would be a column for “First Lady” even if Google could only find 2 or 3 of them. Google now gets rid of a row or column if it can’t find the facts.

Since Google squared allows editing and corrections, it has also improved from the personal input of thousands of individuals amending the information.

You can now also sort the columns, which allows you to rank and compare items.

Here are european countries ranked by population and area.

Here’s a list of the newest baseball stadiums.

You can now also export the data to a Google spreadsheet or CSV file.

Google Squared shows where Google wants to go next with search. Rather than trying to answer search queries by listing websites that contain the answer, Google is trying to include and publish all the information itself. As to how they intend to make money out of that remains to be seen!

Have a look a Google squared and let us know what you think.

It’s a while since we talked about click fraud. This is when people or computers click on pay per click adverts without the genuine intention of finding out more information about the product or service advertised.

Click fraud is carried out for two main reasons. The first is to make money. When pay per click adverts are published on a website, most commonly through the Google AdSense program, the owner of that website makes a small amount of money every time a visitor clicks on an advert.

Consequently, there is a huge incentive for website owners to get as many clicks as possible on the adverts on their website. This has led some people to try to obtain these clicks fraudulently.

The second reason for click fraud is to drive up advertising costs for competitors. If you know that your main competitor gets charged £1 every time you click on their adverts, there’s a big incentive to click on them.

Google and other providers of pay per click advertising have got pretty smart systems to weed out these fraudulent clicks. For example, if your computer consistently clicks on the same advert, or on the same website, the chances are that those advertisers will not get charged for those clicks. Google will have detected that you are carrying out click fraud.

This has led to ever increasing levels of sophistication in the techniques of click fraudsters. Last month, click fraud monitoring service Anchor Intelligence discovered a 1,000 member click fraud ring in China. The ring had managed to compromise a network of PCs in order to carry out click fraud on pay per click adverts on the Google search results.

At the time of the discovery, the fraud had affected more than 2,000 advertisers. Members of the ring would build websites, and then sign up with advertising networks like Google Adsense. They would then click on the adverts on each others websites in order to generate pay per click revenue.

What made it harder to discover was the sheer number of members in this click fraud ring.

In just two weeks, Anchor Intelligence estimated that the group generated millions of fraudulent clicks across 200,000 different IP addresses. According to the details reported on TechCrunch, this had generated more than $3m of click fraud.

“We have seen 200 fraud rings and this one by far trumps them all”, said Richard Sim, VP of Anchor Intelligence.

Have you tried placing adverts on your WebEden website through Google Adsense? Have you ever been tempted to click on a competitors’ ad? Do you think that Click fraud is a problem for online advertising? Leave us a comment below.

Almost every status update on Facebook can be interpreted as an indication of happiness (or otherwise) of the user. Since Facebook has over 300 million users and 40 million status updates, there’s a whole load of data about people’s wellbeing.

As part of a new prototype application called Gross National Happiness, Facebook engineers have tried to aggregate this data in order to gauge national happiness in the US.

As reported over on TechCrunch, here’s how the application’s developers describe it:

“…Grouped together, the status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!”

Here’s a screen grab from the graph that shows the peaks and troughs of happiness.

It’s possible to alter the view by using the slide bar along the bottom, By dragging it sideways you can see how happiness changes from hour to hour.

So what’s the big takeaway? Well perhaps unsurprisingly, happiness is lowest on Mondays and it then climbs throughout the week, peaking at the end of the weekend. Public holidays also generate large peaks.

For this year there is a drop around the start of June, which TechCrunch interprets as being associated with the death of Michael Jackson. Well, I know it almost took down the Internet, but that seems a bit extreme!

Have a look at the Gross National Happiness and let us know what you think!

Its been a few months since we talked about Phorm. The online advertising firm has raised controversy due to its technology which allows advertisers to target users based on their online behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, Phorm has met considerable resistance from online privacy campaigners, including the ‘father of the Internet’ Tim Berners-Lee. Big name websites such as Amazon and Wikipedia have also pledged to block Phorm from gather user data from them.

Whilst Phorm has to a certain extent faced down legal threats to its operation, the biggest challenge has been to convince an ISP partner to get involved. For the system to work, Phorm needs to install its equipment into the ISP data centre. No ISP, no Phorm.

Although Phorm convinced BT to run an early trial, it has since lost support from previously willing ISP partners. BT pulled the Phorm contract earlier this year, and TalkTalk has cut ties with the company. Virgin “continues to evaluate” the system.

For this reason, Phorm says that the UK was now just a “medium to long-term prospect”, adding that it will “deploy in other markets first”. The country which has been most open to this form of behavioural targeting is Korea, where Phorm is partnering with the largest ISP ‘KT’.

Nevertheless, Phorm has said that they will keep their UK operation running despite the challenges it faces here.

“Phorm remains fully committed to its operations in the UK. We continue to be active in the market and are confident of the opportunities domestically. Meanwhile, Phorm is also making substantial operational progress internationally”, it said in a statement.

Back in September Phorm released an update to its trading figures, which show that its had incurred a pre-tax loss of $15m for the first half of this year. This is a big drop in the same period last year, when it lost $24.7m.

What do you think of behavioural targeting? Are you willing to give up some privacy in order to get tailored advertising messages? Have we heard the last of Phorm? Leave us a comment below.

Have you ever reached a particular website and found it really hard to find the information you were looking for? Have you ever needed a bit of help from friends to work the checkout on a website? What about letting others know how great you think a site is – did you want share your feedback with other visitors?

Thanks to the Google Sidewiki, you can now do all of these, and much more besides. And you can also read the notes and comments left by other visitors to a website.

Launched a few weeks ago, the Sidewiki lets you add helpful information alongside any webpage. The Sidewiki looks like a browser sidebar, where you can read what others have said, and also write your own entries.

If a webpage has lots of entries they are ranked according to lots of ’signals’ which mean that those considered most useful stay at the top. The ranking system takes into account feedback that you and other users have given, and previous entries you’ve made. The entries are ranked in real time. You can read more about how they’re ranked on the Google Research Blog.

If you make a comment about a particular web page, the Google sidewiki will also display those comments against webpages that contain the same snippet of text.

Let’s say you were leaving comments about Gordon Brown’s party conference speech, on a webpage that actually included the text of the speech: your comments made on one website could also be visible on other websites displaying the same bit of Brown’s speech.

The sidewiki also pulls in posts from blogs and other websites that discuss the particular webpage, so you can see what other people are saying about it even if their comments reside elsewhere.

At the moment the Sidewiki is a feature on the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

If you’re interested you start using the Sidewiki by visiting google.com/sidewiki to download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.

If you’re a website builder, this feedback is a potential goldmine of information. We’re going to be able to get live feedback from our website visitors about what they think of our website. They will hopefully point out where they think we’re going wrong, and what we need to do to fix it.

Do you think it’s a good idea to allow anyone to comment on any webpage? Would you be happy to read the feedback on your site? As an experienced web user, are you happy to share your feedback? Leave a comment below!

Did you know that there are 1.6 billion people in the world connected to the Internet? And did you also know that there are more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute?

If you’re a lover of these sorts of Internet facts and statistics then today is a happy day.

I seem to spend half my day hunting round for some stats to back up what I’m trying to say. And the other half trying to remember and find the Internet facts that I read about last week.

Thanks once again to Google, all these facts and statistics can now be found in one place. They’ve launched a microsite that brings together all the Internet stats and insights for the UK.

The statistics are collected from a load of other third party research organisations. They cover lots of different areas, but are strongest in broad brush economic trends and media insights. They also look at consumer behaviour and the influence of technology, and how that changes over time.

Here some interesting snippets that we’ve grabbed:

“Over 60% of online businesses are confident about the future.” (NMA, March 2009)

“In the UK, searches for “discount vouchers” grew by 94% between November and December 2008” (Google Insights for Search)

“By election day, fully 25% of people who pulled the lever for Obama were already connected to his campaign electronically.” (New York Magazine, January 2009)

“More than 1 in 5 adults in the UK, FR, IT, & US with Internet access had watched longer videos such as feature films or full-length TV shows online.” (Ofcom, December 2008)

“In May 2009, Google had over 4.0 billion search page views in the UK.” (Nielsen Netview, May 2009)

Have a look at the site and let us know which fact you found most interesting.

In a recent blog post, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that for the first time the service is starting to turn a profit. This is ahead of Facebook’s self imposed target of being cash-flow-positive by 2010.

Of course, many have argued that with such a large number of users Facebook could hardly fail to successfully monetise their service. Although it has come in for a lot of criticism, Facebook’s business model of selling advertising against user profiles has meant that it has managed to turn users into dollars.

And with the financial news comes that of user numbers, which have now reached 300,000,000. That’s a three fold increase on this time last year.

Zuckerberg said that the financial news meant that Facebook was now a serious independent Internet company. And with such a large and fast growing userbase, it is being seen as a rival to other big Internet brands such as Google and Yahoo.

And he also has much bigger plans for the userbase: 300million, he said, was just a starting point.

Last month of course we reported on the news that Facebook is now the fastest growing search engine. And the site is also currently testing an online payment method.

Are you a fan of Facebook? Have you tried advertising your website using their self serve advertising system? Have you integrated your WebEden website with Facebook? Leave us a comment below