Russian search engine Yandex shut down its social search app Wonder today. Why? Because Facebook’s data is worth that much.

Facebook’s data is a rich pool of information that, when used appropriately, could create some really interesting products outside advertising. Yandex showed us that when it launched Wonder last week. But Facebook doesn’t allow anyone to use its data to “replicate” its own features or provide obvious ways to share back to the social network, so Wonder is being taken off the table.

“Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API,” a Yandex spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. “Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being.”

Yandex launched Wonder last week, calling it an experimental product. The app used voice-to-text software from Nuance to allow anyone to ask natural language questions out loud and receive answers on their phone. Answers were based on data from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and Twitter, but the app only served questions related to places, news, and music at its launch. In order to protect itself from Facebook, the company explained that it does not consider itself a search engine and thus it is not in violation of Facebook’s platform policies. Facebook didn’t agree.

After cutting off data access for Wonder, a social search app from Russian search engine Yandex, Facebook explained today that if you’re building an app that “replicates” its “core functionality,” its data stream is not for the taking.

“For … apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today,” wrote Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships and operations, in a blog post.

Osofsky explained that Facebook wants to provide resources to any developer who wants to build an app for the social network. He added that Facebook wants to make an environment in which it is easy for developers to create social experiences that are equally as easily shared across the network.

A Yandex spokesperson told VentureBeat via email last night, “We are in touch with Facebook to figure out on reasons and ways to solve the problem. As of now, any new Wonder user who is trying to sign up with their Facebook’s account in Wonder gets the notification by Facebook ‘An error occurred. Please try again later.’ Users who has already been signed up can still ask questions, but the Facebook data will not be updated. Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter data are being updated normally.”

Wonder, which took Facebook’s data and used it in search results evidently didn’t fit the bill. The company tried to head off Facebook by pointing out Facebook’s policy to not provide data to search engines. It then explained that Wonder is not a search engine but a personal assistant.

Facebook also recently shut down data access to voice mail app Voxer, which let you find your friends through Facebook, but it didn’t provide obvious ways to share back to the social network.

The company’s new Platform Policy section 1.10 now reads:

“Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.”

Mark Zuckerberg image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Facebook is giving no data love to Yandex, a Russian search engine that launched a social search iOS app today called Wonder. While Wonder lets you ask natural-language queries in a method similar to Facebook’s own Graph Search, the company said the app is not, in fact, a search engine but rather a personal assistant.

The app launched this morning, and according to TechCrunch, it only lasted three hours before Facebook pulled access to its data. The app lets you search across Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, and earlier in the day, Facebook. You can ask questions like “What are sushi places my friends like?” and it will provide you with a list of restaurants approved by your buddies. The company warned that it was purely experimental and that you’d only be able to ask it questions about places, music, and news at this point.

But Facebook recently released it own search called Graph Search, which does exactly this, only it pulls exclusively from Facebook’s data.

Thinking it could head-off Facebook’s data withholding, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself a search engine or directory, therefore it was not in violation of Facebook’s platform policy. Facebook will not let anyone index its data for a directory or search engine without its permission first.

As TechCrunch notes, this decision to block data from Yandex’s Wonder app doesn’t seem to affect the broader Yandex search engine.

You can still use Wonder as per usual. You just may not be able to access as much data as you once could. The two companies are reportedly in conversations about the data.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.

Hose kink image via Shutterstock

Russian search engine Yandex released its social search app Wonder today — focused entirely on the U.S. market and interestingly timed with Facebook’s own Graph Search Announcement earlier in the month.

Wonder is an iOS app that anyone can use to ask it questions verbally, in natural language. It uses Nuance’s speech-to-text technology in order to facilitate this feature, though it will also let you type out the question if you’re in a place that is too noisy (or you’re too embarrassed to ask it out loud). The app searches across Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can ask it questions like “What sandwich shops in New York City do my friends like?” and it will return a list of sandwich shops, with the corresponding names. You can also ask it things like “What news articles have my friends shared?” and it will pull up your friends’ top headlines. Right now, it only supports places, news, and music searches, pulling extra data from sources like Last.fm and Foursquare to give you more data about a place or artist.

The app seems similar to Facebook’s new Graph Search, which doesn’t search any other social networks other than its own. They both focus on discovering things around you through your friends, and the question construction is also very similar.

As TechCrunch notes, the company has provided a legal notice that could head off any aggression from Facebook (such as cutting the company off from its data). Yandex explains that Facebook does not allow anyone to index data for a “search engine or directory.” It argues that Wonder is not a search engine at all, but rather a “personal assistant,” think the iPhone’s Siri.

We have reached out to both Yandex and Facebook and will update upon hearing back.

Wonder image via Yandex

At least, that’s what Chris Winfield believes. He’s the cofounder and chief marketing officer of BlueGlass Interactive, a digital marketing agency with Fortune 1000 clients such as Disney, eBay, and the NFL.

I chatted with him today about Facebook, Graph Search, and Google.

VentureBeat: Let’s start generally: What was your first reaction to Graph Search?

Winfield: For me, one of the most interesting things was the way they announced Graph Search. It was understated, there was no livestream, no partnership with CNN, and it wasn’t in a huge venue. They’re really under-promising, saying it’s not a search engine, it’s not Yelp, and we’d love to work with Google if they want to.

To me, that’s a bigger sign that they are in fact looking to compete in search.

But Facebook has a partnership with Microsoft, and you can bet they’ve really looked at how hard its been for anyone to compete with Google. They’ve watched Microsoft pour billions into search and barely make a dent.

VentureBeat: So how would they compete?

Winfield: To start, all they want to do is get people comfortable with making some searches on Facebook … starting to get something they can’t get anywhere else.

The most important thing for Facebook is they just have to get people comformtable with finding a couple of things, and then what we’ll start to see is the evolution of it as they build it out. One goal will be to get more and more businesses to stop caring so much about Google Local.

And then, over time, search and being able to control that experience will become fundamental to Facebook and especially to their advertising platform.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about Facebook and advertising. How does this help?

Winfield: Everything for Facebook ads right now is based on guesses about what you’re interested in, but search became the most effective advertising engine of all time because people are directly looking for something … you see the intent.

That said, the holy grail is personalization: The more the platform knows about you — what you’re looking for, and what you’re likely to not just click on but also take some kind of action about — the better. Which is why Google has not just focused on being the best search engine but [has] added the personalization that is so important.

Now, from the Facebook point of view, if an advertiser can bid on terms related to your business — and friends have liked that business — that’s the Holy Grail. There’s a long way to go, but if you can put intent and what you like and who you are together, that is very, very powerful.

VentureBeat: Where’s the biggest conflict?

Winfield: Initially, they’re going to position this as if there are no conflicts — we’re completely different, we’re solving the people search problem.

But they’re almost trying to change how people think about search. Googling something is obvious and standard now — Google has it locked up. But when Facebook is talking about natural language search and changing how search is done socially, that’s key.

In my experience, as soon as someone says we’re not really competing with you, that’s when you get really scared. For example, TripAdvisor — you have this partnership and you think you’re safe — but now that’s at risk. Or Bing, frankly. There’s no way that partnership lasts very long. As soon as Facebook thinks they have something that works better, it’s gone.

Facebook doesn’t need to come in and be the dominant search site. They just need to start chipping away.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about the advertising potential here.

Winfield: That plays back to Facebook’s whole overall messaging: We know we have the audience, we know that advertisers want to spend more with us, and we know they’re not spending as much as they want to because they’re not seeing the same results as elsewhere (like AdWords).

Facebook doesn’t really need to convince advertisers, they just need to create the product and get people using it. And then they’ll have advertisers lining up around the block.

VentureBeat: Is this perhaps the first really serious challenge for Google?

Winfield: Yes, because Facebook has over a billion users. And it’s not just like a Yahoo home page with a billion visitors; these people actually have accounts and are actually logging in.

So Facebook has the opportunity to grab those people’s attention – that’s what makes this different.

VentureBeat: What should Google do?

Winfield: Really, Google should just keep doing what they’re doing.

The big question for Google is: How do you incentivize people more, or give people reasons to spend more time with Google? It’s not about being the next Facebook, it’s about trying to control more and more of people’s experience. Which is why Google is integrating everything.

For Google, it’s about how they convince people that they have the best search engine. If you’re able to find what you’re looking for and are finding what you need, you won’t leave.

photo credit: Tom.Bricker via photopin cc

At launch, Bing’s social sidebar, the right-hand section that surfaces Facebook activity and other social content related to your queries, was a tacked-on gray blob that did little to make search any better. Today, following cosmetic and content improvements, the number two search engine’s solution to socially enhanced search doesn’t look so bad.

Old social sidebar

Microsoft’s Bing announced Tuesday that its social sidebar, first introduced in May, has received a makeover to make it more functional. The idea is to better direct searchers to social network friends who may have the answers.

The ugly, separated gray bar has been replaced with a white-washed area labeled “Social Results” that now blends with the rest of the content of the page.

The section still includes potential subject matter experts from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Klout, but finally shows off their relevant content — photos, “likes,” updates — inside the bar instead of forcing you to hover over their name to see what they’ve shared. The seemingly pointless “ask friends” Facebook prompt has also been stripped from the experience.

New social sidebar

I first noticed the design and content changes yesterday when checking out Bing’s enhanced snapshot middle section. The social sidebar actually grabbed my attention for the time first, because it contained eye-catching photos from my Facebook friends — photos I didn’t know existed. The photos and extra Facebook content did not influence the end result of my search experience, but the refreshed sidebar did make Bing a more welcome, warm and fuzzy place.

In my opinion, the sidebar changes still aren’t radical enough to inspire people to make the leap from Google to Bing anytime soon, but they certainly supplement search results better than the old sidebar did.

Bing Social’s principal group program manager Chris Rayner said that the changes will be rolling out to Bing users over the next few days.

Photo credit: betsyweber/Flickr

Over the past 14 years, Google has set the standard for online search. The ability to access expansive amounts of information on a global scale and deliver links full of information to our fingertips was, and is, revolutionary.

On an average day, Google crawls through 20 billion web pages, and serves 100 billion searches every month.  These numbers will only continue to increase, as data increases exponentially. It’s no secret that this data overload is causing a lot of problems.

One unexpected and dramatic impact of this influx of information is that it has exposed the weaknesses of the current design of search as we know it.

Today’s search is flawed

Today’s search function is mainly linking to mostly static content. It is not able to differentiate on an individual level which of the potentially relevant answers is the most accurate one for your particular search just by referencing popular keywords — it uses a popularity algorithm as a proxy to solve this. But, as we know, what’s popular isn’t always the answer to our specific question or search. Likewise, modern lifestyles have experienced the limitations of the mobile interface, making it difficult to research topics on the go.

These factors reveal a fundamental problem with search today: it’s not a dynamic and flexible process. Surely, in today’s world we need more than a search page with a list of blue URL links to sort through when we’re looking for recommendations, advice, diagnosis and other methods of finding and exploring information and products in the digital age.

The next frontier: mobile search 

Consumers are beginning to demand a better, more comprehensive search experience. People are already using highly specific apps on their smartphones, rather than traditional search engines to find information. According to Roger McNamee 1 out of a 100 Google searches are conducted on mobiles devices and the rest accounts for PC web searches. 

Yet, this doesn’t actually mean people aren’t searching on their mobile device, it only means they aren’t using Google to do so. In most cases today, a subject-specific app is more likely to generate the tailored content you are looking for.

For example, suppose you are shopping for an outfit for an upcoming holiday party and want to get a sense of what kinds of new styles are available in your favorite stores. Does your online search begin with Google or your favorite store’s website? Or, image you are in transit on your way to now buy the outfit from your favorite store and you want to double check your bank funds before purchasing. Do you type in your bank’s name to the Google search bar, or do you tap on your banking app to access your bank account?

Increasingly, the answers to these questions do not involve a traditional search engine. As our lives become a bundle of digital data — online and on our mobile devices — we’re approaching the next generation of access to information; a new form of search and discovery. This new phase is all about the Internet growing up and starting to provide the same kind of service we get when we’re offline. With data consumption and data creation growing by the minute, search and discovery must evolve to not only deliver specific keyword matches, but to offer a personalized experience based on the individual needs and wants of a user.

Consumers are beginning to require their search functionality to be more tailored to specific preferences and constraints, and hence, the app-centric world we live in today is beginning to take root. A recent Nielsen report shared that the average number of apps owned by a U.S. smartphone user is now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year. To access our version of the information we’re looking for, we now tap on our shopping apps, our banking apps, our news apps, our entertainment apps, our social network apps.

The future of Artificial Intelligence and search (AI)

Artificial Intelligence will take this one important step further by providing the deep personalization and rich interactivity that the consumer is now craving by referencing a users’ usage, profile and behavior, and resulting in delivering information that’s much more relevant.

Additionally, AI can handle the complex task of optimizing recommendations and advice based on your contextual information (such as location and time) but also personal taste, needs wants and constraints. Therefore, a shopping app with AI integration could come in the form of a real estate app that’s able to alert you when your dream house comes up for sale after taking into your personal basic financial information, travel, school needs, entertainment and work preferences without you having to constantly spend hours poring over possible houses.

But how will AI help us in daily tasks versus just daily questions in tomorrow’s search? Both online and mobile users will become increasingly reliant on AI virtual assistants, or “smart” apps, in place of search engines, to procure relevant information. These assistants will have the ability to perform human-like reasoning and problem-solving, and better analyze and predict our digital content.

Many more providers of digital content will be offering their own virtual assistants and “smart” apps that will offer services that mirror how you would engage with a sales assistant that knows you very well and who would be able to recommend or advise you on products and services. It will be completely natural to outsource the search for news to a personalized magazine that knows what you want and need and bring it together for you on demand. You will have access to medical diagnosis that offer advice on your health, replacing the various searches you conduct online to find out specific or unusual aliments.

In this world the value of search moves from the central search engines to the individual companies and apps that provide the expertise or services you want, as the search of tomorrow requires more knowledge and expertise than a central search tool could ever handle.

Lars Hård has over 20 years of experience in running advanced AI development teams, both in Europe and North America. In 2006, Lars founded Expertmaker, an Artificial Intelligence platform solution based in Malmo, Sweden and San Francisco. 

Lars is also a guest lecturer at Lund University on the topics of theoretical ecology and genetics and is a frequent speaker at conferences on technology innovation and mobile evolution. 

Top Image via Shutterstock

EverySignal is a new way to find the handful of important announcements from your social networks – all your social networks — in just one daily email digest.

The digest brings clarity, organization, and best of all, brevity to an information-gathering process that could take hours, should you choose to forage around the web for important events in the lives of friends, family, and colleagues. At a glance, you can see who moved to a new city, who’s sick, who had a baby — and you can respond with congratulations, encouragement, or advice of your own.

Yes, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all offer their own homepages, discovery tabs, and algorithms to sift out the noise and deliver the signal, but EverySignal’s new product brings a few distinct advantages, founder Derek Merrill said in a phone chat with VentureBeat yesterday.

“We aggregate across all of the networks,” he said. “We have access to the full breadth of a person’s networks.”

In addition to bringing more data into one place, he said, EverySignal also makes better use of that data without requiring users to take additional steps.

“Facebook, they’re gonna get better at it, but they’re kind of using Life Events as tags … but we know users don’t do that. They have to change their behavior. Most people just want to write what they want to write, and then technology should categorize it for them.”

Merrill said he got into the idea of social data sifting in the most normal way possible. Like most human beings (read: unlike most Silicon Valley wannapreneurs), he doesn’t live and breathe Facebook, so he has a more natural perspective on what’s wrong and frustrating about social media.

“I never lived inside Facebook,” he told us. “Because of that, I really was missing most of the things happening, or if I found out, I was the last person to know.” This applied to life events such as marriages or pregnancies as well as professional events such as promotions or lateral company moves.

“From my point of view, this is bringing me back into [social media] in a natural way. I don’t really care about a picture of someone’s burrito, but I do care when someone starts a business, or when you go on an exotic vacation, or when your dad is hospitalized.”

And for normal people who don’t exist with one eye on a smartphone around the clock, email is still a fine way to get that information across. In early testing, Merrill said, users opened around 70 percent of daily digest emails.

And the EverySignal team strove to find a familiar, safe way to display data for users — something that would convey all the information needed without overwhelming.

“It’s a tough problem,” Merrill said. “If you think about this from an engineering perspective, every user’s interface is different. That has been an enormous challenge. … We decided, let’s just play off normal user familiarity. We’re trying our best to make things feel comfortable. We don’t want to copy the Facebook feed, but that’s what people feel familiar with.”

EverySignal’s business plan involves using the same kind of social data for more commercial purposes, both for power users and for businesses, brands, and agencies.

“We have potential to build a very large business by offering a free product everyone can enjoy and then offering professional features we can charge for … things like getting more real-time updates through a mobile applications or SMS alerts, or access to more information within a network,” said Merrill.

EverySignal launched today from the Science incubator in Los Angeles. Science is about one year old and was founded by former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham.

Top image courtesy of Peshkova, Shutterstock

With new investment in the bank, Bottlenose is angling for dominance in the social media monitoring and analytics space.

The company, which helps companies make sense of what’s happening right now on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, launched its public beta in May. Today, it received just under $1 million in seed funding from ff Venture Capital and Prosper Capital. As part of the investment, John Frankel, a partner at ff Venture capital, has joined the company’s advisory board.

Bottlenose infuses social elements into your search “stream” — a term the company uses to refer to the sea of status updates and news. Search for a term on the website, and Bottlenose will surface what the world thinks, organized by relevance to you. Social search is Google’s greatest weakness — fixated on Google+, it does not do the job of incorporating results from the leading social networks.

Bottlenose has spent the better part of two years building out its technology. During that time, the 10-person startup received three acquisition offers (one from Twitter, we suspect). In December 2011, it launched its first product, a social media dashboard. Since then, the search tool has nearly 100 million topics and 10 million URLs analyzed to date, with more being added continuously.

CEO Nova Spivack told me that the tool proved to be particularly useful for advertisers during the Olympics, who used it to “deliver target messages and gain attention for their brand during the games.”

As we reported, the Olympics — termed the “social Olympics” — enabled social media analytics companies to flex their muscles.

The startup is highly similar to Topsy Labs, which also claims to deliver “instant social insight.” Both companies offer free access to their tool to anyone and are building out a premium service for business users. Bottlenose told me it will release its pro offering as early as Q1 in 2013. New advisor Frankel will assist the company in building out its pro service and attracting the attention of Fortune 500 companies.

Like Topsy, the company’s three dozen customers are primarily agency types, advertisers, professional bloggers, and digital marketers. It’s still early days, so Bottlenose is not yet in a position to disclose any of its customers by name.

According to Spivack, Topsy does not deliver on its promise to bring real-time results. Bottlenose has patented its StreamOS tool, its chief competitive advantage, which uses natural-language processing, analytics and trend detection to surface results in a matter of seconds. Bottlenose is building more advanced analytics into the technology, which Spivack hopes will rival Radian6, the social monitoring tool acquired by SalesForce.

To learn more about how it works, check out the video.

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Bottlenose is to social networks what Google is to the web. At least that’s how Bottlenose CEO Nova Spivack describes his tool, launching in public beta today, for helping people make sense of what’s happening right now on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

“We’re trying to be the ‘now’ company,” Spivack told me. “We’re trying to build the highest resolution picture of what’s happening right now.”

Simply put, Bottlenose is search for social networks — or the “stream,” as Spivack labels the never-ending sea of updates that his company attempts to understand. Search for something and Bottlenose will you tell you what the world is saying, but with a filter that finds, sorts, and organizes the social updates of the greatest importance, as they happen, around any given query. Just like Google, Bottlenose is on a quest for extreme relevance.

Bottlenose has spent the greater part of two years attempting to perfect its advanced solution for organizing the world’s attention. In the process, the seven-person, angel-funded startup has fielded three acquisition offers (one from Twitter, we suspect), though it still has little to show the public of its hard work. In December 2011, Bottlenose released its first product, a sophisticated social media dashboard, into private beta. Since then, the startup boasts that it has attracted a user base of 60,000 algorithmically-selected influential web denizens who spend an average of 90 minutes per day with its web-tracking tool.

Today, Bottlenose is making its dashboard available to the public and simultaneously releasing a social search engine that finally dresses up the beauty of its big data brain.

“We’re measuring the crowd in real-time using our algorithm called ‘StreamSense,’” Spivack said. The algorithm uses in-house natural-language processing, personalization, and semantic techniques to figure out trending topics and trending content, he said. “StreamSense helps us assess what the crowd is actually paying attention to right now.”

A Bottlenose “Now” page on Apple

Bottlenose, which runs atop a javascript and HTML5 platform, spits out a “Now” page for every query that includes top stories, trending topics related to the subject, trending people, images, recent links, and fresh comments from social networks. Spivack likens the pages to Wikipedia entries, except that Bottlenose pages are automatically edited based on what the crowd is sharing. The pages will also appear in search engines, exposing Bottlenose’s brainpower and its ever-changing pages to the traditional searchers of the world.

The company’s dynamic results pages are also meant to be collected and saved to the dashboard side of the tool. So a person could use Bottlenose as her Internet start page and browse the latest headlines and conversations surrounding events like the Olympics, scan trending topics across social networks, dive into subtrends, find the most influential people on a subject matter, and read up on the day’s hottest news as plucked from the most relevant social updates.

Before Bottlenose can convince consumers and professionals to use it as a start page or default to its engine for queries, the company will need to prove that it offers more than just your run-of-the-mill social search experience. A slew of similarly purposed engines cropped up a few years back to fill the real-time information gap; consumer rejected most of them and they’ve since faded into oblivion. Now, Google and Bing are supplementing their own standard search results with social feature additions and integrations that, depending on who you talk to, either add to or detract from the overall experience.

Spivack isn’t worried. He believes people will find Bottlenose pages through the standard search engines and stick around for a better view of what’s happening now. And because one can use Bottlenose to detect trends early, Spivack expects professionals, journalists, brand or sports enthusiasts, and news junkies to flock to the tool.

“There’s a lot of different use cases when knowing information early gives you an advantage.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Popular social network Twitter will unveil significant changes to search and discovery as soon as today, according to a tweet by engineering manager Pankaj Gupta.

“Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw,” Gupta wrote on Twitter on Thursday evening. “Team — congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!”

Search and discovery are incredibly important features for the network, and many times a search on Twitter is more valuable than a Google search because you can see real-time responses to things that are happening now. Discovery is important too, and with a well-implemented design, discovery can make you want to spend more time browsing a network.

Gupta’s tweet suggests that the changes will take place either today or tomorrow, but we’d be more likely to bet on today because more people will be around to write about the changes.

We’ve contacted Twitter for more information about the changes and will update this post if the company gets back to us.

Twitter bird photo: Beau Giles/Flickr

The socially-augmented, Facebook-laden version of Bing’s search engine is now live for all people in the U.S., Microsoft announced today.

The new Bing, first revealed in early May, features a three column design with search results on the left; a “snapshot” center column with maps, reviews, movie times, and restaurant reservation options; and a right-hand strip of Facebook updates from friends who might be able to help with your queries.

“Whether it’s making a purchase, choosing a restaurant or deciding what movie to see, our new Bing design offers unique ways to bring friends and experts right into the search experience,” the Bing team explained in a blog post. “We now show you which friends have liked or might know about content related to your query and will identify experts and enthusiasts that can provide recommendations on the topic of interest.”

Bing’s search-plus-social experience aims to help people accomplish more while searching with the help of their Facebook friends. The redo echoes Search Plus Your World, the recent Google search rollout that pivots around Google+ data, but offers searchers a bit more in the way of two-way communication.

The launch also underscores an ongoing change in search as a product and industry. Traditional search engines, often thought of as passive, single-person experiences, are in state of flux as players seek to make search more encompassing of today’s landscape, where web and mobile denizens are finding more of the information they seek on social networks or in apps. We’re not convinced that Google or Microsoft have hit on the perfect formula — Google leans too heavily on Google+ data and Bing requires too much action of the user — but we do expect search and social to become even less like disparate entities in the months and years ahead.

To celebrate the U.S. launch of the new Bing, Microsoft will be running ads on television and the web, and doing a big social media push in a “Bing Summer of Doing” campaign.

A week after previewing the revamped Bing, Microsoft has released the latest version of its search engine to people in the U.S. Head over to Bing.com/new to test out the new social features as well as annoy your friends with questions in the process. It doesn’t have all of the new bells and whistles announced last week, and you can only sign in with a Facebook or Windows Live account — though Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter support should be coming soon.

New Bing has a gray sidebar on the right that, once you login with Facebook, shows all the new social features. When you search a topic, new Bing will list friends who might be able to answer your question and help with the search based on whether they’ve “liked” or mentioned something with that keyword in it. It even shows any relevant images they’ve posted.

You can then post a question directly to Facebook or specific friends in the know from the sidebar. If you find something useful while searching or want to answer a buddy’s question with a link, you can post the URL directly to Facebook from the sidebar. Relevant Twitter results from random people are also sometimes shown at the bottom of the box under “People Who Know”.

Most of my test searches showed no “Search With Friends” results, even for things I know my friends love and post about often such as cats, cheese, Dollywood, robots, or the Maker Faire.

Earlier this year when rival company Google first attempt to mashup your social graph and search habits via “Search Plus Your World,” the results seemed invasive and annoying. Second-place Bing seems to have learned a bit from Google’s stumbles, cordoning off the social element on the far right side of your screen.

However, even if the social/search feature was more helpful, I’m not sure there’s a big need for this kind of integration. Most people have mastered searching for things themselves, or posing questions to Facebook. If they haven’t, I usually send them to lmgtfy.com.

via Search Engine Land

Today, Google introduced Search Plus Your World. Wait no: Actually, Microsoft introduced more “personalized search results” in Bing using Facebook’s data, a move that looks an awful lot like the social network-enhanced search results Google announced in January.

Microsoft’s Bing is three years old and has for a long time lived the shadow of Google’s much more popular, older search engine. While the two companies’ search results are generally on par, Google remains the number one search engine in the US and abroad. Indeed, a recent study by comScore revealed that Google owns 66.2 of search engine market share in the US, with Bing only just slipping past Yahoo to claim a distant number two spot in February.

That same month, Bing teamed up with another Google adversary to try and capture some more attention: Facebook. The partnership, while beneficial, wasn’t robust, and needed a pick-me-up. Enter today’s new Bing. The company is diving deeper into Facebook’s rich stores of data to bring personalized results to its search. Now, when you type in a keyword, it will show you images of friends on Facebook who have somehow listed or liked that keyword. And without leaving Bing, you’ll be able to pose questions to that defined crowd.

But the new program sounds very familiar. In January, Google announced its Search Plus Your World initiative, which takes data from its Google+ social network an includes photos, profiles, and posts that are relevant to your keyword.

Bing has two points in its favor, however. First off, Bing isn’t using Google+ data, it’s using Facebook data, which has had many more years to collect a lot of relevant information. Facebook is closing in on a billion registered users, while Google+ reaches a much smaller audience. Secondly, Bing’s social integration looks great: It’s just better-looking than Google.

Bing now includes a black box on the right side of its search results for these personalized results to live in. Friends who match your searched keyword will show up there, with comment boxes for you to pose questions to your friends — a conversation which can take place completely within Bing. The company uses the example of a person looking for hotels in Honolulu. He sees a friend’s pictures from a recent trip to Hawaii and asks where the friend stayed. From there he makes his choice of hotel.

Facebook isn’t the only one getting Bing’s attention. The search engine will also provide people it believes are relevant to your search from Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Microsoft hasn’t yet released the new social search features to Bing, saying only that they are “coming soon,” but you can provide an e-mail address to request early access. Check out the company’s promo video below:

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With Google’s new mode of searching, social media results powered by Google+ show up among regularly ranked links and images.

However, searching for a Twitter handle with these Google+ results included won’t necessarily get you to a Twitter page. Instead, you might be shown Google+ profiles instead — a move that doesn’t seem fair or competitive to the Twitter team.

Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray tweeted today, “Folks asked for examples. Here’s what a user searching for ‘@wwe’ will be shown on the new @Google.” He included the screenshot below:

While Twitter couldn’t provide any additional comment, a company spokesperson said these search results speak for themselves — and as you can see, searching for this particular Twitter handle doesn’t seem to yield much in the way of Twitter.com results.

We thought we might see non-Google+ social results by turning off Google+-powered search altogether. However, this wasn’t the case. Searching for “@wwe” in a non-Google+ search session yielded the same results. Whereas a day or two ago, we could easily find Twitter profiles in Google search, these results from Twitter.com are now shoved down on the page and designed to be ignored by users.

Granted, you can find Twitter-specific results easily if you search for a name or handle and add “Twitter” to the query (for example, searching for “wwe twitter” will take you directly to the brand’s Twitter profile). But as Twitter pretty much owns the “@” symbol and its place in online handles, it seems odd to show Google+ results for an intentionally Twitter-focused query.

Yesterday, a Twitter rep sent us the following statement in an email:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

The statement struck us as uncharacteristically pointed, and we wondered what would come of it. Apparently, those were fighting words from the startup to the search incumbent, and having legal counsel look into the matter is only a first step.

Google launched these social search features just yesterday. In addition to the usual assortment of links, pictures, news items and shopping results you’d see in a typical Google search results page, logged-in Google+ users can now also find several kinds of Google+ content sprinkled in among the normal search results. There are even promoted Google+ profiles and pages — an attempt to compete with Facebook’s highly successful social ads, we’re betting.

Even as Twitter sends out its examples, some commentators are already murmuring about possible antitrust violations.

“Google has had a form of social search in its main results for a while, but this is a significant redesign that gives a lot more prominence to social and to Google’s own social product, Google+,” wrote analyst Rocky Agrawal on VentureBeat yesterday.

“The biggest losers are Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor. Twitter and Facebook stand to lose if brands choose to move some of their efforts to Google+ to benefit from enhanced Web search rankings.”

In a conversation with VentureBeat, a Google spokesperson said, “As always, our goal is to provide you with the most relevant and comprehensive search results possible. That’s why for years now we’ve been working with our social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your friends and social connections, no matter what site that content is on.

“However, Google does not have ready access to incorporate all the information from some sites, so it’s not possible for us to surface all that content in real time.”

In other words, if Twitter wanted to see its pages appearing in Google’s social search results, it shouldn’t have revoked access to the Twitter firehose back in July 2011 or started using nofollow tags for links shared on Twitter — but that’s another story altogether.

The course of real-time search never did run smooth, and we’ll be following this testy war of words to its conclusion. Stay tuned.

Google has had a form of social search in its main results for a while, but this is a significant redesign that gives a lot more prominence to social and to Google’s own social product, Google+.

So is SPYW part of an evil attempt by the “Don’t-be-evil” company to rig search so that it always points back to Google? Or is it a legitimate response to a market need?

I’d argue, it’s a bit of both.

Social search has been the Holy Grail of the search business — people have been looking for it since the early days of search.

(Disclosure: I worked on social search when I was at AOL. I’m also an inventor on an AOL patent that may cover parts of social search.)

The premise of social search is simple: Content shared by your friends is more relevant than content shared by random people you don’t know. It also fits the mental model that many use in the real world: When you’re looking for a referral for a plumber or a dentist, you start by asking your friends. If that doesn’t work, you turn to search.

People have been doing a form of social search in a very inefficient way by using Facebook status updates to pose questions to friends. When I’m about to go on a trip, I’ll post a status message asking friends for advice on things to do and places to eat. For each post, I usually get 5-10 responses.

This annoys a friend who works at Yelp, who almost always responds that I should check Yelp instead. But one thumbs up from someone I know is worth a hundred positive reviews from random strangers. I can quickly evaluate the result based on what I know about the responder. If my friend Dariusz recommends a restaurant, I know I can go there without thinking twice because he’s a foodie and our tastes overlap. But I also know to discard the recommendations of another friend whose favorite place is Chick-fil-A.

With SPYW, Google automates this process and makes it instantaneous. Instead of relying on users to actively respond to my request, I get access to all of the previous activity they’ve shared. If a second- or third-degree friend shares content about a topic, I instantly have access to it.

Think of it as word-of-mouth on steroids. In the real world, I might remember the travel histories of 5 to 7 of my close friends. With SPYW, I have access to the travel-related content of hundreds of friends. There’s an ancillary benefit: It helps to strengthen my relationships with those friends because I can discover shared interests.

So SPYW is a great product and represents a very important milestone in search. But a lot of people aren’t happy about it. Luther Lowe, Yelp’s director of business outreach and government affairs, expressed a concern many share when he tweeted:

A quality [review] losing prominence in search for not being published on GOOG’s [Places]  is absurd.

Lowe’s tweet was retweeted by Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, who was a star witness in September’s hearings about Google and antitrust before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights.

Google faced that hearing because of antitrust concerns that the secret algorithms it uses to rank search results were manipulating those results to fit the interests of the company. In defending Google at that hearing, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told Congress that the algorithmic results are untainted. That is true. But it’s also not a meaningful statement, because no one sees algorithmic results.

Atop and alongside the algorithmic results, you’ll see special content that favors Google products. Queries for stock quotes, maps, products and others highlight this content.

Consider the following search result screen shot, for example.

Yelp, which is a top-ranked site for this result and has some of the best local content, gets a fairly standard treatment. Google gets nearly the entire right side of the screen, with a map and pictures.

Schmidt made the argument at the hearings that Google is delivering what consumers want. That’s a fair point — a consumer doing this search would likely want a map, hours of operations and pictures. (In this case, 4 of the 5 pictures that are used are actually from urbanspoon.com, but clicking on the thumbnails takes you to the Flour + Water Google Places page.)

Does Yelp just suck and not have pictures from flour + water? Nope. Pictures are one of Yelp’s greatest assets. For flour + water, Yelp has 232 pictures; that’s 231 more pictures than Google. But you wouldn’t know it from Google’s Web search results.

How do you tell other results from an algorithmic result as a consumer? They’re not labeled. Even experts can have trouble figuring it out. But consumers consider them to be algorithmic results. More accurately, consumers don’t care — they trust Google to be impartial and bring them the best of the Web.

But Google treats its own content with special presentation that other sites don’t get. It  blends in to its algorithmic results content from maps, news and social search. A result from Google Places can take the screen real estate of 6 or 7 algorithmic results.

If you happen to follow an account on Google+ and that person posts content that matches your search term, it will move up in the rankings for you. In the following example, I did a search for “Rick Santorum” and the eighth result is a story by search guru Danny Sullivan. It showed up there because I follow Danny on Google+.

As you can see, Google+ gets preferential treatment here. 7 of the 8 links in this result go to Google+, including the most prominent links. Only one of the links goes to the site that Danny shared. The entire block gets as much real estate as about four standard Google results. The display alone will significantly increase the likelihood of a click.

When I do that search while logged out, that same result doesn’t appear in the first 5 pages of results. That’s a significant disadvantage as many searchers don’t go past the first page.

This creates an incentive for a) people to create an account on Google+ and b) people to share articles on Google+.

These incentives are especially critical right now when Google+ is struggling to gain meaningful adoption. On its own merits, I would not currently recommend to my clients that they spend time on Google+. But because of the potential effect on Google Web search results, I think it now makes sense for many businesses.

As an author, I have long avoided meaningful use of Google+ because it didn’t solve a problem for me. (See my Bloomberg West debate with Robert Scoble about Google+.) But with the launch of SPYW, I’m reconsidering that because I want to be where my audience is — and that’s on Google search.

Google provides enhanced treatment for some links shared on Twitter, but this seems to be reduced now that Google is no longer licensing Twitter’s firehose.

In addition to the explicit incentives that Google creates, there are the implicit incentives created by Google’s black-box ranking algorithms. Legions of SEOs with no inside knowledge Make Shit Up. They advise clients how they can please Google’s algorithm Gods, often by making more use of other Google properties. (Which, of course, said SEOs can assist them with.)

The way Google packages its ad products also means that SPYW will likely let the company help itself to a bigger portion of available ad dollars.

Google bundles several discrete ad products together. In some cases, it is impossible for advertisers to opt out of certain properties that they might not want to buy.

In other cases, Google offers a wide range of other ad products that can be easily purchased with the primary Web search advertising buy. Advertisers can easily buy into the contextual ad network, mobile ads, etc. From an efficiency standpoint, this makes things much easier for advertisers. But the net effect is that Google can take more share of limited advertising dollars.

Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, wrote a great analysis of how Google’s practices affect advertisers. That was a topic that didn’t get much consideration in the Senate’s hearings.

So who wins and who loses with the launch of  SPYW?

The clear winner in SPYW is Google+. This level of integration illustrates a commitment to Google+ that many questioned with the failures of Google Buzz and Wave.

The biggest losers are Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor. Twitter and Facebook stand to lose if brands choose to move some of their efforts to Google+ to benefit from enhanced Web search rankings.

Facebook has presented a special challenge to Google. Because much of the content in Facebook is private, Google’s crawlers can’t access it. That’s an important loss of signal. While real people have been sharing quality content on Facebook, spammers have been gaming Google’s results on the Web. SPYW significantly dampens the effects of spammers and has the potential to force Facebook to open some of its content to crawlers.

Yelp, which recently filed to go public, and TripAdvisor, which was spun out of Expedia in December, are both heavily dependent on Google for Web traffic.

On the potential plus side, consumers stand to win if Google’s move finally forces Twitter to build a usable search product for tweets, something it has long neglected.

This post was adapted from a series on Google and antitrust published on Rocky Agrawal’s blog, reDesign.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

Twitter is not happy with Google‘s new social search features. So unhappy, in fact, that the company is calling it a “bad day for the Internet” and media overall.

“We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone,” the company said in a statement. “We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google introduced its new “personalized,” Google+-enhanced search today. Instead of providing regular Internet results such as photos, videos, news and shopping results that have been the norm for Google’s web search, now the company is pushing Google+ content to the first page of your search queries. A search for photos will push photos from your Google+ friends to the top of the results. Looking for a person? Their Google+ profile will show as a suggested result.

Larry Page, Google’s chief executive officer, recently blogged on the social network that Google had delivered the “+” and was now injecting more “Google.” Now it seems Google+ is starting to push a little of the “+” into the company’s other products.

Twitter, which once had related tweets show up in Google search results, though it does not anymore, is not happy with the change. Many would argue that the short length of tweets, 140 characters, isn’t enough content to act as a “result,” though Twitter adamantly disagrees.

“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results,” statement continued.

Perhaps it is because of its brevity that news is broken so frequently on the site, and can be valuable with the addition of multimedia such as video, photos, and links. Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, tweeted this was a “bad day for the internet” and having worked for Google said, “I can imagine the dissension at Google to search being warped this way.”

Google has not sat idly by, however. The company responded to Twitter on its official Google+ page. The statement reads, “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer, and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

Twitter blocked Google from being able to access its data feed of public tweets in July, causing Google to take its real-time search offline completely. The company blames this as one of the reasons why other social results do not show up in searches. One Google spokesperson told VentureBeat:

“For years now we’ve been working with our social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your friends and social connections, no matter what site that content is on. However, Google does not have access to crawl all the information on some sites, so it’s not possible for us to surface all that content. Google also doesn’t have access to the social graph information from some sites, so it’s not possible to help you find information from those people you’re connected to.”

Google has faced antitrust opposition for months now. In July, the company sent chairman Eric Schmidt to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary antitrust committee about claims that the company was not being fair in its web-based search and other products. Shortly before that, the company admitted to a probe by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Why target Google? Well, the company has obvious dominance over the search market and is gaining much popularity in the mobile phone industry. Having this kind of influence requires a level playing field for other companies, less Google become a monopoly.

Recently the company released a new flight search tool, which raised eyebrows among air travel aggregators such as Orbitz, Kayak and even newcomer Hipmunk. Google introduced the tool, which allows you to search for tickets without leaving the Google search website, in September and starting pushing the tool to the top of search results in December. With Google accounting for a good amount of traffic to other travel sites, taking the top search result spells antitrust issues.

Facebook declined to comment in an e-mail to VentureBeat.

via All Things D, Image via VGramatikov/Shutterstock

Well, it’s finally happened. Google web search has been Google-Plus-ified.

Today, Google is bringing some specific new features to Google web search, its flagship and most widely used product. In addition to the usual assortment of links, pictures, news items and shopping results you’d see in a typical Google search results page, logged-in Google+ users will now also find several kinds of Google+ content sprinkled in among the normal search results. There are even promoted Google+ profiles and pages — an attempt to compete with Facebook’s highly successful social ads, we’re betting.

We’ve been telling you this was coming for ages, so we hope you’re not too surprised. Eventually, Google+ will be part of everything Google does on the web and mobile.

Yesterday, VentureBeat spoke at length with Jack Menzel, Google’s web search product management director, about the newest changes.

“This isn’t the entire Internet, it’s your entire Internet,” he told us. “With Google+, we understand who people are, and we use that.”

This Google+-powered approach assumes certain ties between relevance and personal connections. Links shared by your G+ connections are given more weight and will show up in the first page of web search results with a person icon on the left.

You will also be able to see Google+ posts in search results based on keyword relevance. Basically, Google+ posts are seemingly indexed just like every other page on the web, but they’ll only show up in your search results if the poster is connected to you on Google+.

Photos posted to Google+ will show up in web and image search results — again, only to searchers who are connected to the original person who posted the photo in question.

Finally, you’ll also be able to search for specific people who have Google+ profiles using a Facebook-like people search tool.

The Google+ links, posts and pictures that will appear in your searches are from you, from your friends, and from persons of note (broadly speaking). Mostly, said Menzel, you’ll only see content from people you’re connected to.

For every piece of social content that shows up in a web search, you’ll be able to see who it’s from, with whom it’s shared and why it’s appearing. “Everything we show you, we label that very clearly and explain why that’s showing up,” said Menzel.

“Security, transparency and control are of paramount importance,” he said. “When we’re returning these personal results, it really is between you and Google … We’re using secure code.”

These social search integrations, which Google is calling “search plus your world,” can be toggled on and off by using the “person” and “world” icons in the top right corner of search results. It’s so easy it takes just one click to disable or enable the new features.

And of course, there are promoted Google+ accounts. On the right side of the results page, you’ll see featured profiles and pages, along with a link reading “Learn how you could appear here too.” While these promoted accounts are currently algorithmically determined, we’re seeing this real estate and approach to Google+ page promotion as eventual competition with Facebook’s highly successful social ads; as such, it might be the most important part of today’s announcement.

The business and financial dynamics between Google and Facebook have many points of conflict, but none is greater than the fact that Facebook has for some time been stealing Google’s ad revenue due to its ability to serve highly targeted ads based on social graph data. With Google+, Google is making a bid to acquire and build a social graph just as rich as Facebook’s — richer, in fact. So seeing Google+-related ads is one signal that Google is ready to start putting its social tools to work.

While we struggle to think of a scenario in which our friends might know more about any given topic than the Internet does, we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt for now. But Menzel said that the judicious addition of a smattering of social media can amplify without overwhelming.

“It usually isn’t the case where you’re making a binary decision of using only personal results or only general results,” he said. “When you’re looking for something new, it’s the mix of those results that’s the most powerful and the most useful.”

And, as Menzel told us, “The more information you have associated with your Google+ profile, the better it gets.”

Google+ results are coming today to web search, and although the company can’t talk timelines for future rollouts, we fully expect to see Google+ results in Google News, Google Maps, Google Shopping and other search properties soon.

“For this launch, we’re just talking about web search and image search,” said Menzel, “but I wouldn’t rule out improvements to those other products.”

If you, like your curmudgeonly correspondent here, bristle at the thought of yet another change to what was once a simple, beautiful product, remember that short months and years ago, image and shopping and news results were not included in the basic web search, either. Eventually, Google+ will be a ubiquitous part of the woodwork — just as Google has planned all along.

As we relayed to you lo these many months ago, Googlers see Google+ as “more than a social network or a collection of communication tools; it’s Google’s plan to bring social information into everything you do on the web, from shopping to search to email and beyond,” in the words of a team member working on building and marketing Google+.

In the end, Google+ is the new mode of Google usage. It’s a unifying umbrella for a diverse network of web and mobile apps. It’s the company’s plan for a stable financial future. Google+ is, in fact, not a mere social network.

Microsoft’s anticipated social network So.cl has arrived, but don’t expect it to be the Google+ or Facebook challenger it was widely rumored to be — at least not yet.

So.cl, pronounced social, is being billed as a site for student collaboration and information gathering. For now, Microsoft is calling it just an “experimental research project” and only making it available to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse University and New York University.

So.cl is “designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information from both inside and outside the classroom — in a sense, transforming the web and social networks into the new classroom,” Microsoft said in a blog post on the launch of the site.

That’s all fine and dandy, but what’s it do? Well, simply put, it’s a social search site. The site features a search experience, powered by Bing, that displays search result data but also encourages students to share links as they search. Students can also build their own communities around subject matters or topics of interest.

So.cl’s most unique feature, however, is the rich post, which is like a meta-status update and can include multiple links and images that are assembled together in a visual montage. Rich posts (pictured below), just like status updates, can be commented on, but they can also be tagged and embedded elsewhere on the web.

And then there’s “video party” (pictured above), a group video-sharing feature that also ties in with the site’s search experience. The So.cl user can start a video party to search and collect a list of YouTube videos, and then view those videos together with friends. Video parties are saved as collections and users can view each others’ collections.

So what we have here is a slight twist on the social network that caters to students who are already social media-obsessed. Microsoft is certainly playing up the student angle, but that strikes me as a temporary and manufactured hook to get people to see So.cl as something other than a generic social network.

So.cl is a product of Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs.

That may seem a bit underwhelming after all the rumors about a rival social network, but this is actually a big deal for Google. Like the company’s executives have been saying for a while, +1 isn’t a standalone site. Instead, it adds a social layer to Google’s two key products — Google search and AdWords. It’s also an answer to the social search partnership that Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing announced last fall.

Google already has a social search feature, which allows users to see comments and annotation made by their friends in their search results. It upgraded the feature last month, making it more prominent and bringing in comments from other social networking like Twitter, leading me to speculate that Google’s big social launch was almost ready.

+1 takes the social search idea step further. Now, users should see a “+1″ button next to every search result in Google. When they hit that button, they’re recommending that result, and that recommendation will show up in their friends’ search results. Here’s how Google explains the social mechanics:

So how do we know which +1’s to show you? Like social search, we use many signals to identify the most useful recommendations, including things like the people you are already connected to through Google (your chat buddies and contacts, for example). Soon we may also incorporate other signals, such as your connections on sites like Twitter, to ensure your recommendations are as relevant as possible.

Users can also hit “+1″ to recommend ads they like, which should make Google’s advertising programs more powerful — if a friend has recommended an ad, users are much more likely to click on it.

This doesn’t look like a direct threat to Facebook, but besides being a response to Bing’s social search partnership, it also poses a challenge to Facebook’s goal of expanding its reach beyond the site itself using tools such as the Like button and other social plugins. In fact, Google told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan that it’s working to make a +1 button available to website publishers, another area where the Like button has made inroads. And +1 should increase the number of people who fill out their Google Profiles, since you need a profile to make and see recommendations.

So is this the limit of Google’s social ambitions? Sullivan speculates that it could lay the groundwork for a bigger social push in the future. When he asked Google, he was told:

As we’ve already been saying, we’re committed to making the web more people-centric, and we’ve been gradually giving people new ways to share things and interact within our products. This is just another example of how we’re centering our products around the millions of people who use them every day.

Our focus is on improving our search results — to ensure we get the most relevant results to our users as quickly as possible. Relationships and recommendations are one way to help us achieve that goal — and this is what today’s announcement is all about.

Enter HeyStaks, a new startup launching today which wants to make search more efficient by making it social. HeyStaks revolves around the notion of a Stak, which synthesizes the best shared search results of a group of users on a particular subject.

Granted, social search is already a crowded field, with a host of startups trying to solve the problem. And Google itself has said it will be putting a “social layer” on its products to combat the rise of Facebook, though it’s not yet clear what that will look like.

But if you look at the amount of searching that gets done, it seems reasonable that a startup like HeyStaks might slice off a piece of the market. Search is still a time-consuming and often frustrating business, especially if you are searching for information on a more esoteric or specialized subject. According to search engine marketing firm iProspect, a typical knowledge worker spends 16 hours a month searching for information and 50 percent of all those searches fail. HeyStaks’ founders claim that 1 in 4 searches are repeats of your own past queries and 2 out of 3 of searches have already been executed by someone else in your social network.

In HeyStaks, each user has a default Stak of their own searches and can start or join other Staks. A Stak might cover startup advice or travel in San Francisco. As a user, you choose your preferred Staks and who to collaborate with to get better search results. You might have one friend who has great insight into the design scene but knows nothing about high-tech startups.

HeyStaks provides a browser plugin (currently Firefox only) and a mobile application. Once you have installed the plugin, relevant HeyStaks community search results start appearing in your Google, Yahoo and Bing search results.

The results to the left are from a search for “hard rock reviews”. The searcher is a mountain biker who is looking for reviews of Hard Rock mountain biking gear. Google thinks that the user is looking for the Hard Rock hotel or hard rock music, so its default results are not relevant. Since this user is a member of a mountain biking Stak, HeyStaks anticipates that the user is more likely to be looking for mountain biking results. So it makes suggestions accordingly.

HeyStaks is based on technology developed by a group of researchers in search, data mining and personalization. The company’s CTO is Barry Smyth, a prominent expert in personalization whose previous startup, ChangingWorlds, was sold to Amdocs for $60 million. Smyth told me that around the time Google launched there was a rival, and now now long-forgotten, search engine called DirectHit which used page popularity (the number of times a page has been selected by searchers) to rank pages. Like Google, it had the potential to deliver demonstrably better search results than existing search engines but it turned out to be easier to “game” and so Google won out.

Intrigued by this idea, Smyth’s research group embarked on various research projects to improve upon a simple, popularity-based approach to result-ranking. The group, including researchers Maurice Coyle and Peter Briggs, developed and patented a number of core technologies in this area.

The HeyStaks social ranking and relevance engine takes 10 different types of user behavior into consideration. These include behaviors like how often a user selects a page and whether they tag it, share it or post it on their social networks. Results to date suggest that HeyStaks recommendations can be up to 50 percent more relevant that the vanilla search engine results.

HeyStaks CEO, Jonathon Dillon, was previously a VP at Yahoo. He says Yahoo tried to do something similar with social search after the acquisition of Delicious 5 years ago but failed because social graphs were still too immature.

The success of HeyStaks depends on how willing users are to share their search results. The founders say, that in the private beta group of 500 users, 70 percent of users shared 70 percent of Staks with 3-4 people. A typical beta user got community recommendations for about 1 in 4 searches.

Anything that improves search results is relevant to advertisers. HeyStaks’ business model will, at least partly, be based on advertising, but since the advertising model is not yet launched, the company is unwilling to discuss it in detail. Another obvious application is knowledge sharing on company intranets.

HeyStaks was founded in 2008, has 9 employees and is based in Dublin and San Francisco. The company has seed funding of $1.4 million.

Back in October, Bing and Facebook unveiled a feature where Bing highlights search results that are endorsed by your Facebook friends (endorsements taking the form of Facebook Likes). So if you’re signed into Facebook and you perform a search for steakhouses on Bing, then if one of your Facebook friends has said they “like” a certain steakhouse, it will show up in a special section of the results called “liked by your Facebook friends”.

Today, the Bing team said it’s moving that social information out of a specialized box and into the regular algorithmic search results. For example, group program manager Paul Yiu showed search results for “baby won’t stop crying”. That’s a case where you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time reading multiple websites with lengthy instructions. Yiu saw in the Bing results that one of his friends had hit the Facebook Like button on a related article, so he clicked on that article first and found a handy list of tips about what to do when, yes, your baby won’t stop crying.

Satya Nadella, senior vice president at Microsoft’s online services division, acknowledged that even with today’s addition, Bing’s social features only affect a small percentage of search results. (One thing that increases usage is the fact that users don’t have to sign in to Bing — one out of five Bing visitors are already logged into Facebook, so they automatically get social results.) Still, Nadella said that when social data does improve results, “It’s magical to see some of the queries change.”

“Even if a small percentage [of searches] have this moment, it’s a big change,” he added. “And then you come to expect it, and it causes you to prefer one search engine over the other.”

Why is it so “magical”? On a theoretical level, Nadella said the Web is now divided into the “Web of pages” (which is the traditional Web) and the “Web of people” (the social connections on a site like Facebook). With its social search, Bing tries to connect these two areas.

It seems like a problem for Google is that so much of Facebook’s data is hidden from search engines. As Google’s Marissa Mayer (who previously led the company’s search experience but recently switched to the location team) said at the TechCrunch50 conference last month, “There is a lot of content that is being locked in.” To make matters worse (again, from Google’s perspective), Facebook recently announced a deal to use social data to improve the results in Microsoft’s competing Bing search engine.

One of the analysts on today’s conference call about Google’s third-quarter earnings asked whether it will be a problem if Facebook’s data continues to be largely hidden from Google. Nikesh Arora, president of global sales and business development, said that’s not a big concern, because “the Web continues to grow at such a blazing pace” that any site that keeps its data private will be “completely swamped by the Internet.”

However, chief executive Eric Schmidt (pictured) then added that Google is “always concerned” about sites that aren’t accessible via search. From both a “religious and business perspective,” Google believes that websites shouldn’t wall themselves off, he said.

Earlier in the call, Schmidt also answered a question about how Google is able to index real-time and social data. He declined to offer any details but said real-time and social data is included in the “complex signals” that Google uses in its rankings, and that Google is developing new ways for users to “give us that sort of information” — presumably these are the social features that Google has been hinting at.

The two companies were already worked together, with Bing providing search results in Facebook and using public Facebook data to create a “social” area within Bing. Today’s announcement goes further by personalizing results in regular Bing searches.

Microsoft and Facebook team members said there are a number of ways that Bing can use Facebook data to personalize your results, with two initial features going live over the next few days. First, Bing will be able to highlight search results that have been “liked” by your friends. For example, if you search for a steakhouse in San Francisco, you’ll get the regular Bing results, but if your Facebook friends have said they “like” a specific steakhouse in San Francisco, that will show up as well. Bing will even tell you which friends recommended the restaurant. Bing can also use Facebook data to improve the results when you search for a name, so that a Facebook friend is more likely to turn up in the results than a random person with the same name.

As with anything involving Facebook, especially anything that involves Facebook working with outside websites, there are privacy concerns. Both companies emphasized that Bing will only show “likes” that Facebook users have chosen to share publicly. Bing, meanwhile, won’t share any of your search information with Facebook and will give searchers an opportunity to opt-out.

Still, at the Microsoft press conference, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid wondered if this might just feel creepy. For example, it could be uncomfortable if you’re searching for a disease and you suddenly see that your friend has recommended an article about that disease.

“I don’t think that would be creepy at all,” said Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Again, your friend chose to share that article with the public, and the fact that you searched for that disease won’t be shared with your friends.

As for why Facebook is working with Microsoft and not Google on this kind of integration, Zuckerberg said it’s because Bing is in a better position to innovate.

You can read more details on the Bing and Facebook blogs.

Q&A services or “social search” has been a hot topic of late because algorithmic search technologies can only go so far in answering people’s questions. For one thing, not all content is in digital format.  Secondly, humans are still better at answering questions such as “What’s the fastest route to take from San Francisco to Campbell at 4pm today?”

Though Ask.com, chose to develop its Q&A service internally, Google decided to shop for an existing service with talented (ex-Google) engineers. In February, the search behemoth acquired social search engine Aardvark. Also, Facebook is rumored to be readying its own Q&A service, while the company’s former CTO recently launched a similar service named Quora, which already boasts an $86 million valuation.

Nonetheless, integrating its own social search functionality into Ask.com would seem to be a smart move. As behemoths such as Google and Facebook enter the social search space, doing nothing does not seem like a valid response. If the new Ask.com service performs well for the site’s 87 million monthly visitors, parent company, IAC, could possibly convince some of its critics of its value (niche or otherwise) within its dwindling share of the search engine market.

According to the company, a new user interface and proprietary search categorization to route questions and solicit high-quality answers are key features of the new service. The new functionality will be initially available in beta by invitation only.

That means the company, which is trying to brand itself as an “information network” rather than a social network, is handling 24 billion queries a month. The last time the company reported daily search volumes was back in April at its inaugural developer conference, Chirp, when it said it was supporting 600 million queries a day.

It’s hard to compare Twitter’s monthly query volume to that of Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, since worldwide figures for their traffic are fairly old. Comscore reported that Bing was supporting 4.1 billion monthly queries worldwide while Yahoo was handling 9.4 billion in December.

Daily volumes also vary widely. The company, at times, was handling up to 750 million queries per day back in April, its then director of search Doug Cook told SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan.

Growing search volume should help underpin the company’s advertising strategy, which depends on sponsored tweets appearing atop its results.

Google started mixing in content shared on Buzz into social search today. For people with friends who are avid users of Buzz, the move should fill out their personalized search results, which have been pretty spartan for the last half-year. Social search has had little more than Google Blogger, Picasa and Reader to grab content from.

First unveiled last fall, social search augments Google results with links shared or published by friends. For example, if your friend shared an interesting link about the financial crisis in Europe, that might show up the next time you search for information on the economic fallout in the region. Or if you’re looking for the best fried rice recipe, ones from your friends might appear at the bottom of the page. Only publicly shared content will show up in results.

Content comes from your “social circle,” or friends you’ve made through a Google profile, people you Gchat with often or people you’ve followed on Reader or Buzz. More importantly, if a user has linked their account with another service like Twitter, Google will siphon in contacts followed on the microblogging service. Google needs to expand the number of relationships it’s explicitly allowed to track in order to catch up with Facebook, where the average user has 130 friends.

The boost comes at a sensitive time for Google. It’s clear that personalized search, which Google has been dabbling with for at least three years, is the future. An interesting question is whether Google, the undisputed king of search, can be the better provider of that experience five years down the line, or whether another company — namely Facebook — will.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will start filtering popular content shared on Facebook into its real-time search engine.

The move has been a long time coming. Microsoft initially signed a deal with Facebook last fall to filter its status updates into search. Facebook then went ahead during the f8 developer conference in April and opened up its feed of publicly shared content and “likes” to other third-party search engines like OneRiot.

Bing, in particular, has found an elegant workaround on the thorny issue of privacy. It only shows popular links in aggregate form and doesn’t reveal the name or photos of who shared the content. (It will sometimes show how many people shared the link, though.)

With content feeding in from Twitter and Facebook, Bing will redesign its search engine’s front page to incorporate trending topics and explanations. On top of publicly shared content, Bing will also show updates from Facebook fan pages, which Google has been doing with its real-time search results since February even though it got a much narrower deal than Microsoft for access to Facebook’s real-time feed of data.

The demo video below is from TechFlash, which also has a take on today’s launch here:

As seen in the results of a search for Spock, OneRiot returns not only the most popular one to three pages linked that match a given keyword, it also displays the names and avatars of, at this moment, the 606 social network members who linked. Click the “expand” link beneath a result to see who shared it. The results page updates every five to six seconds, continuing a trend begun by FriendFeed.

OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says the company crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in under a minute. Searches are filtered for spam. Duplicate links from URL shortening sites like Bit.ly and Tinyurl are reconciled.

OneRiot’s relevance algorithm has 26 parameters by which it determines a link’s importance. Most important is the sheer number of links to a URL, and the “velocity” — how fast the number of links to a URL has climbed within the past two minutes. If you specify a domain name, for example “venturebeat.com” instead of “venturebeat,” OneRiot will return the hot links from that domain. Try it with CNN.com.

Results in our tests were mixed. For a search of VentureBeat content linked from Twitter, Scoopler found far more stories. But OneRiot’s results for “Spock” zeroed in on Monday’s hot online gossip much more clearly: In the new Star Trek movie, actor Zachary Quinto had his fingers glued together to perform the traditional Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.

In an interview, Peggs said he thinks Google misses the sweet spot of social network search by serving a Web index of everything on the Internet and a News search of serious journalism outlets.

“Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now,” Peggs wrote in a self-authored press release. “Traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially-relevant results. That’s the hole –- and it’s a big one –- that OneRiot is filling.”

OneRiot was founder by Robert Reich and Peter Newcomb in 2006 and formally launched last November. The company’s series A funding of $5.3 million came from Spark Capital and Appian Ventures. Last May, OneRiot closed a B round with another $15 million. The company currently counts 28 employees.

It’s one of the best web applications I’ve seen during my year with VentureBeat.

The simplest explanation is Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — real-time, rapid fire responses, by actual human beings, to intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) questions. It helps you find answers that are too complicated, even for Google’s search algorithms.

This is very different than the brouhaha of expectations crafted for search engines Cuil and Powerset. Why? Cuil wants to index more pages with better and more relevant results, and Powerset (which was purchased by Microsoft for more than $100 million) attempted to improve results with its natural language processing. Aardvark, on the other hand, takes the cake because it doesn’t try to use artificial intelligence to match a question with an answer. Instead, it uses its advanced algorithms to match the question with a number of people who can answer the question.

Essentially, when a user sends a question to Aardvark (via email or instant message), the service analyzes the question and categorizes it, then distributes the question to those who have self-appointed domain knowledge in that category, who can then respond while retaining some level of anonymity.

Other users who receive the question can either answer it directly, pass the question on, or even request to receive all answers. Where Aardvark gets social is that for every user who answers your questions (or vice versa), it creates a social connection and adds that person to your graph. Also, you can specify that you trust certain friends for certain categories.

For example, I might say that I trust VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon for information on “Oregon” or “Facebook” or “Politics.” That way, when I send a question to Aardvark, it will first check against my existing social graph to see if one of my friends/connections is an expert in the relevant category. I can also self-appoint myself in categories, perhaps “college football” or “foreign languages” or “music technology,” and Aardvark will send me questions about those categories, in addition to my previously listed interests that I filled in upon signing up. The initial interests can be imported directly from your Facebook profile, while the categories you’d like to answer are up to the user.

In the example below, you can see that I sent an email to Aardvark about finding housing in Hollywood, Calif. Aardvark then responded with an automated note to let me know it has received the question.

Later, I received a response from Ethan, a 28-year-old male from LA, with a suggestion on location and pricing.

The second screenshot is a snippet of my profile at the aardvark.im web page. I can of course see and edit my personal profile, but also see a history of the questions I’ve asked and the answers I received. I can see that I am connected with Ethan, who invited me to the Aardvark service. Ethan’s already answered questions about concerts in Los Angeles, and the profile reads that he knows a lot about music sites and indie music. I trust Ethan for questions on Los Angeles and the music business.

Why is this so important?

First, let’s analyze how some people use web darling Twitter.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson writes on his blog:

And of course, Twitter is huge when you are on the road. I got advice on coffee in Paddington Station, where to get a U.K. blackberry charger, and a host of other suggestions on life in Paris via friends and followers on Twitter on this trip.

Fred has more than 7,000 users on Twitter, I have barely 200 followers — but with Aardvark it not only evens the playing field, but opens the possibility of much, much more because of the network effect: The more users on Aardvark (there are currently more than 1,500 testing the beta), the more knowledge is available, and the faster the response.

Aardvark brings that power to the masses, and it leverages the collective intelligence (like Yahoo Answers) in real-time (like Twitter) without restricting you to just your followers.

And you don’t have to worry about spammers.

Despite being quite powerful, the service still has its faults (after all, it is in beta testing). You can’t search and view other users’ questions/answers on Aardvark –but this is something that should be available when the site is public. Also, while I like the idea of social connections, I could easily recognize other users on the platform just by first name, last initial and location. Ivan K. from Boston, is Ivan Kirigin, one of the founders of TipJoy (I e-mailed back to verify). As a safeguard for privacy, I might not want every question I ask tied to my account/user name.

I asked Rob Spiro, part of Mechanical Zoo’s research team, about this issue, and he replied:

You’ll see more about the people you’re interacting with, you’ll see how you’re connected socially. The routing algorithm will start favoring friends-of-friends, which is a very cool experience. It may be a strange transition for our existing users, but ultimately we’re confident it will lead to better, faster answers with more credibility.

You make a great point that as we get more open, we need to accommodate the questions that you don’t want tied to your identity. We’ll build features to support those questions — specifically the ability to ask on someone else’s behalf, and potentially the ability to ask anonymously.

It might make sense to add a delicious-like “do not share” feature that will automatically make any question asked (or answer given) anonymous and not tied to a user’s account.

Finally, the service’s biggest challenge is how to get user adoption. Creating incentives for people to provide information — to give, and not just take — is something that may or may not be prohibitively expensive, depending on how smart the company is in generating good will among its community. Will there be enough fanatical users of the service to answer everyone’s questions for free?

Overall, I think this is a phenomenal service, and is one of the best technologies/applications I’ve seen in a long, long time. There’s a good reason why Marissa Mayer of Google praised social search — it’s one of the natural evolutions of search. Aardvark.im is much more effective than Google’s search in a plethora of situations.

And it will most likely have the same initial business model — search-based text ads.