ReadWriteWeb

Google.com is still one of the cleanest, calmest sites on the Web. At least, it is before you start typing. At this point, you don't even have to hit enter before the page starts filling up with noise. Google has been hard at work on its core product this year. The changes have affected search quality in uneven ways.

This year, Google's Panda updates seemed careful and prudent, punishing sites who game the system for better page rank. This was also the year of social SEO, in which the +1 button began to affect search results. Google is also moving away from historical results and toward real-time search. Is Google still as good as it used to be at finding what we're looking for?

YouTube reflected on its banner year today, announcing that it served over 1 trillion playbacks in 2011. "That's about 140 views for every person on the earth," YouTube's Rewind blog post says. YouTube saw record traffic and mobile growth this year. It gets 3 billion views per day, and video uploads have doubled since last year.

Looking at the trends, it's clear YouTube viewers are looking for quick entertainment, music and humor. The report excluded content from major music labels, and it's still full of songs. The most viewed video was "Friday" by Rebecca Black, of course. For the year of a trillion views, the success of this weird, bad video is reassuringly YouTube-like. But YouTube began some major changes and unprecedented deals this year. What will YouTube's next Rewind be like?

Smart devices have fundamentally changed how people interact with the world. Users now have information on tap, everywhere at any time. That has correlated into a shift in how consumers react with brands online, in retail stores, what products to buy and when to buy them. When consumers' brand interaction change, it is a sign that advertising is going to change as well. According to Google, that shift has started to take place.

Google posted five trends to watch in mobile advertising that evolved in 2011 and will continue in the next couple of years. Google is targeting its mobile ads solution not only at developers and app publishers but also towards its traditional market of brands and retailers. The growth of mobile ads will be important in how publishers monetize mobile endeavors. How will it evolve?

In what sounds like its last announcement before the holidays, Google+ has shipped one of its best updates yet. It addresses the noisy the stream with a slider at the top of every circle, allowing users to adjust the volume of that circle within their overall stream. It also adds more information to the notifications menu and makes new events easier to understand.

In a big update for organizations, Google+ Pages can now have up to 50 administrators. Notifications for pages have been rearranged to support multiple managers. Finally, the lightbox for Google+ Photos has been redesigned, improving comments and tagging while keeping the image as the center of attention.

Earlier this week on his personal blog, one of Google's product management directors, Hunter Walk, posted a very interesting sampling of responses from technology journalists about the broad question of whether they are receiving the level of journalism from our business that they deserve. I found it very interesting that a product manager from any company was able to reveal at least as much, if not more, about the folks who usually interview him than they reveal about his company.

The emerging theme from the journalists' responses was distinct exasperation and frustration with the level of interest that you, their reader, have demonstrated in their product. It's getting "harder... to convince people to read these stories" on broader subjects like piracy, said one. Another remarked, "I wish more people cared about" the very topic on which his publication was founded (you'll know the one I mean), and which you would think his livelihood is based. And a third went so far as to blame readers for being interested in the wrong things, saying, "I am dismayed every day by the crap that people seem to find worthy of page views."

As the go-to place for finding anything on the Web, Google has unique insight into the spirit of the times. The trending Google searches of the year are a glimpse into what's on our minds. For the past 10 years, it has published a year-end Zeitgeist report on the major search trends around the world. Zeitgeist 2011 was released today.

It was a weird year. Perhaps it's not surprising that, of all the grim and tumultuous events that transpired this year, the top Google searches were mostly frivolous. The number one trending search was Rebecca Black. But this year's Zeitgeist site is dynamic, detailed and easy to explore. Drilling down by region reveals some timely insights into what interested the wired world in 2011.

Gmail has updated its fraught iOS app with some new features. It now supports custom signatures for mobile messages and a vacation responder. It also improves the display of nested labels. For users of Apple's newest iOS 5 operating system, the push notification sound has changed to make it distinct from other notifications.

The update also adds an unexpected feature that allows users to scribble with colors on a canvas and attach it to a message. It's a basic paint application that takes advantage of the touch screen, rethinking the way mobile email apps work. Unfortunately, some of the most requested features are still in development. Maybe the ability to scribble will tide users over...

Google just announced a range of updates to Google+ video hangouts, declaring its intention to move social networking "beyond the status update." Any conversation on Google+ can now "go live," with a "Hangout" button underneath every post. Clicking 'Hangout' starts a video chat with everyone involved in the thread. This feature will work through Google+ Messenger in upcoming versions of the native Android and iPhone apps.

The On Air hangouts that have allowed public figures like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to broadcast live to the world are becoming available to more celebrities and G+ users with large followings, and it's becoming a self-service feature, instead of one managed by Google. It's also being integrated into YouTube, so a recorded version gets uploaded to the broadcaster's YouTube account.

Google announced a major redesign of Google Map Maker today. This is the tool that allows anyone to propose edits to the live Google map, so that locals can offer more detail than Google's own teams can provide. The new tools offer simple ways to add and edit places, roads and paths, as well as reviewing the edits of others.

That peer review element is key to Google Maps' new direction. In September, Google rearranged the Map Maker review process, deputizing regional expert reviewers to expand its capacity to handle crowd-sourced edits. Today's new tools take that a step further, allowing anyone to review proposed edits before they're incorporated into the live map.

This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? In a short video today on Google's Webmaster Central Channel, Cutts answers a question about SEO practices and whether "poor" sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google.