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Google News now highlights +1'd articles from people in your Google+ circles in its Spotlight section. Friends' faces and Google+ profiles are displayed next to the link, just like in Google's social search results. Earlier this month, Google News added the same feature for authors, showing Google+ info under their headlines.

While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.

Google revealed 10 recent changes to its search algorithm today, including one to favor "fresher" results over older content in certain situations. Detection of "official" sites or pages has also improved. Other updates improve search snippets and page titles, as well as info retrieval across languages, among other tweaks.

In addition to the algorithm itself, Google has changed features of the search interface recently. It eliminated the "Timeline" view of results to organize them by date range, and it has integrated Google+ social content in a variety of ways.

As Google works to emphasize up-to-the-minute search results, it has also quietly killed off a search feature that helped users search for content from the past. As users in the Google search help forum have noticed, the Timeline feature for Web search has disappeared. It helped filter search results for specific timeframes.

Timeline view is still available in Google News, but it only searches certain archived publications instead of all Web results. Google community managers have suggested the normal date range filter as an alternative, but this isn't a browsable feature like Timeline was. Just as it has done with Google Reader in recent weeks, Google has killed off a feature used by a small but dedicated set of its users.

Searchmetrics has measured the impact of last week's "freshness" updates to Google's search ranking algorithm, which affected around 35% of all searches. By measuring SEO visibility, Searchmetrics found that a clear category of sites gained prominence as a result of the update, while the few sites that lost are all over the map.

Sites that benefited from the update tend to be content sites and brand sites with frequent updates. Many are news sites, but others are travel sites or other consumer sites. The sites that lost in this update are more of a grab bag. Many of them are government websites or less time-sensitive news organizations.

Google announced a big change to its search ranking algorithm today that affected around 35% of searches. It now makes an effort to determine when a query should return more up-to-date, "fresher" search results, before more established but older links. For example, if you search for "olympics," you're likely to be looking for information about the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics, rather than older or more general information. Google search is now fine-tuned to make that assumption.

With Google+ indexed in Web search and providing real-time search data, Google now has strong signals for timeliness and relevance. By tweaking search algorithms on one side and gathering social data on the other, Google is working towards a clearer of picture of what's happening on the Web this instant.

SocketStream is an open source real-time web framework for Node.js sponsored by AOL. It's in its early stages now, and isn't production ready but is usable. It's built on Socket.io, Redis and JQuery and supports CoffeeScript.

Last fall, Twitter announced a partnership with Gnip, making the latter company the only commercial provider of the Twitter activity stream. And although the "firehose" metaphor has been beaten to death, says Gnip CEO Jud Valeski, it still holds true.

Valeski spoke today at Gluecon about the challenges of handling the firehose - what it means to process high volume, real-time data streams and to be able to do so "in a consistent and predictable manner."

Since I'm on an Erlang kick recently, I thought I'd share with you Zotonic, an open source content management system built with Erlang and PostgreSQL. It's not a new project, it's been around for a couple years now. It's up to release 0.6.0. Its admin UI looks a lot like WordPress, but it claims to be 10 times faster than PHP-based CMSes.

When the team at Wufoo sent out a mass email announcing their company's acquisition by SurveyMonkey earlier today, they were able to watch the campaign's results in real-time. Each time somebody opened, clicked, forwarded or shared the email, a pin landed on the map displaying their name, photo and city.

This rather neat visualization was made possible by Worldview, a feature recently launched by email marketing provider Campaign Monitor.

Ever since Google launched its instantaneous search product last fall, I've noticed something - everywhere I go on the Web, I enter search terms and and pause for a second, only to remember that not everything has yet gone instant.

Today, Yahoo has announced that it too has gone instant, but with a slight twist on Google's solution to providing an ever faster real-time Web. Yahoo says it will offer "answers, not links".