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It's often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company's categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey - Mark and Ev are right behind you.

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

We've just heard from our friends at Google that their mobile app is now available in the App Store for iPhone users everywhere.

In the new version of Google Mobile, everyone's favorite search company has redesigned their results display to show more results at one time. Also, users will be able to open web pages from search results from inside the app. Other new features are pretty impressive, too.

According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog, the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post.

Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Smartphone users just got an early holiday treat from Google.

Now, when searching for movies on their iPhones or Palm WebOS- or Android-powered devices, users can get not only theatres, showtimes, and films; they can also get trailers, ratings, and proximity-based information. This way, you can get in the car and peal out of the driveway before conducting a desktop search for movies, thus saving yourself another excruciating 5 minutes of "holiday cheer" with the family.

Having just launched a new real-time mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot only weeks ago, mobile search company Taptu is now expanding their revamped service to the Android platform. Today, they're launching a new application designed specifically for Android phones running version 1.5 and above. Like their brand-new mobile website, Taptu for Android includes real-time search results thanks to OneRiot integration. It also offers a touchscreen interface for viewing the results without having to pinch, resize, or refocus the screen.

With Google's Social Search experiment, Bing's integration with Twitter and Yahoo!'s partnership with One Riot, social search clearly has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how?

I've written previously about how social search won't replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank can be used to deliver good results, and why the concept of social search is a return to a familiar state rather than something to fear. Today, I'll get more specific about the three flavors of social search that will improve user search experiences.

Specialized mobile search engine Taptu and real-time search service OneRiot have teamed up to launch a new real-time search engine for mobile. With the touch-friendly interface provided by Taptu, you can now perform searches from your mobile phone and receive real-time results from sites like Twitter and Digg. In addition, you can browse through the trending topics to see what recent events are currently being buzzed about.

Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public.

This is a strange story, but no one said the path to the future wouldn't itself be strange. So consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

Halloween's barely over, but it's already the most wonderful time of the year! Brace yourselves for the onslaught of holiday-themed money-grubbing, folks.

The tech sector is subjected to the same indignities, beginning with a new enterprise search product from our friends at Google, who insist that users will stay on your pathetic website for about eight seconds unless they find exactly what they're looking for. And how ever shall they find it? Google Commerce Search, of course!

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

Back in April, Google launched a new search feature in Labs that allowed users to find similar images.

Initially rolled out for select images only, the capability is now being rolled out for what seems to be the majority of images in Google image search. This is particularly useful when search terms include homonyms, we think; and we applaud Google for removing a major pain point in our searches for pics of Tesla the band as opposed to Tesla the scientist or Tesla the automotive brand.

Is today's news of major search engines' integration of Twitter posts in search results the herald of a mass extinction or a mass acquisition?

According to tonight's conversations with key players in the space, the day's events and announcements could spell either or both. Every real-time search engine we spoke to has expressed every intention of weathering the storm on their current strategies, all of which center on providing an excellent UX though excellent product development. And all see the day's events as a validation of years of concentrated effort. But who will prevail, and who will profit?

A group of UCLA researchers has determined that for middle-aged and older folks, using the Internet, particularly search, causes enhanced neural stimulation leading to better reasoning and decision-making.

At a recent presentation at the Neuroscience 2009 meeting in Chicago, the scientists stated, "The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults." Defying folk wisdom regarding old dogs and new tricks, the research was conducted on Internet users aged 55 to 78, about half of whom rarely used the Internet.

Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.

Facebook is opening up to a search engine - that's very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it's a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly - once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This 'aint your big sister's Facebook anymore.

Microsoft has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that its search engine Bing now includes Twitter search results. Facebook messages posted by people with public profiles will roll out next, at a date to be determined.

Twitter can bring a new level of up-to-the-minute information to web search, but can Bing add value to Twitter search? We asked three User Experience experts for their opinions about what Bing would need to do in order to succeed in this integration from a UX perspective. They agreed that there was exciting potential here but that the implementation was rudimentary.

At our ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View last week, we came across Stinky Teddy, a new real-time meta-search engine developed by David Hardtke. Before starting this project, Hradtke worked as a physicist at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. Hardtke named his new project after his daughter's "trusted (and abused) stuffed bear." Stinky Teddy, which Hardtke describes as "real-time gossip powered metasearch," combines search results from Bing, Yahoo, VideoSurf, Twitter and Collecta and reshuffles the search results to focus on topics that are trending right now.

Back in May, when Google launched a spiffy new suite of search options at their Searchology event, users got a gambit of new tools for exploring different kinds of content posted within different time ranges.

Today, Google has announced that the same options are coming to mobile search. Now, mobile users will have the same options on-the-go as they do when using Google search from their personal computer.

A new feature introduced today by Google lets users quickly preview forum discussions within search results.

The new feature will apply to sites that have a large number of relevant posts for a user's search query. Users will see the topic of the thread, the number of posts, and the date the thread was posted.