ReadWriteWeb

Google shipped a major redesign of its Google Search app today with a faster and more tablet-friendly interface for the iPad version. The launch page is now a spare, simple descendent of the iconic Google.com homepage for the post-PC era.

The search bar is front and center, collapsing to a top menu bar instantly when you put in your query. You can also access search history, Google Web apps, voice search and "Goggles" - image search using the iPad's camera - right underneath. The new Gmail app for iOS may be a dud, but this update to an already-great Google Search app makes it the best Google iOS app by a longshot.

Google has been making lots of tweaks to its search lately. Search is why we all came to Google in the first place, but these days it's taking the product we knew and loved in a different direction. It's changing the way queries work, turning "+" into a social search instead of an "and," and it's taking away chronological features in favor of what's hot right now.

In response to user feedback about the changes, Google gave us a new feature this week called "verbatim search." In its blog post, the Google search team warns that verbatim mode will take away all kinds of helpful things they've built for us. But users wanted a way to search for exactly what they want, and Google has built it. Here's what it does and how to use it.

PostPost, a powerful, noise-reducing search tool for Twitter, has pushed out some updates that make it even more useful. When we first covered PostPost in April, we were struck by how easy it made sifting through one's Twitter timeline. To do that, it indexes your last 3,200 tweets and then narrows your stream down to the most important 200 users and indexes the last 800 tweets posted by each of them.

Since then, PostPost has been updated to handle searches far more effectively. First, it switched its default search operator from OR to AND, which improves the results for queries containing multiple words. It also now uses a link: operator to let you search for links to specific sites or pages. Searches for multimedia content now return more specific results as well. Instead of searching broadly for videos or photos, you can drill down to just YouTube or just Instagram.

Trapit, a personalized tool for discovering Web articles, opens to the public today. Trapit crawls roughly 100,000 sites, adding more sources every week, to provide users with the most relevant content from deep within the Web, not just the popular or SEO-spammy results. It's built on the same AI technology as Apple's Siri, which means it learns what interests you and gives you better suggestions over time.

You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

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.

I first saw a startup called Apture demonstrated in an off-the-record session at O'Reilly's by-invite-only FOO Camp several years ago. The room was packed and I had to stand on my toes outside the doorway to see Apture's Tristan Harris navigate around the Internet on a projected screen. He was highlighting words with his cursor and making related articles, photos, Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos pop off the surface of the page in a handsome little box with rounded corners. Everyone in the room made ooh and aah noises when they saw it. Wherever you saw a word - you could learn a whole lot more about it with a little swipe of your mouse.

What will the Internet look like in 5 or 10 years? Will it still be a series of linked pages that users browse through, one at a time? Google may be betting that it will be something very different, if the company's latest acquisition is any indication. Apture, the service you can see in action if you highlight any word on this ReadWriteWeb, has been acquired by Google, the two companies announced this morning. An addition to offering media-rich contextual search pop-ups on the pages of publishers who have installed the service, Apture also offers a browser plug-in that adds the same functionality to any page on the web. Much of that same functionality will be baked into Google's browser Chrome very soon.

Google continues the inevitable wallpapering of the Web with the +1 button, adding it to image search today. This makes Google image search into a social affair, highlighting images and displaying annotated recommendations from your +friends. Images will now appear in the +1 tab of Google+ profiles.

This extends the Google+-powered personalization of Google search results into the realm of images. Social search could be the greatest impact of Google+, since the +1 button now affects the way Google search results appear. For anyone logged into his or her Google account, social signals have begun to affect the results of all kinds of Web searches whether users want that or not.

Good news for Twitter, for Firefox & for Firefox users.

Firefox 8.0 was just announced for download and one of the biggest changes that users will notice is that Twitter search has been added to the default search options in the top of the browser. Answers.com and CreativeCommons are out (ouch) and Twitter is in.

The implementation is nothing special, it just drops users off on Twitter's own search page, but for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who don't know how to navigate to Facebook other than to search for it in their browser search bar - those people will now be one step closer to seeing what Twitter can do.

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.