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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.

Google just launched a new layout for search results about places. To the right of the text search results, there's now a panel that shows a map view along with photos and business details. Certain businesses will have the little pegman on their images. Clicking him will take you into a 360-degree interior view of the place.

Other places in the search results have a ">>" symbol that instantly opens the same preview. The new layout and 3D features will come to restaurants, landmarks, museums, hotels and more. The features will roll out in more than 40 languages over the next few weeks. It's a flashy feature, but Google has its reasons.

Google just launched a more streamlined process for updating small business listings on Google Places, but it asks forgiveness instead of permission. Instead of requiring owners to manually update the listing, Google Places will now automatically update with user-submitted info or updates to another source on the Web that Google identifies. When a listing is updated, the system will notify the business owner of the change by email.

Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.

In a rare appearance by engineering SVP Vic Gundotra himself, today's Google Plus update video introduces real-time search and actual hashtag support. "We're trying to make it easier to follow and contribute to live events on Google+, including breaking news, sporting events, and many others," Gundotra says.

Google Plus search results now update instantly, and hashtags are now clickable, taking you to the search result for that term. Google Plus got its own search capabilities last month when the service opened to the public.

New data from Experian Hitwise show that Google continued to widen its lead in the U.S. search market last month. Google accounted for 66% of searches in September, gaining by 2%, while Bing and Yahoo lost ground by 3% and 2% respectively. The remaining 66 search engines analyzed by Hitwise powered 5.8% of U.S. searches.

But for how long will this kind of search query dominate the way we find things on the Web? With today's release of iOS 5, Apple - Google's mobile rival - sets the stage for Siri, an artificially intelligent voice search assistant that goes out of its way not to use Google to find results. Google is winning the search game, but Apple is about to change it.

A week after version 2.5 of Google's tweaks to the search rank algorithm - A.K.A. Panda - rolled out across the Web, new data from Searchmetrics show that the changes appear to be rolling back. Panda is designed to reduce the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game Google's page ranking algorithm.

Out of the 30 domains that were hit hardest by last week's changes, 10 of them have recovered to receive more traffic than before Panda 2.5, with another 10 restored to 80-90% of their pre-Panda 2.5 visibility. Only four sites did not recover their SEO visibility: bettermedicine.com, faqs.org, ohinternet.com and The Next Web.

Google recently rolled out version 2.5 of its tweaks to the search ranking algorithm - codenamed Panda - to improve the quality of search results for users. Panda suppresses the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game the system.

New data from Searchmetrics show that consumeraffairs.com, savings.com and prnewswire.com were among the biggest losers. Consumer sites like Motor Trend and technology blogs The Next Web and Technorati also lost significant ground since the update. The biggest winner in Google's Panda update? YouTube, Google's own Web property.

Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Julpan, a New York-based social search startup founded by former Google scientist Ori Allon, announced today that it has been acquired by Twitter. Julpan algorithmically analyzes social Web activity to make search results personally relevant.

With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, Twitter needs smart personalization algorithms to make sure its search results are relevant far beyond simple keyword matches. This acquisition will help Twitter keep the value of search inside its own properties.