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This week, Google chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. The hearing is called "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?" Schmidt will be followed by testimony from Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, whose company's treatment by Google exemplifies the ethically touchy parts of Google's search business practices.

In July, Google made its move in local business reviews, pushing results from sites like Yelp down the page below reviews from Google's own Places service. The accusation is that Google's search privileges its own content (and ad businesses) ahead of competitors. These allegations have arisen before in both the U.S. and Europe. But are these practices really anti-competitive under the law?

I had lunch with one of my favorite Internet entrepreneurs today, Mark Sawyier, the CEO of Off Campus Media. The company provides college students with apartment listings near their schools, and what started out as an idea five years ago is now a multi-million dollar business. Sawyier came to this business without any formal training in computer science, business, management, or other technology training, yet he is a natural when it comes to running a modern-day Internet business. In the short time we spent today, he came up with a few bon mots and wise thoughts that I want to share with those of you that are thinking about starting your own businesses.

Google has updated its powerful search app for iOS with a quicker way to filter results by type, as well as with support for pre-loading Instant Pages, which was recently added to the Chrome desktop browser. The update also adds a more intuitive, gesture-based help screen for figuring out the few key interface elements. It's a universal app for iPhone and iPad available now in the iTunes store.

Last week, we reported on a leaked blog post from Google indicating that a new native search app is coming to Android as well, but that update still hasn't been released.

Google has updated sitelinks, the column of sub-links beneath a Google search result that allows navigation straight to pages within a main site. The update makes sitelinks more visible, gives them flexible rankings based on the particular search query, increases the maximum number from eight to 12, and establishes a clearer hierarchy for the domains of search results.

Under the hood, the update also improves the quality of sitelink results. The signals Google uses specifically to generate and rank sitelinks, such as the link structure of a site, are now combined with the overall ranking algorithm, so main search results and sitelinks are now ranked and displayed based on one unified set of principles.

Google's recent improvements to its search-ranking algorithms, codenamed "Panda," have just rolled out in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The changes are intended to reduce the effect of "content farms," sites that churn out lots of low-quality content to skew search results in their favor. Reports show that Panda appears to be working; the biggest content farms have shown marked decreases in traffic since Panda first launched in the U.S.

The changes began in February for the U.S. market and expanded internationally, though still only for English results, in April. Google reports that the algorithm changes affected almost 12% of English queries and the inclusion of new languages will affect 6-9% of queries worldwide.

Google will soon release a new version of the Google Search app for Android with some handy user experience improvements. The app will group suggestions by content type, with Web search results at the top. It will also offer country-specific suggestions and results for all international Google domains. It adds several new gestures for editing or removing search history items. The overall interface has been simplified, and performance has been smoothed out.

Google published the announcement on their Google Mobile blog, but it has since been removed, and the update is not yet live. We will update when the app is released.

New data from Searchmetrics indicate that Google is making precise adjustments to their search result algorithms that, at least in some cases, help drive traffic to Google's own Web properties. There's not enough evidence to imply causation, but the noticeable increases in video and image results, both of which are dominated by Google properties, would fit with a pattern of accusations that Google's search results favor its own sites.

The data show sharp increases in the number of image and video results, with video now returning for 60% or more of all searches. The number 1 sites for video and image results are YouTube and Blogger respectively, both of which are Google properties. Google also dominates maps and shopping results.

Wajam, a social search extension for the browser, has added Google Plus integration, alongside Facebook and Twitter, so that users can search their friends' posts across all three major social networks.

The plug-in displays personalized results, accompanied by faces and profiles from social networks, inside normal searches. The Wajam team says they recognizes Google Plus' appeal as "a viable alternative" to Facebook, but they also criticize it for its lack of deep search features.

Tired of waiting for Google - you know, the search engine company? - to add a functional search feature to its new social network Google Plus? Yep, so were we. So we did a little Googling, and found a way to add it ourselves. No, it's not a browser extension. (There is one of those, of course, but it's filled with ads.)

Instead, this method (below) uses a feature in Google Chrome which lets you add custom search engines to your browser. In just a minute, we added both Google Plus Profile search and Google Plus Posts search to Chrome.

Cloudant will announce today a new product that brings Apache Lucene's search capabilities to BigCouch, Cloudant's version of Apache CouchDB. Typically, to search BigCouch or CouchDB you need to write map-reduce queries in JavaScript. Cloudant Search will bring Lucene's front-end features such as its Google-like query language and its analyzers to create a more usable way to explore data contained the BigCouch document database.