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.

Collective Social Search

"Collective social search" is similar in concept to the wisdom of crowds, in that search is augmented by trends shared on a network (a la Twitter Trends) or results ranked against the real-time buzz of a group. Why might this be useful? Well, in some instances, we can't immediately find the information we're looking for; and pooled, aggregated data from the collective may point us to new avenues that expand our discovery process.

As of yet, no major search systems are doing this very well - and we don't know what type of interface would be optimal for sharing this information. The Cloudlet plugin inserts tag clouds (based on keywords) into search results; but tag clouds are known to be more of a distraction than a utility. BingTweets has been touted as such a resource, but it really only offers Twitter and Bing results on two separate pages. OneRiot shows only collective data from the real-time stream, although it may be integrated with Yahoo! results soon. And we are still waiting to see how Google and Bing integrate the Twitter firehose into their traditional search results - as opposed to merely including them as additional document-like resources.

Equally important will be understanding when collective social data should be shared with users: while performing the search or after? And for which types of searches?

My research on search strategies begins to address this question. Collective guidance may be useful when users are exploring a search space, possibly because the search domain is not familiar to them (i.e. they lack knowledge of how to drill down to an answer), or because they are passively exploring a problem. I find myself doing this all the time when I prepare recipes to cook. I want to browse recipes from many different sources before I decide what my own recipe will consist of. I don't have a specific recipe in mind (it's not an urgent, active request), and therefore I don't necessarily know when I've found what I'm looking for.

That said, it's hard to determine from keyword strings how active or passive a user's search is; i.e. it may be quite difficult to determine the type of search they're performing or how far along they are in their search process ("exploring" or "narrowing"?). Furthermore, the utility of collective social data for mainstream consumers will be limited, mainly because it doesn't come from trusted sources, unlike "friend-filtered social search" (see next section).

Friend-Filtered Social Search

Friend-filtered social search is approximately what Google is doing with its social search experiment: providing social data that your peers, friends of friends and wider "social circle" have shared. This data could appear alongside traditional search results (as with Google) or be exclusive results from within your peer network (as with TuneIn).

This is useful if your friends have shared relevant links, blog posts or tweets about a topic that you're searching for. If you were gathering ideas about, say, "the future of the desktop," you would see thought pieces, write-ups and links to projects from the main search algorithm, as well as stuff your friends are saying about applications they've encountered recently. If you trust your friends, they may serve as reliable filters, pointing you to relevant information.

The three major limitations of this approach are:

1. Your friends may have no archived social content that's relevant (or available) to your query. Searching within your Facebook network quickly demonstrates this problem. For this reason, augmenting traditional algorithms with friend-filtered social data may be better, rather than relying exclusively on data from one person's small exclusive network.
2. Current implementations are limited to keyword matching; whereas, searches that retrieve related posts based on topic, theme or timeframe might expose a wider set of results and combat the niche-social-network problem. This approach would be computationally harder than keywords alone, and exposing enough of the appropriate context remains a problem (see next item).
3. Understanding the context in which a post or link was shared is important. Without this, keyword- and even topic-matching might not convey to the user the relevance of a search result. Google provides limited context at the moment (showing only how you know a user, the source of the post and a short snippet). More testing is needed to learn how much and what kind of context is appropriate for social search content.

Similarly there is the issue of when friend-filtered social search would be relevant during a search. My instinct is that it will be useful throughout a search and for many types of searches (it is, after all, just another type of search result). This is critically different from collective social search and collaborative search.

Collaborative Search (a.k.a. Question-Answering)

"Collaborative search" is when two or more users work together to find the answer to a problem. This could look like IM-based question-answering (a la Aardvark ), Yahoo! Answers (which is relatively passive and asynchronous) or over-the-shoulder two-person search. In all of these cases, people speak to each other using natural language, which is incredibly useful for open-ended queries (e.g. "What is 'design thinking'?") or queries about unfamiliar domains (e.g. law, health, business, depending on your background). Such conversations, even not real-time ones, can assist people who don't know the right keywords to use (what's known as the "vocabulary problem").

My research has looked at the benefits of question-answering and at people's processes and preferences during search. Many users report that they want to attempt to search on their own first, or don't wish to interrupt their colleagues before they have given it a shot independently. This suggests that early social support should be passive (as with presenting collective or friend-filtered social data).

But later in the process, if the searcher gets stuck on a problem, they often turn to a colleague for help. If systems had a way of identifying difficult queries or search-process inefficiencies, they could offer more explicit social support to searchers. Perhaps the system could identify a domain-specific expert from the user's extended social circle. Information that this person has shared could be presented to the user, or this person could be suggested as a resource to chat with or email (depending on availability and preferences).

It should be clear by now that these three flavors of social search are complementary. Each has its pros and cons and is appropriate for different kinds of searches and during different stages of the search process. A powerful "social search engine" would be "smart" by making use of all three, while also exploiting the value of traditional algorithms.

Photos by: Who Wants to Be?, Claudia Lim and brewbooks.

Guest author: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.

Using the OneRiot API, Taptu's new homepage presents a mobile-friendly search engine interface complete with search box and verticals for searching just the web, images, and now, "buzz." Previously, the site included verticals for music and video searches too, but those have seemingly been done away with in an effort to simplify the interface.

The new "buzz" section is where you can find the real-time results. Here you'll find content pulled from sites like Twitter, Digg, other social sharing sites and the company's own panel of users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are sharing their web-browsing data in anonymous aggregate.

While Twitter is clearly a source of breaking news, we've always found it a bit odd that OneRiot includes Digg in its "real-time" search engine. We've never thought of Digg as anything near real-time - in fact, it pales in comparison to Twitter when it comes to the speed with which information spreads. With the immediacy possible on today's web, sites like Digg seem much slower - painfully slow at times - often taking hours on end to feature the news that had already been buzzing on Twitter for half a day.

That said, Digg and other social news sharing sites can sometimes unearth news that had been overlooked by major media outlets, especially when focused on a particular niche like technology. For example, just think of how many stories you read on someone's personal blog or Reddit and never saw anywhere else on the web. By tracking niche websites like these as well as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, microblogs and URL-shortening services, Oneriot can discover links that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Taptu's new mobile search engine interface currently works on major touch-enabled devices including the iPhone, iPod touch, G1, Nokia N97 and 5800, and the BlackBerry Storm 1. The Taptu iPhone application will also be updated soon to include the additional functionality. You can test the new service yourself starting at 9 AM EST by pointing your mobile browser to www.taptu.com.

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.

Leapfish searches for user queries across 25 different services, from Google and Yahoo to Yelp, Digg and some Real Estate sites. The service determines which sources are providing the most relevant results and constructs a search results page accordingly. If users love Leapfish enough to marry it they can turn on as many as 35 different widgets to interact with things like their Facebook and Twitter accounts on the Leapfish home page.

The design of the site and results pages are quite nice and the fundamental idea is a good one. But how could Leapfish already be set to bank $10 million in revenue this year?

The Pleasanton, California company says it has 100 employees; 50 are listed on LinkedIn and almost every one of them are in sales.

The sales pitch is this: Leapfish is small today, but the keyword prices that companies (like this lady) are paying will be a bargain if Leapfish can really grow. It's an investment, and as such it's a very affordable one. Some companies have already resold the keywords they bought from Leapfish for a profit, the company says.

One part of what's being invested in is, no doubt, a vision of the future. Check out this absolutely cathartic video the company made about the real-time web.

Unfortunately, in our tests Leapfish doesn't work very well. Search results are often off-topic, there are software bugs in some of the most basic parts of the site on the day of its grand unveiling and the compelling vision isn't that exciting in reality. Check out our 5 minute tour of the site to see what $10 million in ads have been bought against over the last year.

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!

Here's a prematurely festive and depressingly commercial demo video:

Sure, it'll make users happier by decreasing the keystrokes between rabid greediness and commercial satiety, but at what cost? That's a factor you'll have to contact Google to actually learn about; pricing is not available online.

It's dirty electronic retailer ROI powered by Google - happy holidays. Webinars are coming to a monitor near you on November 12, November 17, and December 3.

Real-Time Web Crawling in the Future?

Although only briefly mentioned in the post, Google hinted that they may begin looking into other mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub, an open protocol that provides near-instant notifications of change updates. No further details were provided beyond the one sentence, but the announcement clearly shows that Google has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the real-time web is the future. This is one trend the company isn't planning to ignore.

The real-time web, heavily influenced by the speed of Twitter and other other rapid-fire social networking updates, has created a desire among internet users for faster access to information. This desire has, in turn, led to the creation of new real-time protocols such as the above mentioned PubSubHubbub and its counterpart RSSCloud. If Google began to use these technologies for scanning the web, their search results wouldn't just be updated faster - they would be updated in real-time. That means information would become available in the search results listings as soon as it was published to the web.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine - most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google's search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat. However, Google is already doing this to some extent now. Over time, the PageRank algorithm has evolved and can now reward sites with fresher, more fitting content and rank them higher than sites with more links on some occasions. And if anyone can figure out the proper algorithm for mixing in real-time content and ranking it appropriately along with static pages, it's got to be Google. In fact, we'll probably soon see exactly how they plan on addressing this issue, when they incorporate Twitter search results into their index, as announced last week.

...But Until Then, Google Delivering Faster, Fresher Results Instead

Although the PubSubHubbub mention may have been the most exiting part of the announcement, real-time search results aren't here just yet. In the meantime, we have to just be content with sped up results instead. The post advises website owners who are blocking Google's search bot software known as Googlebot from crawling their RSS/Atom feeds to unblock it via their robots.txt file. If unsure, webmasters can test their feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools, as the post recommends.

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.

Note the lilac-colored links under most images. Users can employ this feature for narrowing results to specific people, objects, poses, angles, or even identical images posted on different sites. Here's what happened when we clicked the "similar images" link under a thumbnail of hair metalists Tesla:

And again, when we clicked a thumb that pictured the entire band playing live onstage:

It would be interesting if the similarities became more and more granular, but results appear to occasionally broaden or simply stop refining a few clicks into the search process. For this search, however, we were able to see an entire set of photos from a single concert and multiple sources, which was pretty interesting.

What do our readers think? Are similar images helpful to you in your quest for better image searches?

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?

Gut Reactions

Universally, these startups said that hearing today's Google/Microsoft/Twitter news was a welcome validation of their years of perseverance in real-time search.

"It's super exciting," siad Peggs. "There's been one way to search the web for 10 years, and we're looking at a total revolution in the way that people find information. It's a huge change in the industry. To see that feeling validated is awesome."

According to York, "I don't think we could ask for anything better than an endorsement from the major players. This is nothing but good for us. Back when I started, the marketplace was not very receptive to a new strategy." York continued to say that he supported mainstream exploration of the real-time space, with the telltale caveat, "even if it means licensing someone else's information and community."

Campbell said this new information is something Collecta has built into their corporate strategy. "This is something we heard rumors on and had anticipated. It was fully expected. Having been involved with one of the giants [AltaVista] at one time, it's quite obvious. It's something we've anticipated and part of how we structured our company."

Thoughts on Product Development

All the startups in real-time search have taken various approaches to the monumental task of indexing the real-time web. Collecta has employed the XMPP technology that powers IM clients in order to push streams of information. OneRiot has a fascinating algorithm that indexes tweet content, links in tweets, and the content of the linked-to pages to serve relevant results. And Wowd has developed a SETI@Home-like distributed computing model to effectively harness and parse the dataset created by users of real-time technologies.

Each company is proud of its hard-won advances and speculated on how Google and Microsoft will handle the data.

Campbell told us, "I can't say Google will bring to real-time search. But it makes sense that any dataset will be part of their approach. This is the largest corpus of real-time data that has not been accessible. As a search practitioner, I think they're going to keep on with their ranking approach."

York added that nothing unforeseen has yet been announced. "The Twitter thing, that's the kind of thing people have been expecting."

But he also talked about the challenges of parsing real-time user-generated content. "I think the data stream is broader and shorter. There's more and more real time, and you need different architecture to keep up with it. It's important to have real filtering applied to a noisy, low-value data stream. We believe people are the key to finding the good stuff."

"Knowing what goes into the product is quite eye-opening," said Peggs. "There's a tremendous lot of work to do once you've got tweets containing links, to process that information in real time and index the content on the page and render results based on content rather than just tweets. It's relatively easy for someone to spam Twitter with irrelevant links; but you've got to follow the links and index the pages and search against the content of the pages, not just the 140-character tweets. You also have to link to results based on relevancy, not just based on retweets."

Follow the Money

The opportunities for monetizing a new and powerful stream of Google- and Bing-driven traffic are both exciting and confounding for these startups, some of which have not yet put into play their own ideas for generating revenue.

As York noted, Google's and Microsoft's entry into real-time search represents a shift in the marketplace from these startups and their technology being a geek's plaything to being a new way to direct user attention and serve powerfully relevant advertising.

"Google is in the enviable position of having a high profit margin in the search business itself," he said. "It does fit their strategy to have as many eyeballs as possible, to get more people doing more stuff. We're interested more in matching personal interest profiles."

Also, as Peggs noted, "OneRiot has an API that allows anyone to incorporate our results. We also have a real-time ad model."

Collecta also has rolled out two APIs, one for general search results from the real-time web and one for XMPP-powered streaming data. Campbell has also hinted that their monetization plans are innovative, but his team has not yet released specifics.

"Having been involved in this growth of paid search several times over," said Campbell, "the creation of new technology creates new business opportunity. The monetization of search was a redefinition of online business models: You can advertise to users without being slimy. There's now an opportunity to make users even happier without distracting them from the page."

Strategy: Beyond "Get Acquired Or Die"

The startups in the real-time search space also universally expressed a commitment to current business strategies. Some seemed to have clearer exit goals than others, but all believe that their unique focuses on tech and product will allow them to survive the intrusion of Microsoft and Google into their arena.

Campbell, like many of his cohorts at other startups, noted that Twitter is a small segment of the available content sources for real-time web information. He also said, "Engines that are based solely on Twitter are probably more dead-on in terms of competition [with Google]. The less-funded companies are in a position where they have to do something more clever and unique."

Collecta, he said, is still figuring out their role in the story. "We are a push search engine," he told us. 'That is increasingly our defining characteristic. The perception of speed is critical, but it's not our most unique characteristic. Because we're based on XMPP, the chat protocol, we're pushing results as soon as possible."

Said Peggs, "Our strategy doesn't change. We're focused on producing the most relevant web results based on not just Twitter, but also Digg and other services - a much wider pulse of the real-time web on the back end. And we continue to distribute those through our API."

What's to Come for Real-Time Search Startups

Every single startup we spoke to tonight expressed some trepidation about things to come.

"What happens to the bubble of startups in this space?" asked Campbell. "I hope they've had the foresight to see this through."

"It doesn't really change our strategy," said a confident Peggs. "Two years ago, when you explained how this would change search, they looked at you like you were crazy."

York's assessment of Wowd's place as an open-sourced approach to a problem now being tackled by major corporations was also optimistic. "When you're a startup company competing with established players, there are always reasons to be cautious. We believe the approach we're taking is a great way to go. It's different, even than what you've heard today. We think this approach isn't a gimmick; it is a fundamentally different approach."

The bottom line, as in all verticals, is that once the major leagues take interest, some startups will sink and some will swim. Some will be acquired, and some will fail. Some may survive long enough to pose a legitimate challenge to the dominant players, but this circumstance is less likely.

Let us know your prognoses in the comments, and stay tuned for developing coverage of this space and these startups from ReadWriteWeb.

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.

One of the authors of the study, UCLA psych professor Dr. Gary Small, said, "We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function." In other words, it takes just a matter of days for older first-time Internet users to catch up to their more experienced counterparts in terms of brain activity.

Small also wrote iBrain, a book all about how technology use impacts brain functions.

Here's how the study was conducted: The researchers found 24 people aged 55 to 78 whose brains functioned normally. Half were daily Internet users, and half were noobs.

First, all the volunteers searched the web in a lab setting while the scientists took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains, looking at changes in blood flow in the brain. Next, the test subjects were sent home and asked to search the Internet for an hour a day for seven days over the course of two weeks. Their searches were based on assigned topics that required them to search the web, explore websites, and read. Finally, the participants returned to the lab for more scans while they searched for more information on different topics.

What researchers found was that the Internet noobs' brains displayed activity in areas of the brain that govern language, reading, memory, and visual ability during both the "before" and "after" scans. However, their brains showed new and increased activity in the parts of the brain that control working memory and decision-making. The patterns were, in fact, similar to those found in the brains of the longtime daily Internet users.

The UCLA team said that these changes occurred because search requires users to store information in working memory and also determine relevant details from datasets of competing pictures and words.

The study was funded by the Parvin Foundation. Researchers included Susan Y. Bookheimer, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute at UCLA; Himaja Gaddipati, a UCLA neuroscience student; and Jennifer Brace, a UCLA doctoral student in neuroscience.

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.

You don't want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you'll change your mind. Seeing some peoples' Facebook status messages show up in Bing search is likely to freak out people who aren't familiar with public profiles and have a strong interest in their own data remaining private.

Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook's long-term ambition to challenge Google and its Microsoft backing will probably mean that the world's leading search engine will never be allowed to index activity on the world's leading social network. The public parts of profiles, yes, but activity? No.

Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.

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.

Bing now has real-time access to the full fire hose of Twitter data, that's a really valuable flow of data. It's clear that Twitter can provide some real opportunity for Bing, but what can Bing do for Twitter? Would Twitter users be better off just using Twitter search?

We asked three User Experience professionals for their opinions. They provided feedback as the announcement rolled out, through the Aardvark IM interface. (Which was awesome.)

Ben Thompson, Massachusetts-based financial services UX designer.

"The ability to integrate facebook and twitter streams and data is the next evolutionary step for search. To me it isn't a game changer like Google was but evolutionary in that real time was always desired. It's the next step."

Thompson is excited about potential use cases.

"The integration of the real time stream can bring pertinent information on live events. Say we are watching the next Presidential debate. Now people can search and get real streams from people and their thoughts about it instead of just listening to the pundits. The celebrity angle will allow people to get closer to the direct information from that celebrity instead of just news stories about them. Plus it will allow up-to-the-minute information."

"I believe Bing can add value to Twitter search by making people more aware of the power of Twitter. Many people think Twitter is just a silly place where people write about themselves in 140 characters - not understanding the true power of Twitter is in massive amounts of real time data. So Bing displaying twitter results will help bring that concept to the masses."

Thomas Vander Wal, Principal at InfoCloud Solutions.

"I would give Bing/Twitter a 70% good, but not too different from other things. I am wondering how they can or will disambiguate the Paris Hilton type problem (hotel & celebrity). I saw the photos of Carly Fiorina from W2S yesterday and dropped 'carly' into bing/twitter, but it did not disambiguate the 4 various 'carly's being tweeted about."

"Tag clouds normally are a large problem for finding and navigating, they work best on distinct objects, e.g. '2010 Ford Mustang.' Top level tag clouds normally work best for the things biggest and boldest, but most people don't see the other elements. Twitter's own list view of hot topics is easier for people to grasp. Tag clouds are more cool and fun (for those few that grok them) than helpful - any usability testing normally drops them from consideration for use."

"This new integration does not sound like much of a value add to what Twitter already offers, just mashing it into something else. The basic level Information Architecture on the Bing Twitter search page is far from clear. The way that retweeting gets gamed I am not sure how valuable that metric is, but if weighted low in an algorithm it could have value."

"Playing with the site, it does not understand me in context. The 'most recent tweets about...' are pulling from the public stream and are not delivering quality results. It's not taking into account who I am, which means it is not pulling things related on following relationships."

"I am one of those outliers who deals with heavy information flows. Having something that can not sort through the volume of micro information without adding some contextual relevance is going to be tough for general users."

"If Bing learns interests to filter by context and interest then there is really something there."

Nicole Califano, UX Designer at The Barbarian Group in San Francisco.

"My first instinct is that there needs to be some really creative user preferences down the line, as this could get messy. This is all very exciting but I'm a little concerned with filtering these channels (so far I think Twitter & Facebook are unsuccessful at filtering).

"No doubt, Google will be integrating Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets to their search soon too. This is not a new idea, but the right execution has yet to be seen."

Can Bing step up its game with regards to Twitter search? The initial launch isn't very promising, especially when there are so many small startups doing much more interesting things with search on top of Twitter. At the very least the integration might bring real time into the consciousness of more consumers, though.

In our tests, Stinky Teddy performed pretty well, especially when we searched for politicians and celebrities. The only real disappointment was that the videos from Videosurf - which we like a lot as a video search engine - were often rather old. Sometimes, old search results also slipped into the news search. You can, however, filter results according to the type of source, so that Stinky Teddy displays only items from news sources, for example, or from real-time sources like Collecta and Twitter.

Bridging the Gap With Meta-Search

We have seen quite a few real-time search engines like OneRiot, Faroo, and Collecta recently, but it seems that every time the search engine market hits on a new concept, meta-search engines like Stinky Teddy come in to bridge the gap between existing products and the new generation of search engines.

In its current state, Stinky Teddy is definitely worth a look. It's still in its early days, and Hardtke is still actively tweaking the algorithms in the background; but the variety of sources make it a worthwhile alternative to other real-time search engines.

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.

As Google software engineer Reza Ziaei wrote this evening on the Google Mobile blog, "You can do this simply by searching for the name of the product. Then, on the search results page, use 'Options' to filter by 'Forums' and refine further by choosing 'Past week.' See the screenshots below for a sample query. Try these and other Search Options yourself by simply doing a mobile search on google.com and selecting Options."

This announcement comes on the heels of Google's announcement of enhanced mobile local search options and results last week.

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.

According to Google's post from director of product management Johanna Wright, "We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web - even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions. At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always - so if you can't pinpoint a useful comment there's a list of relevant sites there to help."

The feature seems simple enough, but it's a relevant and welcome addition to Google's search offering and an interesting commentary on the SEO value of forum discussions. In a recent video interview with Vanilla forum software creator Mark O'Sullivan, we chatted in depth on the evergreen nature and value of forum discussions, especially in terms of search.

We can speculate that the Google team might be working on a similar solution for Q&A sites; it would only make sense.

At first glance, this seems to be a great new tool to streamline the flow of information between our online and offline worlds. But how well does Google's new local mobile search work in reality?

This video from the Google team shows more about how to star certain locations in Google Maps while at a computer and use the different features of local search for mobile:

Sounds great, right?

But when we tried to use Google's local search tab on a mobile device, some of the results we got were strange and disappointing. We were searching for "coffee" and "WiFi" in southeastern Virginia, and the top result was for the Hotel Taj Bengal Kolkat in West Bengal. And although we do enjoy the Cafe de Paris in Monte Carlo, we do not think this was an appropriate second result for local search in Virginia.

When we narrowed our search to just "coffee", we got better results, but who wants just coffee with no WiFi?

Next, we tried browsing the categories, again with mixed results. The ability to access saved and recent searches, however, was stellar and is probably users' best bet for getting around to local businesses while on-the-go.

Many people have worried that the inaccessibility of historical Twitter search results might mean that the messages weren't being saved at all. Company co-founder Biz Stone told us otherwise by email today, though. Twitter is in fact saving all the tweets. You just can't access them through search "right now."

Scrubbed geolocation data after two weeks and no way to access historical information at all? That sounded like a pretty bum deal for a world-changing new communication platform. So we emailed to ask.

This was the reply we received from Biz Stone: "We definitely save all the tweets although you're right in noting that our search focuses more on newer content right now. And yes, the plan is to drop the coordinates after 14 days."

There you go. Now that Twitter is putting $100 million more into the bank, it would be great to see some of those resources dedicated to making information retrieval on the service a first class function. The future would be thankful.