If you search for a topic or hashtag, such as "SOPA," a post box at the top promps the user to "join the discussion." Posts from this box include the note "Shared from the Google+ SOPA stream." The topic name links back to the search results page.

Earlier this month, Google unveiled its pivotal effort to make search more social. Its "Search, plus Your World" update changes its search engine from an unbiased look at indexed pages to something influenced by your friends and contacts. Google's bet is that this helps users find more relevant results.

Google's real-time, topic-tagged social searches now give it a graph of the online public's interests, which is the same valuable commodity on which Twitter is trying to build its business. Twitter's torrent of real-time data produces trends, and it sells promoted ad spots on those trends. For users, search is an essential part of exploring their interests on these networks, so it's a crucial spot for these networks to monetize, too.

Twitter has been slow to build its own search product. For a while, Twitter just fed its results to Google. But that put too much power in Google's hands, and now Twitter won't play ball. Twitter acquired its own social search startup last September, but nothing has come of it yet.

Much like Twitter's website, Google+ search pages show trending topics along the right side, employing its real-time search and hashtags to discover new, timely content. Today's update makes Google+ searches more visible by including them in sharing. Google+ also added its "What's Hot" section to the mobile Web version today, adding another way to discover real-time Google+ stories.

Do you use search or browse for topics on social networks to find stuff that interests you? Or do you discover content in other ways? Tell us in the comments.

Be that as it may, the feature can also be pretty awesome. Below I've listed 5 examples of search queries that were fabulously improved by the availability of the new search results. What do they have in common? They surface timely and opinionated content, shared by people I know and trust. Search super-expert Danny Sullivan has shown with a long list of examples that some queries suffer at the hands of the new feature. I'd like to offer some counter-examples.

I don't know about you, but when I want to find Britney Spears, I know where to go. And I've never found myself grunting the word "cars" at a search engine, either.

But look for business or technical terms and if you've got friends like I do, the new Google search feature is great. The UI? I agree with ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell - I think it's incredibly non-invasive.

Ok, here are some examples of the new search being a big win.

Last night for example I Googled for the phrase IBM Social Business, because I've still got it on my mind after writing about it this week. When I search for that phrase in the new social search, I find a months-old Plus post from analyst Jeremiah Owyang adressing the term social business in August. Specifically, he had just completed an extensively researched report on the topic. That was a very useful thing to find, among other social search results. I wish I would have seen that before I wrote the article I did.

I also found my own article there too in those search results, it was an easy way to search my own content. Blogging hacker Pete Warden says he's already found the new search to be the best way to recall content he's written himself. He thinks of it as Memory Augmentation and that could be said just as easily about the streams of content shared by your friends that you saw (in theory) but that you couldn't previously recall.

One of the blog posts that showed up in that search was from giant PR firm Edelman. Reading that post stirred my interest and made me search for Edelman and Social Business.

That search brought back a full page of official content from Edelman.com, but in this case a social result was inserted at the top of Google's list of results. What was that result? It was a critique of the larger trend of PR agencies inferior to Edelman trying to do trainings on social, written by one of the world's leading social media marketing consultants, Jay Baer. Way to sneak that critique in at the top of an otherwise very offical page, Google!

If I search for Jay Baer's name, by the way, I get a page full of social results in the form of links that other friends of mine have shared about the man himself. The world's best-known nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter shared a Baer blog post on Google+ and says it's terrific. If Beth vouches for someone, I can't think of better validation. Amber Naslund, former VP Social Strategy for Radian6 and now startup co-founder at SideraWorks is goofing around with Jay on Google+. And Francine Hardaway, a tech investor and pundit, says she's known Jay for 20 years. I feel like the social search results contributed a lot to a search for a person's name. I had no idea that so many people I know knew and interacted online with Jay Baer.

Then I search for "reviews of SuccessFactors" the giant HR software upstart that SAP paid $3.4 billion dollars this Fall. If I search for Successfactors SAP on the main Google intereface, I get news stories from Venturebeat, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Those are big general interest business websites. But when I select Social, then I'm delivered news stories from enterprise technology specialists. Those are the people I'm connected with online, not people from the WSJ.

If you've got a well-stocked set of people you're following on Google +, then there's a lot this can do for you. Speaking to blogging hacker Pete Warden again, Warden says searching for technical topics works very well with Plus. That's probably because he's following a lot of technical people on the Plus social network.

A search for Scala and Play in Google proper, Warden points out, returns all kinds of information about these two web frameworks from official sources. "I just wanted to know if it [Play] was any good," he says. The new social search returns the kind of opinion-based content that Warden is looking for.

Those are all great use-cases, if you ask me.

It seems clear to me that if you've got the right contacts and you think about it the right way, then you've really got something valuable in the new Google Search Plus Your World.

If you're like me, you've dreaded this day. Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest. But the new Google unveiled today leaves the user in control. "Search, plus Your World," Google has called it. It's two kinds of search, and they're separate. If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether.

When you're in personal mode, you can now see your own stuff and stuff shared with you on Google+, even if it's not a public post. This includes photos, Google+ posts and shared links. Personal mode still shows global Web results, but it mixes those in with the social results Google thinks are most relevant. Personalized results are marked with a blue person icon.

At the top, where you're used to seeing the number of search results, you'll now see how many personal results and overall results turned up from your query. If you click the number of personal results, it will show you personal results only, taking out the global results. Flipping between personalized and global results takes one click. Both modes are available in Web search and image search.

Even when you search in personal mode, Google wants to show you the most relevant result at the top, even if its not from Google+. Prior to today's update, this wasn't happening reliably. The source of my concerns about Google+ was the prominence of Google+ results in search when outside Web results were more relevant. In the example slide Google showed to me, a search for "49ers" produced 49ers.com as the top result in personal mode, followed by Google+ posts.

The San Francisco 49ers do not have a Google+ page. I asked Google Fellow Ben Gomes whether that would be the top result if they did. He said the global result would be more relevant, and if the administrator of the Google+ page linked it with the website, that would be even more accurate. "It's an algorithm," Gomes reminded me. "It's not perfect, but we're tuning it to provide the most relevant results for our users."

If you don't buy it, or if a particular search doesn't personalize the way you'd like, just click the little Earth icon, and you get normal, global search results.

Of course, this mode will still privilege content posted to Google+ ahead of other social networks. Your friends' Google+ photos will take precedence here over their Instagram photos. But now that we can turn off personalization completely, it doesn't feel like Google is foisting Google+ content on us as much anymore.

Profiles In Search

Searching the Web for people is hard, especially for common names. Today's update pulls Google+ profiles into personal search along with content from around the Web associated with that person. This way, Google can use your social signals to figure out which Ben Smith is the one you know.

My top concern for this feature was that Google+ pages would always appear ahead of personal websites. If that happened, users would no longer be able to control what came up when others Googled them. Here's how Google talked me down: First of all, just switch to global mode and boom. No more social stuff.

But furthermore, these Google+ profile results aren't totally walled off to Google+ content. The link for the person is to Google+, but the snippet displays the most important content from that person below, whether it's on Google+ or not. This is what the links and authorship section of the Google+ profile are for. If you want your Twitter feed or your blog to be highlighted in Google searches for you, just add them to your Google+ profile, and they'll show up prominently.

People And Pages

The third feature of today's update is the most Google+-focused and least exciting, and you'll definitely notice it. On the right sidebar of some searches, there will be a "People and Pages on Google+" box. The example Google shows is a search for "music," which displays the Google+ pages for Britney Spears, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg in the right sidebar.

Presumably, some of the placements in this sidebar will be natural suggestions, like the 'Suggestions' box on Google+ itself. (Update: Google spokespeople have written in to clarify that it's currently all natural, algorithmic suggestions) But it's also ripe for paid promotions. This feels more like a potential ad spot than a user feature, but that's Google's business, after all. As long as Britney Spears can't pay to appear in my main search results, I'll tolerate sidebar ads as I always do on free Web services.

Security, Transparency and Control

"This is your data," Ben Gomes says. The new features bring an unprecedented amount of personal information in to Google search (when you're in personal mode), so today's update comes with new controls to set users' minds at ease. Signed-in users now get SSL search by default, as was announced in October. You also can block or un-circle unwanted Google+ users right from search.

But most importantly, for those who don't want any part of this social search business, users can turn it off temporarily and even opt out entirely. On every search, this toggle lets you switch between personalized and global results. There's no more inconvenient need to log out to see more objective search results.

And just as it has in the past with other conspicuous search features like Instant Search, Google allows users to deactivate social search entirely from search settings.

So, Is Google+ Still Going To Mess Up The Internet?

After my rant last week, I bet you're expecting me to quickly disable social search and breathe a sigh of relief. But I'm not. The toggle feature is something I did not expect. I thought Google was going to force us to use Google+ by making it a part of every search, as it was until today. But now, since it's so easy to flip back and forth, I can test to see which mode is more useful. I expect that social search will be better in some cases and worse in others. It's great to have the option.

I don't think Google is out of the woods. The instructions teaching users about these features are pretty clear, but people get set in their ways on the Web, and it's hard to change them. Some users freak out when Google changes even little, teeny things about search, and some Google+ overhauls of existing services have caused major backlashes.

But today's "Search, plus Your World" update actually softens the impact of Google+ on search. Google+ content is better integrated with outside stuff now, and, of course, it's optional, even for logged-in users. There are still problems with the state of Google search, but none of them are as dire as they were a week ago.

Now that Google users have control over the level of personalization, I don't think Google+ will mess up the Internet anymore. Social SEO will not take over, because natural search results still matter. My fear last week was that anyone who wanted to use Google would be forced to use Google+. Today's update shows good faith. Google has given its users control.

What do you think of the new Google? Will you use personalized search results? Sound off in the comments.

The tweaks are a little bit scattered, affecting all different aspects of Google's search returns. Most of them affect the actual presentation of results. A couple affect the way results are ranked. There are two new kinds of results for entertainment-related searches. And there are a few back-end improvements and adjustments affecting site administrators.

Changes To Page Ranking

The page ranking changes all affected image searches. One change, codename "simple," improves the analysis of image landing pages. "We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages," Google's blog post says. A related change, codename "leaf," extends existing algorithms from main search results to improve spam detection in Image Search.

These two changes are related to changes noted in last month's report. In November, Google reported that it was retiring a signal that looked for images referred to by multiple documents around the Web. It also improved detection of "official" pages for topics or brands.

Changes Affecting Presentation of Results

Continuing a trend, this month's changes affected the sitelinks that display below a search result, as well as the rich snippets that fill in results with ratings, reviews, images or other content. The "concepts" adjustment focuses the sitelinks algorithm to show more relevant links, such as those specific to the user's metropolitan region.

The process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets has been improved, so more results will start showing rich snippets.

Relatedly, there are two new types of search results. The "Live Results" project will now display NFL and college football scores and standings live. Another change improves the display of Google Places results for concert venues, showing up to three upcoming events for major venues.

Two more aesthetic changes affect the +1 button, which now only appears when you hover your mouse or when the result has already been +1'd, and to image sizes in Image Search. Codename "matter" will now display images with larger full-size version.

Changes Affecting Infrastructure & Performance

Codename "old possum" changes the final destination URL in mobile search results, skipping more of those annoying mobile redirects for faster smartphone browsing.

Encrypted Google search is now available on regional domains, but it's opt-in. Users in the U.K., Germany and France can go straight to the secure version of their regional Google domain, e.g. https://www.google.co.de, to activate secure search.

SafeSearch has also been improved. Codename "Hoengg" improves the result filtering under strict SafeSearch. The methods for finding related queries have been improved, making the algorithm more conservative and using a new dataset to determine relationships between search terms.

For the webmasters, Google has added so-called "soft 404" detection for sites that don't send the right HTTP code when a page is missing. Google doesn't know how to crawl pages that are missing but don't send the correct 404 code, so this change improves the way Google detects "soft 404" pages.

There are more changes this month, but they're mostly little, behind-the-scenes things. If you're interested, the full list is available on the Inside Search blog.

Those were among the findings in a study released by Healthline Networks for the top searches on its health information site in 2011. Chlamydia was the number one query for mobile device users, while cancer was the top search from desktops and laptops.

The top 10 desktop and laptop searches are more straightforward and include such terms as pain, weight, diet and sleep.

The searches were conducted on the company's Healthline HealthWeb, a healthcare-specific site that links consumers to 50 destination sites including health information publishers, insurers, employers and traditional search engines.

"Personal phones are individually owned whereas desktop computers are usually shared (e.g. among families, co-workers) so people will opt for the search method that gives them the greatest sense of privacy," said Dr. Ash Nadkarni, resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Medical Center and founder of Appguppy Mobile, an application creation service.

Among the other findings:

• People were five times more likely to search for diseases than symptoms.
• More mobile traffic andd searches were recorded in March than in any other month, which Healthline was a result of heightened concerns about radiation sickness following the Japanese earthquake.
• Most mobile health searches are made on Wednesday; very few health-related searches are made on weekends.
• The biggest spike in desktop and laptop searches was between Feb. 12 and Feb. 15 when the FDA pulled the breast cancer treatment Avastin and President Barack Obama was discussing the 2012 healthcare budget.

This year, Google's Panda updates seemed careful and prudent, punishing sites who game the system for better page rank. This was also the year of social SEO, in which the +1 button began to affect search results. Google is also moving away from historical results and toward real-time search. Is Google still as good as it used to be at finding what we're looking for?

Rick Webb posted an illuminating comparison on his Tumblrmajig yesterday. It's anecdotal, not a study of Google's search quality, but it's a reasonable experiment.

If Jane Q. Internet wanted to know the price of gold, she would be likely to enter a Google search for "gold price," right? Google tends to be good about those kinds of queries. It does math and checks spelling, so it would be reasonable for a user to expect it to return the price of gold.

But look what happens when you Google "gold price." From Rick Webb's illustration:

Contrast this with geeky search tool Wolfram Alpha, which starts with a search bar no more intimidating than Google's own. Again via Rick Webb:

One could not ask for a better search result for "gold price." There are two problems with Google's result. One is the SEO crap from "goldprice.org." This is the kind of thing Google is actively fighting against, and the Web's snapshot of the price of gold is probably pretty messed up by conspiracy theories and other bad content, making Google's job harder.

But the other problem is one Google doesn't want to solve. The three paid ads, taking up half the page, are no better than the SEO crap below it. Google has made a compromise here and sided against the user. Let's look at some other aspects of the state of Google search at the end of 2011 and see who benefits.

"Freshness" Replaces "Timeline"

Google's "freshness" update to search results affected 35% of searches. Content and brand sites that update frequently benefited, and the sites that lost were all over the map. Google touts a user benefit of this change. When you search for "olympics" in spring of 2012, you're likely to be searching for content about the 2012 Summer Olympics, not the Wikipedia page for Olympic Games. Google's just trying to help.

Google has killed the Timeline view, a useful tool which I used on a regular basis. bit.ly/t8Ef9h #nottoohappyaboutthat

— David Friedman (@ironicsans) November 11, 2011

But as Google brought the so-called Caffeine update in the front door, it kicked some historical search tools out the back. It eliminated the "Timeline" search view, which made browsing historical search results easier and more informative than the simple date range constraint that is now users' only option.

What does this say about Google's priorities? Could there possibly be some huge operational cost of supporting timeline searches that Google had to eliminate? Or is it rebuilding the way results appear chronologically in order to favor real-time search? The second scenario seems much more likely. It's a choice to encourage one kind of user behavior and discourage another, and Google's ideal user behaviors are determined by ad impressions.

Google+ Comes To Web Search

Google's new social network is also its new source of real-time search data, replacing the deal with Twitter that expired this summer. But Google+ also provides another new piece of Google's new search priorities: personalization.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal has offered a compelling defense of this move, explaining that personalization is all about context. Google can better figure out what a query means to a user if it has social signals.

So Google added public Google+ posts as search results, and that's fair enough. Tweets are search results, too. But it also began to allow the +1 button on regular Web content to influence search results in a variety of ways. There's a +1 button on image search now, as well as on Google News articles. And Google added the +1 button to one more important kind of content that ties it all together: display ads.

That may make ads more relevant, which makes Google money, but it also pushes users to rely on their social graphs for relevance, rather than a more objective standard.

Other Tweaks & Trends

Other changes to Google search will play out in 2012. As Google goes head to head with Siri and the iPhone for control of local search, Google Places will receive more prominence in search. This affects Google's notion of universal search, the effort, which began in 2007, to consolidate all kinds of content on to one search results page.

Google was once revered as the paragon of minimalism on the Web, but this effort to compress more and more content for maximum impact has resulted in pages that look more like the "gold price" results.

Has your satisfaction with Google search results changed lately? Share your thoughts in the comments.

It was a weird year. Perhaps it's not surprising that, of all the grim and tumultuous events that transpired this year, the top Google searches were mostly frivolous. The number one trending search was Rebecca Black. But this year's Zeitgeist site is dynamic, detailed and easy to explore. Drilling down by region reveals some timely insights into what interested the wired world in 2011.

This year's Zeitgeist report offers amazing depth, visualizing the data and allowing users to compare searches with one another and over time. In addition to the fastest rising searches, it shows the fastest falling, as well as the trending searches by category, including Google Maps and Google News. You can also browse by various countries and regions. Visit googlezeitgeist.com/en to explore.

You can read Google Fellow Amit Singhal's impressions of the Zeitgeist on the Google blog.

Did you use the Web for anything major this year? Share your experiences in the comments.

Last week, Google fellow Amit Singhal, who appears in today's video, published some thoughts on personalization, which has been Google's most publicized and controversial change to its core product. Google's in a thoughtful mood about its recent changes. As Vic Gundotra made clear at Web 2.0 this fall, the company's whole identity is shifting. Here are four major trends in how Google search has evolved over time.

Universal Search

Google's introduction of universal search in 2007 was the beginning of a trend away from separating Web search results by type and toward putting it all in one place. As connection speeds improved and video and image content became ubiquitous, Google found that different types of results could still be relevant to one query. Soon enough, Google users began to find videos, images and place results all in response to one search.

But as Google got better at indexing these varied kinds of content, it also expanded its portfolio of Web services into dedicated tools for organizing and presenting them. By acquiring YouTube and building out dedicated Web properties for News, Maps, Places, Shopping and more, Google began to advance its search-based advertising business into the realms of its competitors, including content companies.

Google Goes Mobile & Local

Before long, Google was deep into the business of local commerce. With the rise of Android, Google had an end-to-end business of finding location-based results for local businesses, restaurants and destinations. It began to build commerce businesses like daily deals and mobile payments to monetize it. And local business offered a rich vein of advertising dollars, so Google made the mobile Web, and mobile ads, a top priority.

Google's local efforts played right into universal search by making maps and place results more relevant, even when a user searched from his or her desktop. This inevitably led to clashes with competitors like Yelp, whose dedicated local business content was threatened by Google's integration. But Google kept going, even acquiring professional local business content company Zagat. Google's definition of relevance grew broader.

Google Search and Time

Google has changed the impact of time on search, as well as place. It has tweaked the way timeliness of content appears in search multiple times, and its latest update calculates when a search is probably looking for recent results rather than historical ones.

At the same time, Google has eliminated some historical features from search, shifting the priority onto real-time results. Now that Google's users are out and about using Google to find things to do, it has to respond in real time.

Google+: Google's New Identity

Identity is the final piece of the puzzle. Google has personalized results for a while using Web history and sharing data. But with the launch of Google+, Google has introduced a form of social SEO. Social activity is now a fundamental part of how search results appear for users logged into Google's ubiquitous Web services.

The +1 button is all over the place now, and Google is using this signal to determine which results to show its users by analyzing their interests. As Singhal said in his thoughts on personalization, it's all about context. Google can better figure out what a query means to its users if it has real-time and social signals.

At Web 2.0, Gundotra said that Google had shipped the "Plus part," meaning the social network itself, and is now shipping "the Google part," meaning the way Google+ signals integrate with relevance in search. The "+" is a small modifier to the name "Google," but it represents a whole new understanding of what constitutes meaning in Web search.

Check out the six-minute video of Google's "Evolution of Search:"

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.app, which is a universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, was last overhauled in August, adding more search filters and Instant Pages for pre-caching result pages, so they load faster. In today's update, the search results themselves are instant, too, showing up as soon as you type in your query.

The app now has even more tablet-friendly UI features, like a swipe-able carousel for viewing image results. It also has visual history, instead of just a text list of queries. It adds search previews that pop up before you choose which search result you want, a feature recently added to desktop search. And, of course, there's a +1 button.

Google Search App Is Also A Launcher

This excellent release leaves iOS users with an obvious question: How can the search app be so good, while the new Gmail app is so bad?

Today's update gives two possible answers. It's now even easier to launch all of Google's great Web apps from the search app, which was already one of its most useful features. That includes Gmail, and the Web version of Gmail is more or less the same as the native app, if not better in some ways. So using the Google Search app puts users one tap away from a menu with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, News, Plus and more, even Google Voice, which has its own (lame) native iOS app, too. This launch screen got a nice overhaul today.

The other reason this is Google's best iOS app is voice search, also available with just one tap on both the iPad and iPhone versions. Apple's voice-powered AI search assistant, Siri, bypasses Google for some searches on purpose, and Apple is buying Google competitors, such as 3D mapping companies, to find even more ways around Google. By building an excellent iOS search experience, with voice search just one tap away, Google can train iPhone and iPad users to keep using it for search, even with Siri on board.

Do you use the Google Search app on your iPad or iPhone?

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.

• You won't get spelling corrections.
• It won't personalize your results with Web history or social stuff.
• It won't include synonyms or related terms (like "automobile" if you search for "car").
• It won't search for words with the same stem (like "dancer" if you search "dance").
• And it won't be able to understand clarifying optional terms like "circa" in "Roosevelt speeches circa 1939."

In other words, Google's serious when they say verbatim search looks for your exact words. If you have a specific query you'd like to search for verbatim, here's how you do it:

Get to a search results page:

On the bottom of the left sidebar, click 'Show search tools:'

Then scroll way, way down and click 'Verbatim:'

Do you like this new verbatim feature? Let us know in the comments.

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.

The value of a tool like this cannot be overstated. NPR social media guru Andy Carvin, speaking at ReadWriteWeb's 2Way Summit this summer, bemoaned the difficulty of searching and resurfacing old tweets. Carvin is not alone. Trying to find a tweet from even a few days ago can be a challenging ordeal using Twitter's native search tool or bigger search engines like Google and Bing.

PostPost attempts to alleviate this problem by not only indexing tweets from the last several weeks, but by limiting your stream to only the most important users. In our initial tests, it seems to have done a pretty good job of doing so. We were delighted to see relevant tweets from early October, something that typically would be very difficult using Twitter's own search.

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.

When you search on Trapit, the first batch of stories might be pretty good, depending on your query. The interface prompts you to give five stories the thumbs-up or thumbs-down until it's finished personalizing. This isn't an up-vote or down-vote for popularity; it's just whether the article is what you're looking for or not. This is how the AI engine learns what you like and personalizes results for you. After that's done, the results are fine-tuned to your tastes, and the same trap on someone else's profile might look completely different.

Don't think of Trapit as a search tool. You can save traps to your profile, and as the engine finds new stories it thinks will interest you, it delivers them to your traps and gives you a notification. Trapit makes for a great homepage; every time you open your browser, you'll see new stories listed in your activity feed, which you can read now or save to your reading list for later.

While the trendy discovery engines these days are social, trawling your Facebook and Twitter connections and using those to approximate your interests, Trapit goes the other way. It uses only your query, your votes and its machine intelligence. "There's no concept of crowd-sourcing on here," Griffiths says. Trapit shows you featured traps by other users, which you can add as your own, but as soon as you do, they start personalizing for you specifically.

Trapit reminds me of Thoora, an app with a similar mission, but they work rather differently. Thoora's algorithms use certain signals, including popularity but also using smarter semantic data, to pull in content from millions of sources. Trapit scours fewer sources, but it uses different underlying technology with a grasp of natural language.

I've tried out both, and I don't know which is better. They both work much better than dumb popularity-powered aggregators, that's for sure. I can find endless amounts of relevant reading on either one.

Does a personalized news feed like this help you find good stuff to read? Try it out and tell us what you think. Go to trap.it and sign up for free and share your reactions and favorite traps in the comments.

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.

Google continues to improve rich snippets and learn how to pull relevant page content into search results. Recent updates make Google smarter about pulling page body content, rather than header or menu content. Others improve page titles by de-duplicating anchor text in links, and improve details in rich snippets for applications.

Google has also retired a signal for image search that looked for images referred to by multiple documents around the Web. Another change improves detection of which pages are "official" for a topic or brand.

Changes To Time-Sensitive Results

Google is making a concerted effort to shift from basic chronological results to real-time search. Its recent updates to the Caffeine search infrastructure semantically determine when a user would want recent, "fresh" results instead of the all-time ranked pages. For example, it may determine that users searching for "olympics" are more likely to want results about the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics than the Wikipedia page for the Olympic Games.

By eliminating the "Timeline" view and applying "freshness" adjustments to queries with specified date ranges, Google is pushing timeliness as a new priority in how it determines relevance.

Google is also improving "freshness" signals by incorporating Google+ activity into overall search. After its real-time search deal with Twitter expired this year, it needs new signals for what's currently trending. Google+ offers just such an opportunity, and Google is trying out real-time search within the social network.

Other Search Changes

Several recent tweaks to Google search improve cross-language results, using Google's powerful translation to retrieve content for searches in languages that have limited Web content. Another improves query auto-completion in Russian, which used to produce some arbitrary and unhelpful predictions.

To see the rest of Google's bullet-point search improvements, visit the Inside Search blog.

Do you think Google search is improving over time?

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.

In response to user complaints about the disappearance of Timeline, Google search community manager Kelly Fee suggests using google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search for graphs of search results over time, but those tools only go back to 2004, and they aren't a part of Web search. She also suggests the Google Books ngram viewer, but that's only for book searches.

Google's Going Real-Time

The end of Timeline coincides with its implementation of new real-time search algorithms that privilege recent results over old ones by assuming when users want current information. It's also experimenting with real-time search on Google+, and it's surfacing recent posts from the social network in Web search. The removal of Timeline pushes users of Google search away from historical content and toward real-time results.

Google can do whatever it wants with its free services, and it doesn't have to explain itself to anyone. And pushing around smaller products like Google Reader in the interest of Google+ is a sensible business move. But taking away useful features of Google search raises a more core issue.

As Vic Gundotra has made clear, the + part of Google is integral to Google itself. Is it starting to change the company's priorities? Google's mission has always been to organize the Web's information. Is its new social experiment in real-time trends compromising that?

Timeline search screenshot credit: Digital Marketing Rucksack

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.

Apture Highlights Extension Welcome Video from Apture Inc on Vimeo.

I love Apture very much - I want Apture for my iPad, I want it for my phone, I want it to shoot out the end of my finger when I see words printed offline. Unfortunately, the Apture app is going to be shut down by Google in 45 days.

The very good news? The same type of functionality is going to be baked into Google Chrome in the near future. Look out, other browsers, Chrome and its users are about to get a whole lot smarter.

Google emphasized that the literal product itself is not going to be placed directly into Chrome, but said that Apture was being shut down so the team could focus on building "more things like it" as a part of Chrome.

Apture says its scripts get served up on 1 billion pages every month right now. "I'm going to miss it [the product] myself, too Marshall," CEO Harris consoled me today, "but hopefully this kind of thing will be showing up all over the place."

The Next Layer of Search

Will people use functionality like this as part of their browser? Will people think to "highlight to Google?" When I first wrote about Apture's browser plug-in, I said it was like Augmented Reality for the Web. But I wondered if people would use it regularly. "If I told you the world was your oyster, that layers of multimedia explanation and context lay behind every word on the web and are now accessible with a simple flick of the wrist - could you develop a new habit of lifting the covers to look at it?"

Other companies that track copy-and-paste activity say that highlighting things on a page so they can be shared by email is still far, far more common than clicking buttons to links via Twitter or Facebook. I imagine that once those copy-and-pasters learn they can highlight to Google, it could really change the search experience.

Harris:

"I can't comment too much about Google's future plans but what I'm excited about is: in 10 years are we still going to be browsing the web we do today? Is search still going to be 10 blue links? Are we going to still click on links to visit another page? I think those things are going to change and Apture represents just one part of those changes. Infinite background information and videos can compliment your understanding of anything you're looking at.

"When you think about Google's mission of making the world's information organized and accessible, you can't think about that without thinking about the browser. Google.com is v 1.0 of that, and Chrome's performance and speed has done amazingly well, but the browser is still a flat web browser. I think what you're going to see is more moving beyond the traditional metaphors of a traditional web browser. What's beyond everything we've seen with a browser so far? I hope it's beyond the single page and browsing metaphor that started in 1995. I think we'll see a lot more from the browser itself."

Apture now changes from an option add-on to, in spirit at least if the same software itself does not literally live on, a new way to Google for things. Not on Google.com, not in the search bar, not by voice, not by mobile - but directly from the fabric of the web. That's a big responsibility for a little four year-old company that raised just over $4 million in venture capital.

A Win for Human Intelligence

It's also a hopeful turn of events for those who read with curiosity. I love finding peoples' names online, highlighting them and having their Twitter handles appear. I love highlighting the names of companies and instantly watching product demos in an inline YouTube player. The service's Wikipedia integration means you can read words on the web not just with your own understanding, but with the world's largest, most refined, collective encyclopedia always at your fingertips.

When I asked about integration of this kind of functionality into the developer-facing parts of Chrome, Harris said he thought that was a good idea but couldn't comment.

"When you have native access to search in a browser," he said, "I'm really excited to think about other things Google that could do to enhance other kinds of products."

I am too.