ReadWriteWeb

Wednesday in ReadWriteWeb, Jon Mitchell posted a very pointed opinion on how Google's social network, Google+, is leading to gradual, though noticeable, adjustments in how all of Google's services work. In his article, Jon provided evidence that Google search results appear to favor recommendations on Google+ that link to an article that meets the search criteria, over a direct link to the article itself.

Writes Jon, "Google used to be about organizing the world's information. It was a service to the entire Web. But this social tangent is changing that. It's turning the Web into a Google+ popularity contest." However, he also writes that other Google users in his Google+ circles tell him they get different results.

Among a handful of patents transferred last December 31 from IBM's portfolio to that of Google, as first discovered by Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea, is a system for processing text compiled by users of social networks, and ascertaining their common interests. We've already seen the rise of tools such as Radian6 for ascertaining social net users' individual interests; this new technology, which received a U.S. patent only one year ago, would judge what concepts they share with one another.

The goal of this technology, as IBM originally stated, is to literally to filter out irrelevant links to articles that may not pertain to users' search intentions. What we don't know yet is whether Google intends to use this technology, or simply keep others from using it first.

Two companies that you don't hear much about these days have partnered to help improve online Q&A. ChaCha and Wolfram Alpha have now combined forces to improve the quality and depth of answers to online questions.

Here's another semantic search tool for Web application developers: Picky, a "a semantic text search engine for categorized data, such as varchar fields from a database." It's written in Ruby and you can grab the source here.

The developer, Florian Hanke, emphasizes that Picky is not a replacement for for full text search engines like Sphinx and Lucene. It's just for searching small, structured data very quickly.

Semantic search engine Hakia announced a major redesign of its site today, including the addition of 'credible sites' to its search index. In order to create this index of trustworthy sites, Hakia is asking volunteers to submit credible, peer reviewed sources. Credible sites are currently limited to health and environmental topics, but Hakia is planning to expand this quickly. By adding these credible sources, Hakia wants to go beyond '10 blue links' and give its users an alternative to popularity driven approaches like Google's PageRank. Hakia has also added a 'Galleries' section, which is a structured directory of some of the most popular search topics.