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When Google shipped its Search, plus Your World update earlier this month, it turned out better than expected. Google left users the ability to click back and forth between personal and global modes or opt out altogether. Google's personal search draws in the user's Google+ relationships to tailor the results. When it launched, Google took the position that other social networks were welcome to participate, they just had to make a deal.

Google does make some effort to identify content from other networks. But some SPYW features only highlight Google+ material, even when other services are more relevant. If Google favors its own product over a better result, users get the short end of the stick. Some engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have built a browser extension called Focus on the User to prove the point. But what about Google+ users? For them, Google+ results are the better result. Arguably, Google should cater to them, as users of its service.

Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that digests the links in one's Twitter feed and produces a daily email of the most relevant stories. The developers will join Twitter's Growth team, and their work will still "explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news." As Twitter nears 500 million users, it needs new ways to teach them how the service works.

It's hard to learn to use Twitter, and users give up easily if they don't get it. Summify can help Twitter show new users why they should use the service. Twitter's latest changes are all about discovery of new people and content. Summify isolates the most meaningful stuff in one's Twitter feed, which helps users get value out of it.

Google and Twitter couldn't make a deal to renew their real-time search partnership, and now Google+ is plowing ahead on its own. A new Google+ feature makes searches on the network more timely, social and shareable. Google+ users can now post updates to their streams directly from search results.

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.

Much spleen has been vented over the launch of Google's Search Plus Your World this week. As was inevitable, Google has merged its new Google+ social signals into its Web search, an act that the blogosphere waited until this week to be upset about. Before this launch, the integration of Google+ into search looked like the complete destruction of Google search, forcing social crap into everything. Instead, we got two modes: personalized and global. And now, unlike before, you can shut off social search entirely.

Search has a toggle switch now. One side recommends things based on your friends and connections, the other is a plain old search engine. Many bloggers still feel that it's terrible, whether you can turn it off or not. Others find it useful, if you're good about managing your contacts. One objection to the change is that it privileges Google content over objectively better results. Others find evidence that Google's definition of "Your World" is bigger than Google+. What about you? Are you mad enough to dump Google?

Google News now highlights +1'd articles from people in your Google+ circles in its Spotlight section. Friends' faces and Google+ profiles are displayed next to the link, just like in Google's social search results. Earlier this month, Google News added the same feature for authors, showing Google+ info under their headlines.

While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.

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.

Google just announced that its social search results will now include public Google Plus posts. Since the expiration of Google's realtime search agreement with Twitter last month, it hasn't been clear how Google will continue to integrate posts from social networks into search results. Now that Google's in-house social network will provide a stream of content, Google can try to build out its social search out from there.

For users logged into their Google Accounts, searches will now display public Google Plus posts from people in their circles as search results, right alongside web pages. If it's a link, for example, that link will show up like any other Web result would, but the person who posted it will be displayed underneath it, along with the date of the post.

The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S.

Today, the company announced that it is "bringing Social Search to more users around the globe" and that it has plans to bring its most recent social addition - the +1 button - with it.

When you look at the numbers, there's no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future.

We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big thing, if Bing could have found some solid ground to stand on in taking on the big G.

Microsoft's search engine is about to tie its search results to the Facebook social graph in a move that will come as a blow to Google and its +1 initiative. Where Bing will be able to take existing "likes" from friends and integrate them into search, Google +1 has to be added from within search results before someone even clicks on a page. Google's biggest rivals are teaming up to try and make the Mountain View giant irrelevant in the future of social search.