Google announced a new feature called Search plus Your World that offers signed-in users a customized set of search results that contain personal photos and friends' activities pulled from the web, including social media sites. However, results apparently do not include material from Facebook or Twitter, and this sparked some back-and-forth.

Google disabled its author search functionality from Google News in favor of the Google+ Authorship capabilities it introduced in November. Searching within Google News for "author:‘firstname lastname,'" returns no documents, but participating journalists can opt to have a link to their Google+ profiles displayed next to articles they've written.

Microsoft acquired VideoSurf, Inc., a video discovery technology company offering back-end computer vision that can identify video frames. Microsoft plans to integrate this technology with its entertainment platform and enhance search and discovery of entertainment content using Xbox LIVE.

Covario, Inc. and Adobe announced plans to integrate SEO data from Covario Organic Search Insight with Adobe SearchCenter+. The integration is designed to help marketers asses the impact of Organic Search rankings on paid-search programs.

Covario, Inc. and Kenshoo, providers of digital marketing solutions, announced an agreement to deliver search and social marketing solutions for enterprise marketers. Under the agreement, Covario will license Kenshoo's digital marketing software to enable scalable online media buying.

When your Chief Marketing Officer is breathing down your neck, demanding to know why your company's website still isn't the top hit for the most-searched term in your industry -- and you're trying to figure out the most tactful way to tell him that it'll never happen -- breathe easy. Conductor, the SEO technology provider, has come along with some solid new research demonstrating that you can get as much bang for your SEO buck without nabbing top billing on the highest-volume search terms.

Content in the cloud is a natural evolution from storing files on our desktops-but the content creation explosion that has overfilled our inboxes and overwhelmed our social networks won't be solved by moving the growing mass of data from a private realm to a public one.In fact, there's a solution on the horizon that promises to keep the clouds fluffy and the content contextual. It's the "curated cloud," and it's the next big thing. By one measure, we created 5EB (exabytes) of data from the beginning of time until 2008. Now we're creating 5EB every 2 days. Where did that statistic come from? The folks who should know: Google.

Last spring, Google found itself on the receiving end of a fair amount of consternation from the technology press, privacy advocates, and several European countries. German officials accused the search giant of using its ubiquitous Street View cars to do more than merely snap those unsettling panoramic shots of your house and neighborhood. Those official Google vehicles were also collecting "samples of payload data from WiFi networks," Google admitted in April on its official blog, in response to the accusation.

Social search is still so new, it can sometimes be hard to get experts to agree on what it is or, more importantly, what it has the potential to be. As even major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! offer social search results and new specialized tools pop up, the face of search may just be changing forever.

The French government and international news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) have teamed up to spearhead a consortium of digital media content producers and publishers aiming to find a high-quality semantic search strategy for AFP's Arabic-language news, audio, and video multimedia content, a solution that creators hope could serve as a model platform for Arabic news organizations around the globe.

Discovery has never been a simple process for organizations, even in the "old days" when discovery generally entailed gathering piles of documents into large boxes and wading through them by hand. Information long ago evolved from print documents to electronic formats, which has created challenges and opportunities.

By now, most of us know the basic ingredients for a good website. The mobile experience, though, is still a relatively new concept compared to the traditional web—so figuring out how to provide the best mobile search interface remains a work in progress. Yet organizations with digital content are wasting no time working with the technology to expand their traditional web search capabilities into the mobile space.

It is the very breadth, depth, and possibility inherent in semantic technology that can prevent content companies from experimenting with a technology that may be one of the most useful commercial innovations of the past decade. The murkiness of the word itself—not to mention the standards, acronyms, and jargon that can dominate the discussion of semantics—only adds to the confusion.

With the proliferation of search-oriented online content providers such as AOL, Yahoo!, Demand Media, and About.com, internet users are increasingly likely to find that most of the general searches they do return results from these SEO-oriented content creators and so-called "content farms". Whether this is a good or a bad thing from the user perspective remains to be seen—and opinions vary. But from general tactics, to long tail search and universal search strategies, SEO remains critical to web publishers.

Today, many business intelligence tools offer an array of event-driven and proactive features designed to provide information and to enable employees to take action. From Google to the Grateful Dead and from direct response fulfillment to sustainability management, interactive intelligence is helping a variety of organizations extend tightly stretched resources to create new avenues of efficiency and profitability.

After many successful Enterprise Search Summit events in the U.S., Information Today, Inc. (EContent's parent company) is launching Enterprise Search Europe in London. Conference Chair Martin White calls the event noteworthy, because in a world where "search" and "Google" are synonymous, he says, it is important to realize the scale of information retrieval research and of the enterprise search business in Europe.

Commentary from Martin White: About 50 years ago I fell in love with chemistry. I could think of no more interesting subject and spent 3 very enjoyable years at the University of Southampton. It was a time when the department was home to some exceedingly able researchers, and when I crept into the research meetings I heard phrases such as, "We are beginning to think ..." and "It's starting to look as though ..." as new techniques were being developed just down the corridor in the undergraduate labs.

Search is all about the meaning of words, and we need to take this into account in developing search technology.

I was part of a conversation the other day with the CEO of a niche animation company. He explained the company's digital strategy, which was to drive audiences solely to its website because, as he boasted, once your living room television talks to the internet, people will navigate to his company's site and it'll have "twice as much value." This presented me with the opportunity to hypothesize on what actually might happen when your TV does merge with the web.

Dear John: Over the last 6 months, we have spent a lot of time and effort talking to staff throughout our organization, both in this country and globally, to identify the way in which our current search engine is meeting their requirements. The objective of the research project was to develop a set of requirements for a new enterprise search engine, but one of the discoveries we made was that many of these requirements could be met by enhancing our current search engine.