The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, with their constant streams of fresh user updates have given rise to a new type of web search engine that is challenging Google’s dominance in the area of internet search – the real-time search engine.

According to a recent Wired.com article, the internet is changing rapidly thanks to the popularity of social networks and social media.

People are increasingly searching the web for fresh, up-to-the-minute information on timely topics like celebrity gossip, current news events, profile updates from family and friends, current political events ( ex. Iranian election protests ). Web metrics show that searches for these types of subjects is rising.

It is commonly called the “real-time” web.

The real-time web is shaking up the internet as we have experienced it in the past, and it’s a trend that Google needs to take seriously if it wants to compete in this new search engine arena.

For over a decade, Google has indexed the internet by determining which site had credibility. Google measures the popularity of sites in part by measuring the links that point to them, a big part in Google’s PageRank measurement.

Google checks to see whether a site grew in popularity naturally, which tends to show credibility. However, if a site gets a lot of inbound links overnight, it’s could be due to link spamming, a practice that is frowned upon by the Google search algorithm.

In contrast, real-time web search works the opposite. Real-time search is about “trending topics” and current news items — which can create a huge number of inbound links and comments in minutes. Real-time search engines can’t wait days to determine what is the most popular real-time news source or blog post.

People who search the real-time web want to know the source of trending topics immediately.

Real-time search engines like OneRiot, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are in the process of redefining what the rules that determine what makes a current piece of information on the web relevant.

The majority of these up and coming real-time search engines use Twitter data to drive their search results. Whenever an explosion of Twitter tweets on a particular topic or site links emerge, it’s considered a “signaling event” for trending topics on real-time search engines.

Collecta’s CTO Jack Moffitt says: “We want to be limited only by the speed of light.”

Search results on the real-time web is vastly different from those on a typical search engine. If you search for a celebrity on a traditional engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing, the majority of the search results stay constant from day to day.

Rankings change slowly on a traditional web search. However, real-time search engines serve fresh results by the minute.

Developers of real-time search engines say that their goal isn’t to answer questions like Google, Yahoo and Bing do, but rather to give people a fresh snapshot of current web buzz.

In a nutshell, Google is still top dog when it comes to topical research, but a new group of real-time search engines are better equipped to give you a front row seat at the global water cooler.

Source: Wired.com

Facebook has mined user data from their social network and produced a graphical representation of the collective happiness of Facebook’s millions of U.S. users.

Facebook analyzed information from their database of user updates and scanned for words indicating a particular mood of happy or sad and correlated the updates to the day they were posted.

Analysis of the Facebook profile updates showed that holidays tend to make people feel happy and celebrity deaths make people sad.

Facebook noted that Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the happiest days for profile updates, while the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson ranked among the saddest for user updates.

Although these findings seem pretty obvious, Facebook’s collection and analysis of users’ “mood demographics” could become more useful with years of data mining — especially when this information is associated with economic indicators.

However, Facebook’s data mining of user updates makes some people wonder if it is a good idea for large social networks to use personal profile updates for demographic research.

If you publish personal data on the Facebook social network, no matter how private your profile settings are, Facebook.com can still save it, mine it, analyze it and use it for their own purposes.

Some people feel that Facebook’s so-called “Gross National Happiness” indicator is Orwellian and intrusive.

Mint, a personal finance site, also mines uers data and runs this type of information analysis. The company tracks and analyzes millions of bank and credit card accounts that its users input for personal finance purposes in order to rank the most frugal urban areas as well as geographic wealth distribution.

Regardless of privacy concerns, the trend among many social networks and web 2.0 sites will be to mine user data and analyze the information for business, social, market and maybe even political purposes.

Source: LA Times

Social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are blocked on over half ( 54% ) of corporate networks, according to a recent survey of Chief Information Officers that was conducted by Robert Half Technology.

Furthermore, this 54% represents the percentage of CIOs surveyed who say that their corporations do not allow use of popular social networks by employees for any reason while on the job.

The officers were asked the following question: “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?”

The CIOs’ responded to the social network question as follows:

- Prohibited completely – 54%
- Permitted for business purposes only – 19%
- Permitted for limited personal use – 16%
- Permitted for any type of personal use – 10%
- Don’t know/no answer – 1%

Source: Robert Half Technology

Our Alaska property tax assessor records search and directory has been updated for the following areas of Alaska:

Anchorage Borough property tax assessor.
Fairbanks North Star Borough property tax assessor.
Juneau Borough & City property tax assessor.
Kenai Peninsula Borough property tax assessor.
Matanuska-Susitna Borough property tax assessor.

Our directory of Alabama property tax assessor records sites has been updated for the following areas in Alabama:

Autauga County property tax assessor.
Baldwin County property tax assessor.
Blount County property tax assessor.
Calhoun County property tax assessor.
Chambers County property tax assessor.
Chilton County property tax assessor.
Clarke County property tax assessor.
Coffee County property tax assessor.
Colbert County property tax assessor.
Covington County property tax assessor.
Cullman County property tax assessor.
Dallas County property tax assessor.
DeKalb County property tax assessor.
Elmore County property tax assessor.
Escambia County property tax assessor.
Etowah County property tax assessor.
Houston County property tax assessor.
Jackson County property tax assessor.
Jefferson County property tax assessor.
Lauderdale County property tax assessor.
Lee County property tax assessor.
Madison County property tax assessor.
Marion County property tax assessor.
Marshall County property tax assessor.
Mobile (city) property tax assessor.
Mobile County property tax assessor.
Monroe County property tax assessor.
Montgomery County property tax assessor.
Morgan County property tax assessor.
Perry County property tax assessor.
Pickens County property tax assessor.
Pike County property tax assessor.
Randolph County property tax assessor.
Russell County property tax assessor.
Shelby County property tax assessor.
St. Clair County property tax assessor.
Talladega County property tax assessor.
Tallapoosa County property tax assessor.
Tuscaloosa County property tax assessor.
Walker County property tax assessor.
Wilcox County property tax assessor.
Winston County property tax assessor.

Wonder what all the fuss and buzz is about surrounding Google’s new communication tool called Google Wave? This clever video attempts to explain some of Google Wave’s “killer app” potential in 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

Although Google Wave isn’t ready for public release yet, you can learn more about Google Wave on their site at Google Wave.

Here is a great mother and daughter reunion story that shows how online people search efforts can reunite a mother with her long lost daughter after almost 40 years —

A woman whose kids were taken from her by the East German Stasi secret police was recently reunited with one of them after nearly 4 decades.

Petra Hoffmann, now 55 years old, was reunited this week with her daughter Mandy Reinhardt, now 38 years old, for the first time since the East German Communist police seized her after she was born.

Mandy was born in 1971. Her father was a political dissident who had served prison time for speaking against life under the rule of Communist East Germany.

“The Youth Welfare people came to my door one day, said I was not a fit person to be a mother,” said Mrs Hoffmann.

“They put me and her into a home. Days later, against my will, Mandy was given up for adoption.”

After the Berlin wall fell she began the hunt for her children.

She hounded government authorities, put notices in newspapers, asked for help from old friends. But the Communist police had destroyed most of the paperwork and her search went nowhere.

However, six weeks ago, a letter came from Berlin to Petra which read: “You don’t know me at all, but I believe you are my mother.” Mandy had been searching for her mother since 1992 after her foster parents she was given to informed her that she was adopted.

Mandy had searched for her mother on the internet and wrote to government authorities for help, but ultimately found a plea that her mother had posted on a website, which led to the communication and recent reunion between the two.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

The latest search engine statistics from StatCounter show Microsoft’s Bing search engine losing US market share to Google search. Bing dropped 1.17 percent to 8.47 percent in September from a peak 9.64 percent share that Bing had in August.

However, Google’s search engine market share in the US rose from 77.83 percent in August to 80.12 percent in September.

Bing’ search drop is interesting in light of the search engine’s steadily climbing performance since it launched along with the new features Bing added to internet search like indexed Twitter tweets.

Google recently announced nine new search options to help users find what they are searching for, including: searching fresh information by past hour, date range, commercial sites, visited and not yet visited sites, books search, blog search and news search options.

Source: Top News.

Google has made some recent changes to help their search engine compete with the real-time search engines by adding search options that allow people to choose search results based on freshness and timeliness.

Today Google announced 9 new search options that allow users to refine their searches:

Past Hour and Date Range: Users can see the most recent results in the Google index, or get results from a specific date range. These search options will show you the freshest information or information that was released during a specific time period.

More Shopping Sites or Fewer Shopping Sites: Choose the “More shopping sites” option to show more commercial pages and product prices in Google’s search results. In addition, you can choose the “Fewer shopping sites” option to weed out many of the commercial search results.

Visited Pages or Not Yet Visited Pages: Find pages you’ve visited already by choosing the “Visited pages” option or remove the pages you’ve visited by choosing “not yet visited.” To use these options you must be signed in to a Google user account and have your web history enabled.

Books, Blogs and News: Choose these options when you want your Google Search results from one of these sources. Using these filters together, along with video, forum, and review options allows you to change between different source types directly from Google’s search results.

You can use the new search options yourself by doing a search on Google and clicking the “Show options” in the blue bar under the Google logo.

Source: Google

According to BBC News a High Court in the UK has approved an injunction that will be served through the Twitter social network.

The court order will be served against an anonymous Twitter user who posts on Twitter using the same name as a UK political blogger.

The court order requires the anonymous Tweeter to reveal their real identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who writes for his own blog called Blaney’s Blarney.

The order claims the anonymous Twitter user is violating the copyrights of Mr Blaney’s writing.

Blaney told BBC News that the opinions being posted anonymously to Twitter under his name are “mildly objectionable”.

Mr Blaney requested the court to serve the injunction through Twitter instead of dealin with the hassle of contacting Twitter headquarters and asking them to handle the issue.

UK law allows injunctions to be served by various electronic means including faxes and email.

Mr Blaney got the idea to use Twitter to serve the injunction after he heard about a recent legal case in Australia where a court order was served via the Facebook social network.

Mr. Blaney said he believes this to be the first time Twitter will be used to deliver a court order.

Source: BBC News