MediaFile

Google’s Web search engine is getting a bit of a facelift.

The company said on Wednesday that Web surfers will begin to see a new column of tools running down the left side of all their search results, as well as a slightly new look for Google’s famous multicolor logo (the shadows on the Google logo will be less pronounced).

The logo redesign probably won’t excite anyone but the most obsessive corporate branding wonks, but the new left-hand navigation bar represents Google’s latest effort to evolve its search engine to the changing nature of the Web and the competition.

Google’s new left-hand tool bar presents a slew of options that allow web surfers to filter their search results according to various categories of information indexed in its massive databases, from blog posts to videos.

The selection of options changes according to each search query: a search for “NFL draft” for instance, delivers a navigation bar that allows the user to view the latest “Updates” (in which the search results are heavy on real-time fare like Twitter messages), as well as search results that include only “blogs” or “news.”

A search for “red shoes” produces options for filtering results to include only “Images,” “Books,” “Videos,” and “Shopping.”

With social networking services booming, website operators are increasingly looking for ways to make their sites play well in the social world.

Witness the clutter of “share this” buttons on websites urging surfers to share a video or an article with a litany of social networking services that the user may or may not belong to.

Now Internet chat and toolbar company Meebo is introducing another option that it says will allow websites to custom tailor the experience to each visitor’s personal social networking predilections.

Like an ancient riddle, the secret to making money from Internet social media has obsessed, and frustrated, Web entrepreneurs for years.

But Bill Gross is not your ordinary entrepreneur.

As the founder of Goto.com in the late 1990s, Gross created the first successful implementation of  paid search, the concept that today underlies Google’s roughly $24 billion-a-year cash machine.

His latest project, TweetUp, aims to do something similar for Twitter messages by ranking Tweets by relevance and by allowing Twitter users to bid money for their messages to rise to the top. (Under the bidding system, a person selects keywords and bids a penny, a quarter, or more, for their Tweets to appear on searches for those keywords).

Direct, real-time communication among politicians and the public through social media platforms is reshaping democracy and the news media, but questions remain about how the fabric of society might change as a result, argued a panel at an event hosted by the BBC on Tuesday evening at Westminster.

The Web provides a de-centralised opportunity for users to communicate from various points on the political-economic spectrum, but gatekeepers are emerging who try and curtail the dissemination of information they find objectionable, suggested panellist Aleks Krotoski, who recently completed work on the BBC series "Virtual Revolution".

"Innovative social-media platforms start off being interactive, but then they can become broadcast tools," cautioned Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's new digital election correspondent.

Twitter announced a new service on Monday for embedding its functionality into other websites. Called @anywhere, the technology gives websites tools for letting users follow Twitter feeds or share media.

“Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page,” Twitter said on its blog.

Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams, demonstrating the service at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas,  said launch partners will include Amazon, The Huffington Post and the New York Times. He didn’t give a kick-off date for the service, which is Twitter’s answer to the Facebook Connect tools embedded in sites such as the Huffington Post.

Google touted its 176 million Gmail users as a key advantage in its latest attempt to break into the red-hot social networking market, dominated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. But email may turn out to be Google’s Achilles heel.

Less than four days after introducing Google Buzz, a social networking service that is built-in to Gmail, the company is already moving to address a growing privacy backlash.

At issue is the network of contacts that Buzz automatically creates for new users based on their existing email contacts, saving people the laborious chore of manually building a social graph from scratch.

The debate over freedom of expression and the impact of social networking on democratic rights in the courts is in focus in Canada after a Facebook group became the centre of controversy when it may have violated a publication ban.

The group, which has more than 7,000 members, was set up to commemorate the murder of a 2-year-old boy in Oshawa, Ontario.

The breach of a publication ban could lead to a mistrial, a fine and even jail time. Violating a ban could taint the opinions of witnesses or jurors, and the news media must wait to report information protected under a publication ban until after the trial is over.

Bill Gates may have been one of the prime movers in the computer age, but now he’s  just another middle-aged late adopter.

Only this week, the  Microsoft co-founder got around to joining Twitter and launching his own website.

His first Tweet (“Hello World”) set the ball rolling on Tuesday, and already he has almost 250,000 followers. Several of his tweets have been about raising money for Haiti earthquake relief.

The last time the world had a look at Twitter’s financial books, the company was targeting a meager $400,000 in revenue for the third quarter of 2009 and $4 million in the fourth quarter.

But that information was based on documents stolen from Twitter by a hacker and republished by the blog TechCrunch.

And it was before Twitter, the popular microblogging service that allows users to broadcast short, 140-character text messages across the Internet, had inked monumental deals with search giants Google and Microsoft.

If you’re an Internet search engine, having Twitter content adorning your results has become as fashionable as claiming a Tiger Woods liaison seems to be for a certain group of people.

Google and Microsoft both raced to announce deals to incorporate Twitter in their search results within hours of each other in October.

And Yahoo – despite its plan to cease investing in back-end search technology and to outsource the job to Microsoft – does not want to be left out of the action.