Here’s a YouTube video that speaks to the question:

What are some of the things on your [Google's] radar, or some of the trends in search you’d like to talk about?

In a nutshell, social is the next big thing for Google, in particular, integrating reputation of individuals into its ranking algorithms.

Here’s another video on Google social and reputation and ranking. An accompanying article is at Search Engine Land.

Hat tip to Deep Web Web Design.

Andrew Pace, Executive Director for Networked Library Services at OCLC, penned this very catchy jingle for your Christmas singing pleasure:

My server got run over by a cloud app
Quicken, Word, and CRMs all grieve
I’m lovin’ Google, Mint-dot-com, and Salesforce
Like Zuckerberg and cnet, I believe

It’s like software as a service
It’s second nature to the kids
Any metaphor will work here
Clouds, architecture, rent, or power grids

I read ebooks on my handheld
And I can bank while in the loo
All my data’s on the network
At home, at work, in church, or Timbuktu

Click here for the whole song.

And, if you can’t get enough of the catchy jingle check out this iPhone app.

Hat tip to Roy Tennant.

Deep Web Technologies, sponsor of the Federated Search Blog, just published an article, Search Strategies in Federated Search: Refine Search.

Refining or clarifying an initial set of search results is a fairly common practice among search engine users that don’t know exactly what they are looking for. Yet in federated searching, refining a group of results is often not the best strategy for a user to find the best results they are looking for.

The article makes an excellent case for not using the refinement feature of any federated search application. Read the full article to learn why you should “say no to refinement.”

Stephen Arnold recently posted “Google and Search without Search” at Beyond Search. The article is in response to Marissa Mayer’s Next Big Thing: Contextual Discovery—Google Results without Search.

Arnold writes:

The phrase “contextual discovery” is short hand for the content system knowing who is logged in, what actions the user has taken in the past, and what the user is doing now. The “now” part comes from geographically aware software and some Julia Child-type numerical recipes. These “inputs” formulate a search query or point to content that others in a closely knit statistical neighborhood have recently accessed. Add salt and queue up search results. The user glances at his mobile device screen and, presto, relevant content appears.

Search without search.

Mayer thinks search without search is going to be the next big thing. Arnold doesn’t. Read what Arnold has to say here.

Carl Grant has just published an article on his blog: Reverberations and amplifications on some important issues for libraries. The article keeps the discussion going on about the importance of libraries not giving away their power to provide value to their patrons.

Here are a couple of snippet’s from Carl’s article:

Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies wrote an interesting post linking the European Union case filed against Google this past week to what both the Federated Search Blog in a recent post and I’ve written about recently in a couple of posts (here and here) concerning the Charleston Conference Face-Off and biased search result sets. Librarians should not turn a blind eye to the potential problems here. It is important to understand that commercial interests can potentially void some of the checks and balances that should be preserved in the library supply chain. …

Another snippet:

Another blog post I found particularly interesting is one by John Wilkin, Executive Director of HathiTrust and Librarian at the University of Michigan Library. His post, entitled: “Open Bibliographic Data: How Should the Ecosystem Work?” is required reading as are the comments that follow. While I won’t say I agree with all of John’s points, he makes a number of very pointed and well-deserved remarks aimed at OCLC that I do agree with. …

Read the entire article here.