Microsoft is working on a new feature for Bing called "Bing and Ping." This is a means to share your search results with friends. Bing’s "decision engine" nature provides plenty of content that users may actually want to share. Nicholas Kerr of the Bing Team explains:

Update: Digg shared some more details about how its search feature (relaunched earlier this year) works. Sammy on the company blog says:

" We’re using Apache SOLR/Lucene which helped us scale horizontally and solved many of our relevancy issues as well as enabling discovery of new content through facets.  Beyond site search, the rich set of features has allowed us build a platform that enables other features such as Related By Source and Related By Keywords."

Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.

Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:

Hulu has made a few changes to how it presents its search results, as well as the site’s "most popular" and "recently added" pages. Most noticeably, Hulu has abandoned the two-column approach in favor of a more "prominent placement of the show Hulu thinks you are looking for.

Google’s Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site’s performance in Google.

Now that Google is putting Google Profiles in search results, you might want to consider getting verified. You have to go through a process to do this however.

"Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results," says Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. "But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense."

In 2008, Eric Schmidt called the Internet a cesspool and said that brands were the way to sort it out. Popular blogger Michael Gray aka Graywolf says that big brand media sites are "the real cesspool of the Internet."

When you search for local businesses on Google Maps, you will now see more than just ten results at a time plotted on the map. While the initial ten will still be plotted by pins and letters as before, you will see dots representing many more search results.