This new browser extension, called “Apture Highlights”, brings in instantaneous search results for users to see. Apture Highlights aims to put a stop to the “search leak” occurring in the Web today.

The way Apture Highlights works is simple. When a visitor is browsing a website and reading its content, he usually comes across some term, name or place which he would not know much about. Rather than open a new tab and go to a search page, users can now just highlight the words or phrases in question and automatically an Apture Highlight popup window will come out with several resources pertaining to the highlighted term. This way, users won’t be severed from the material they have been reading, putting a stop to the “search leak” occurrence that so vexes online publishers.

The popup window will give users around 60+ sources ranging from YouTube and Wikipedia to social networking sites like Twitter. This new extension is now available for Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

This technology is in no way recent as Apture has already offered this to web publishers like the Financial Times and Reuters. This is the first time though that the company will be offering this extension to consumers. This is a great boon to online publishers as they have observed an increase of around 2-3 times in customer visits whenever the Apture Highlights feature is activated.

Developer Apture further affirms this by claiming that publishers have increased their site page views and search volume by funneling traffic to relevant sties for every query. Moreover, the company’s financial standing says it all; Apture has already generated around $4.1M in funds since its inception in 2008.

Real-time search engine results have been a major development in the industry today. Recently, Yahoo! announced that its SERPs will be run with “near real-time information.” The search suggestion feature is the tool that does this as it gives users the current trends with regards to their searches. Users can then deem if any of the suggestions fit what they are looking for.

This setup, though, has its share of disadvantages. One of the major setbacks to this is the fact that you can actually lose a significant amount of your traffic because of this real-time suggestion feature. While it is great that users have an easier time in their searches, keywords are still the main weapon of web developers. It’s quite alarming when one is doing great with a set of keywords then having Yahoo!’s suggestion features come in and display other sites. You can either gain a substantial amount of traffic or lose the same all in a moment.

Yahoo! states that the real-time feature will be based on whatever is trending in the search world at that moment in relation to the words/phrases being searched for. They added that real-time news and events are also included in the result pages. With info being updated every second, this can give your traffic a bit of a stumbling block unless you learn how to take advantage of it.

One thing you can do is to diversify. This means taking advantage of not only one money keyword but several of them. There are plenty of tools you can use to be able to pull this trick. You can maintain your top ranking in Yahoo! and in other search engines by being always on the lookout for updates — including ones shown by Yahoo!’s real-time feature.

The company had just introduced Facebook Places, a service that allows you to identify your location at any moment during the day. The company says that with this new service, you will be able to meet up with your friends easily and be able to go where people you know are going. This new service is Facebook’s response to the already popular geolocation service, Foursquare. Given Facebook’s considerable market share, this is sure to bring tougher competition to this particular niche.

Basically, Facebook Places lets you post your location for all of your friends to know. You enable the Places setting and you can then “check-in” to whatever establishment you are at. This can be a hotel, coffee shop, mall, or whatever. Using your mobile device, you can search the venue you want to be checked into or even add a venue if it’s not on the list then tap on the “Check-In” button on your Facebook account. You check-in will appear on your latest posts and your friends will be able to see in real-time where you are located.

The main difference that Facebook Places have against other geolocating service is that it allows you to tag or “check-in” your friends with you. When you are with someone, strolling around the mall, you can use the Facebook Places to tag whomever it is you are with. The potential for this new service is enormous. Imagine being able to gather all of your friends just by updating your status!

The main advantage of Places however, will also be its biggest disadvantage. By allowing a user to tag his friends along, this will surely be another case of privacy invasion. What if the friend you are supposed to tag does not want to be tagged?

Facebook has already thought of this ahead and have added security settings that users can customize if they don’t want certain people to see where they are located. Users who do not want to be tagged can tweak their privacy settings to avoid being tagged.

AS of the moment, Facebook Places is only available for users in the United States. Also, the service can only be used in iPhone devices or devices that support HTML 5 and geolocation services. But the company says that they expect the service to be available on more countries and additional mobile devices soon.

The addition of these new features makes it easier for Twitter users to see who is trending and who their friends are following. Basically, the “Followed By” feature allows you to see the people who follow another Twitter user. The “You Both Follow” feature, on the other hand, allows you to see the common people being followed by you and the person you are following. The company announced that both features are well on their way to full functionality over the next few days.

These features greatly expand the users’ ability to see the Twitter network much easier. It enables users to easily follow certain people since they see that their friends are following them also. This makes it easier to accept follow requests from people especially if you see that you have a lot of friends in common.

Other social networking sites such as Facebook have already implemented features like these for their pages for quite some time now. Twitter actually is kind of a late bloomer when it comes to features like these.

Another update said to be added to the Twitter pages is the Tlists.com feature. This feature allows users to know which lists they have been added to by their followers. It allows you to know what category your account and your tweets belong. Although, Twitter has announced that this is only a tentative feature and shall still be evaluated before being implemented fully.

Tlists.com is a real time media company that provides its customers live-stream “channels” on particular topics they may be searching for. It filters content from sites such as Twitter in order to give their customers more relevant results for their searches.

What happened to the hype?

Since it was released, customers have literally found little use of this particular Google product. In a blog post released last August 4, 2010, Google announced that despite “many wins and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption” that the company would have liked.

The blog went on to say that the company does not have any further plans to develop Google Wave as a stand-alone product, but they would be maintaining the site at least until the end of the year. The codes for Wave will also not go to waste as the company is planning to use them in their future projects.

Moving Forward

The buzz on Wave has disappeared at an astonishing rate. It was easily one of the most hyped products of 2009 and now it comes crashing back down to earth. This is another note on the company’s long history of social media failures that date back to the early part of the 2000s.

Its search results for movies, TV shows, and famous people now have featured videos, images as well as links to sites related to them.

Actually, all major search engine sites have been trying to upgrade their features to make result pages not just another directory of links. The plan was to provide the right content users are looking for on the result page.

Music search features have been striking for several search engines, like Microsoft Bing, Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO), which let users stream music directly from the results pages. However, the latest feature from Yahoo! is sure to be a step farther than what its competitors are providing.

These search-related additions that Yahoo! has made, however minor, have significantly made an impact on the site’s click-through rates. With the success of such features, the search engine site recently disclosed that its “Trending Now” lists have proved to be a huge success. The lists deliver trending topics as a user browse through Yahoo! properties. When one clicks any terms on the list, one will find the latest details on the topic and find associated content from the Search page.

According to Yahoo!’s Search Blog, its click-through rates had multiplied more than twice since the optimization of its Trending Now lists, with the use of content optimization technology that influences Yahoo!’s Today Module in its homepage. Adjustments to both the lists and Yahoo! News were likewise said to be in the works.

Other add-ons and changes in the page include Yahoo! aiming to enhance the relevancy of Trending Now lists and matching finance reports to Yahoo! Finance. Another test is being done to make new “Infinite Browse” modules. These add associated search content below the news reports to aid people in discovering other details on the topic, including other news articles, images, slideshows, videos and search suggestions. All other information is provided for the user in the same page.

“[B]oxes like this appear below articles on Yahoo! News to give you more information on the topic you’re reading about,” as explained in the blog.

Search suggestions, articles, images, videos, and slideshows have also now been made available. Initial rates have, again, earned double.

Yahoo! said the internal data denoted that the user’s involvement with such related search information in Y! News was closely twice the amount as seen in related features. “We’ll be rolling this out to all users when ready.”

Blogs and Dollars

Although the Internet is rife with millions of blogs today, being at the top of the blogging world is still reserved for just the chosen few. These pioneers of the blogosphere have been in the business for so long that they have had their own innovations that have changed the over-all blogging landscape. Websites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, and Perez Hilton have dominated their various blogging niches for many years now.

Blogging as a way of life has become a way for many people to voice out their opinions ad experiences to the world. But today, blogs and bloggers have become so much more that a medium, they have become legitimate businesses where people can actually make a decent living out of. Many blogs that started as personal start-ups have become widely syndicated that they eventually became companies themselves employing staff to keep their operations running.

Blogging’s Influence Today

Here are some of the ways blogs have transformed over the years:

• Blogs for Businesses

As has been mentioned, many developers have already made millions out of their blogs. Blogs are a perfect platform for web advertising, especially if your blog has many followers and is on top of its SEO market.

Mashable was just a start-up personal blog when CEO Pete Cashmore posted his first entry. Today, blogs number about 14 million all over the world in different languages. The growth of the blogosphere is said to be going at a rate of 80,000 per day! Today, many companies, from multi-national ones to the local ones, have set up their own blogs in order to penetrate more easily to their customers. Blogs are modern and youthful. Businesses understand that they have to incorporate blogging to their strategies in order to maximize their customer reach.

Aside from these, businesses now make actual money through their blogs. Annual income of some established bloggers today can actually amount up to $42,000, not a bad keep for working with your PC at home.

• Blogs as Social Media Tools

Over the years, people have increasingly turned to the Internet to get their updates of current events from all over the world. They also turn to the Web for research and to find resources they can use to aid in their work or school life. Most notable of all these developments is the fact that blogs have become a social media tool people use to push their advocacies to the consuming public.

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, and others are trending nowadays because of the social factor that they enable their users to feel. Blogs are the same. There’s probably no faster way to spread information than by using the Internet and blogs as your social media tool.

• Blogs as the Newest Source for News

There was a time when it was unthinkable for us to get our updates of daily events anywhere but from a television set or radio. Today, breaking news literally means breaking news as it is delivered right off the bat by news companies through their blogs. Minutes after an event happened or even during the time a major event is happening, we already get updates in the blogosphere. Blogs and the Internet have made us a more informed world and they have encouraged people to get updated with what’s happening to their surroundings.

A Little History of the Blogging World

There have been a lot of events over the past decade that has led to the blogosphere landscape of today. Numerous developments have helped shape the industry as we know it today. There’s Arianna Huffington and her $2.5 million investment to set up the now famous Huffington Post in 2005. Huffington post started from this initially and has now become one of the most popular blog in the whole Web.

Federated Media was also launched in 2005. It is one of the first firms to focus on blogs, more specifically advertising through blogs. The investments this company made has helped numerous start-up blogs get the much-needed capital to keep their sites running.

According to Steve Spalding, founder of the blog “How to Split an Atom,” said that “As [blogs] kept making more content, they kept appearing in Google and kept getting linked to by bigger and better sites, which lead to more traffic, more relevance, more links and most importantly, more money.” The blogs that have obtained more investments and continued to post excellent content are the ones that have raced ahead of their competition.

Another important event in the history of the blogosphere is the rise of WordPress. WordPress.com was a free hosting blogging service that enabled anyone to set up their very own blogs easily. Today, over 25 million users are using WordPress, resulting to an average of a billion page views per month. Tumblelogs, the most popular of which was Tumblr, also generated enough push to move the blogging word forward.

Looking Forward

Blogs will surely be around for many years to come. With technology ever advancing, there are plenty of software and devices that have already been introduced to encourage people to blog away! The Internet has given every individual a certain sense of power that almost anyone, no matter the age or educational attainment, can type out their opinions and share them to the world.

For the past decade, the rise of the blog has been an amazing thing. It started out as a way for people to type in their thoughts and events of the day. Now it has transformed into a worldwide phenomena that has the capability to change lives wherever you may be in the world.

With the Internet being used by millions of people from all over the world everyday, Google has basically entered every market and niche of cyberspace. Web advertising, search engine optimization, and others are just some of the company’s penetrated markets. Today, even the mobile phone search niche is being capitalized on by this corporate giant.

This week, Google has just released an update that will make it easy for their search engine users to review their recent searches. Google has introduced a new search history setting specifically for its mobile phone users. The feature is now up and running at the Google Mobile homepage.

This new feature can be accessed through the “History” link that can be found at the bottom of the mobile Google page. Clicking this button will enable you to access the page that will post your search history to your mobile searches but to your desktop searches as well. To be able to use this function, you need to have your Google’s “Save Searches” feature enabled.

In this page, you will see your past searches arranged in chronological order. The searches also include a time stamp and it also displays the pages you have actually entered during your search. To help you distinguish between searches, Google uses a mobile icon for the searches done through your phones. What’s more, Google includes starred results in this new feature. This enables you to view the pages you have bookmarked either through your phone or PC.

Google aims to better integrate and enhance user experience in doing their searches. The new History feature basically gives users an instant bookmarking system where they can access their marked pages anytime, anywhere.

Most people set up accounts in order to connect with friends or reconnect with old ones. The communication landscape of today has undergone major changes that the Internet has become the easiest way for all of us to keep our relationships with majority of our friends.

Admittedly, we cannot spend time together with friends and family every single day. Some of us are constrained by work or by logistics. In this light, the Internet has become a blessing in disguise for many of us. So it is very understandable that the recent Nielsen reports conclude that the majority of the time we spent browsing the Internet is through these social networking websites.

According to these new statistics, 22.7% percent of our Internet time is spent either updating our status on Facebook or Twitter. While there are other reasons why people log into their social networking accounts more (like getting news updates, shopping or even advertising), the Nielsen report suggest that social networking is bit by bit displacing all other form of communications we do in the Web.

Placing a far second is online gaming with 10.2%. Third is e-mailing at 8.3%. The report also reveals a 43% percentage increase of social networking from 2009. Only social networking and online gaming experienced increases during the past year as all the others showed declining rates. Even instant messaging decreased by approximately 15% compared to its average a year ago.

Here are the top ten activities we do on the Internet and their corresponding percentages: Social Networking (22.7%), Online Gaming (10.2%), E-mailing (8.3%), Portals (4.4%), Instant Messaging (4%), Movies and Video Streaming (3.9%), Searches (3.5%), Software (3.3%), Various Entertainment (2.8%), Advertisements/Classifieds (2.7%) and everything else (34.3%).

While this may not be really that surprising, it is important to note the trend happening into the Internet. Expect to see more drastic changes in user behavior in the years to come.

The search engine giant is in possession of a whole lot of information, that is a given. The number of apps and web add-ons that the search engine has is bewildering.

Many people and developers though have been wary that Google’s ability to acquire information may be breaching the lines and is already invading our privacy. Several web plug-ins have surfaced to enable users to know whether they are giving out too much info not only to Google but to other search engines as well.

This week, another app called “Google Alarm” has hit the Web. This plug-in notifies the user every time information about him/her is sent to the servers of Google. Google Alarm works on both the Firefox and Chrome web browsers.

The Developer

Jamie Wilkinson, the developer of Know Your Meme—a site that documents various Web phenomena—and Mag.ma, developed this new add-on. Wilkinson says that Google Alarm is aimed at making users aware of the amount of information that they are sending to the search engine giant.

“Google makes great products and gives them all away for free, which has made them into [an] ubiquitous and omniscient force on the Internet” states Wilkinson. He adds that he was surprised when he found out that more than 80% of the websites he visited while developing Google Alarm have Google tracking bugs on them. The plug-in he developed, he says, is designed to notify users and make them more aware of personal information that is being sent out to the Internet giant.

Security for Users

There are plenty of web add-ons around the Internet that will enable users to block any malicious and unwanted content from the web browsers. The credibility of Google Alarm is yet to be seen but the potential it has is a positive development for the security of all Internet users.