Concerns about online privacy and limits to data sharing have dominated the social media waves over last few weeks. First Zuckerman blazed away with Open Graph, relegating any concerns  about privacy to something very old fashioned. He then made a quick U turn and promised to simplify privacy settings on Facebook  (whose security settings are not less daunting than setting the winking clock on a old VCR -if you are old enough to remember).

Then the shoe dropped loudly with a research report from PEW  Internet revealing than 71% of youngsters (ages 18-29) have changed the privacy settings to limit sharing information about themselves. 47% of this age group removed unwanted comments from others from their sites and 41%  turned to anonymity by removing their names from photos/tagged photos.

Quite the opposite to being social!

This undercurrent has been simmering for some time. Previous surveys conducted by CareerBuilder and Microsoft have established that young job seekers were being rejected because of content on their Facebook pages or online photo albums. In fact college grads have been creating profiles with incomplete names or fake alias just to escape the unwarranted  attention from Recruitment Managers or overzealous Admission Officers. (See the blog post on Hiring in a social world…)
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Last week at  Search Engine Strategies show in New York City, Yusuf Mehdi,  the Search Boss at Bing, admitted that Microsoft neglected the long tail of search “We missed the boat early on that the focus was about the long tail,“. He went on to say “… it turned out the long tail was much more important.” This, of course,  caused a ripple in the media and everyone weighed in with their own angle on this revelation.

For those of us, neck deep in the thicket of search engine marketing this did not come as a surprise.  For the word on the street has always been that Google’s had (and still has) the biggest lead on indexing of the long tail keywords. Their gargantuan index has helped Google’s ranking algorithm to match the queries exactly to the desired content, much faster. It also helped small advertisers by providing them an an affordable way of  generating leads through paid search in the face of stiff competition.

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Internet in US virtually lit up when some doctored images appeared image appeared at the top of the image search results for Michelle Obama (a sample appears below)

Image search results?

Why the related search suggestion?

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Google today sported a new logo to recognize invention of bar coding by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952.

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This week Google created a wave, at least in blogosphere and twitter universe, with the beta launch of Sidewiki. This browser plugin lets a website visitor leave comments on any website that other visitors with Sidewiki enabled can view when they visit the website.
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Surprisingly media did not give much attention to Google’s gaze into crystal ball to look at the future of search at SES San Jose.  Nick Fox, Business Product Management Director from Google, let this loose in the Keynote address
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