Google has not let its recent setbacks )the closing of Google Wave comes to mind( stop it from launching new services. Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account,

And then they were two' This week the world lost another search engine giant. Yahoo! in the US and Canada has switched over to using the Bing database, and the rest of the world will soon follow. This means that the North American market is now totally dominated by Google and Bing. This does not mean that Google and Microsoft have achieved global domination, though. Yandex is, for instance, the big player in Russia and Baidu is dominating the Chinese market. Still,

Google has relaunched Google Replay as part of an improved real-time search feature. Google Replay was Google's attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period. The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page .

Here at Pandia, we have gathered tools and tips for all kinds of searching. We even have a page dedicated to shopping search which was recently updated, which will help you find quality shopping sites online. Pandia Shopping Search has three parts. The first part is a list of shopping search engines and online malls. There are separate sections for comparison shopping, customer information, shopping trends and more.

Social media of all kinds are a source of huge amounts of fresh information about news and events, likes and dislikes. But the signal-to-noice ratio is not good: Much, maybe most, of the material posted is personal and it can be hard to find the pertinent information. You need help to sift and sort the items, so why not try one of these five great real time search engines. There are all kinds of search engines out there, searching the real time web.

If you are an avid user of social networks or if you want to monitor the hive mind for news about, say, a brand, a sports team or a celebrity, you know it can be hard to keep up across the different networks. Here's a solution. 48ers is a new search engine in public beta. It lets you search Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious all at once. All you do is enter the search term and hit Search. By default, results from all five networks are displayed.

Twitter is a storehouse of information, but how to sort out the gems from among all of the nonsense? Here are some little known tools that will help you find what you need. Twitter's own tools Searching Twitter became easier once the search box was added to the menu on the right of your tweets. Here you can perform searches and save them for later. But what if you search results are still not great?

Ask is relaunched with a question and answer database. We have always had a soft spot for the Ask search engine. Throughout the years they have managed to make some serious innovations as regards search technology and the presentation of search results. For instance: When Google and Bing presents search results in three column table, with results in the center, that is an idea they stole from Ask. But for some peculiar reason Ask seems to lose its direction.

Google has redesigned its image search engine. Covering the search engine scene from outside the US sometimes leads to surprises. Features that are introduced in the US are not found elsewhere. When researching the new Google Image search engine for this post, I suddenly realized that I was not looking at the new one, but the old version. This is how Google Image search results look in my Firefox browser on our PC: On the Mac I got the new version,

We are back with a new review of the latest search engine news articles and blog posts. Google's wind power Google's purchase of twenty years worth of renewable energy from an Iowa wind farm )Inside Google July 26 2010( What Does Google Read? Want to read like a Google exec? Don't expect any laughs. )Beyond Search July 27 2010( Apple Search Engine Lightning Bolt to Strike Google? Is Apple working on an app search engine and trying to stop Google from doing the same?

We apologize for the lack of search engine news wrap-ups and newsletters for the previous weeks. The Pandia site is run by a wife and husband team on a part time basis, and we came to the conclusion that we needed a vacation. It seemed the world of search engines managed well without us, while we were walking in Scotland and the English Lowlands. But we are back now. Here are some of this week's headlines, plus a few others from the weeks we were away.

China renews Google's licence for operating in mainland China. When Google decided to give the Chinese authorities an ultimatum by stopping censoring Chinese search results, many observers thought they were mad. It looked like they were abandoning the world biggest market. Google must have known that the Chinese Communist Party will not give up on censorship. This is, after all, partly what keeps them in power. We guess Google knew as much.

How do you engage the visitors on your site? How do you work to develop new interactivity? A lot of insight can be gleaned from the experiences of the people who are out there getting their feet wet, building online communities from scratch. Here is an interview with Roberto Sarrecchia, owner of qmpeople , a social network with some original features. Disclosure: qmpeople is a Pandia Sponsor. Pandia: Your site has been online since 2004,

The European Parliament has asked the European Commission to include search engines in the Data Retention Directive. This will force the search engines to store your searches and IP addresses, undermining the Commission's attempts at protecting the privacy of European citizens. Privacy and search engine data storage It is not easy being a search engine. Giants like Google and Bing would really like to store your searches and link them to your IP address,

The Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reports that Facebook is misinforming advertisers about the number of users in the Oslo area. The question is whether the company's visitor statistics can be trusted at all. Norway has a very high Internet presentation, but we have always found the number of 2.6 million registered users to be too high. That would mean that half of the 5 million inhabitants have Facebook accounts. Only Iceland has a higher Facebook usage per capita.

A private initiative in the European Parliament, 'Written Declaration 29′, puts search privacy in peril by proposing to extend the European Data Retention Directive , already in place. The initiative, spanning several political parties, is proposed by Titziano Motti )Italy( and Anna Zaborska )Slovakia(. The two are fighting to stop child pornography and online sexual harassment of children " a noble cause. Their means, however, are dubious,

Real time search is at its most powerful when it comes to breaking news. And I often find myself filtering the results to get to the photos. A picture is worth a thousand words and real time images from the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico or the soccer world championship in South Africa is a powerful way to plug into what's happening. No real time image search at Google With the recent addition of the sidebar tools,

More news headlines from the world of search engines! The Australian Federal Police tackle Google An official Australian investigation into the search giant's Wi-Fi privacy debacle has launched. )apc June 6 2010( Google using search engine to muscle into Internet businesses, study finds Universal Search favors Google's properties with prominent listings in its results )Inside Google June 2 2010( Google Health Is Alive and, Er, Well Is Google Health,

Google lets you add a background photo to their home page. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, they say. In fact, much of the most productive innovation taking place in the business sector is copying, and we are not they ones to complain if copying leads to a better search experience. We actually think Bing's home page looks great. The background picture does not add much in terms of functionality, but it does look good, and we humans are aesthetic beings.

Google, Facebook and Apple are no longer the underdogs. The online literati are now turning their critical eyes towards the new symbols of big capital. "Once you're big, you're not cute anymore!" Wise words from Markham C. Erickson , executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, on why Google is getting such attention from U.S. antitrust regulators. The current backlash against popular companies like Google, Apple and Facebook does indeed have an irrational side.