The role of search has evolved throughout this past decade, moving search into different formats, such as: videos, maps, social, and even the aspect of “real-time search results.” Having your search results presented to you from various sources around the web in real time, the search giant Google has now dedicated a separate page on its site to this constantly evolving form of search, appropriately named Google Realtime.

According to Google’s Blog post announcing this new feature, you will be able to search real-time results from the most blogs, news feeds, and well-known social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Google‘s own social network Google Buzz.

To view and experiment with Google‘s new real-time search section, visit http://www.google.com/realtime in your web browser or click on the screen shot below.

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Gmail, which is the search-giant Google‘s web-based e-mail service, has evolved into its own entity ever since the service opened up to the public in 2005 after being an invite-only service. After going public, Gmail has become one of the largest web-based e-mail services, competing with other services like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

Recently, Paul Truong, a Creative Technologist on the Google staff, wrote a simple Space Invaders-like game for you to enjoy called Galactic Inbox, including the various aspects of the Gmail service. The game was written in HTML5, which is the new and emerging version of HTML that is still in its development stage.

Truong wrote Galactic Inbox as a thank you to his team, as stated on his Google Blog post: “While I’m not on the Gmail team, I felt a little celebration of how far we’ve come was in order, so I wrote a little HTML5 game, in part as a ‘thank you’ to the Gmail team for their ongoing work to improve the webmail galaxy.”

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Recently, I posted an article on this blog titled Google Image Search Gets a Makeover, which elaborated on how Google Image Search has modified the cosmetic appearance of its image-searching tool to look like Bing’s Image Search. With this in mind, the social networking giant of Facebook has now joined the trend.

According to Facebook’s Blog, a post was published last week from Stefan “Sparky” Parker of Facebook announcing that its photo-sharing service’s albums will be visible on one page, rather than being sorted by pagination. To view this blog post, click here.

With the implementation of this new look to Facebook‘s photo-sharing service, there are some pros and cons that I have provided below.

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When people think of Google, they think of it being the dominant search engine of the web; however, not many people think of the other services they provide, such as Google Wave and Google Buzz. Both of these services are very large tiers of the Google network.

According to a recent blog post on Google’s Blogspot Blog, the search engine giant has agreed to close Google Wave, because Wave “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” as stated on their blog.

If you are unfamiliar with Google Wave, it is an invite-only service that functions fairly similar to Usenet, where various Gmail (Google‘s e-mail system) users can communicate with one another by using “waves,” which are XML-based documents comprised of low-latency modifications. To participate on Google Wave, the user must receive an invitation from an already existing user on the service.

Ever since the announcement from Google to close this service down, there has been a large reaction from Wave users who want to petition to help keep this service alive by giving a virtual “thumbs up” on the recently created site of Save Google Wave. Users can also show their support for this dying service by following @savegooglewave on Twitter.

What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think that Google Wave should be saved, or is this service a flop by Google? Please be sure to leave your reaction to this issue in our comments section below.

Keywords play a big part in the SEO process by helping you to acquire the best traffic to your website, and they are a “must have” when constructing the meta tags for your website. With this important SEO element in mind, I would like to bring your attention to Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool.

With Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool, users can analyze how certain keywords play a factor within the SERPs and how well they rank for search engine results. This tool is a great way for you to help build keywords for your website to include in your meta tags.

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The search giant Google offers users various ways to search for media, such as video search, map search, and also their image search feature, which I will be elaborating on today.

Google Image Search is a great way to finding images pertaining to a specific subject or niche around the web and also recently updated their design and functionality to make search for images easier on the end user. The new features that Google has implemented into this feature are listed below.

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With the internet being such a vast resource of information and with so many people having unlimited access to it, privacy and securty are big topics when relating to searchable information around the web with questions like “Who will see this information?” and “How much information is too much?” Privacy plays a big part in SEO, especially with websites being categorized by “dofollow” and “nofollow” attributes and when some search engine crawler’s look for more information on a website more than others.

Google, the world’s largest and most widely used search engine, has various ways that you can search for information, such as: images, videos, and also by maps. Within Google’s Maps section, users can get an exact image of the place that they are looking for on the map by using Google Street View, and I have provided a video below about how Google acquires this information.

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Back in May, I published a blog post that announced a new SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) design launched on the search-giant Google. The SERPs have been updated to help make your search engine experience more relevant to the data that you have are looking for.

Since the launch of the new SERPs to Google, the search giant has made it even easier for you to bring the most relevant information to your search results. For example, if you do a “how to” search, Google‘s SERPs will display various ways of bringing the “how to” information in a way that’s best for you. For this example, I used the search query of “How to Tie a Tie” to best elaborate all of various tiers of the new SERPs.

When performing a “how to” search on Google, the SERPs will display the various media embedded in the results to help you get the most relevant information:

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