As people search out advice online for everyday, personal decisions, the standard list of links served up by Google is not seen as intimate or trustworthy, Google Group Product Manager Ken Tokusei said Monday. For decisions such as choosing a restaurant or a day care provider, social networking sites or known review sites have an advantage, he said.

Such sites offer information from friends or acquaintances, and Tokusei said users tend to trust that information more. This puts Google’s results at a disadvantage.

“We haven’t gotten to the point where results are seen as if they come from someone you know,” he said.

The search giant has begun to offer tools for users to rate results and delete unrelated links, but it still has work to do, he said.

As Internet users gain savvy and experience, they also expect better-honed answers to queries. Sites such as WolframAlpha, launched earlier this month, comb the Internet for data, and analyze it to provide specific answers to queries, rather than a list of sites.

Google Inc. does something similar for some searches, providing price quotes for “Sony stock” or an answer for “Tunisia capital.” But it also provides the familiar list of sites to dig further, a strategy it is unlikely to change.

“It’s a matter of determining what kind of information the user is looking for. But we will always serve some links to pages with our results,” said Tokusei.

He spoke to reporters at Google’s Japanese headquarters in Tokyo, where he gave an overview of the company’s basic search tools.

Google has developed a host of expanding tools and services, from a mobile operating system to an online word processor, but it devotes 70 percent of its employees and resources to search.

The company still faces fresh competition from its traditional rivals, which are regrouping in an attempt to take back market share.

Microsoft has failed to make much headway in repeated Internet ventures. But the deep-pocketed company, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into improving its search engine, continues to develop a new search technology, part of which is called “Kumo” internally.

Yahoo, which has seen its share of total online searches conducted plummet to Google, is tweaking its search results, cutting out some links and emphasizing images and video.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said he is still interested in buying part of Yahoo after a proposed deal was turned down last year.

Researchers uploaded photos on 16 popular websites – including Facebook, Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa – noting the web addresses where the images were stored and then deleted them.

The team said  30 days later, it was able to find them on seven sites, including Facebook, using the direct addresses even after the photos appeared to have gone, BBC reported Thursday.

Facebook, however, says deleted photos are removed from its servers “immediately”.

Joseph Bonneau, one of the PhD students who carried out the study, said, “This demonstrates how social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct.

“It’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on.”

The Cambridge University researchers said sites such as Flickr, Picasa did better and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

But a Facebook spokesman defended the company’s approach saying: “When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook, it is removed from our servers immediately.

“However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time.”

The Shin Bet security service said in its statement it had “received many reports of terror groups approaching Israelis on the internet offering to recruit them… and possibly kidnap them”. The statement mentioned one incident in which an Israeli citizen had been approached on Facebook by a man who described himself as a Lebanese merchant and then offered to pay for classified information. “The option exists, it’s easy, since many Israelis, not only young ones, sit at the computer a lot,” Elkana Har-Nof of Israel’s counter-terrorism headquarters later told Channel Two television. “It is a weapon for terrorist organisations.” Israel has warned against reprisals from the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah after its military mastermind, Imad Moughniyeh, was killed in a 2007 car bombing in Damascus. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the attack and has vowed revenge. Israel has denied involvement in Moughniyeh’s death.

The Shin Bet said that in the past several years a number of Israeli citizens and residents were arrested after being recruited by terror groups over the internet.

Millions of Britons use sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to chat with friends, but ministers are concerned the rapidly evolving technology could be exploited by extremists. Critics have attacked the plans as more evidence of big government intruding into people’s lives. The Home Office confirmed on Wednesday that the government was looking into the possibility of monitoring networking sites, but said the idea was only at a consultation stage. It also insisted it had no interest in the content of private conversations, simply on who is talking to whom. “We have been clear that the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change so that law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism and gather evidence,” a Home Office spokesman said. “We have been very clear that there are no plans for a database containing the content of emails, texts, conversations or social networking sites,” he added. The spokesman said the government would begin consulting industry and the public on ways of closing potential loopholes created by technology used by social sites soon.

Facebook’s chief privacy officer and head of global public policy, Chris Kelly, criticised the plans as excessive. In an interview with IT website ZDNET.co.uk he said: “We think monitoring all user traffic is overkill.” There was sufficient legislation, he added, to allow law enforcement access to traffic data of suspects. Kelly was responding to comments made by Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker earlier this month at a meeting of the House of Commons Fourth Delegated Legislation Committee. Coaker said the EU Data Retention Directive, which requires internet service providers to retain traffic data for at least 12 months, did not go far enough because it did not apply to social networking providers. Coaker said the government was considering retaining traffic data for all instant messaging and communications on networking sites as part of its Intercept Modernisation Programme.

At the same meeting, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Tom Brake called plans to include the sites in mass surveillance of citizens alarming. “Plans to monitor our phone and email records threaten to be the most expensive snooper’s charter in history,” he said in comments published in the Independent newspaper on Wednesday.

Perhaps taking a cue from Twitter, the rising service for letting people express themselves in 140 characters or less and keep up with what celebrities have to say, Facebook said it will let users follow public figures like President Barack Obama and swimmer Michael Phelps, bands like U2 and even institutions like The New York Times.

Facebook’s fan pages currently work as static destination sites for anything from bacon to Coca-Cola to Jane Austen. The social-networking site will eventually make them work more like profiles, which individuals can now continuously update by posting photos, links and other tidbits.

“As more and more information flows through Facebook, the need for people to easily discover the most recent and relevant content has grown,” Founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post.

Beginning next Wednesday, Facebook will also launch a redesigned home page that lets users receive continuous updates from their friends instead of every 10 or 15 minutes.

It is also adding filters so people can choose which of their friends to keep up with and which to silence, limiting news from tiresome or annoying acquaintances you don’t necessarily want to “de-friend.” Currently, people can choose to receive less information about certain friends but can’t silence them completely. With the changes, users will even be able to filter updates so they only see photos or videos, for example.

Facebook will also tweak its central feature, the status update, which now invites people to broadcast to their friends a response to “What are you doing right now?” Responses can now range from mundane to poetic to uncomfortably personal.

Facebook’s new question, “What’s on your mind?,” may encourage people to dig deeper into their subconscious and post more entertaining updates than “Kevin is updating Facebook.”

In hopes of avoiding complaints that followed past redesigns, the company posted a preview of the changes Wednesday and invited feedback.

In a conference call with reporters, Facebook executives did not spend a lot of time on the business side of the changes, though Zuckerberg noted that the site is moving in a direction where brands can interact with people.

Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with eMarketer, said Facebook has been “very aggressive in trying to rethink what advertisers can do, and more importantly, how they can interact with consumers.”

“In many ways Facebook is the poster child of the future of communications,” she said. While there is a lot of hope and excitement about the marketing opportunities on Facebook, Williamson said growth has been slower than “anyone has expected.”

As millions of people embrace these online hangouts, consumer brands and the social-networking sites have been looking for ways to capitalize on this captive audience.

But so far, ad dollars have been elusive.

Williamson noted that this is uncharted territory, much as Google was in its early days before discovering the cash cow that is search advertising.

Companies have been getting their feet wet with varying degrees of success.

As of Wednesday afternoon, for example, a search for Skittles on Google brought up a link to the candy’s Facebook page, where fans declare their love for the rainbow-colored snacks — typos, exclamation marks and all.

It’s part of a larger marketing campaign for Skittles, which earlier this week redirected its home page to Twitter’s search page, such that every short post that included the word “skittles” got automatically displayed. That experiment turned sour when some tweeters posted vulgar comments. Soon, the candy’s page moved from Twitter to Facebook.

From the world’s biggest phone maker, Nokia, to tiny Irish semiconductor start-up Movidia, delegates to the wireless industry’s biggest annual gathering couldn’t stop talking about Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

The majority of visits to such online communities are still made by people sitting at a computer telling their friends where they are and how they are feeling, exchanging opinions on their favourite movies and music or uploading videos.

But the spontaneous and personal nature of much of that communication lends itself perfectly to the mobile phone.

The top executive at MySpace, owned by News Corp, said members reaching the network from mobile phones had quadrupled in the last year to 20 million, out of 135 million unique visitors in total, and Facebook has seen a similar leap.

“This is really just the start of where we’re going with this,” MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe told Reuters.

MySpace announced deals at the fair with Nokia and Palm, who will adapt some of their phones to make uploading pictures or video to the social network a matter of a single push of a button.

The company is confident that most smartphone makers will feature MySpace in the coming year.

The so-called Facebook phone or Social Mobile made by INQ, a spin-off of Hutchison Whampoa’s 3, won handset of the year award from the show’s hosts, the GSM Association – and everyone involved was eager to claim a share of the credit.

“Qualcomm’s integrated chipset technology and BREW software have enabled INQ… to realise the potential in mobile social networking,” gushed Enrico Salvatori, the head of chipmaker Qualcomm’s operations in Europe.

BUZZ

Behind the buzz is a telecoms industry that has finally brought together the network speed and capacity and the gadgets to make capturing and sharing pictures or video on the run a fun thing to do rather than a tedious and frustrating experience.

Apple’s iPhone, first announced two years ago and updated in mid-2008, gave the industry a jolt and still sets a benchmark, although imitators and challengers abound.

Korea’s LG Electronics has also struck out with bold designs and models made for capturing and sharing media, and has been marketing features like a single button for publishing video to Google’s YouTube for over a year.

Sony Ericsson made headlines at the mobile fair with plans to bring a 12-megapixel camera to market in the second half of this year, and Samsung unveiled an phone with built-in high-definition camcorder.

Components suppliers and carriers are also playing their part – and everyone hopes to profit from the trend.

Texas Instruments is making what it calls “material” shifts in investments to give higher priority to chip products that make possible the richer multi-media content crucial to drive more mobile social networking.

Movidia, armed with $14 million of venture capital funding, has built a processor that allows users to do sophisticated video post-production on their phones, which it will soon release to phone makers for testing.

Chief Executive Sean Mitchell said in an interview the company had attracted much interest from Japanese and Korean phone makers at the show, and handsets containing such processors could be out in time for Christmas next year.

Mobile carrier Orange, the main brand of France Telecom, is tempting customers with special pricing that offers unlimited access to sites such as Facebook and MySpace – but meters all other data use.

And of course MySpace itself – created to sell advertising, not just for fun – is confident of profiting from new opportunities to sell ads based on features unique to mobile, like knowing where members are, if they choose to opt in.

“That will take you into a whole new realm,” DeWolfe said. “We are focused on creating a large, profitable business.”