Google Instant took flight yesterday from the ashes of some mysterious logos and via a live transmission on Google's Official Youtube Channel. What was announced was arguably the biggest change in the user interface (UI) of search engine results pages since search engines were invented and one of the most sophisticated engineering projects for Google since Caffeine. Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer at Google, had a great phrase to summarize the announcement, "Google Instant seems so obvious, that in retrospect, you'll wonder if search could have been any other way."

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Yesterday's curious Google logo mystery is almost solved. Many blogs and broadsheets were wondering what the meaning of the logo was, as uncharacteristically, the logo did not click through to a search and had no 'alt' text explaining what the logo was commemorating.

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A little over a month ago, we reported this story "Facebook In Early Stage Search Engine Tests?" and detailed some of the changes we were noticing. Well, today, based on another tip from bloggers at All Facebook, we can confirm that Facebook is indeed displaying 'liked' news content in it's search result drop down. In fact, further to what All Facebook reported, they are also displaying content shared by your network of friends that matches the keywords you are sharing.

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The Isreali start-up AOL bought three years ago to compete in the Q&A market has been rebranded as AOL Answers this week. The site is similar to Answer.com, Yahoo Answers and Ask Answers.

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Only two years ago, the Associated Press tried to stop bloggers from using their content. Threatening to charge sites that used their content and demaned that The Drudge Reports pull headlines and story briefs from their site. But now AP is singing a different song - saying this week that they will credit bloggers for any stories they break.

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Seems the privacy advocates see Google as 'evil'. Or at least the animated cartoon aired by Watchdog on the Times Square jumbotron suggested that yesterday. The clip below shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt gathering information from children as they attempt to buy ice cream from his Google truck.

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If you haven't already seen it YouTube has recently added two targeting features which enable advertisers to have more control on what videos their ads are placed on. Age restriction and video or channel URL restriction. Age restriction is not a self service feature, and will require you to work with your official Youtube representative but URL restriction is a feature you can enable yourself.

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Today Apple launched Ping. You can get the full story on ClickZ who covered the announcement. Were you expecting apple to launch a music social network today?

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At some point during the crush of Connected Marketing Week, Experian Hitwise announced the launch of two new premium Search Intelligence products that can improve your search marketing performance. I just found the press release in my email, so I hope you don't mind if I finally get around to reporting the "news."

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Following their new computer to phone calling service Google have launched a new beta feature for Gmail users, called priority inbox. It ranks your email according to what you read.

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Hot on the heels of the organic results integration in the US, Yahoo & Bing both announced today that now is the time to begin preparing your paid search accounts for the final integration, in which Microsoft Adcenter will power all paid search ads on Yahoo! Search in the U.S. & Canada.

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One of the events that was part of Connected Marketing Week was a one-day forum on the "Future of Display: Ad Networks and Exchanges," which was co-programmed by the IAB Networks and Exchanges committee.

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Last friday, Google launched the Googlebeat channel on Youtube, which aims to bring the value of services like Google Trends & Hot Trends, Google Insights for Search and Year-end Zeitgeist to a wider audience. This strategy is of passing interest as it seems that Google is squarely positioning itself as generating the equivalent value as trending topics in Twitter. Something which the latter has had great success with in garnering media attention. For example, FastCompany, called Twitter a "Human Seismograph Measuring the World".

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Today, Bing announced the Bing for Mobile Android App. Significantly, Bing also announced that Verizon will launch new Android devices pre-loaded with the Bing for Mobile app over the coming months.

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Last week at SES San Francisco, Brent Payne, the SEO Director of the Tribune, shared some of his social media link building tips during the News Search Optimization session.

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