Social Media Digest: Google update, Twitter stories, Klout Criticism

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1. Google has just announced that it has updated its search algorithm to promote the latest relevant results where it makes sense to do so. The company explains “Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.” 35% of searches should be affected, Google says. These include, recent events or hot topics; regularly recurring events, and topics that are frequently updated.

2. Twitter has announced Twitter Stories, which is an online portfolio that Twitter will use to display stories about how single Tweets have affected its users. You can submit stories by mentioning mentioning @twitterstories or by using the hashtag #twitterstories, Twitter says to feel free to link to a photo or video and they will include those in the story. Twitter will then feature a selection of profiles every month. The site is already live with a nice selection of stories to check out:

3. Search engine Google is now indexing public comments made on websites that use Facebook, Disqus and other add-ons. The move means that all comments on any publicly visible website could show up in Google search results. Previously, search engines were unable to read comments because Facebook, Disqus and Intense Debate used programming that was not easy to read automatically. This meant that comments could play any part in a website’s search ranking. Now, however, the web tools that Google uses to trawl the web and index content are able to read comments that have been made using Facebook’s Connect add-in for other websites, as well as other equivalent services.

4. Just five companies control 64% of all online spending, with Google controls 46% in total. The others are Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL. Here are the full results:

5. Following last week’s news that Klout had changed its algorithm for calculating social capital, there has been a groundswell of criticism against the site. CEO Fernandez responds to his critics here.