The jury is "very much out" on whether social media tool Twitter can turn its growing popularity into revenue, according to one commentator.

Tim Houghton, managing director of New Media Intelligence, said that the time had come when social networks such as Twitter needed to find a way to generate revenue, but that in terms of generating page views they had been "incredibly successful".

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a mighty big rock of late, you’ll no doubt have heard about Google Streetview. There’s a lot in the media at present about the privacy issue (yawn) – but this post IS NOT about that, so you can continue reading without getting bored!

Internet users have been advised to mix up the search tools they use in order to protect the information that online behaviour firms are able to gather, which could have an effect of search engine optimisation techniques.

Pam Dixon, executive director at the World Privacy Forum, said that the group recommended users did not conduct their entire web searching in one spot.

A number of major media companies have recently met with Google to discuss their rankings and search engine optimisation.

The media outlets argue that their content should rank more highly than blogs or Wikipedia pages on Google results pages, Accountancy Age reports.

A change to the title tags from Twitter could have a number of implications for search engine optimisation for businesses, it has been claimed.

The discovery was made by Robin Wauters at TechCrunch, who noted that Twitter results displayed in Google have been subtly optimised.

New improvements to Google search results have been revealed by the search engine provider.

The first change users will see is an expanded list of related searches at the bottom of the results page, while the other is an addition of longer search result descriptions.

Media firms and executives have recently been complaining that Google search engine optimisation (SEO) is ranking blogs and websites from outside the mainstream media, one sector commentator has claimed.

In a post for SEO Book, Aaron Wall said that Google "of course" tilted their algorithms in the direction of brands but that there was a different between professional content and content that was "actually worth reading".

While Microsoft may still have a way to go before it steals Google's crown as the leader of search, the technology giant has asserted in recent weeks that this gives it more freedom to take risks than Google can afford.

Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was recently quoted by Bloomberg as saying that Microsoft search does not need to be "all things to all people", unlike Google's service.

Twitter celebrated its third birthday on Saturday (March 21st), prompting one commentator to list the possibilities of the power behind the social media application.

In a blog for Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker said that Twitter had become the number two ranking referring site to the technology resource over the past three months.

Building up a user profile of what consumers search for and where they go when they are online has become a standard practice for many businesses, one expert has claimed.

Pam Dixon, executive director at the World Privacy Forum, said that for the commercial sector, there are no specific limits on the practice of user profiling, unless the companies have written them into their own privacy policies.

The year of mobile marketing and search has been on the horizon for a number of years now but each time has been proved to be a "desert mirage", one commentator has claimed.

In a blog for Search Engine Watch, Michael Boland states that now mobile internet is closer than ever before but the market is still cautious about "bold" claims about mobile search and location-based services.

When creating pay per click (PPC) adverts online, the importance of the display URL can be overlooked, but one sector commentator has reminded search engine marketers of the vital role it plays.

In a blog which appears on SEOmoz and YOUmoz, Randy P notes that brands and businesses should take maximum advantage of each of the limited number of lines they have to work with.

Social media sites such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Wordpress are "manipulating" the open web and if people continue to use them they could "lose" the free benefits of the internet, in the opinion of one sector commentator.

In his blog, John Andrews, a search engine optimisation consultant from the US, explains that links are code which webmasters used to publish on the web but that today people could do this without using code.

A recent query on the Google Webmasters help thread has led to debate among two search engine optimisation experts.

One Google user complained that although their site was ranked well by the search engine for a particular keyword phrase, when users followed the link Google did not direct them to the page that was most relevant to the search query.

A code of best practice for online behavioural advertising published by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has received widespread support from the UK's online advertising industry.

Among the major players to sign up are Google and Microsoft and it is hoped the good practice guide will promote trust and understanding of behavioural advertising practices among consumers.

Some businesses are finding that their websites are failing to engage their audience due to a number of small but significant errors, one sector commentator has claimed.

Steve Simmonds, business manager at Design UK, speaking at the Technology for Marketing & Advertising event, said that peoples' eye movements on the page could be tracked which gave a better idea of which information they primarily focused on.

Google has announced that it is set to focus on the behavioural advertisement marketing market, which has led to a large amount of debate among the search engine optimisation sector.

Speaking before parliament, the internet's creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee argued that internet service providers should not on principle be able to profile the online movements of their users, the Register reports.

In yet another move to personalise search, after Google SearchWiki dropped at the backend of last year, the mighty G has now announced the personalisation of its content network ads to individual users – in what it calls “interest-based advertising”.

It seems as though more people are Tweeting everyday and some recent figures are leading to the suggestion that the social media search tool is on its way to surpassing traffic to Google Blog Search.

In his blog Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel claims that Twitter traffic is due to overtake that to Google's blog, with the site currently enjoying 1.35 million visitors per month compared to Google's 1.38 million.

Large companies are increasingly turning to search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing to boost their business, one commentator has suggested.

Mark Jackson, in a blog for Search Engine Watch, claims that this could either be a product of firms looking at more efficient ways to market themselves on a budget or it could be due to a natural evolution in marketing, with a move towards digital forums.

After a year of discussions, propositions and denials, it appears that the Yahoo! and Microsoft saga is still not over.

In an interview with the Times, Kevin Turner, chief operating officer of Microsoft, claimed that the software giant was still open to a future deal with the search engine with a partnership of search facilities.

Keyword research should not just be about creating a list of phrases that an internet user will employ when they conduct a search, in the opinion of one expert.

In a post for Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty said that the deeper the topic of keyword research was understood, the richer the content would become and that businesses were likely to achieve more occasional search referrals - those that were not already optimised for.

There have been a "fair few" false starts for social media and mobile as marketing platforms, one expert has claimed.

Phil Turnbull, marketing manager at Hostway, said he believed web media would be "number one" in marketing tools for a very long time and was likely to evolve itself into something else as the internet advanced.

In a recent television interview, the chief executive officer of Google has stated that the search engine firm has no plans to purchase social media site Twitter.

However, although Eric Schmidt, appearing on US network PDS's programme the Charlie Rose Show, denied any short-term plans to buy Twitter, he added that this was because the prices were still high, claiming that Google would "wait that out".

A judge has ruled in favour of one AdSense publisher who brought a case against Google to court claiming that the search engine had cancelled his account with no warning.

In an article for the Huffington Post, Aaron Greenspan claims that his account was cancelled nine months after signing up in March last year and that he never received the $721 (£512) his Think Computer site made.

Businesses, brands and individual web users alike may have found in the past that some of their search engine rankings are pages which include negative content about them, such as an unfavourable review.

Google's head of web spam Matt Cutts recently claimed that the search engine would not remove the pages if requested to do so, which left the user with two options: to contact the author of the content themselves or - if the page was doing something against the law - to seek legal action.

Marketing through social media could really take off, as long as businesses are clever about how they place their content on social networking websites, according to one expert.

Riley Samuda, sales executives at the Marketer - the official magazine of the Chartered Institute of Marketing - explained that this decision was not about having a "great" banner or a generic online advert, but about integrating a brand with the site in a way that generated good returns.

People across the world may be lapping up Twitter and enjoying the micro-blogs of both each other and the rich and famous, however, it is just a tool, according to one sector commentator.

SEO Book's Aaron Wall claims that Twitter is responsible for stealing links that would otherwise have occurred on the "real web" through the hard work of online marketing such as search engine optimisation.

The search engine organisation Yahoo! is celebrating its 14th birthday this week and has posted a blog stating that it thought of itself as having played an instrumental role in the internet revolution of the 1990s.

In a post for Yodel Anecdotal, blog editor Nicki Dugan has posted a number of pictures that tell the story of Yahoo! since its beginnings in 1995, including an early screenshot of its homepage, an image of its first headquarters and a snap of the business plan - written six months after founding.

This year, businesses are likely to be turning towards newer marketing techniques, one expert has claimed.

Phil Turnbull, marketing manager at Hostway, said that these methods are not likely to be more advanced, but would add to the marketing techniques already being used, which may include search engine optimisation, social media marketing and pay per click.

It is vital that businesses register and secure their company name across all of the various social media networks, an expert has claimed.

In a post for Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker explained that this was not just a way of building links on a site or getting positive branding results out of Google, but was also a defensive measure.

Yahoo's fight to prevent Microsoft from taking over or purchasing its search engine business cost a total of $79 million (£55.4 million), reports suggest.

According to the search engine group's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the majority of this was spent on external advisors and Yahoo! eventually rejected all of Microsoft's proposals, including an offer of $33 per share.