Being ranked first for your keywords in major search engines is bound to get you a lot of clicks, but it might also help you get something you didn't expect — unquestioned trust. A Northwestern University study found:

Most students clicked on the first search result no matter what it was, and more than a quarter of respondents said explicitly that they chose it because it was the first result. 'In some cases, the respondent regarded the search engine as the relevant entity for which to evaluate trustworthiness, rather than the Web site that contained the information,' wrote researchers.

It seems to be the case that people trust Google/Bing/Yahoo! and therefore trust the results these companies give them, without question.

The paper quoted numerous students professing their particular love for Google, or talking about how Microsoft's search services are credible because Microsoft is a "more professional" company—basically, search engine brands meant a lot to the students using them, and those students seem to place credibility on the automated search rankings provided by those services.

This article puts forth an interesting idea — namely, that Facebook will kill all creation and usage of microsites. The main argument being:

Some digital marketers...have a negative opinion of the use and abuse of microsites by brands. The internet is cluttered with microsites that no longer have a function. Every year advertisers invest considerable amounts of money to build these sites only to later abandon them to their short shelf-lives.

These sites tend to be badly built or over-reliant on flash, and only gain visibility due to their distinctive URL or by virtue of being linked to an offline campaign. From a search engine optimisation perspective, we find they fragment the authority of the main domains and could impact negatively on rankings.

As Facebook pages are increasingly being listed on results pages, brands should take the opportunity to build consistent but evolving brand messages on social media. It enables you to show the evolution of a product and the ‘thinking’ behind the marketing campaign rather than the ‘today and die’ microsite approach.

While their SEO argument seems a bit misguided (I've never heard of a microsite hurting the main domain's ranking), there is an argument to be made that Facebook has a built-in audience.

However, the one thing that Facebook doesn't allow for is control. As any developer will tell you, Facebook can and will change their code and/or requirements at a moment's notice — meaning your campaign or contest can be running smoothly on a Facebook page one minute and down the next. Until Facebook becomes a secure platform to build on, I don't see microsites going anywhere.

Kevin Rose may have started the rumors about Google Me, but they didn't end there. New rumors have Google Me launching in 2010, possibly October.

I'm going to go ahead and start my own rumor — pure conjecture with no insight into the situation — my guess on what Google is building. Google Me will be a social network without a hub; a Facebook without a facebook.com. Essentially it will be a Like button that's tied to your Gmail account and/or Google Profile that third-party sites will add to their social jewelry section.

This ties in with Google's main focus, which is still search, and gives them a lot of new data they can use to increase accuracy of that focus — the more you use this button the more Google can tailor searches to your actual needs, wants and likes.

Whether I'm right or wrong, Mashable sums up the whole situation by saying, "What makes the project really interesting is that Google cannot afford to fail on this one; if it does, it will only strengthen Facebook as the number one social network out there."

And speaking of Kevin Rose, Digg just got a lot more social, personal and automatic:

You may have noticed something new in your Facebook searches recently, third-party sites. As Facebook themselves told All Facebook, “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them.”

All Facebook is declaring it the shot heard 'round the world in the Facebook/Google war. But as Daily Finance points out,

So, should Google be worried? Not anytime soon. Fact is, Facebook's move represents very shaky first steps toward integrating Web search features into its service, and it's clear the company is conflicted. Remember, Facebook wants you to stay on its site and click on display ads. Google loves sending you to other sites because that means its search service is working, which means its search ads are making money.

Either way, I'd like to be the first to coin a phrase: FBO (Facebook Optimization) — it's just better than Facebook SEO.

I have a Google Places account. For those of you who don't know what Google Places is, it's the new name for the local business listings that appear at the top of the screen for popular searches.

Beyond the new name, Google is adding some enhancements to Places and they sent out an email giving those with accounts a hint at what's to come — mainly Google Tags. Google Tags is a little, yellow tag that allows you to promote specific information, such as a coupon, a link to your reservations page or any other advertising message or deep link you'd like potential customers to see.

Besides moving your ad into a more visible area of the page, Google Tags appear on mobile searches, giving them a big advantage over other Google advertising. It will be interesting to see what sort of tags are created to attract the attention of mobile users.

A quick recap:

1. BP spills a bunch of oil.
2. Greenpeace creates a meme redesigning BP's logo.
3. @BPGlobalPR becomes more popular than any real BP Twitter feed.
4. The CEO of BP's statement of "I want my life back" becomes both a meme and rally cry against BP.
5. BP has their real Twitter account hacked.
6. Tumblr turns itself black.
7. This ironic sign gets floated around Facebook.
8. In an old-school move (and by old school I mean 2001) BP buys adwords relating to "oil spill" — this works against them once the public finds out.
9. BP's Facebook page becomes less popular than multiple anti-BP Facebook pages and groups.
10. BP starts to care about social media.

This quote in Wired hits the nail right on the head:

BP didn’t begin its social networking campaigns in earnest until one month after news of the spill broke, says David Binkowski of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. And when it did, the company seems to have been hamstrung by legal advice not to apologize for or admit to having done anything wrong, other than accepting responsibility for fixing things.

Such admissions can haunt a company in court, but BP’s inability to apologize has hurt its ability to have an honest conversation, however difficult, with the public.

Google announced the live launch of their new web indexing system, Caffeine. Mike Cutts, the Google guru who made the announcement, said, "Fundamentally the change is as soon as a document gets crawled, boom, it gets indexed. This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time."

So what does this mean for the owners of web content? Not much. The game is the same, it just got much faster. There will just be more competition for those ever valuable top 10 spots. Users searching for breaking news or live events, however, will get much more relevant links towards the top of their Google search.

As for social media: when asked if "you could now, for example, look at Facebook’s open social graph or whatever it’s called, see all the Likes for a particular page and associate those Likes with that page," Cutts replied, "If that page were public, then you could." Which, if I'm hearing things correctly is Google saying, "Thanks for all the data Facebook, this is going to really help with our indexing."

Yahoo and Facebook may be uniting, allowing users to link their Yahoo and Facebook accounts. It's a union that doesn't make much sense, unless you give credence to this rumor:

There is also speculation abound over how long it may be before Facbook makes an offer to buy out Yahoo, which could allow them to gain a dominant foothold in social search.

And if that's the case, Google better watch its back.

Clickjacking is a word you should get used to hearing. In its current context, it refers to unscrupulous website owners misusing the Like button and gaming the Facebook system. It's also why Facebook won't defeat Google/search in the battle for web supremacy anytime soon. When users can't trust the links, things and places their friends are liking then the entire system falls apart.

A recent survey had some interesting tidbits about online reputation management. The key finding is that rep management has increased, "57% of adult internet users now use search engines to find information about themselves online, up from 47% in 2006." But that isn't the surprising part; the surprising part is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to protect yourself online.

18-29 year olds are more likely than older adults to say:

• They take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online
• They change privacy settings
• They delete unwanted comments
• They remove their name from photos

This goes against commonly held beliefs that Gen X and Gen Y don't care much about privacy or how they're depicted online.