Social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate genuine personality, instead of an exaggerated identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin. "I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," said Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles. "In fact,

This time of year everybody likes to start making predictions about where industries are heading. This is especially true in the search industry. My guess is that we will see quite a few pieces this month regarding where search is going in 2010. These can make for entertaining reads and get the mind going with regards to how we are going to have to plan for an ever-changing future of search engine marketing. Share your own predictions for search here .

We've discussed Google's snippets before. But few people discuss Yahoo! snippets. Maybe the search community has written Yahoo! off as irrelevant? Regardless of what any of us think about Yahoo!, they are still a part of the search game. And I'd say a major part since they are still the second largest search engine around. Recently, SEO By The Sea wrote a blog post detailing a patent application regarding a method for selecting a snippet for a search page. Bill Slawkski,

Very quick post, but Investp are now running the second year of their online marketers of the year poll. I was quite surprised, but very honored to be nominated amongst some great guys - including fellow SEOptimise blogger Tadeusz Szewczyk . Last years vote was very popular and I'd encourage that SEOptimise readers take part in this and of course any votes for myself or Tad would be greatly appreciated! © SEOptimise.

In today's weekly Twitter Friday column I want to compare the 3 most common retweet buttons for WordPress blogs . A retweet button is a button that not only retweets the particular post it was clicked one but also displays how many people tweeted that link: On click these buttons also lead to a list of those who tweeted the link.

by Ross Dunn Over the past 12 years consulting on web marketing I have answered countless questions but one question I receive often stands out from all; how to remove a Google penalty. The following is an example of a question I received in the past from a person named Patrick: PLEASE HELP! For the last 8 years we were #1 for a ton of search terms but then my site got penalized by Google because we had overused some keywords.

by Mike Krumboltz Assuming your first name isn't Tiger, this past week had a lot of news to smile about. One of the most famous women in the country announced her engagement, an extraordinarily cute kitten became a Web sensation, and a game that was thought to be unbeatable was conquered by a relentless gamer (sort of). Put on a happy face and check out those stories and more with the Buzz Week in Review.

When Google launched personalized search , it was for signed-in users only (and then only when Web History was enabled for the account). Now, guests or signed-out users at Google will get personalization. If you don't want the personalized experience - you can opt out . Google uses an anonymous cookie to keep track of signed-out searches in order to provide the personalization. When customized search results are available,

Microsoft and Yahoo! have finalized the search agreement initially announced last July . Originally, they had planned to finalize things by late October . When they didn't meet that deadline, they assured everyone that progress had been made. Here's the joint statement released by both parties: Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice,

by Claudine Zap Hey, cat people: Your pets want you to know. Their lives are not so, well, cat-like. They don't just sleep all day â?" they do stuff. That's what a study revealed after attaching kitty-sized digital cameras on the collars of 50 house cats to capture them in action â?" or inaction. According to the animal behaviorists who collected data for Friskies ,