At the  Search Marketing Expo in New York earlier this week, search engines Google and Yahoo made a couple of shocking revelations. The first announcement pertains to the canonical tag, which is a collaborative effort from the engines.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing, and later Ask, all joined together to allow users to dictate which of the duplicate pages on their site they want the search engines to list. While users find the tag useful for internal purposes, users have been asking for an external solution for many years. Users want to be able to control which page is listed across multiple domains as well.

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The stability in the future of search has recently been put into question due to the impact of social media on search. Since people are doing more and more searches on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, does it mean that social media will eventually replace search engines?

Both Twitter and Facebook have launched real-time search engines within their service offerings, and the major search engines are still struggling to enter the real-time search arena. Heather Dougherty, the Research Director at Hitwise, said:

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Twitter launched a new homepage last week. The redesign contains many new features, but the most prominent one, by far, is the search box.

Twitter says the new design is one effort the company is taking to help new users and people unfamiliar with the site better understand what the service offers. Aside from the sleek new color scheme, Twitter's homepage also sports a new slogan. Instead of "What are you doing?" the new company slogan reads "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world."

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Most new sites do not currently charge for content, but that could all change within a year. During a speech in London, Financial Times Editor Lionel Barber said he could, "confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organizations will be charging for content."

This prediction comes after Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation made a statement in May in which he said his newspaper websites, such as The New York Times, would likely begin charging for content within a year. Incidentally, the New York Times recently let it slip that it was considering a $5 dollars per month subscription fee.

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If you haven't yet heard, rumors really are going around about Twitter getting a Nobel Peace Prize. It all started when former Deputy National Security Advisor Mark Pfeifle suggested it in an interview with Fox News. He said:

"If there's anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so."

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