The Web is well known for its ability to bring the faraway to your screen. The new frontier for social networks: introducing you to the guy who lives across the street.

One day in the future, mobile search might appear indistinguishable from Web queries. But for now, people come to mobile search with very different expectations than Web search.

Niche companies and the Big Three search engines seek opportunity in the nascent mobile market. Advertisers, meanwhile, watch and wait.

The iPhone changed the way we view the Web on mobile devices, but how long will it be before the marketplace catches up?

What happened to summer? I'm writing this on a muggy day in mid-August and the closest I feel to the season is the sundress and flip-flops I'm wearing to the office because the a/c is acting up.

Members of the Digg.com community rose up in revolt when management appeared to violate the news site's core principle of user-controlled content by stopping a member from publicizing a code for disabling copy protection built into high-definition DVDs. Ultimately, Digg management relented.

In some ways, behavioral targeting -- the ability to serve online ads to visitors based on their viewing habits -- is seen as the ultimate in efficiency. But reach is still an issue.

Sports fans, especially those who indulge their jones online, are an alternately accepting and ornery lot. I'm one of them.

Here's how Google's "Universal Search"--combining information from videos, news, Web sites and other sources into one set of search results--redefines relevance.

Bonnie Taffer has spent 17 years at American Express, with a five-year interregnum in which she pursued several entrepreneurial opportunities, including founding and serving as CMO of a venture-funded media start-up based in New York.