After back-to-back trips into the heady searchosphere to explore Ambient Findability and MyLifeBits, I've decided to come back to reality and take stock of the current landscape. One of the topics that still seems to have people buzzing is universal search. Fellow Search Insider, Gord Hotchkiss, wrote a few columns recently about how personalized universal results are changing the way people interact with search engine results pages (SERPs).

Video search optimization and advertising worlds have collided, and the big bangs bursting forth will shape the video marketing landscape for years to come.

In what's become something of a quarterly ritual, Google and Microsoft are now dueling to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The fight this time is over Facebook, for which Microsoft is reportedly looking to pay up to $500 million for a 5% stake -- and over which pundits are on the lookout for a Google countermove. Let the games commence. But whether Facebook ultimately migrates towards Google, Microsoft, or neither, it's still worth evaluating which of the two competitors could go furthest with the social network.