As most media watchers know by now, the industry is going through an unprecedented upheaval, with newspapers in particular being disrupted by the shift to digital and what Om has called the "democracy of distribution" created by real-time social tools like blogs and Twitter, which make anyone into a publisher.

So while news used to be a tightly controlled product from a few mainstream sources, there is now an explosion of content from virtually everywhere -- some of it good and much of it not so good. At Google's recent Zeitgeist symposium, legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel suggested it is somehow Google's duty to fix this problem, and CEO Larry Page seemed to agree. But relying on Google to choose what news we should read is a very slippery slope.

Continue reading on GigaOm

Ask.com announced on Tuesday it will lay off 130 workers in the United States and China as the company decided to close its Web search operations and refocus on its question-and-answer service, Agence France-Presse reported.

"We know that receiving answers to questions is why Ask.com users come to the site, and we are now serving them in everything we do," president of Ask.com Doug Leeds said, PCmag.com quoted. "Unfortunately, this absolute focus means that we need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic web search development."

Over the next few months, the IAC will close its facilities in New Jersey, the United States and Hangzhou, China and it will relocate some of the workers to its offices in California.

Experts view the announcement as an acknowledgment that Ask.com could not compete with Google, which controls 66 percent of the market, the BBC explained. IAC's search engine only accounted for 3.6 percent.

Alibaba Group, a notable e-commerce company in China, has partnered with Microsoft Corp. to create a new search site, a move that could challenge Baidu and Google in the Chinese search market, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Last Saturday, Alibaba Group launched a beta version of a web site called Etao, which is aimed to drive traffic to Alibaba's retail website, Taobao.com.

Search results first show up Taobao listings, including images and product prices, followed by links to related online forums and informational web sites, as well as search results provided by Microsoft's Bing.

Both companies confirmed that Etao is in public, or beta, testing, but refused to do any further comments.

Baidu's dominance in the Chinese search market has increased since Google decided not to cooperate with Beijing's censorship regulations and moved its site to Hong Kong, where the regulations don't apply. Google is still accessible in China, but sometimes interrupted by the government's firewall technology. Baidu and Google did not comment on Etao, WSJ reported.

Microblogging service Twitter announced that its recently launched search feature has been revamped, TheNextWeb.com reported today. According to Search Engine Land, Twitter receives over one billion search queries a day.

Vator News outlined that users send more than 1,000 tweets per second, amounting to 86.4 million tweets daily. Users embark on 12,000 searches per second, which is roughly 1 billion per day. Search Engine Land also reported that other Twitter benchmarks included April 14, 2009 (when it got 19 billion queries a month) and July 6, 2010 (24 billion queries).

However, "queries" are different from "searches," since a "query" can be done by a machine, such as when a user signs up to receive automatic replies to their tweets. Furthermore, the search is only available for Tweets that are up to seven days old. Twitter told Search Engine Land that it was not planning to provide archive searches since other companies were already doing that and instead would be focused on ameliorating the service in other ways.