Social searching is getting smarter all the time (or so we hope), and Microsoft announced some further interesting developments on Bing Social this week. But how do the two heavyweights of social search, Google and Bing Social, match up? We measure them up here.

Facebook over the weekend quietly unveiled (and then pulled again) a new pages-discovery system. The new initiative recommends pages to users, compiling the most popular pages in a user’s network and combines them with individual interests to create personalized “Like” recommendations. Considering the many other tools recently released for mining potential customer “likes”, Facebook is trying to ensure the wave of brands coming onto the social network don’t get lost in the stampede.

Social is beating search in the battle for our web time, with new comScore research showing Facebook topping Google in terms of time spent on the site. This isn’t too surprising, as people tend to linger on their Facebook profiles and only briefly use Google to go elsewhere. Nevertheless, this is yet another signal of the shift of web dominance.

Yes, Google Instant is a time-saver. But does this new innovation in search (the first we’ve had in ages) really lead to smarter search results as Google claims, or does it tell us what we already know, just more quickly? We took it through its paces in multiple locations. Here’s what we found.

It could be just what couch potatoes everywhere have been waiting for – YouTube (as well as much of the rest of the Web) is coming to your TV, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced yesterday. Before you ready your Microsoft WebTV cracks, consider this: Americans alone view over 13 billion videos a month on YouTube. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

YouTube may finally have found a way to make a profit. No, this isn’t a scheme to make us pay for cute kitten videos. The secret formula to a profitable YouTube may lie in a subtle advertising deal between the video host and big-name studio producers.

The analysts at Experian Hitwise think it’s just a matter of time. In the latest Hitwise newsletter, the web usage measurement firm says that at 26 million users, the UK Facebook population very likely has hit its “saturation point.” Sure enough, a look at some tell-tale usage statistics show the Facebook growth engine in the UK just might be, gasp, running out of steam.

Big brands are going where the money is: social gaming. As Facebook boosts its advertising revenue due to a surge in membership and traffic, brands are buying in to get a piece of the viewing time. Meanwhile, Google is making moves to get into the social gaming arena. Could this be the perfect social gaming storm?

It’s never an easy decision to kill off a brand, particularly a geeky brand that was all the rage just a year ago. So, not surprisingly, Google’s announcement yesterday to pull the plug on Google Wave, a real-time communication/collaboration app, is not going over so well this morning with die-hards who’ve taken to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to voice their displeasure with Google. In real-time.

Twitter is imposing password resets for accounts that bought followers from third-party applications. Besides being against the spirit of grassroots community building, buying followers is often detrimental for the health of subscribing accounts.