Internet giant Google has launched the latest of its search engine services this week in the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Russia and USA.

‘Google Instant’ presents users with predicted search results based on the individual letters users type into its search bar. Sources at Google claim this represents a quantum leap in search.

On average Google research has demonstrated that users spend approximately 9 seconds entering a search term and 15 seconds perusing results.

Google estimates that ‘Google Instant’ will shave two seconds of the time it takes users and consequently, 9 seconds the overall time taken to find information related to their search query.

Whilst to most people, this doesn’t represent a huge shift in the time taken; Google does believe users will benefit from the service predicting results and make growing competitors such as Bing become less interesting.

Google Instant is expected to available on mobile devices during Autumn this year.

Advertising news website, Advertising Age, has revealed the levels of search spending by some of the worlds biggest brands this week, focussing in particular on the much troubled oil behemoth, BP. The document acquired by Advertising Age doesn’t reveal spending for all advertisers on Google, however it does give an apparently accurate summary of spend by big brands, after verification from various sources with knowledge of spending levels.

The document shows that the spending on advertising with Google AdWords, often known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising, increased significantly during June when the company were suffering from the negative PR and strong criticism from all quarters regarding their handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Previous to the disaster the company were spending a modest $57,000 a month on Google sponsored results, however a dramatic injection of budget means BP are among the top monthly spenders on Google Adwords, with an investment of $3.6 million in June alone.

The increase in spend is being seen as an reflection of how important Google’s search engine has become for reputation management. The increased spend on the BP adverts were targeted to keywords relating to the crisis, such as “oil spill” and “leak”.  The initial dramatic increase in the spend can also be attributed to the company targeting these keywords on “broad match”, meaning the BP adverts will appear on many search combinations of “oil” and “spill”.

Other large brands named in the report include Expedia, Amazon and eBay, who all spent over $5 million in June on Google Adwords. BMW, Kodak and GM spent under $500,000, whereby iPhone-maker Apple spent approximately $1m. The report also summarises the top 10 spenders on the platform, and includes the revelation that the top 10 spenders combined only account for 5% of the total revenue for Google in the US in June.

A spammer has managed to successfully hack into Facebook’s photo upload system in order to spam Facebook and Twitter with photos promising free iPads and iPhones.

The spammer who managed to post these photos to people’s walls, exploited a flaw in the system which did not check if a photo could be posted to someone’s profile and pretend to be from that person, then send this photo promoting schemes of free or cheap gadgets.

People who saw these photos appear on their wall assumed it was just their account that had been hacked and then change their password. However, this didn’t make any difference as the flaw is in the photo authentication code in Facebook.

Facebook commented that they had found a bug in the code that processes the photos when they are being uploaded. The bug caused a block in the checks that are normally made as to whether the photo should be posted to a person’s profile. While fixing the problem the spammer managed to post photos to people’s profiles that they hadn’t approved.

This spammer made the most of weak passwords. The photos and message were sent via web so it didn’t look like a third person or a linked site had sent the messages.

Search engine giant Google have released the latest version of their browser, Google Chrome, which marks the 2nd anniversary of the versatile browser application. In the 2 years since release Google have captured a market share of more than 7.5% of internet users, sitting in third position behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (around 60%) and Mozilla’s Firefox (around 23%). On initial viewing the market share still looks small in comparison to IE and Firefox, however when you consider that the Opera browser has gained just 2.5% in 10 years it has been a remarkable rise for the Google browser.

The release of version 6 shows continued development in what Google has self-crowned “the modern browser”. The focus has always been on speed and simplicity, and the latest version is no exception. The focus on speed and simplicity has been a significant factor in the browsers early success, but also has been a significant influence on the development direction of it’s main rivals, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The speed of development is indicative of the importance Google have placed on the browser market, but also offers an insight into the future uses of the Chrome code. A Chrome Operating System, or Chrome OS, is expected to be released by the end of the year, which will not be available for download, but will ship with specific hardware. The operating system will be focused on simple, speedy internet access, designed for users who just want a simple browsing experience. With more and more application migrating from the desktop to working in the cloud, Google anticipates a boom in the number of consumers who are comfortable with organising and storing their digital lives on remote servers.

Google has launched a ‘priority inbox’ feature for Gmail aimed at helping people manage their email more effectively by identifying what is important and separating them out.

This new service has been developed using a complex set of algorithms that analyses the email behaviour of the users and in turn automatically grades the emails depending on their importance.  This will allow users to focus on what is important rather than having to sift through unimportant and spam emails.

The algorithm determines the importance of the email by looking at a number of factors such as which emails the user reads and replies to, the number of other people copied in to message and also by the content of an email.  Google does already ‘scan’ emails to try and identify and filter out spam.

The messages will be separated in to three categories, with the important and unread being prioritised at the top of the inbox, followed by “starred” emails that users have marked to action or for reference, and then all other emails will appear underneath these.

Doug Aberdeen, Senior Software Engineer at Google wrote on the company’s blog “Priority inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules,”

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail in to the ‘spam’ folder, but today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important.”

The new priority inbox feature is optional and will be rolled out to all Gmail and Google Apps accounts over the coming weeks.