Google dominates the search market. Bing has made an impression and Yahoo still has a loyal following, but Google is king, especially in the West. However, a new search engine has just been launched, and it does things differently.

The new search engine is called YaCy (pronounced “Ya See”). Heavily backed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), an organisation that advocates digital rights and online freedom, YaCy aims to de-centralise search by using a ‘peer to peer’ approach.

One website that has been getting quite a bit of press coverage recently is Klout. This is a new service that attempts to measure online influence by monitoring social networking traffic.  It allocates a score of between 1 and 100 to individuals and organisations, with the higher the score, the greater the influence.

The founder, Joe Fernandez, had the idea for the site when he broke his jaw and, unable to talk, took to Twitter in order to communicate. He soon realised the influence of the medium, and saw how useful it would be to measure this.

Looking through the scores, they seem to reflect how many social networking users are interested in celebrity culture – Canadian teen pop idol Justin Bieber scores a perfect 100. Closer to home, Stephen Fry scores 82, Wayne Rooney gets 81 and Ed Milliband 35.

The recent News of the World phone hacking scandal illustrated how easy it can be to access poorly protected information. The investigators who hacked into the phones were not IT geniuses; they just exploited basic flaws in the caller ID and PIN systems.

A few years back, a default PIN was provided for access to mobile messages – with the onus on the user to change it if they wanted to. Needless to say, many people never bothered to change this default PIN. Even when they did, it was often to an easy to guess number, like 1234 or 3333.

While things have improved with mobile message security, people still often pick easy to guess PIN numbers, and this problem applies to other technologies as well. Ideally, passwords should have a mix of letters and numbers, upper and lower case and even symbols. The same password should not be used again on any other website or email account either. The problem is; so many passwords can be required now that it can be a nightmare to try and adopt this best practice.

The internet has led to an increasing clash between personal and professional lives. Once upon a time it was only your CV or application that counted when trying to win a job interview, but one new trend is to vet perspective employees using their online presence.

It’s well publicised that many employees have got into trouble at work due to comments they’ve made on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. A lot of organisations now have strict internet usage policies, and it’s estimated that 8% of companies have dismissed staff due to their online actions. What is less well known is that an increasing amount of job applicants are vetted before the interview stage, using the information about them that can be garnered from the internet.

Advances in technology have made it easier to collect and organise information than ever before. Companies like Google and Facebook store billions of details from websites and online accounts, and make good money from the services they provide to people. Governments have also been developing information-centric systems, from the laudable data.gov initiatives both in the UK and the US to the more questionable collection of personal data. Once information is collected and organised electronically, it’s much easier to share and exploit.

Social networking has been a major part of the rise of ‘Web 2.0’, a phrase coined to represent the move towards greater information sharing and collaboration on the internet. While MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin and others have played their part, Facebook dominates social networking. As of July, 500 million people around the world use Facebook actively.As people increasingly share information on the internet there have, however, been growing concerns about the privacy. Earlier this year, Facebook came under increased pressure over poor privacy controls and a lack of transparency about how it used user data. A backlash against Facebook culminated in a project to develop Diaspora; an open source, private and secure alternative that is launched in October.