Today Google unveiled three big new features for its campaign to bake Social Search into your browser. Over the next few days, the company plans to roll out these developments to anyone signed in and searching in English. In a blog post called, "Search, plus Your World" the company enumerated the changes that will empower the search engine to understand "not only content, but also people and relationships."

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

The second feature is useful (that is if you're looking for the few people who update their Google+ regularly) and the third is spammy--remember when Google tried to promote its infinitely less useful Google Places listings over Yelp? But the bone we want to pick is with feature no. 1.

For years pundits have been bemoaning the mental dexterity lost to the ease of a Google search engine. (Why would any kid growing up today bother to memorize Pi, much less the director of Pooty Tang when they could just type words into a box? Bonus trivia: It's Louis C.K.!) The idea of limiting the results you get during the aforementioned lazy look-up makes that loss of brain power even more acute.

Of course, as ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell points out Google has made the far-sighted decision to offer an easy out button for Personalized search. "If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether," he writes. But our quibble isn't about our browser alone. We don't want anyone else to use this function either. Here's why:

1.  In the post today, Google writes, "Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met." WHY IS THAT A BAD THING? What if all that information you could ever learn for the rest of your life was limited the brains of your current Google+ followers? *Shudders*

Google's strength as a search engine has always been that it's the best possible portal for the wide world of content online. There are prevailing market concerns, naturally, but if Google wants to try to compete with Facebook, do it on the side, don't sully your core competency. Besides, if you really wanted to find out what your friends were thinking, would you search Google+? Or Twitter and Facebook? Exactly. This muddies the water without adding any real value. (On the other hand, as we mentioned before, we've never met 75 percent of the people who added us to Google+. Hello to our fans, Southeast Asia!)

2. Perhaps this is a personal peccadillo of  a professional researcher, but in our opinion, it's hard enough to get at all the good stuff that's ever been published online with simplistic keyword matching and boolean logic, even with all the bells and whistles Google has built-in over the years. This narrows the landscape even further. The other day Google started returning an article we'd already read as the first hit for a particular search when it previously showed up towards the bottom of the page. But just because we foolishly clicked on it a couple times doesn't mean that's what we were looking for. For those of us on the hunt for new information, we're already working with a flawed product.

3. Which brings us to our next point. In theory, sure those little "people" icons should be enough of a distinction between global content and Stuff Your Friends Like, but we are, after all, human. You see an article from Ars Technica show up in your search results and you see your ex-boyfriend's face, which one are you going to click on? We're conditioned to want to be social, that doesn't mean the impulse should be indulged. One source even says Facebook designed Timeline to help advertise leverage a user's instinct to click on their friends's faces. C'mon Google, you're better than that. This kind of stuff is best left to Zuck.

If you are anything like Betabeat, you cover your eyes every time you're forced to confront your new Timeline-ified Facebook profile. No, Facebook! Why? Things are all askew chronologically, zig-zagging this way and that. We're convinced fewer people actually see what you post because of the layout, stalking others is less linear, smartphone photos can't stand up to the larger display format, and . . . and . . . well change is bad, okay. No "like" for Timeline.

So it comes as a particular slight to know that this discomforting development was cooked up by just four people in one (regrettable) night:

"Timeline started as a Hackathon project in late 2010 with two full-time engineers, an engineering intern, and a designer building a working demo in a single night. The full team ramped up in early 2011, and the development team was split into design, front-end engineering, infrastructure engineering, and data migrations. By doing staged and layered prototyping, we achieved an amazing amount of development parallelism and rarely was any part of the team blocked by another."

An intern! No wonder.

Proust started in beta in 2010. Since then, however, features like the ability to visualize one's life history as a timeline, have been adopted by another social network you may have heard something about one time.

In a statement, IAC wrote:

"Since its launch in 2010, Proust slowly gained users but did not result in an associated revenue substantial enough to maintain operations. We explored several strategic options for Proust, but decided that the best option was to fold its assets into IAC.”

In an email to AllThingsD, co-founder and CEO Tom Cortese said he was “totally bummed.”

Oh c'mon, that's not very Proustian. How about something more like,  "It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying."

Screengrab from an October 2011 presentation "Facebook Updates"

This is a guest post from a former CTO who now does tech consulting for other start-up ventures and was briefed on Facebook's advertising strategy. The story was edited and checked for accuracy by Betabeat.

If you logged onto Facebook yesterday, perhaps you caught a link at the top of the News Feed that read: "About Ads: Ever wonder how Facebook makes money? Get the details." The answers provided some context on the news that starting in January, Facebook will start integrating a type of ad, called "sponsored stories," that display your friends faces next to content they have "liked" in larger-sized ads your News Feed mix. "Facebook makes its money from showing you ads," the company told consumers yesterday and with the ramp up to its spring 2012 IPO, the social network is getting serious about that endeavor.

In what seemed like an unrelated move, in September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out by month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. At the time, Facebook described it to consumers as a chance to: "Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now." By the end of this year all 800 million plus Facebook profiles will have been converted to this new interface.

What most users don't know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, "brands are now an essential part of people's identities."

The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what's displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.

"Graph Rank" is a complex and non-published algorithm, but we know direct payments to Facebook and app/user popularity are important parts of the ranking. The newest thing is no longer on top. There is a rough month-by-month sort, but within the month it's graph rank, not chronological order, that determines placement.

For advertisers and social app developers, capturing user tastes (which used to be good enough) is now secondary to knowing what users are doing right now. Your reading habits, music tastes, guilty TV pleasures, holiday gift purchases and so forth are part of stream of information from which Facebook wrings profits and a new advertising channel in and of themselves.

Disguising ads as your friends' updates is being offered up as an antidote to the dismal click-through rates for traditional web advertising. Sponsored stories in your feed and sidebar ads based on your friends' likes will become ubiquitous. Indeed in marketing materials, Facebook says these new premium ads are 90 percent accurate, compared to the industry average of 35 percent. "When people hear about you [the brand] from friends, they listen."

Facebook derives its revenue from advertising--an average of $100 million a month since last January. At this point, many understand that the business model revolves around selling the mountains of personal information people post to Facebook. In the ramp up to its IPO, the company is anxious to show better revenue growth.

As the post from Facebook yesterday morning explained, sponsored stories are different from ads in that a user's name or profile might appear alongside the ad,  "If you've liked that business's page, the story about you liking the page (including your name or profile photo) may be paired with the ad your friends see." While sponsored stories don't include additional messaging from the sponsor, businesses pay Facebook to feature posts and activity that mention their brands. In both cases, these are only visible "to friends you've already shared this information with."

How long users will tolerate this is unclear. There's already a class-action suit pending in California against Facebook for integrating user's pictures without their permission in advertising based on "Likes." Many Spotify listeners and Washington Post readers are no doubt regretting listening to that one good song from that otherwise unpardonable band, or clicking on that salaciously titled article, which then appeared on the screens of everyone they know along with their smiling profile picture.

We have reached out to Facebook for comment and will update when we hear back.

Mr. Lessin

Of the many announcements to emerge from F8 --Spotify is now integrated with Facebook! Netflix is now integrated with Facebook! You can "watch" and "read" things instead of just "like"ing them! Things are just really different, okay?Good luck not friending your Mom, because she'll be on there soon!-- was Facebook's Timeline.

Rather than having to hit "Older Posts" again and again, Timeline lets you stalk with the greatest of ease by arranging a user's information in chronological order. As AllThingsD's Ina Fried notes, it also lets you pick a big, About.me-like cover photo for your life story.

Mark Zuckerberg introduced the feature with pictures of a toddler Zuck in pink tie and suspenders--and nary a thought about privacy in his head. But from the looks of the Facebook blog, it was former Brooklyn boy Drop.io founder Sam Lessin (now a product manager at Facebook, which acqui-hired him in last October) who was in charge of the feature. And after watching the video introduction to Timeline, Betabeat has a feeling we know at least one source of Mr. Lessin's inspiration.

Watch this sentimental "A Life on Facebook" video from last November.

And just try to tell us it doesn't remind you of this sentimental video explaining Timeline, minus the puking, cheating on the girlfriend and getting caught on Facebook part, of course.