Google Inc said on Friday it was the target of an investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office into the fairness of its search engine rankings.

Facebook launched its latest missile in the war against Google for the trophy of world wide web domination. At F8, the company’s developer conference, in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company’s “Open Graph”, which essentially extends Facebook’s “like” feature to a multitude of external web sites, allowing users to feed their activity back into their Facebook news feeds. It also gives brands and site owners the ability to better track demographic data of the users visiting their sites. With this feature, Facebook has made a huge move in driving forward the semantic Web — something that Google failed to do with Buzz.

An Internet that gives people the information they want virtually as soon as it’s created is getting closer, according to Internet professionals.

But before real-time Web becomes a reality, developers say they need to figure out how to protect people’s privacy while blasting out as much information as they can, as fast as they can.

“A lot of this data that people would like to make available, they wouldn’t necessarily want to make available to everyone,” said Jack Moffitt, chief technical officer for Collecta, a search engine that aims to give real-time results. “I think we’ll be wrestling with privacy issues around real-time data for a long time.”

Despite only being launched this week, spammers are already targeting Google Buzz, the search engine’s social network, says Websense.

Websense said that when Twitter launched it took a little while before it was targeted by spammers. However, in an indictment of how rapidly spammers are learning to abuse social networks, it took only two days before they started to hit Google Buzz.

“It’s worrying that spammers have an improved knowledge of social networks these days that allows them to hit new services like Google Buzz so rapidly,” said Carl Leonard, security research manager at Websense.

“To embrace social networks like Google Buzz safely, businesses need to protect themselves and their employees with a security solution that keeps up with constantly changing web content in real time.”

Just two days after launching its Buzz social networking tools, Google last night said it has tweaked the technology address early privacy concerns.

Google last night disclosed in a blog post that the quick updates makes it easier for users to block access to their pages and eases the path to finding two privacy features.

“We’ve had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback,” wrote Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, in the blog post. “In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn’t yet have public profiles from following them.”

Google earlier this week threw its hat into the social networking ring when it announced new Gmail features designed to make the e-mail service more of a social networking hub. Google Buzz is the company’s attempt to make the flood of social posts, pictures and video easier to weed through, and to make it easier to find important information.

SUNNYVALE, Calif – Yahoo Inc executives defended the company’s commitment to Internet search on Wednesday, vowing to reverse the erosion of the company’s market share and to fix the “misconception” that the company has given up on the business it helped create.

Speaking at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters on Wednesday, a string of Yahoo executives took the stage to provide a peek at innovations that Yahoo said will distinguish its product after it completes a deal to let Microsoft Corp handle the back-end technology that powers its Internet search service.

“We have not been sitting on our backside doing nothing. We just have not been talking about it,” said Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s new Senior Vice President of Search, who joined the company last month.

“We are doing a lot to continue to invest in that space, continue to maintain our market share and grow the market share,” he said.

The idea is to take the thinking behind core Google concepts such as PageRank and quality score and apply it to social media, and Buzz is an early example of that process at Google, Jackson said. Expect to see further updates, as Buzz fits right into Google’s classic strategy of launching a product as soon as possible and making constant updates.