In case you haven’t been paying attention, there have been a lot going on in the search industry. First, we have Facebook pickup Friendfeed, and then change its advertising system to allow you to target others by their birthday or their connection to your pages. And then we have Google showcasing Google Caffeine. You can’t forget about Google Adwords latest changes to include related ads in the sponsored section. So let’s see what has changed in detail:

Facebook:

As you can see, Facebook has added a few new fields to its ad form, making it so easy to target customers by their birth date. So you can essentially give out discount coupons for their birthday. Another interesting Facebook Ads feature is two brand new fields that help you target people who are and are not interacting with your fan and product pages. For those who are not part of your fan club, you can use Facebook Ads to target them and give them some incentive to join your club. And for those who are a part of your fan page community, you can put up ads to make them interact more with your pages.

Google:

There have been a lot of talks about Google Caffeine. After testing it for a few hours, I am very impressed with the speed and overall quality of results. In some cases, there aren’t too many differences between the old and new Google. But in many cases, there are some major differences, which should be exciting for SEOs. But I was most interested about was the changes that Google is implementing with Google Adwords. Now these changes have been going into effect over the past few weeks, but it’s interesting that you don’t have to actually click on the “related products” link to see related ads.

What these changes mean is you can better target your audience and provide better information for it to click on the ads and purchase products from you. I am starting to like Facebook Ads a lot. It’s getting so easy to target a specific audience with Facebook, and the latest features can only help. I wish StumbleUpon would pick up a few tips from Facebook, but as it is Facebook is a league of its own.