Over the weekend, Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross led an initiative to build a browser bookmarklet called “Don’t Be Evil.” Ross built the bookmarklet to rewrite Google’s personalized search results to include content from other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and MySpace rather than just Google+. The engineers also launched a website for the tool and called it Focus On The User.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Google over the Google “Search, plus Your World” feature. “Google’s business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s consent order,” stated EPIC. The Google Search, plus Your World would find results that include personal data including photos, posts, and contact information gathered from the Google+ social network. Many people believe that Google is using their search engine market dominance to push for a stronger social networking market share for Google+ to effectively compete against Facebook and Twitter. [EPIC]

Google Hangouts, the video chat software built into the Google+ social network, has been updated with several features. The primary video feed is bigger and it now has screen sharing features just like Skype and Apple iChat. The screen sharing feature makes live collaboration more useful. Hangouts on Google+ also supports Google Docs collaboration and mobile video chat. [ReadWriteWeb]

Yesterday Google announced a new feature called “Search, plus Your World.” This feature would integrate Google+ status updates and profile information into Google’s search engine. Microblogging company Twitter.com has publicly said that the new features are “bad” for users because it would make information harder to find. Twitter also pointed out that providing real-time and personalized information will not help Google compete with them.

Google has added new features to the Google Search engine that mixes personal content with you from people that you care about. Currently search is limited to billions of public websites. Google Fellow Amit Singhal stated “You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.”

Google has been intensely focused on quality control over the Google+ social network. Upon launching, Google+’s policies stated that people must use real names rather than pseudonyms. On top of that, they insist that people do not include “mature or offensive content” including the middle finger as MG Siegler learned the hard way. Without telling Siegler, his photo was removed so he replaced it with the one above. Below is what Siegler had to say about his photo being removed.

Google has released a commercial for the Google+ social network featuring the Muppets. The song playing in the background of the commercial is Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” The Muppets studios have been creating viral videos for the last couple of years and this is the type of commercial that Google needs to get more attention to their social network.

Bradley Horowitz, the VP of Product at Google+ wrote on the company blog that they have created several new features to the social network. The new features include the ability to fine-tune your stream using a slider, a “sneak preview” notification system, and improvements to Pages.