Searching for a hot news topic or buzzword can already lead an unsuspecting person to harmful malware. Recent articles are full of warnings about malware hidden in links that are supposedly about the World Cup or the Icelandic Volcano. Estimates have suggested that about 14 percent of traditional searches for trending news go to sites hosting malware.

As real-time search becomes more important, the problem of malware-related results could become much worse, according to a talk given yesterday by Dan Hubbard, CTO of Websense, at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, which took place at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The event brought together speakers from government, industry, academia, and the underground. Hubbard outlined several ways that real-time search results are easy to poison.

Much of the problem stems from the nature of information provided in real time, Hubbard says. It's noisy, spammy, and not authoritative. So search engines have a difficult task ahead determining what links can be trusted.

The results are also easy to manipulate. Hubbard experimented with searches related to the recent Boston marathon. He found that he could get posts to the top of real-time search engine results by posting in anticipation of events. For example, he posted information about who had won before there was a winner, garnering a top spot on real-time results pages. He found that he could trick even Google by introducing typos that other users might be likely to make (such as "Botson" marathon). And, by posting images along with text, Hubbard found that he was able to rocket his posts to the top of results pages.

Hubbard says spammers could use social graphs to manipulate real-time search results as well. A botnet, for example, could create large numbers of interconnected Twitter accounts, creating a source of information that could seem authoritative. Hubbard also pointed to recent reports of spammers taking over the Twitter accounts of well-known users.

There may be big opportunities for spammers as location gets factored into the ranking of real-time results. Current location services trust where users say they are, he says. Location is also relatively easy to spoof. Spammers could add their links to real-time search ranks by seeming, for example, to tweet about the Icelandic volcano from Iceland, or about the Boston marathon from the finish line.

Hubbard plans to continue his investigation by looking at how spammers might be able to influence Facebook streams and search, and what they might be able to do with the popular location-based social network Foursquare.

Google has revealed its latest foray into the social space: a tool called Google Buzz that integrates with Gmail.

The basic idea is similar to the feed on a Facebook user's home page: Buzz allows a user to see a stream of comments, links, photos, and videos that have been shared with friends. But while the interface looks familiar, Google could have a real advantage in tying Buzz to other successful products to beef up its functionality and adoption. The company also seems to have been working hard to identify and solve several problems inherent to existing social networks.

Gmail users will be automatically subscribed to 40 people based on their e-mail and chat behavior. The Buzz page (already available to some users) will show items shared by these people, and it will also recommend items that a user might be interested in, even if those items were posted in their extended network. As with Twitter, a Buzz user can direct an item to a specific person by using an @reply. This sends the item to the friend's inbox, where it functions as a "live object," updating in real-time as others comment on it.

Whenever social sites like Twitter are discussed, the issue of signal-to-noise typically comes up, and Google seems to have a plan for that too: using location information to help decide which posts are most relevant to a user.

Buzz will also help users control who sees the items they share. Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, notes that "many users use one product to share things publicly and a separate product to share things privately." Buzz, on the other hand, has been built with a user interface that makes it easier to flip back and forth between public and private, in the hope that users will use it to perform both functions.

Google has also announced three efforts to promote Buzz on mobile phones. First: a mobile app for both the iPhone and Android; second: links to Buzz on Google's mobile home page; and third: integration of Buzz with Google Mobile Maps so that users can see items posted near a location. For the mobile versions of Buzz, users can also choose whether to have Google rank posts based on social considerations or proximity. Selecting the "nearby" option within Buzz shows items posted near the user's current location, regardless of whether they were posted by a friend.

Google says that Buzz will reach most Gmail users within the next few days; the mobile application is available at buzz.google.com.

During a press conference held in Mountain View, executives said there were many great opportunities to integrate Buzz with Google Wave. But to my eye Buzz takes many of the attractive features of Wave offered and pulls them into products that people actually use. This seems like a better way of executing these ideas.

The announcement also demonstrates the keenness of Google's recent push into real-time search. Google executives have said in the past that it's hard to determine the best ways to rank tweets. But having better access to information on user's social behavior will help the company rank trending items on its search page (which is, after all, still its main product).

It seems that Google's recent deal with Twitter is already bearing fruit. Today, Google announced that in response to English searches it will now return a "latest results" section that will include posts from Twitter and Friendfeed, along with seconds-old headlines from newspapers and blogs.

It'll be interesting to see how well this content will supplement Google's regular results, which change at a much slower pace. There isn't much room in a 140-character Twitter post to provide the context that search engines typically use to judge relevancy.

In a recent article on Google's forays into real-time search, I also briefly discussed the problem of ranking tweets. The power of Google's search engine lies in its ability to rank the relative importance of different Web pages. But Google's CEO Eric Schmidt asked: "How do you rank the tweets against themselves and against all the other content? That's an example of work that we have done and are continuing to do."