Online merchants can expect to see an increase in sales compared to the previous quarter, according to a survey by Javelin Strategy & Research releases by eBillme.

Online shoppers are predicting that they will spend and average of $281 during the fourth quarter of 2009, a 24 percent increase over the last quarter. This is the first increase of online spending since last year, but also a 18 percent decrease in spending compared to the fourth quarter of2008.

“This quarter’s uptick in spending is evidence of improving consumer optimism as we head into the holiday shopping season, while consumers are planning to loosen their financial constraints this quarter, they are still holding on to recession spending habits.” Says President and CEO of eBillme.

“This includes changing the way they shop and pay to better control debt. Forty percent of consumers plan to use their credit cards less often in favor of non-credit payment options this quarter. We have seen this significant shift in attitude towards credit carry over from previous quarters, and it will definitely impact consumer spending decisions this holiday season.”

Consumers were also surveyed about projected holiday spending this year. Eleven percent are planning to do majority of their holiday shopping on Cyber Monday, while forty eight percent are planning on avoiding Black Friday shopping in favor of online shopping.

“This quarter’s Index shows some visible signs of improvement in the online retail sector,” says Beth Robertson, Director of Payments Research for Javelin Strategy & Research. “We haven’t seen a projected increase in anticipated spending since this time last year. And it comes just in time for retailers during the most important quarter for capturing sales and customers.

“Although consumers are still spending with caution, 51 percent are delaying purchases because of continued uncertainty in the economy. This increase is a positive sign that consumer confidence is on the rise.”

Google announced last week at the Web 2.0 summit that it was working on a social search feature, but also stated that it will be weeks before it went public. Social search taps into your social networks profiles and then displays relevant links and status updates from all your friends across your social profiles have shared and then displays them at the bottom of the search page. Google states that, Social Search will improve your search results on Google by providing you with personal relevant search results.

In order for you to start using Social Search you first have to go to Google Labs experimental section and then activate the Social Search Feature. Social Search will only be available in US and English for now.

From what networks?

Social Search will tap into three different sources, so you will need at least one of these accounts to make Social Search work, I would say at least Google profile would be best, if you don’t have one go make one here.

Social Search uses your Gmail’s contacts that you have created with your friends and coworkers for email and chatting with Google Talk. Social Search also uses your Google Reader subscriptions and all the social networking profiles that you have linked into your Google Profile.

Now you don’t need a Google Profile, this is the place with all your social networking profiles for Social Search to gather information from friends. Based on the information you give in your Google Profile, Google can now auto-detect all of your social networking profiles and your friends connected to services like Facebook, Flikr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, BrightKite, and  so many others.

How it Works.

Once you have activated Social Search, It’s results will appear at the bottom of your stand search results page and will be clearly labeled as “results from people in your social circle.” Goggles search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out is that it is important to note that not every search will trigger the Social Search results. Now when it does, the  search results should be highly relevant to your search query .

You may also manually trigger Social Search from your search options panel while you are logged in. There, Google will now present a list of all your friends that it thinks that are closely relevant to the key phrases you were searching for.  By clicking on a name you can restrict your results even further and see results from just one person or two people.

More and more companies are starting to realize that the content they offer on their site will not match up to the social media sites out there, where the community contributes to the content.

Several, on the other hand, have gone to great lengths like candy company Skittles, which redesigned their entire homepage with Twitter’s search stream. The only thing remaining on the homepage is a little navigational console in the upper left hand side of the page, which right now is taking up some room in the Twitter stream, but instead of them talking about how great Skittles are, it now is regular consumers talking about Skittles. I love this idea I think its great PR for the company.

Now this approach is not common in any way when it comes corporate websites, it has already been done other places. Lots of musicians are considering MySpace to be more important than their official website, and promoting their music, new, events and other good stuff there rather than their site. I look forward to seeing more corporations using more social channels but I don’t think we will anytime soon.

Twellow is expanding into different areas of Twitters functions. Today a new feature was announced/launched, which makes it easier to search among your followers and friends.

With the launch of Twellow’s new followers and friends features, now you can look at your current social graph of tweeple that you are tracking via the familiar Twellow profile lists.

Being able to search within your followers and the tweeple you follow should make it better and easier for all Twitter users. Twellow also started integrating new tabs for the recently added features. Now from any page on Twellow you can easily go to them on any page.

Google has finally decided to open a Twitter account. It is attached to a random googler and the bio states “news and updates form Google”.

The first tweet was created around 7pm EST last night, and Google already has 24,149 followers. They are following 58 other people mostly fellow Googlers, and Googles products. Biz stone, Evan Williams, Pete Cashmore.

The Google Twitter account was long overdue, but well liked as the number of followers shows you. First of all, this enables Google to have yet another outlet for distributing updates about the company.

The list of follower is a good way to find other Googlers to follow like Matt Cutts @mattcutts. The Google product accounts like Google Reader are not just throwing links to their blog posts either. For every one that want to keep up with every Google detail, this is the account to follow.

Last Tuesday Google Maps made a small tweak, finally. Now, instead of showing just the top ten results for local search on the map, now it shows all of them. It’s still going to show you the top ten with the map markers, but now little circles will also show up, showing all the other places that may be closer but did not show up before.

This will be good for smaller businesses and smaller restaurants to gain visibility. But it currently does not work on mobile devises or other websites, Google says that other domains that use Google maps will not be supported yet but in the future. For now, the only way to see these new results are by going to Google Maps search page.

The new version is available in limited Beta, but will come out to the general public in the next several weeks. Once it comes out, expect a lot more sharing going on. CEO Tim Schigel says “we see that sharing frequency increases 5 times when users leverage tools like ShareThis with access to their contacts and friends”

ShareThis is featured in tens of thousand of sites including NFL, MTV, TechCrunch, Wired, and many many more. You can see the new version in action now on the beta sites including: Boston.com, Elle.com, and FoxNews.com

New Features in the beta version include:

* ShareBox v.2.0- Users can now save the content rite to their ShareBox through the link within the widget, allowing for easier access to the content you shared previously.

*Contact Manager- Now users are able to import email addresses and contact names right through the widget from most of the major webmail providers with the ShareThis new contact manager, making it easer for you to share with all your contacts without ever leaving the site where you are getting the content.

*Better Design- ShareThis is completely redesigned to be tab free.

*Widget Gets Smarter- It will automatically display the last 3 email addresses you used, making it faster and easier to share content with friends and family

Google has recently announced canonical tags. Now this is great because it allows everyone to fix the duplicate content issue. For instance you site has identical or very similar content that can be accessed through multiple URLs, this tag provides you with more control with the URL that comes up in the search results.

Check out this quick video of Matt Cutts from Google speaking with webpronews.com