A new way of personalising search engine results is about to be rolled out by Google.

The firm has come up with a ‘stars’ system, which lets users mark their favourite websites with a gold star rather than bookmarking them. Once a relevant search is performed, favourite websites will appear in the listings with star symbols next to them.

The stars will be a replacement for SearchWiki as feedback received by Google suggests people did not like changing the order of organic search results.

Google project manager, Cedric Dupont, said: “The great thing about stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them.”

Unlike bookmarks, stars can’t be transferred to other search engines such as Yahoo or Bing, giving Google users another reason to stay loyal.

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A well-known phrase in American marketing circles has it that you will never go broke if you assume that the general public are, to put it kindly, none too bright.

Now, one canny software developer is living proof of that maxim.

Eddie Kim has developed an app for use on phones running the Google Android operating system which allows owners to find where they have parked their car.

IT newsletter TechRadar reports that the app is earning its creator a handsome US$13,000 a month at $3.99 a time.

As Gary Cutlack points out in an article detailing the app: “We understand that a lot of modern cars do look a bit similar and the colours often aren’t that unique – but do people really need to spend $3.99 on a mobile phone app to record, via GPS, where they left their Corsa?

“Is this utter madness, or are we massively underestimating the proportions of American car parks?”

Google has announced the launch of Buzz, a new tool which aims to compete with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

During a conference at the company’s Mountain View headquarters in California, Google released details of the new feature, built into Gmail, which will enable users to share information, photos, videos.

The search giant said Buzz, which “goes beyond status messages”, will allow users to automatically follow the people they “email and chat with the most“.

Users will not only be able to receive updates from friends who post directly to Buzz, but also link directly to their accounts with Twitter and Picasa to receive social networking streams from those sources. Buzz will also recommend content from people that it thinks users may like to see and incorporate it directly into their content stream.

Google said the product would begin to roll out in America immediately, and the rest of the world in the coming days.

Speaking at Tuesday’s press event, Google Buzz product manager, Todd Jackson, described it as “an entirely new world in Gmail”.

In a later comment on the company’s blog, he added that “organising the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve.”

Buzz is also integrated with Google’s mapping service, meaning that status updates sent from phones will record the sender’s location and add it to their messages.

“You can see what people in your neighbourhood are saying,” Google’s Vic Gundotra told the BBC.

This is Google’s second attempt to launch a social network, coming six years after it unveiled Orkut. However, while it has become big in countries such as Brazil and India, Orkut has since been put in the shade by the likes of Facebook and MySpace.

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Dedicated local pages containing business listings or details of interesting sights in a particular neighbourhood are now available when you search Google Maps.

The project brings together information contained in the maps database with Google business listings and, where available, customer reviews, in what many see as a logical extension of the existing Maps service.

For once, though, Google is playing catch-up with this service, as Bing and Yahoo!’s search results already show something similar, while Ask.com harnesses information from Citysearch to enhance the detail in its business listings.

Google Earth associate project manager Matt Holden explained the new service on his blog, saying: “When I’m exploring my neighbourhood or planning a trip, I often find places I want to know more about. Place Pages (puts) lots of great information about a place on a single page.

“You can see a summary whenever you click on a business or place of interest, and then click a link if you’d like to see more.” Summary information includes a full address, telephone number, and a link to the business or location’s website, if available.

He concluded: “We hope (Google users) enjoy exploring Place Pages and find them a helpful way to learn more about interesting places they see during their virtual browsing.”

Google allows local businesses to update their details on the database through its Local Business Centre.

British pest control to parcel delivery company Rentokil Initial has chosen Google to manage its electronic communications, making it the largest company yet to deploy Google's Apps worldwide.

Rentokil, among the FTSE list of the UK’s top 100 companies, said the move was part of its five-year turnaround plan and was as much about simplifying email systems as saving money.

“Today we have over 40 different systems which vary from open source systems to Microsoft Exchange to other complex arrangements, hosted both internally and externally,” chief information officer Bryan Kinsella told Reuters.

“We looked very carefully at rolling out server-based standard solutions and 15-18 months ago we looked at delivering the solution via the cloud.”

Cloud, or web-based, applications enable companies to access applications and data via the internet, eliminating the need for applications and data to be held on dedicated local servers, and elimimating the risk of losing masses of information and programmes in the event of a major system crash.

“We felt the fastest way we could deliver the mail solution to the group was through the cloud,” Kinsella said. “The challenge for us has been creating capability, actually more importantly than cost saving.”

Google’s UK Head of Enterprise Robert Whiteside said 1.75 million businesses were using Google Apps, most of them small and medium-sized companies, but Rentokil was its largest customers worldwide to date.

Companies initially worried about security concerns were increasingly confident about moving services into the cloud, Whiteside believes.

SunGard, a privately owned IT firm, said on Monday it had signed up a financial services company for the launch of its fully managed “private cloud” service in Britain.

Keith Tilley, UK managing director of SunGard Availability Services, said moving to the cloud enabled companies to cut capital costs.

“You can subscribe to what you need when you need it and focus your capabilities on your true business,” he said.