Another Google exec has decided to leave Google to join Facebook. This time it’s Elliot Schrage, VP of global communications and public affairs. He’ll become the VP of communications and public policy at Facebook. He was at Google for two years.

The funny part is how quickly he got on Facebook and started sharing the news. Like the COO hire, this is a strategic hire for Facebook as they try to follow in Google’s stock price footsteps. If enough early stage Google employees go to Facebook they just might be able to recreate that early Google startup feel.

Schrage will report to COO Sheryl Sandberg, another exec who recently left Google. Add Ben Ling (marketing) and Ethan Beard (biz dev) to the list of the departed, and it looks like people are craving that startup culture that used to be Google.

Yep, Yahoo working to make the world a safer place—to search.

Yahoo will now display warnings on SERPs to indicate that some of the sites listed in their results may not be entirely safe. Yahoo’s SearchScan feature will be a new default for SERPs served to the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. Potentially dangerous sites will feature a highly visible red warning tag under the page title.

The advisories in action:

The advisories even specify what kind of dangers might lurk in the pages to come.

Yahoo’s new advisories are based on McAfee’s Site Advisor findings and are used to denote sites that may feature dangerous downloads (including dangerous downloads disguised as or packaged with legitimate downloads) and unsolicited email harvesters.

…or at least the company appears to be sporting a new look for its search engine.

What do you think? A superficial facelift to win some pride after backing out from Yahoo or perhaps a sign of renewed effort from Microsoft?

UPDATE: The Live Search team explain the details of the new design.

If I were one of the stressed out digerati–constantly overwhelmed by the demands of social media–I could probably list out a dozen existing tools that Google Reader’s new sharing options borrow from. Instead, I have my social networking habits under control, so will stick with just the obvious comparisons.

First, what did Google Reader announce?

• A new bookmarklet. Add the Google Reader bookmarklet to your browser and you can save any web page–even if it doesn’t have an RSS feed–while also adding your own notes or sharing with friends.
• Share items with a note. I share a lot of items on Google Reader. They all get added to my link blog, but until now, you’d never know why I found an item interesting. With this new addition, I can annotate a shared item with my own notes. So now you’ll know why I liked it.