Facebook is becoming a powerful force in the search engine market. It's still far behind search behemoth Google (GOOG), but the social media platform's U.S. search traffic ticked higher by 13% last month, according to data from comSore (SCOR). From 351 million search queries executed on Facebook in December, the number grew to 395 million in January.

Google still owns 65.4% of the U.S. search market, having received 14 billion search queries last month. Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), Aol (AOL) and Ask share the remainder of the market. Among these competitors, market share changed little month-over-month. So, for Facebook, this month's growth bucked the trend.

Sergey Brin claims that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) didn't try to buy Twitter. The co-founder of the search engine giant made a surprise appearance at Web 2.0 Thursday, where organizer John Battelle asked point blank if he'd made a move for the popular microblogging website.

Of course, Brin revealed his fluency in corporate speak, continuing, "But if companies approach us we definitely consider any opportunities to buy," according to Reuters. A denial doesn't always mean a denial, especially if there were agreements to keep negotiations confidential.

Several weeks ago, AOL admitted it "screwed up" by releasing 20 million search records of over 600,000 AOL users. Yesterday the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the FTC to investigate AOL's breach of consumer privacy. The complaint also wants the FTC to require AOL to strength its privacy protection policies in light of the inadvertent release. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains that there was enough information released to allow a few individual users to be identified.

AOL removed the data set from the website intended for academic research purposes, but the information had already been copied and possibly circulated by the time AOL acted. AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein stated "AOL did not provide any personally identifiable information to a third party," according to Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post. The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a confidential brief to the FTC asserting that AOL did just that. In addition to the complaint regarding invasion of privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also lodged a complaint against AOL for deceptive or unfair trade practices.