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(CNN) -- Archaeologists in Russia have discovered an "extraordinary" group of Stone Age artworks which appear to have been carefully buried in pits and covered with mammoth bones, the researchers announced this week in a newly published paper.

Archaeologists uncovered these Stone Age figures buried in pits southeast of Moscow.

At least some of the 21,000-22,000-year-old objects appear to have been regarded as magical, the scientists surmise.

The collection includes the only example of engravings of images found to date at the site -- what appear to be three overlapping mammoths only a few centimeters long and carved onto the rib of a mammoth.

"The main lines of the image are clear, not ragged; they were made by confident, unbroken movements," Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev write.

The carving may have been part of a hunting ritual, Lev told CNN.

The objects they describe in their new paper "show an extraordinary repertoire of incised carving on mammoth ivory plaques and carving in the round, including representations of women and large mammals, and geometric decoration on bone utensils," they write.

They also uncovered two female figures, including one 16.6 centimeters tall with a head they call particularly accurate in shape. The figures, which Lev called Venus statuettes, had been carefully placed in pits and surrounded with colored sand, Lev said.

The archaeologists uncovered the objects in 2005 at a site called Zaraysk, which was discovered in 1980. The site is about 100 miles southeast of Moscow.

Researchers have been excavating the site since 1995, and have found a necklace made of teeth of the arctic fox and a carving of a bison made from mammoth ivory.

Zaraysk is the northernmost known location for a style of Stone Age artwork called Kostenski-Avdeevo after two other Russian locations where art of that type has been found.

Lev said the Zaraysk site was on a par with Kostenski and Avdeevo "in terms of the splendor and variety of its art."

The site dates from the Upper Paleolithic period, which began about 40,000 years ago and lasted until roughly 10,000 years ago.

Amirkhanov and Lev's article, "New Finds of Art Objects from the Upper Palaeolithic Site of Zaraysk, Russia," is to be published in the December issue of the magazine Antiquities, a York, England-based journal that describes itself as a quarterly review of world archaeology. A version of their article appeared on the journal's website on Monday; the print version is due out soon, reviews editor Madeleine Hummler said.

The researchers are associated with the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Is the Web finally ready for a patent-busting site?

Word of mouth is one of the most common ways homebuyers and sellers find a real estate agent. Now, there are several Web sites that tout a more scientific approach: ranking agents based on criteria such as years of experience, how many sales they've closed, and the number of positive testimonials from past clients.

On auction sites like eBay.com, user feedback-based rankings can give anonymous buyers and sellers instant credibility. But is it a reliable way to find a real estate professional? Can it trump the referral from your a trusted relative or friend with firsthand experience?

Sites like HomeGain.com, AgentRank.com and IncredibleAgents.com function as repositories of agent profile pages. They make money from ads or, in some cases, by selling the contact information of potential customers who visited the site. Their rating schemes vary widely, and lack of active participation by agents can affect the quality of their results.

AgentRank, for example, launched in March and remains in its beta stage of development. The company brews agent rankings through a complex recipe.

Put simply, it bakes all kinds of variables into an agent's profile -- recent sales history, client reviews, experience, average days homes stay on market, among others -- and assigns them secret values that are then pumped through an algorithm that distills everything down to a rank between one and 10, with 10 being the best.

Visitors can search for agents by ZIP code or city and state, and they receive a list of agents ranked in descending order.

A key component of AgentRank and similar sites is the gathering of testimonials from agents' clients. What better way of ranking agents than by the number of positive reviews from past clients?

The site tells agents they can improve their ranking if they "close deals and make your clients happy."

Currently, agents solicit testimonials from their clients to place on the site. But that will change by next spring, when the site begins accepting unsolicited reviews, says AgentRank.com chief executive Marc Dugger.

A search of agents in Los Angeles on AgentRank turned up only 15, which is a precious few.

Dugger acknowledges the site is a work in progress. It has profiles for up to 5,000 agents spread out nationwide, which can lead to some regions having more than others, he notes.

Ultimately, relying on referrals from friends or relatives doesn't always work out, Dugger insists.

"People are very quick to hire an agent based on a single referral, but the power of these reviews are the fact that you get to see a pattern of success for an agent," Dugger says. "There are some agents that have upward of 15 to 20 reviews on the site, and that, in my opinion, would instill great confidence in that agent."

Another site, IncredibleAgents, beefs up its roster of agent profiles by tapping states' data on licensed real estate agents. As a result, many agent profiles on the site haven't been updated by the agents and offer slim to no details or client reviews.

The site, which launched two years ago, has 25,000 agents who are actively updating their profiles, says owner Damon Pace.

But faced with incomplete search results that turn up many stale profiles, it's hard not to feel like the overall rankings are pretty thin.

The rankings themselves are also somewhat puzzling. The site's current top agent in California, John La Mattery, has a score of 926. The next highest agent has 883.

The scoring is an average of 16 attributes, among these: "Office Logo," "Photo" and "Welcome Message." These seem arbitrary at best, when one considers what makes a good real estate agent.

Pace says the site helps validate agents' success and rewards those who are actively promoting themselves on the site, not just asking clients to submit testimonials.

"In a referral, you don't really have validation," Pace says. "You don't really know if that person is who they say they are, or who that person (that referred them) says they are."

The site lets anyone post a review of an agent on the site, whether it's positive or negative.

San Diego-based La Mattery racked up 70 reviews in the two months since he discovered his information on the site.

A link to the site on his e-mail signature is the only encouragement he gives clients to submit testimonials to the site, he says.

Even with his top gun ranking, La Mattery says he has yet to see any client referrals from the site.

"It's just to me another piece of the puzzle and it takes a lot of different pieces to have a client trust you and rely on your expertise and then actually work with you," he says. "Truly, it's an experiment for me."

Another site whose rankings might not instill great confidence is HomeGain.

Agents are ranked with one to five stars based entirely on consumer feedback. However, agents post the client testimonials of their own choosing, and to get a five-star raking, all they need to do is post five.

It's telling the site warns visitors that "consumer feedback may not reflect the actual quality of service" that they receive from the agents.

Matt Malmgren, senior manager of client services for HomeGain, says the site performs audits of agent profiles to make sure the testimonials are legit. In one example, the company booted an agent last year who elicited several consumer complaints and allegations of fraud. Prior to the agent's expulsion, however, he had a star rating of four or five, Malmgren says.

"It can be misleading," Malmgren says of the feedback ranking system. Still, he stresses, "if you meet an agent on the street, they're only going to give you testimonials they want to give you."

Another entrant into agent ranking is ZipRealty.com, an online real estate brokerage that is taking a slightly different approach.

The company rates its own agents based on responses from clients who are surveyed by an outside vendor. Clients are allowed to post comments and rate agents on a five-star scale. The company says, on average, 75 percent of survey recipients respond.

"We have them rate how we did as a company ... agents' performance," says Pat Lashinsky, ZipRealty's chief executive.

One sign ZipRealty's approach may be on the right track -- Lashinsky says: "Agents are nervous."

As gloom descends on Silicon Valley, most startups and giants are growing cautious and cutting back. But not Facebook. The social-networking Web site sees a bleak economy as all the more reason to press ahead with aggressive plans for growth. "This is not the time for tech companies to be cutting back; this is the time to be hitting the accelerator," says Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and investor.

Facebook executives think they can use the economic downturn to gain ground on the competition. So they're going to great lengths to keep user growth on track in these rough times. The company is gearing up for more acquisitions, hiring rapidly, and rolling out new advertising programs. Rather than trim the site's development costs, Facebook has engineers cooking up versions in languages such as Xhosa, Tagalog, and French Canadian to go after niche audiences around the world. "We're in this game not just for five or 10 years," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. "We're in it for 20 to 30 years."

To fuel growth, the company asked the Securities & Exchange Commission earlier this year for an unusual exemption. Typically, private companies that exceed 500 shareholders must start disclosing their financial results publicly. (This is the law that helped push Google to go public in 2004.) Facebook is approaching that threshold, so the company asked the SEC for a waiver that will allow it to keep hiring and handing out restricted stock without public disclosure. The SEC granted the request on Oct. 14. That will help the company reach 800 employees by the end of the year, up from 400 at the close of 2007.

The company is even reducing its revenue goals to pull in more users. In January, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was shooting for revenues of $300 million to $350 million this year. But this spring, Zuckerberg and his board lowered the revenue target to $250 million to $300 million, say sources familiar with company finances. Thiel says engineers were shifted away from ad programs to concentrate on fresh features, languages, and other projects that will boost user growth. Even as the economy has weakened in recent months, Facebook has decided to stick with its spend-now, profit-later approach. "We still think it's a land grab where we have to try to get to scale first," says Thiel.

It's a gutsy strategy, increasingly rare in Silicon Valley. Last month, prominent venture firm Sequoia Capital gave a presentation to its startups titled "R.I.P. Good Times," which argued that companies must cut costs fast to survive. One Power Point slide included a skull-and-crossbones and the words "death spiral" to show the likely fate of startups that fail to come to grips with the new reality. The Sequoia view has become accepted wisdom among Valley venture capitalists, leading to layoffs at scores of companies.

Facebook isn't yet profitable. But Thiel says the company can afford to be aggressive. It has raised about $500 million and is "slightly cash-flow negative," Thiel says. At its current burn rate, he says, the company has enough cash for three or four years. "If we stopped growing, we could make money, but it makes no sense for us to stop growing," he says.

Facebook's strategy stands in contrast to that of rival MySpace (NWS). Part of Rupert Murdoch's publicly traded News Corp. (NWS), MySpace has dialed back on growth to focus on profits. Over the past year the site has expanded modestly, to 118 million users, while Facebook has more than doubled in size, to 161 million users, according to research firm comScore (SCOR).