Where’s the Buzz: Google to buy, Google to launch, Google to announce

July 26th, 2008 by Dr. Taly Weiss

Filed under brands perceptions, Google Hot Trends, internet behavior, purchase, search, Uncategorized, video, where's the buzz

This month Google made a buzz in several fields: new acquisitions, new achievements and new products.
We collected them all for you to follow:

1. Google announced today that it is now indexing 1 trillion unique URLs. According to Read Write Web, Google used to have a counter on the front page of its search engine, displaying the number of sites in the index, but they dropped this information from the site around 2005, when the focus was clearly changed from quantity of results to quality and relevancy.

2. According to Hitwise, Google reaches new scores: it accounts for 69.17 percent of all U.S. searches in June. (Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.62, 5.46 and 4.17 percent respectively). Note that in the U.K. and Australia, Google is reaching over 87% market share.

3. Google is now TOP Consumer Brand in the UK , replacing last year’s winner Microsoft

4. Can Google’s Hot Trends be manipulated?
Philippp Lenssen, our friend from Google BlogoScoped was first to cover the story of the Swastika (the Nazi symbol) appearing at Google’s top Hot Trends list.
It was later discovered that a post on 4chan.org instructed users to Google ‘…#21328;’. When thousands did, they discovered that it was a piece of code which, when processed by a web browser, translates into a swastika. Their collective queries sent the symbol soaring to the top of Google’s Hot Trends.

5. Did Google get its appetite back?
After eight months in which Google was not involved in any new acquisitions, it has announced two new deals: the acquisition of ZAO Begun (a leading Russian context advertising service), and the plan to buy Digg, News UGC site.

6. This week, Google launched Knol – Google’s Wikipedia version. Unlike Wikipedia, writers are authorized, identified and receive an ad share revenues. Can Google compete with Wikipedia? it sure will try.
Wikipedia became one of the most popular platforms to provide a meta support for the web. Few are the search items that will not link first to Wikipedia. Google fancys that. Imagine you start and end your search all in Google’s territory…

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