Google‘s rich history of acquisitions is put together in a very good format here by the guys at Scores.org. Where this infographic is handy is that they quickly identify whether a purchase was a way to enhance existing Google revenue streams, or to get rid of competitors. What I want to know is how many of these acquisitions have been enhanced since falling inside Google’s empire, and how many have died since…

Source: Scores.org

So you want to know where that son of a deposed Nigerian king is really emailling you from? Google made this handy little tool to track where the most Spam is sent from everyday. This is actually tracking in real time as well…

This Postini tool works by scanning identified malicious IPs accross the world - Postini is Google’s messaging encryption and security suite for Google Apps. It seems SA is very busy spamming as well – hey guys, we have too little bandwidth already, cut us some slack, OK?

Via: MBA Online

As we wait in anticipation for Sunday’s final match, Google examines the most prominent search trends over the last 30 days.

The vuvuzela has certainly been one of the biggest talking points of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, and has since crossed beyond our borders into other countries. Even celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio have been spotted with their lips around this plastic phenomenon. Google Zeitgeist – which provides insight into global, national, past and present search trends – has revealed that the United Kingdom is the number one country searching for places to buy the vuvuzela, followed by the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Top 10 countries interested in buying vuvuzelas:

Meanwhile, Uruguayans have been the most interested in Zakumi (the Official 2010 FIFA World Cup Mascot™), with the majority of searches taking place just before Bafana Bafana’s 3-0 clash against Uruguay. Besides South Africa, it seems that Peru, Argentina and Venezuela have also taken quite a liking to this cuddly, green haired leopard, who celebrated his 16^th birthday during the World Cup.

When French coach, Raymond Domenech, snubbed a handshake from South African coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, searches combining their names rose; particularly in France on the day of the momentous match in Bloemfontein. Luis Suarez’s infamous hand ball against Ghana during the quarter finals also sparked a series of searches, with the United States being the most eager to research the controversial play that inevitably dashed Africa’s hopes in the tournament.

Interestingly, Bangladesh leads the pack in trying to find out more about ‘Waka Waka’ (the official 2010 FIFA World Cup™ anthem), with Paraguay and Mauritius coming in second and third respectively. K’naan’s ‘Wavin’ Flag’, although slightly less popular, appears to have resonated with citizens in Hungry, Argentina and India.

Highest regional interest for Shakira’s ‘Waka Waka’ song in the last 30 days:

Anyone can use Insights for search to come up with their own rankings by visiting http://google.com/insights/search/ and Trends http://www.google.com/trends

Zeitgeist Explained

Google reveals the internet “Zeitgeist” (German for “the spirit of the times”) through an exploration of the billions of search queries we receive each year. We also have several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. Google Zeitgeist tools can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time. These tools are available year-round for you to play with, explore, and learn from.  You can create your own lists and rankings on www.google.com/zeitgeist

According to an article published by The Wall Street Journal this week, a Google representative speaking at a publishing-industry event in New York has confirmed that the company plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July.

The new service, announced last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, will be called Google Editions, and will be entirely web-based – in other words, users will be able to download and read books using only their web browser. No details have been provided yet on how this interface will compare to other available e-readers.

Users will be able to buy books in two ways:
1.    Through Google’s book search service
2.    Directly from the websites of book retailers

According to The Wall Street Journal, no decision has yet been reached on whether publishers will set the retail price for digital books or whether prices will be determined by Google.

Well this is interesting – Google bought the guys responsible for BumpTop, the very slick 3 dimensional desktop application. I have always been a fan of the idea of Bumptop, but I hated running another layer over my background. The few times that I did test it I was always impressed, and it ran well, especially its recent Mac OSX version. It was however limited in its free form, and hopefully Google fixes this. Just like Picasa was little known before Google bought it, maybe they will set Bumptop free for all OS’s, with quick links to all Google services. I can imagine that being very handy.

Please Google, dont keep Bumptop only for your upcoming ChromeOS (or Android).

Set it free.

Today, scientists announced a new hominid fossil discovery in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. The discovery is one of the most significant palaeoanthropological discoveries in recent times, revealing at least two partial hominid skeletons in remarkable condition, dating to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years. We are especially excited about it because Google Earth played a role in its discovery.

So how did this come about? Back in March 2008, Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and fossil deposits identified by him and his colleagues over the past several decades, as it seemed the ideal platform by which to share information with other scientists. In addition, he also used Google Earth to locate new fossil deposits by learning to identify what cave sites looked like in satellite images.

At the beginning of this project, there were approximately 130 known cave sites in the region and around 20 fossil deposits. With the help of the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth, Professor Berger went on to find almost 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites, even though the area is one of the most explored in Africa. One of these fossil sites yielded the remarkable discovery of a new species, Australopithecus sediba. This species was an upright walker that shared many physical traits with the earliest known species of the genus homo—and its introduction into the fossil record might answer some key questions about our earliest ancestry in Africa.

“We’re absolutely thrilled about this announcement, and delighted that our free mapping tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps continue to enable both individuals and distinguished scientists to explore and learn about their world. With these tools, places both foreign and familiar can be explored with the click of a mouse, allowing for new understandings of geography, topology, urbanism, development, architecture and the environment. Our efforts to organize the world’s geographic information are ongoing — but at the end of the day, seeing the way these tools are put to use is what most inspires us.” says Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocat, Google.

Previously covered Google news can be found here.

With the FIFA World Cup™ fast approaching, football fever is taking over. People around the world are using the internet not only to learn about the tournament but also to decide on which tourist sites they will be visiting.

It’s no secret that the tourism sector will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the tournament, with international visitors to South Africa indulging in the country’s natural beauty and appreciating its historical sites.  Last year the South African public voted on the country’s most popular tourist sites for Google’s Street View Trikes campaign that ran in conjunction with SA Tourism – as reported on our Africa Blog.

This month’s Google Zeitgeist shows the countries that are demonstrating the most interest in visiting these South African sites, and then reveals that three of the top five coincide with those countries buying the most tickets for the World Cup.

We’ve included these rankings below, which show the country’s top tourist sites, source markets and top ticket buying countries:

Most globally popular (or searched for?) tourist sites in South Africa in 2010

1. Kruger National Park
2. The Garden Route
3. Wild Coast
4. Robben Island
5. Cape Peninsula
6. Blyde River Canyon
7. Cape Winelands
8. Durban Beachfront
9. Mandela House
10. Apartheid Museum

Top countries searching for ‘South Africa tourism’ in the past year

1. India
2. United Kingdom
3. United States
4. Germany
5. Zimbabwe

Now compare that Top World Cup™ ticket buying countries (according to the Local Organising Committee)

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Germany
4. Australia
5. Brazil

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and Google strives to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results. Google has gone unchallenged for years with their dominant position in search. With the emergence of real-time information flow from companies like Twitter and Facebook, the Google search results have seemed out dated at times.

Back in December, Google introduced a string of new search innovations to combat this issue on Google.com bringing their results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Google has now announced that this feature will be available in South African search results.

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, MySpace and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news reports and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, Google will rank these latest results to show the freshest information on the search results page.

Try searching for a celebrity currently in the news, your favourite sports team or the latest political development.  Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google straight after it’s published on the web.

Additionally, by clicking on “Latest results” or selecting “Latest” from the search options menu, users can get view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling on Google’s results page. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku (Google acquired service) and others.

Google’s real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable them to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day.  Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of their real-time partners including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.cah.

Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets.

Admob has launched a number of great tools designed to enable publishers to more efficiently manage their publisher account. The mobile advertising network made headlines last year when Google announced they where acquiring Admob.

The New Publisher Dashboard allows publishers to view key statistics for their mobile websites and apps from one streamlined location. Users can customize the AdMob interface to see data that is most important to them such as revenue for the day, real-time pending earnings or performance statistics by geography. Improved navigation also makes it easy for a publisher to quickly review key performance metrics for each site or app in their account

Enhanced Reporting UI gives users the ability to customize, view and save reports from the same interface. Publishers can easily save time by saving reports they run on a regular basis. Reports can be saved for either a fixed date range, June 1-30 for instance, or for a dynamic time period such as the previous 7 days.  Users can also create reports for different groupings of their sites or apps, for example viewing performance for all Android apps together.

Reporting API (Beta) enables both publishers and advertisers to build their own internal tools and dashboards that incorporate AdMob data.  All statistics available through the AdMob interface can be accessed through the Reporting API allowing users to easily evaluate and compare their performance to that of other networks.  The Reporting API can be found in the Tools section of their AdMob account.

Server Side Controls enable developers using the new iPhone, Android and Flash Lite SDKs to dynamically control ads within their applications from their AdMob account. For example, users can easily edit the text and background color of their ads along with the refresh rate of their applications without the need to submit the changes to their respective app stores. This not only saves time, but also allows developers to test different aspects of their apps and optimize the content based on their findings.

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