Baidu Profit Rises 80% as China Search-Engine Ad Sales Surge: Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) — Baidu Inc., China’s biggest Internet company by market value, said third-quarter profit rose 80 percent, beating analysts’ estimates, as revenue from search- engine advertising surged. Google is not present in China. It’s Baidu’s for the taking.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-28/baidu-profit-rises-80-as-china-search-engine-ad-sales-surge.html

Search engines must go social: Facebook executive:

Facebook Platform director Ethan Beard has said that search engines are failing to provide worthy results to people, and that they must go “social”. Beard’s remarks were mainly directed to search engine and rival Goolge. Recently, Google launched its social networking site Google+. The company has also said that it would integrate its social networking service. with its search engine. More here….

Google Inc. is exploring an acquisition of Yahoo Inc.’s core business. Any deal involving Google could also bring other opportunities, such as bringing Google’s social networking service Google+ to Yahoo’s audience of nearly 700 million unique visitors a month. This sounds like an anti trust nightmare! A few weeks ago, China’s Alibaba also expressed an interest in owning Yahoo. Microsoft is said to be exploring buying Yahoo too.

Google’s autonomous, self-driving cars are deep into R&D/testing mode. In a roundtable with reporters at the Web 2.0 Summit Thursday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin reported that his teams have already driven more than 1,000 miles without the need for a driver to manually take control of the vehicle.

The Google Doodle, the drawings created from the search engine’s logo, isn’t just fun. It’s also a competitive edge. In fact, Steve Rubel, executive vice-president of Edelman, one of the world’s largest indpendent communications firms, said, “the Google Doodle is — arguably — one of the biggest PR coups in the world,” and can drive a “tonne of traffic to sites that rank highly on the search term Google ties to it. Just how much traffic? How about two million page views or more if your web page is the top result.

http://gulfnews.com/business/technology/doodles-of-google-1.907910

Google has expanded its language translation tool on Android smartphones to 14 dialects – including Russian and Mandarin. They are planning to soon “totally bridge the language barrier” using new technology. Imagine that. Languages and dialects will no longer separate people as long as they have an Android smartphone. Amazing!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/13/google-translate-14-dialects

YouTube’s Space Lab To Blast Teens’ Ideas into Space:

A consortium of private companies and government space agencies is banding together in a worldwide educational venture being sparked by Google to inspire students to study space. YouTube Space Lab will challenge 14- to 18-year-old students to design a science experiment that can be performed in space. During 2012 two of those experiments will be conducted aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube. This, my friends, is the coolest! If I was still a student, I would be doing this!

For the first step of the competition, students must submit a video no longer than two minutes by December 7, 2011 to YouTube that describes their experiment. Each student can submit videos for up to three proposed experiments. Students can work alone or in groups of two or three. The video can consist of an explanation on a whiteboard or demonstration of a mock-up in the classroom and must include the following components:

http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/10/10/youtubes-space-lab-to-blast-teens-ideas-into-space.aspx

The article, “Dealing With Regional Dialects & Languages In Global Internet Marketing” examines the advantage a global company can have by marketing itself online using local dialects.

The tricky countries are those with regional languages most marketers have not heard of. Take Spain, for instance. You shouldn’t think of the Catalan language spoken in Catalonia as a “dialect” but as a language opportunity and deal with it as such. The same is true of Basque and Galician which with Catalan are official languages of the regions they relate to.

Catalan is given an “official” status by Google too — since you can use Google’s keyword tool to check keyword search volumes in Spain. Galician and Basque are sadly not available via that route but do exist in Google Translate. A very interesting read…

http://searchengineland.com/dealing-with-regional-dialects-languages-in-global-internet-marketing-95360

Google strikes Mandela deal: to preserve and give digital access to Mandela’s archival documents, photographs and audio-visual material about his life and times.

China plugging holes in ‘Great Firewall: BEIJING - China appears to be moving aggressively to plug holes in its “Great Firewall” censorship system, causing frustration for businesses, web users and foreign Internet companies…The problems have followed a call for subtle weekly “strolling” protests in China inspired by political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and indicate the government is intent on nipping dissent in the bud