It’s official: Google confirms acquisition of feedBurner. There has been rumors around for a week or so, but today google announced on their blog that they acquired the feed distribution tool Feedburner. A good buy, no question.

From the Google blog:

As you know, we’re constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers. Likewise, we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve just acquired FeedBurner.

There’s an an incredible market emerging in China. It’s going to be huge. I happened to stumble upon an interesting article that touches the subject “chinese internet behaviour” from a western perspective. Here I summarized four very interesting facts about internet usage in China compared to the west:

• China is the second largest internet market in the world.
• China has about 150 million internet users and the US has about 154 million. That’s about 68% market penetration in the US but only 10% in China (so far).
• The biggest search enine in China, Baidu, has a market share of 62% compared to Google’s 20%.
• The average time on a search results page in North America before a click is less than 10 seconds. In China it’s about 30 seconds on Google and almost a full minute on Baidu.

The next 10 years will be very interesting.

Google just merged two of their existing services that reveals general search habits: Zeitgeist and Trends into a new service called Google Hot Trends.

The art of trend-spotting is set to take a more scientific turn as Google Inc., the world’s top Web search company, on Tuesday unveils a service to track the fastest-rising search queries.

Google Hot Trends combines elements of Zeitgeist and Trends — two existing Google products that give a glimpse into Web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data.

Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said.

Links:

• Reuters news
• Google Hot Trends
• Webmaster World discussion

Missing the old-school google search without advertisements and extra features? Typing http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout will direct you to a simpler google search page without ads.

Link: Google without ads

Google announced last Friday that it is buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for 3.1 billion dollars.

‘We’ve come to an agreement to purchase DoubleClick,’ Schmidt said in a conference call from Argentina, where Google is opening a new office.

I guess Google is now officially an ad agency that just happens to dabble in search.