And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.

To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.

Read more

It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

Read more

Back in June, Google+ landed with splash in the social network swimming pool, spraying water right in Facebook’s eyes. Judging by the mostly positive buzz so far, it’s arguably one of Google’s most successful product launches ever.

We know there are plenty of early adopters and techies on Google+, mostly males (the term “sausage fest” has been thrown around). But where has Google+ captured the imagination of people the most? Where are people the most interested in this new social network?

Read more

It’s no secret that Yahoo has seen brighter days and that Google has come to utterly dominate the Web in a way that Yahoo just can’t compete with anymore.

But lo and behold, there are still some places where Yahoo is ranked higher than Google. They’re few and far between, but they do exist, and in some pretty big markets, too.

Read more

We all love the Internet, but using it also has its fair share of frustrations. This becomes fairly obvious when you look at the automatic suggestions that Google makes as you type in your searches…

Read more

Few tech companies can tap into the zeitgeist like Apple does. Another excellent example of this has been the hype build-up leading up to the iPad 2 launch. People just couldn’t stop talking about it.

Of course, with the first iPad being such a popular product, interest in its successor has been growing rapidly over the past few months, and speculation has been running rampant.

You know how we love proper data, so here is a graph showing the interest in iPad 2 leading up to the March 2 announcement (based on Google search stats).

Read more

Google began strictly as a search company, and it’s still their bread and butter. However, as the company has grown, it’s spread its tentacles like a giant octopus out to most parts of the Web. A benevolent giant octopus, providing lots of highly useful services, but a giant nonetheless. Try surfing the Web without touching a single Google service. It’s impossible.

Google even shows up in places you’d never expect it to. For example, you know those “captchas” that websites and online forums use to verify that you’re human? Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is currently using the captcha input from hundreds of millions of users to improve its text recognition software.

But that’s just a tiny little service. Let’s see where Google has a more dominant presence, starting with, but not ending with, search.

Read more

Last year, Google bought an old paper mill in Finland. Now the company is in process of converting that paper mill into a major data center. Construction is already well underway, and the data center is expected to go live next spring. It will be Google’s first dedicated data center in the Nordic countries, with several interesting innovations, for example being cooled entirely by sea water.

Swedish magazine Computer Sweden was recently on location in Finland and has published an article (in Swedish) with new information and pictures from the build. We’ve summarized the important parts of that article and also what other information we could find around the Web, mostly from Finnish newspaper articles.

Read more

Google has been dominating the search engine market for years, but at least there are some competitors that have a few percent each.

But if you look at mobile search, i.e. search on mobile devices, which is more or less the smartphone market, Google is utterly crushing the competition to a level that it’s never managed in the regular search market.

Just look at this very telling chart, showing Google’s overall search and mobile search market shares in relation to those of Yahoo and Bing, its two closest rivals. (These are global stats.)

Read more

Google is a bit of a paradox. On one hand, it promotes openness, with a stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” An admirable goal. On the other hand Google is often secretive when it comes to publicly sharing information about its own websites and services.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Google’s own public data tools. Try getting information about Google websites in any of these tools and you will notice that most of this information is nowhere to be found. You’ll be able to find information about any website on the Internet, but not Google’s own.

Read more