When a big website goes down it doesn’t take long before Twitter is full of tweets lamenting that it’s down. This behavior is so common that even Twitter itself has “is down” as one of its query tips on the Twitter Search page.

Now that Google has added a Twitter timeline graph to its search engine, we can actually visualize how much people complain on Twitter when big sites go down. We can now see how the amount “down tweets” blow up. Finally we have some history to go with real-time search, so we should be grateful that Google got access to Twitter’s firehose.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.

And let’s face it, Google is a pretty interesting company. In fact, we think it’s so interesting that we put together this infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. We’ve been digging through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. We hope you like it!

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Google often modifies its logo to reflect current events and celebrate anniversaries of famous people and accomplishments. This post collects all the science- and tech-related anniversaries and events that Google celebrated with a special logo last year.

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PageRank (PR) was Google’s original secret weapon, a scale that would rank websites based on incoming links and where those links came from. Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR.

But do you need a high PR to have a successful site? Search rankings are one thing, but what about actual site popularity and traffic?

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Google has, perhaps more than any other company, realized that information is power. Information about the Internet, information about innumerable trends, and information about its users, YOU.

So how much does Google know about you and your online habits? It’s only when you sit down and actually start listing all of the various Google services you use on a regular basis that you begin to realize how much information you’re handing over to Google.

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The world of search is moving quickly, with promises of big advances in 2010.

From augmented reality to personalized results, here are ten trends and changes you can expect to see in search in the next year. 2010 will for sure bring lots of new technology and changes to the table for search.

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Facebook is easily the most widely used social network in the world today, an international success. Since its start in 2004, it has grown to more than 300 million active users, which is unprecedented. No social network has ever been as big as Facebook is now.

This post takes a look at Facebook’s geographic expansion from its start in 2004 until today in 2009, showing how its popularity has grown year by year.

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Last week we learned that Microsoft had scored a deal with Twitter and Facebook to allow status updates to be searchable from Bing. Shortly after, Google announced a deal with Twitter as well.

These partnerships are a sign of the growing importance of the real-time web – that smorgasbord of sites and services which allows you to broadcast whatever is going on in your life right now. Other examples include the social network Foursquare, which lets you inform your friends when you’re at a particular venue, and a variety of sites that let you instantly upload audio and video from your phone.

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Microsoft’s iPod competitor, Zune, has been revived with the newly announced Zune HD. But in spite of positive reviews, the overall response from consumers seems to be… well, lukewarm to say the least.

To give you an idea, let’s look at the search volume (via Google Trends) to measure interest for Zune compared to the market-leading iPod over time.

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