Here is a list of acquisitions made by Google I found on wikipedia today. The majority of the companies acquired by Google are actually based in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States (silicon valley).
A total of 51 companies have been acquired as of March 2008.
Click the image below to see the full [...]

Today, Google Israel is having a blackout! This blackout is in honor of Earth Hour, a global initiative to turn off the lights for one hour across the world at a specific date and time. Google results pages is still in white however.

In the US, Earth Hour will take place on March 29th at [...]

A recent announcement by Yahoo press center states that they have joined the OpenSocial Foundation. Open Social is a Google initiative that already includes MySpace and other social networks and is a nonprofit organization to promote a universal standard for applications on social-networking sites (OpenSocial.org).
Google also officially welcomed Yahoo to the foundation on their official [...]

A recent New York assemblyman called Richard L. Brodsky has put together a bill that if passed will make it punishable or even illegal to collect personal information about internet user and the clicks they make on advertisements.
He assemblyman stated:
“Should these companies be able to sell or use what’s essentially private data without permission? The [...]

There is a very interesting discussion thread over at Google Groups involving Matt Cutts.
Basically, a website owner complained that his website was penalized by Google and many rankings where lost (-xx penalty). After a leangthy discussion, Matt Cutts joined in and pointed this out:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It
looks like [...]

HA! Found it :) Here is the full Google Human Editors Manual and Guidelines! Its a very interesting read actually and tells you what Google human editors (apparently around 13,000+ human editors!) are looking for in oder to penalize websites listed where they should not be.
I like the final note on spam (Web Spam):
When trying [...]

I recently discovered (shame on me!) that Yahoo Site Explorer allows a webmaster to actually tag an inbound link to their site as ’spam’ and reject it as being counted as inbound link weight. Well, I checked to see if Google allowed this same feature within their Google webmaster tool and fair enough they did [...]

Some of you may or may not know, but their is a search engine war going on which has been hotting up the past 6 months.
Google, although dominating the search market is also aggressively acquiring the online ad display market.
Stats released today from ComScore shows that Google is still growing in search share which increased [...]

This came to my attention today and I wanted to share. You can geo target your website via the Google Webmaster Tool (upon site verification) so that your site will rank higher in a particular country or region! This will only work for generic international extensions like .com, .net and .org. It will also only [...]

The latest Google launch (an boy have they been busy lately!!) is the “Category Exclusion tool” for Google Adwords advertisers. Basically, what this tool allows you to do is block your ads from appearing on poor quality sites that are not converting for you.
It is a great move from Google to fight against the ever [...]