The search engine giant has said that it will invest about $101m (£65m) on the new data centre, which will expand on the data centre space that it is already hiring in the city.

The data centre will employ around 30 people; there are already more than 2000 people working for Google in Dublin.

Google also announced that it will be building new data centres in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan in order to strengthen its offering in Asia.

The organisation is also continuing to expand its data centre provision in its native country. It has just opened a new data centre in Oklahoma and says that it will go on to build a second data centre on the same time.

Google chooses its data centre locations in cities with moderate temperatures that are ideal for data centre cooling, an energy-efficient tactic. For example, its data centre in Hamina, Finland, uses cold water from the Baltic Sea instead of electrically powered chillers.

John Herlihy, head of Google Ireland, said: “We’re very happy to continue investing in Ireland and to build out our presence here even further. The new data centre will be one of the most energy-efficient in Google’s global fleet.”

Ever more data for the search engines means ever more effective searching and linking for web-site designs.

Yahoo! was the subject of a failed take-over bid by Microsoft in the third quarter of 2008, and gross revenues have failed to grow from that point. After Yahoo! announced its redundancy plans, the company’s shares fell 4.4% in after-hours trading.

eMarketer, the business information service which analyses US online advertising spending, understood that Yahoo!’s display advertising share decreased last year to 16.2% from 16.5% in 2009 while – in the same period – Facebook accounted for 13.6% of display revenues, an increase from 7.3% in 2009. Yahoo! chief-executive Carol Bartz admitted that the company was not getting the click revenue it had hoped for.

Yahoo!’s current cuts contrast to Google’s fortunes, as the corporation implements an assertive recruitment plan to hire 1,000 new employees in Europe. In the same quarter that Yahoo!’s revenue had decreased by 4%, Google’s revenue had grown 26% to $8.4bn and its profits by 29% to $2.5bn.

Referring to Google’s further fourth-quarter profits of $2.54bn, outgoing chief-executive Eric Schmidt said: “We had a very, very good year and a very strong quarter”.

The service is optional, and to activate it you have to link your Facebook page to Bing. This is only possible by opting in, and will mean all your friends’ profiles will show up in your search results, even those who have privacy settings that would usually prevent their profile being included in search engines. This is possible as the social search results are unique to the user making the query, so only they can see them.

Bing Social Search allows pretty much exactly the same profile access as Facebook does. Bing have commented that they developed this full profile access in response to user reviews, which highlighted ease of profile access as a chief priority of the service.

As well as including profiles in search results, Bing Social Search will also link you directly to your friend’s likes, through its ‘Liked by my Facebook friends’ option. So, if you’re looking for the latest gossip on a new movie or buzz around a restaurant, then you can now access one of your most trusted sources online.

Including social media within search engine results will mean that now, more than ever, a company’s social media campaign and reputation can have a massive impact on marketing and sales. To ensure you’re in the best possible position, contact NS Design for a free no-obligation quotation.

This latest advancement is based on research which suggests that users take up to 10x longer to type an enquiry than they do to scan a page of results. Instant responds to this by bringing up results as users type, allowing them to scan simultaneously and click through to their desired web page faster. The user also establishes a dialogue with the system, amending their own search parameters as they go to find their required content quicker.

It’s an impressive new tool which accelerates functionality for users of the system; however, it may not be such good news for businesses, especially those running Adword campaigns. Results for Google Instant searches are almost constantly refreshed, and so too are the PPC ads, allowing no time for an interested party to click through.

There is also the possibility that businesses will end up paying for impressions on irrelevant searches, with results changing as a query becomes more defined.

In response, Google will change their definition of an ad impression.  Unless an ad is on screen for 3 seconds or more, it is not considered an impression. This goes some way to solving the problem, but doesn’t help if the user is distracted half way through typing their query, leaving irrelevant results on screen for a prolonged period.

Google Instant has the potential to revolutionise the way we use search engines and its true impact has yet to be felt. Only time will tell us what effect it has on Adwords.

Google Wave
Launching later this year, Google Wave could potentially bring about one of the most significant chanages to the way we communicate online since email.  Yes – it really is big news!!  As Lars Rasumussen (Google Wave developer) put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

If you can find the time (1 hour and 20 mins!), I urge you to watch the video at http://wave.google.com/ and let Google themselves explain it, but essentially Wave is a hybrid communication and collaboration tool, combining email, instant messaging, live chat, wikis, social networking and project management, all in one simple (lets hope so) browser based application.  Head over to the Mashable website for a much more detailed explaination and a summary of all the features.

While it’s not yet live, Google Wave has already been met with a wave (sorry) of enthusiasm from the web community – from designers, developers, users, and industry experts alike.  Let’s hope that when released to the masses (expected to be towards the end of the year) it doesn’t fail to live up to it’s high expectations

Bing
Bing is the new Search Engine from Microsoft, and unlike previous efforts, this one might actually take a slice from the Google pie. So what does the self proclaimed “decision engine” claim to do that’s different from the norm:

• Instant Answers: finds specific answers to informational queries, e.g. “What is 55F in Celsius” offers rich media and structured data and a general search term like “weather” yields a 5-day forecast for your location.
• Preview: enables searchers to find out more information about a site by previewing individual results on the results page to reduce back-and-forth searching.
• Best Match: delivers results with deep links and highly relevant information to help searchers to get the right information faster. 

For webmasters, you can access the Google-like “webmaster tools“, to help better understand how Bing sees your site, and allows you to view stats and submit sitemaps etc.

Early indications are that Bing is being pretty well received by the web search community, although what impact it will have on Google will not be seen for some time yet, but given that they’re reportedly spending $100 million on promoting it, clearly Microsoft are taking this seriously and boast that Bing is just the “first step in a long journey” for their search plans (Qi Lu – Head of Microsoft’s online services).

Wolfram Alpha
It’s own first paragraph explains this new “Computational Knowledge Engine” as “the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  In a nutshell – it claims to provide answers to questions that other search engines (ie: Google) will not provide.

As I test, I used a fairly simple question: “how far is it from Glasgow to London”, and it promptly told me it was 344 miles and showed a nice little map.  Like the examples on their homepage, this is fairly basic stuff, but the simplicity of asking a question in plain English, and receiving one definative answer (instead of the 578,000 results Google gave me) is pretty significant.  To be honest – it’s a different beast to Google altogether, and where it will excel is in “computing” things, not “searching” for websites containing your search terms.

Check out http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html for a good (and suitable geeky) review.

Google Squared
A direct challenger to the Wolfram Alpha site, Google’s been quick to release their own
Unlike typical search, Google Squared extracts data from other web sites, and presents the results as “squares” within what can only be described as an online spreadsheet.  A quick example searching for “Glasgow Web Design” presented me with a nice table of just that – Web Design companies in Glasgow (with NSDesign thankfully within the first page of results!)..

The primary difference between Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha, is that the latter searches only it’s own Databases (currently holding approx 10TB of information), while Google Squared attempts to search the entire data on the web.  How much we’ll all use such a tool on a day to day basis is difficult to predict, but it’s certainly a great start at strcutured searching, with everything is neatly labeled and categorised.
So – Killer Apps, or pleasast distractions from a busy day in the office…?  Time will tell.