A fascinating acquisition has taken place in Russia where Google, which has not traditionally performed well in the Russian search engine market, has paid one of its competitors $50 million for their share of the Begun contextual advertising system. The total acquisition value of Begun was $140 million - but a signficant slice of that will be paid to Rambler's partner in Begun - Bannatyne Ltd. Meanwhile, Rambler, the original control owner of Begun,

Yesterday, Google announced its second quarter figures showing that international revenues represented all revenue growth for the last 9 months with the US virtually flatlining. Growth in revenue compared to last year was 39% and 3% compared with the first quarter of the year giving a total quarter turnover of $5.3 billion. Clicks decreased by 1% over the first quarter of the year but were still 19% up year on year.

Abondance brings us further news of the Google book publishing initiative which sees Lyon , France's second most important city )sorry Marseilles(, jumping the gun on Paris and cooperating with Google. The digitisation will involve those books which are out of copyright. The library houses an important collection of books in the French language and some rare editions from authors such as Nostradamus and Newton.

India is unusual in having 23 official languages from English and Hindi to Kannada and Telugu - now the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing )C-DAC( has released 'cross language search plugins' which are intended to make search more readily available to the wider spectrum of Indian languages, reports India Times . This, together with the wide availability of access, is essential to enable India to take it's rightful place as a major economy in the modern world.

According to Vietnamnet , Yahoo is pushing the boat out in terms of new product launches in Vietnam - a market of around 20 million internet users with a largely young profile. Only in April this year, Yahoo appointed Vu Minh Tri as the General Director of Yahoo Vietnam. Vietnam is a particularly interesting market for Yahoo.

Nokia of Finland, which just happens to be the world's largest mobile phone maker, has partnered with leading Norwegian telecoms company - Telenor - to provide access to various internet services through Nokia's own internet service Ovi, reports Reuters . The Telenor and Ovi services will be offered to customers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Hungary. Why does this matter in search?

The largest company in the WebCertain 'internet companies extract' of the FT Global 500 is Hong Kong's China Mobile with a staggering market value of $298 billion, beating Google into a cocked hat in 12th place at a 'tiny' $104 billion and after such companies as Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, Vodafone, Cisco, Intel and Apple.

A fascinating experiment in internet culture has been launched by Facebook who have localised their interface to the Chinese markets. As the Chinese markets are very concerned about 'face' - how will they cope with a 'face' book that means that even people you don't know are described as friends. This means that Facebook is available in Catalan, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish,

Google has announced it's first quarter financial results in 2008 showing a 42% increase in turnover )revenues( from the same quarter in 2007. In the same timescale, click volumes have increased by a mere 20% showing the value per click which Google has generated is significantly up. Of course, the actual number or value of clicks is missing from the figures - but if we assumed an average click value of $0.

Google has changed its trademark policy for the UK and Ireland bringing it into line with its policy for the US and Canada. What this means in practice is that for trademark complaints relating to its Adwords programme, from now on Google will take NO further action relating to the trigger keywords. It will, however, continue to support requests relating to the use of trademarks in the creative - in other words in the sponsored links. See a typical notification below.

A competitive and balanced industry with two search giants fighting it out to deliver better and better services to advertisers and marketers is an appealing prospect. Regrettably, that's not what a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is going to deliver.