Reports suggest that initially, as early as January of 2010, Google will be selling unsubsidized unlocked phones to the public. They won’t be affiliated to any specific carrier and will be compatible with GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. As mobile internet usage has gone up significantly in the recent past Google seems to recognize this trend and the phone seems to be its first move to cement its position in the mobile market.

Google plans to sell the Nexus One online. Most phones sold in the US tend to be carrier subsidized. However outside the US it’s the norm for unlocked phones to be sold independent of the carrier. How Google will price its product in different countries is still unknown.

Google has been trying to break the hold of mobile carriers on the mobile market, and with recent acquisitions like Gizmo5, they seem to be ready with a new strategy. They can set themselves up to offer subsidized and inexpensive services directly to the consumers using a product like Google Voice. In exchange for advertising, they could offer services that cost a fraction as much as charged by carriers presently.

The growth of mobile search revenue by 30% this year looks like the key reason why Google is looking to strengthen its mobile presence. Apple’s contribution to this increase was pivotal, and this also seems to make the company nervous. They do not want to rely on an outside company to control a major component of its revenue.

Analysts have expressed some concerns about Google’s move into the handset market. Currently, the only presence Google has in the mobile market is through the Android phones made by third parties and the iPhone which supports Google. With the company deciding to enter into the handset market, it stands the risk of alienating their current handset partners.

Google had spent the most of last year teaming up with carriers and handset makers to release its Android OS. As of now, nine phones and 32 carriers have partnered with Google. It looks like Google’s phone will likely upset a handful of their partners.

This also seems to bring to the forefront the growing battle between Apple and Google. Previously thought of to be working together against a common competitor, Microsoft, this move seems looks like the beginning of stiff competition among the two companies.

For example, the Droid, Motorola’s phone with the Android OS offers turn by turn navigation as a standard free app on its phone. The iPhone on the other hand offers an app from TomTom which costs $99.

As we continuously see the search engine market shake things up tremendously, the consumer seems to be getting better and better options. If Google’s phone ends up being the phone the public really wants, then whatever is said about the negative repercussions could be history. And finally Apple might see it’s worthy competitor.

Teracent works with an algorithm which helps advertisements to be modified on the fly. This can help ad agencies modify parameters like images, products, color etc in real time, increasing effectiveness of the advertisements.

“Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads,” read Google’s blog posting.

For example, a clothing store can display ads for snow jackets to people in Alaska. If someone from Brazil were to go to the same page, the ad could be modified to show summer clothing. This additional flexibility offered by real time advertising is a big win for advertisers as they can hit their audiences exactly when they show intent.

The online display market currently is dominated by its rival Yahoo!, with a market share of 14.5% compared to Google’s 2.2%. Co-incidentally, Teracent had also had ties with Yahoo! in mobile ad delivery. How the acquisition by Google will affect this partnership isn’t quite clear, but it isn’t hard to see that it will most likely fizzle out.

The acquisition of Teracent by Google comes after its recent acquisition of AdMob and DoubleClick. All three companies are based on advertising technology. Though search marketing had grown faster than display marketing, Google had said earlier that there will be a shift in the near future. The recognition of this fact by Google seems to be the motivation behind these recent purchasing sprees.

Though Google’s growing advertising muscle may seem bad for traditional advertising, small businesses seem to be the big benefiter. Traditional marketing tends to cater only to a few big organizations. With this massive online presence being built up by Google, small businesses can get as much if not more exposure as big guns get through traditional advertising at a fraction of the cost.

Traditional media like radio, television and print do not have the capability of the internet to reach millions of people at the same time. And even so, through these media it is hard to target just the relevant audience. Through keyword based marketing, businesses have the choice to advertising just to their audience. And since they pay based on this model, almost all the capital expenses on advertising spent by the companies go toward an audience that is more likely to respond. Of course the big guns can use the internet as well to advertise their product, but the playing field is a lot more leveled on the internet.

Who might be next on their purchase list is hard to say. However what we can take for granted is that they will add new twists to the advertising game. Constant innovation and key purchases of new technology seem to keep Google consistently ahead of its competitors. And so far, it has meant good news to small businesses. Let’s hope this trend keep growing in the future.

Current search engines provide links to what might be relevant content. A user has to scan these different links, and decide which links to follow. Most links do not satisfy user needs and they proceed to other sites to find the information. Time is spent on this click-in click-out process and it wears on a user’s patience. Factery Labs now have a new search engine that does away with the whole link system and instead gives the user “facts” instead.

In recognition of PageRank, Factery Labs uses a technology called FactRank developed by Paul Pedersen. What FactRank does is crawl through web-pages or whatever source content looking for semantic information which is evaluated by an advanced language model. When it identifies a passage with a targeted message it cross references it against other similar sources. By doing this, the algorithm starts accumulating “facts”. These facts aren’t exactly a guarantee for truth, but more like a democratic fact. What the user gets in the form of results is a page with chunks of information that is organized based on its relevance. They get the gist of the subject they’re searching for right there on the search page in one glance.

In fact, most searches on a website are done just to get a small snippet of information instead of lengthy paragraphs. If these snippets come organized from different sources on one platform, it saves the user a lot of time.

One fall-out will be spammers trying to hack into the algorithm by manipulating content. This is no different from the challenges faced by a regular search engine. By maintaining a blacklist of potential offenders and constantly tweaking their system, results will get incrementally reliable.

The product isn’t fully functional as a consumer search engine yet though. The website offers demo searches as a proof of its concept. It searches inside real-time and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. They have made available an API for third party developers to use. Possible applications could be to deliver reading summaries rather than traditional links. This is particularly beneficial to mobile users, due limited screen space; condensed information contained in a tight package is highly valuable. The range of products that the technology can be morphed to fit into is pretty interesting.

The biggest issue though is accuracy of the results. The fact remains that judging the truth of any content is outside the realm of any existing technology. Even a human being is incapable of discerning a fact’s accuracy independently. Since nobody really knows how to tell fact from fiction, the best possible path to follow is the one of neutrality. By not placing a bias on any form of content, it relies on the democratic nature of the service. If enough people talk about some particular issue, then that snippet will be treated as a fact. The only real bias that the company can afford to have is toward malicious sites. Spammers will be included in a blacklist, and popular sites will be given importance, just as it is done in traditional search technology.

The current goal of the company isn’t to become a big search engine, at least for the new future. The real potential that is being targeted is the API service offered to developers. There are a number of obvious and non obvious applications that this technology can provide. The ones that do come out in the near future promise to bring with it a new paradigm in the web experience.

Just when we thought the search engine market was getting interesting, the stakes just went even higher!

Google has responded to this move by saying “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute. Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

All the competition that lived under the news agency’s shadow will be able to get higher rankings. Most of the plagiarized content from News Corp’s sites will end up getting the traffic that should have been directed to News Corp’s sites instead. This decision comes in the middle of the debate between free and paid content. He argues that high quality content isn’t being recognized as much as it should. With the death of newspapers, free content is threatening the media industry. And preventing Google from indexing its pages is its first move toward the pay for content motion. If Rupert Murdoch does go ahead with the decision it could lead to very interesting times.