The number one search engine is celebrating its 13th birthday this month. According to the company the exact date has changed over time based on when employees feel like having cake, so we haven’t missed it just yet!

Google has clearly come a long way in the last 13 years though it feels like it has been with us forever. As the history and advancements of Google could provide for a novel, it would be easier to check out the company timeline.

A few months ago, Google introduced their cloud music service, Music Beta, available via invite only.  The quick value proposition behind this, as the company noted on the homepage, is the ability to “upload up to 20,000 songs from your personal music collection to listen from any computer or on your phone, even offline.   All for free.”  The concept is cool, but certainly not unique, a la Amazon’s Cloud Drive/Player and Spotify, among many.

Yesterday Google introduced Magnifier to further expand on this offering and possibly open the door to easier monetization down the road.   Could a head to head competition with iTunes soon follow (which would be like putting a flyweight up against a heavyweight)? Magnifier touts itself as a “music discovery site that will keep your collection growing [and] will feature great music and the people who make it, including videos of live performances, interviews with artists, explorations of different musical genres and free songs that you can add to your Music Beta collection.”

Mashable recently reported that Google’s Realtime search function, disabled in July due to stalled negotiations with Twitter, is planned to resurface and will include data from additional social sources as well as Google+.  Realtime Search, “Updates” on the Google SERP, delivered relevant Twitter, Facebook and other social media data streams in real time whenever major current and world events hit a boiling point.

Adding Google+ data to the results is also under serious consideration, with the Google+ Stream possibly functioning as its own search engine and real time feed, which coincidentally is Google+’s most requested feature.  This could essentially negate the need to incorporate any data outside the Google family of products (like Tweets and Facebook News Feeds).

As we’ve all heard, Google+ is now up to 25 million visitors after only being in market since June 28^th.  If you can believe it that rate of growth is faster than MySpace, Twitter and even the all mighty Facebook!   If you don’t believe me, check out the chart below:

Does this mean that Google + will one day surpass the popularity of Facebook? That is still left to be answered.  The engagement rates are still not up to par as people are still asking themselves what exactly is Google+ and why it even exits.  So why then is Google+ growing so quickly one might ask? Google has used their existing Gmail base to establish themselves as a true competitor in the social network world and it has worked.

What Google+ now decides to do with its growing user data base and how it will apply to advertisers will be their next big move!   Stay tuned advertising world, this just might change how we buy and use social media!

Is anyone actively using Google+ yet? I have 20 or so people in my circle but only a few colleagues are active and messaging me. There was a lot of buzz within the first 3 weeks of the Google+ debut, and in that time over 20M people signed up. According to hitwise though, there has been a dip in traffic the last few weeks leading to the blogosphere insisting that the hype is wearing off fast and that the tool will fall to the same fate as buzz and wave.

In my opinion G+ won’t catch on in terms of usage anytime soon. There are just too many social networks we are currently using–the main of course being FB and Twitter. Google+ looks like it has tried (and failed so far) to become a hybrid of the 2.

Despite it’s shortcomings I love that it can be used as a surveillance tool as a member of my circle has pointed out.

According to Lifehacker “You can use Google+ Hangouts as an on demand remote camera viewer. First, create a second Google Account, and put the alternate account in its own circle. Then, start a hangout with just that circle. When you want to checkup on how everything’s going along in your house, you can just join the hangout with your alternate account, and you should see what’s happening”.

Though this is perfect for disocvering who keeps putting the milk back when it’s empty I don’t advise using as your main source of home security.

For information on how to setup a hangout click here.

As of July 4th, Google+’s user base was estimated at approximately 1.7 million.  Not too shabby for a site that launched less than two weeks ago;  so thinks Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley Idaho last week.

Google intends to use the success of the “circles” concept to fuel and shape existing properties like Buzz and Gmail, while helping to innovate new products in the pipeline, where the “assumption” is that over time, “…everything will move over to using the + infrastructure.”

Schmidt also cited the supply/demand difficulties, especially when considering the many who had invitations but were not allowed access, as being among the greatest problems currently facing the service.  But, he continues to say, “we’re reviewing it on Monday“.

Yesterday Google revealed a new product that entices users through convenience: Google Wallet.

Wallet combines the phone and the credit card–two necessities that few, if any, leave the house without–into one tidy package.

The idea is to link credit cards virtually to phones, so that the phone becomes the only thing you need to grab before heading out of the house. To make purchases, the user simply taps the phone against a machine to pay. Google’s goal is not to eradicate credit cards but to eliminate their physical presence, making it more convenient for the user who has one less item to carry around. (It is more eco-friendly, too!) There is no transaction fee for now, so what does Google get out of this? Insight into consumer behavior and choices that can be used to inform other products like Google Offers.  Offers suggests relevant deals, coupons, and vouchers to users à la Groupon, the behemoth daily-deals site that Google failed to acquire last year.

To encourage greater participation and usage, Google stresses that Wallet is an open platform. A wise move considering Wallet is currently limited to one bank, one type of credit card, one mobile service provider, and one phone at launch this summer. If you do not meet all those requirements, you are stuck with carrying around your, well, wallet for now.

Once again Google is thinking big, but let’s see if it will widen its network enough for Wallet to truly take off.

It has been two weeks since Google announced it would expand Instant Preview, initially launched in November 2010 for organic search listings, to paid search ads as well.  Just doing a quick search for Instant Preview for Ads generated over 3,600 results (now plus one!)  For the unaware, IPfA presents a magnifying glass icon adjacent to the headline of a paid search ad, and upon click and subsequent mouse-over, gives users the opportunity to preview an ad’s landing page.  Searchers are able to quickly review the content of the potential landing page to see if it is relevant to their search prior to clicking.

Google asserts, and I would have to agree in theory, that this tactic will send even more qualified traffic to customer sites since users have the ability to pre-screen the result.  However, is it a stretch to assume the average searcher may not be aware of this icon’s utility?

While results, reviews and opinions continue to accumulate, some initial feedback seems focused on the SEO quality of the pending landing page.  Is there enough informative text on the displayed landing page?  Like a supermarket product label, is the displayed landing page eye-catching enough?

This new feature is a good one in many ways.  Among other reasons, it continues to push the “relevancy” proposition that Google espouses.  Advertisers must continue to make their destination pages more relevant, now not just because of the punishment of a wilting quality score, but because of a user’s ability to choose relevancy before clicking.  That being said, it would be interesting to see the relationship between icon “previews” and actual clicks.  Could that be a new metric?

Google recently launched Search Globe, a visual account of daily searches around the world using a new technology only available for certain JavaScript-enabled browsers, like Chrome.  Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors.  Due to internet availability and world economies, some areas are more densely lit than others.

Search Globe is made possible by a new browser technology, WebGL, which is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard that works with your computer’s hardware to produce fast graphics in 3D.

You can see other cool WebGL demos here.

All over the US, kids from Kindergarten to 12th grade are participating in the contest Doodle 4 Google. These talented youngsters are redesigning Google’s homepage logo to encompass the theme “What I’d Like to do someday…”

One lucky artist will win a $15,000 college scholarship, along with a $25,000 grant for their current school.

My favorite, “Jungle Art” was designed by 9 year-old Katie Stephenson from Stilwell, Oklahoma. Be sure to vote, your last chance is May 13,2011.