Constantly updating themselves by providing high quality web services to its users, Google have certainly took the world by storm, and as such, we have gathered some of the most recent and useful Google Updates for you to learn more about what’s going on over there at the Googleplex. Of course, one of Google’s most impressive features is their maps, which have recently had more than one update made to them…

GOOGLE MAPS LETS LOOSE A FLASH-Y API
This new feature enables developers to use the mapping software (as reported by cNet) in applications that use Adobe Flash technology.

“We’ve designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker, and info window,” an announcement by Google Maps engineer Mike Jones read, “opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video.”

EMBED GOOGLE EARTH IN YOUR SITE & THE NEW GORGEOUSNESS OF GOOGLE MAPS
 O’Reilly reports on the ability to view anything from landscapes to building structures in sophisticated 3D map applications.

 

Shifting realities for a moment, Google recently launched their own viral virtual worlds…

GOOGLE’S LIVELY VIRTUAL WORLD LAUNCH
This new service by Google, reported on by TechCrunch gives users the ability to create virtual avatars, interact with global users within a rich social interaction base.

Google has created a number of sample rooms that can be copied and altered, or users can start from scratch and build their own world. Furniture and other items can be added and moved around. Avatars can talk to each other, do things like dance and shake hands, and manipulate objects (in a demo, my avatar was able to blow up drums of toxic waste by double clicking on them. Users can also, of course, chat with each other - GTalk is the underlying chat engine.

Their translation services have also been widely used and at long last finally upgraded…

GOOGLE TRANSLATE SPEAKS 10 NEW LANGUAGES
Now with more languages (as reported by cNet) enabled to be translated by this unique feature, the world is one step closer to understanding each other.

The online translation function can now understand 10 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. That brings the total to 23 languages, Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

In addition, Google added a language-detection feature that can guess the source language a user is trying to translate. It’s more effective with longer amounts of text, Google said.

Which brings us to their most recent market position…

GOOGLE GETTING CLOSE TO 70% OF U.S. SEARCH MARKET
In the midst of the global financial turmoil, Google’s reliability is paying dividends as its share price continues to soar, especially as Read / Write Web reports that it is now close to becoming the only search engine on the planet.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google gained yet another percentage point on its biggest competitors last month and now accounts for more than 69.17% of U.S. searches. In the U.K. and Australia, Google’s market share has climbed above 87%. This increase comes at a time when, according to Hitwise, more and more Internet users are also relying on search to navigate to key industry categories.

This is perhaps in part aided by their lesser-known hardware services…

GOOGLE ENTERPRISE HITS 20,000 CUSTOMERS AND LAUNCHES NEW APPLIANCE
TechCrunch reports on new appliances Google have created to privately index sites.

Google now counts 20,000 enterprise search customers, about a little more than half of whom use its search appliance and the rest of whom use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. To extend it search into the enterprise, Google is launching the fifth generation of its search appliance. Each yellow box, which is based on a standard Dell server, will be able to index 10 million documents, compared to 3 million in the last generation. And it will serve up results two to five times as fast as before, due to both hardware and software improvements.

For those that had not noticed, Google have now been in business for over ten years…

GOOGLE’S TENTH BIRTHDAY GIFTS TO THE WORLD
In conjunction with its tenth anniversary, Google made a campaign to collect ideas of changing the world and rewarding the most practical of them all.

Want to change the world? We’re looking for big ideas that help as many people as possible, and we’re committed to making the best ones happen.