In the time I last wrote on Google, the biggest text mining algorithm company in the world ( or advertising company, depending on your perspective) has done the following updates-

1) Successfully patented MapReduce but with a wait and watch attitude on monetization especially on Hadoop derivatives. If the West was built and won by intellectual property rights, Google has all the right -legal and moral to enforce its patents on behalf of it’s shareholders, never minding discordant notes by money, err I mean many…… including the notable Curt Monash in his superb piece-

http://www.dbms2.com/2010/02/11/google-mapreduce-patent/

Oracle has long been able to parallelize ala MapReduce. I don’t see anything in the claim that isn’t preceded by what Oracle did, except maybe the emphasis on key/value pairs. (And the same statement applies to the other 15 claims in the patent, at least on a quick skim.) I forget the details of SenSage’s quasi-MapReduce, which also preceded the Google patent filing, but I imagine something similar would be true about it.

There is no doubt that Google popularized the ideas of MapReduce — which turns out to have been a worthy public service. In one great example of that popularization, the seminal paper on parallel data mining is almost laughable in how it deviates from MapReduce key/value pair formalism — but it still seems to have been inspired by Google’s MapReduce. But that’s a different matter; popularization != invention, even though there’s a certain connection between the two in patent law.

2) Launched a Twitter clone called Buzz, revised it for privacy updates but without adding basic functionality like that done by ping.fm services

http://www.google.com/buzz

3) Bought out Aardvark at http://vark.com/

4) Continued the Chinese hacker investigation

Google Cyberattack Linked To Two Chinese Schools

One of the schools has ties to the Chinese military and to a network company with ties to Google’s rival Baidu.

5) No it did NOT launch Google Mox to search within your soul

http://www.fakingnews.com/2010/02/google-launches-mox-to-help-you-search-within-your-soul/

California, USA. Google announced today that it is launching a new service to help users search deep within their soul. “This would not only maximize the untapped potential of our search technology, but also the untapped potential of the human race”, said Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, in an exclusive interview with Faking News business reporter SK Wimwian.

6) Did propose an experimental fiber network for high speed internet.

7) Did launch the Google Nexus One with apps

All in all a very fast 1.5 months in 2010 for Google- with developments continuing in Google Googles ,Google Chrome extensions and Google Voice- 2010 seems to be Google ‘s year to make or break the cloud OS.l