No one reading Search Engine Land should be surprised to hear stories about Google’s dominance of the search landscape. But the degree to which Google dominates in some areas is sure to make you raise an eyebrow.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

This morning Google is rolling out a program in Australia enabling developers to create “social gadgets” that permit sharing, collaboration and groups on the iGoogle homepage. The social gadgets will come to the US and other markets in the future, but the timing is undetermined. I spoke yesterday with Google’s Marissa Mayer about the new initiative, built on the Open Social platform.

At the outset there are apparently 12 social gadgets, eight of which were created by third party developers. For example, there’s a chess gadget and other casual game gadgets — casual games have become huge on Facebook — that allow iGoogle users to play with one another. There’s photo sharing, featuring Picasa and Flickr, and a to-dos gadget, which allows you to share your list or created a combined list with others. In some cases, there will be Twitter-like activity streams (see “Timeline” below) that display updates to all participating users in real-time.

Here are some screenshots provided by Google:

These social gadgets would seem to owe something to both Facebook and Twitter but they also represent a logical evolution of the iGoogle product and gadgets platform more broadly. The personalized homepage has “tens of millions of users,” according to Mayer. It was until recently also the fastest growing product at Google. Making it “social” will likely generate further growth.

I asked whether social gadgets would make an appearance on Google Maps. I was told no but the Maps API permits developers to build social gadgets for iGoogle using Maps. Google is also thinking about extending this into mobile but that will take longer because of technical challenges and constraints in the mobile browser.

I also asked about Google Wave and whether there would be any crossover. Mayer said that she thought there would be some collaboration between the teams.

What’s fascinating to me is that Google has gone from a company that a few of years ago failed to fully appreciate how big social networking would become to one that done “a 180″ and fully embraced community. Google offers a social layer — as with the introduction of social gadgets — across many of its services. Latitude in Google Maps in another obvious example, but there are numerous others.

We don’t yet know how successful social gadgets will be. However, in a best-case scenario, it could potentially become the missing “social center” that has not taken root through other Google services including Orkut, Google’s actual social network.

In addition, if one steps back and imagines a rich ecosystem of gadget developers and engaged users, down the line, one can see iGoogle evolving into a Facebook-like experience featuring community, apps, status updates and so on.

I don’t mean to suggest that iGoogle will challenge Facebook (it won’t) or that anyone else is thinking along these lines exactly. But there’s an interesting, potential parallel if social gadgets really take off and iGoogle evolves into a new social media platform.

I’m in the Google Wave press conference, following a dizzying keynote — dizzying, at least, after a night of little sleep. As he did yesterday Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the discussion and similarly apologized for arriving late.

Danny live blogged the keynote earlier this morning. He jokingly compared Wave to Lotus Notes. In some respects that’s not an entirely inappropriate comparison, given the scope of the product and the emphasis on collaboration — though the Google folks would probably disagree.

Wave seems to be conceived as a total communication and collaboration tool and therefore a successor and replacement for IM and email. In some respects then this is as ambitious as Android, perhaps even more so. It also encompasses mobile communication between users and mobile to PC communications in theory. The keynote presenters demo’d Wave on the iPhone and Android running in the browser.

One of the reporters in the in the room asked the panel about how they thought they were going to get people to change their behavior and abandon email for this new tool. Google responded that what they showed was an early “developer preview” and that there was still lots of work to do and a longish time horizon for the product. What wasn’t discussed was the way that social networks (and Twitter to a lesser degree) are taking the place of email in many instances. So it may not be such a huge problem to shift behavior in the end, provided the user experience is compelling to people.

Wave does seem to me to be a bit bulky and complex, from the blur of screens and demos I saw this morning sitting on the floor in a hall with more than 1,000 people. But the real-time aspect of it — the fact that you can actually see the other person typing — is pretty compelling.

This is a project that unfolded in Australia with 100 Google engineers and began in 2007. It was based on a general concept pitch to Brin by the developers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had previously built Google Maps. Based on that track record Brin said he approved the project and associated resources (not unlike a movie studio approves a pitch by a trusted director or producer). It sounds like Google has spent a bunch of money on this (no figures were discussed) and is pretty invested in its success.

There is no apparent business model (though one could imagine enterprise licensing) and Google intends to open-source it, which is probably smart from an adoption standpoint. Yet stepping back Wave is consistent with Google’s larger effort to move software and applications development into the browser and the cloud.

The Google Blog announced they will be discontinuing Lively, Google’s Virtual World project. In short, they said that Lively is simply “not going to pay off” and that they will be closing it down by the end of December.

It is interesting that this happened just days after I reported that Google will be changing how they develop products. Is this one of the first projects to be axed by Google’s Stuart Smith? Possibly. But this is not the first product to fail from Google.

In any event, Google made it sound like no one at Google will be losing their jobs over the Lively massacre. Google specifically said, “everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.”

In a way, it’s very un-Google. The new Lively 3D “virtual world” that launched today is perhaps another run at social networking after the mixed experience of Orkut (popular in Brazil and India, among a few other places). Apparently aimed at teens and even tweens cutting their virtual teeth on sites like Webkinz and Club Penguin, Lively is apparently the product of the long-rumored Google Metaverse project. It’s only available for PC at the moment.

I spent some time with it this afternoon and found it relatively easy to use and engaging, although there’s slight a learning curve. A nice, fairly in-depth discussion of the mechanics of Lively is on Google Blogoscoped. There’s considerable customization built around avatars and rooms, which can be exported in the form of widgets. Users can enter each others’ rooms and interact/chat with one another. You can also embed and watch YouTube videos within Lively.

Unlike Second Life, the service is entirely free. Lively is likely to be immediately popular. Coincidentally, another 3D social network, Vivaty, launched this morning with an emphasis on Facebook (Coke and Target are sponsors). There are numerous other competitors and there has been considerable VC money flowing into the over-hyped “virtual world” segment.

Beyond comparing the now proliferating virtual worlds on features, it’s worth asking why Google is doing this. As I said in the beginning, this effort is quite far removed from Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information.”

One could take the cynical view and see it as an effort to further develop the burgeoning “in-game” advertising market. In 2006 Google acquired the in-game ad company AdScape. Alternatively, it could be seen as a product to appeal to the youth market (and later offer demographic advertising and sponsorships accordingly). But it may equally be a product of the creativity of a number of Google engineers who just thought it would be “cool.”

It will also be interesting to see whether and how Lively integrates with Google Earth and Maps. Here’s a visual, video overview:

Google hands over data on suspected pedophiles to Brazil via the AFP reports Google has finally handed over profiles of suspected pedophiles to Brazilian authorities. As expected, Google did hand over 3,261 files with information about alleged pedophilia activities in Google’s Orkut communities.

A member of the senate commission, Demostenes Torres, believes the data will provide enough evidence to incriminate about 200 pedophiles in Brazil. In fact, he said about 90% of pedophilia complaints in Brazil come from Orkut.

In any event, this step hopefully concludes a saga that has been going on between Google and Brazil over privacy of these profiles. Brazil has been asking Google for this data since March 2006,;just over two years later, Google has handed over 3,261 files.

Yesterday (technically still today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

Live blogging isn’t my thing, and live blogging when you’re asking the questions on stage certainly isn’t either. Heck, it’s tough enough to jot down notes of what was said. My recap below will be without a lot of direct quotes, but I wanted to highlight points I found interesting.

Previous Query

Last year, we covered (and here) how Google was changing the ads it displayed based on the previous query someone performed. For example, search for [spain] then do a new search for [travel], and you may notice how the ads will be targeted around Spanish travel (see also Google’s help page on this).

Google’s never given this feature a formal name, but Marissa said internally the company calls it "Previous Query," the first time to my knowledge that we’ve had some type of formal name put to it. Learn the name well, because Previous Query refinement is now coming to unpaid or "organic" search results, she said.

For example, if someone were to search for [spain] and then [travel] after that, BOTH the ads and the organic results will be altered to take the previous query into account. To some degree, it will be as if the second query was for [spain travel].

This is a big deal. Big deal. It means that the results for many "single word" queries, which can be hard for sites to rank for when billions of listings come back, will become queries involving two or more words — and much more specific ones.

When’s it happening? "Soon." Indeed, it’s already been happening for several weeks for some people randomly selected. Who will get it, when live? Everyone that accepts a cookie, meaning it’s not a personalized search thing that only happens if you’re logged in.

How could a user opt-out? Heh. I didn’t get to asking that, sorry. But I imagine any search where the + symbol is used before a word or words will override Previous Query.

StreetView Australia

Australia is to get StreetView mapping hopefully by the middle of this year, Marissa said. Cars have already been driving the roads in Australia for some time in preparation for it. See also this news article which picks up on privacy issues.

Google Testing Yahoo

I asked about the news that Yahoo would carry Google’s search ads, to the degree Marissa could comment about it. She remarked that it was a way for Google to test how well Yahoo monetizes. I thought this turn of phrase was important to note — that it’s not a Yahoo experiment, but a Google one. As I remarked in the story about Yahoo and AOL possibly merging, which we covered yesterday:

In my talk today at SMX Sydney with Google vice president Marissa Mayer, she noted that the Yahoo deal was a way for Google to measure Yahoo’s traffic and how well it monetizes. This is important. This is not just a Yahoo test – it’s a test for Google. And from that test, Google will better understand how much it could make in a crucial revenue guarantee to a combined Yahoo-AOL, which might help the deal move along and keep Yahoo out of Microsoft’s hands.

Other Points

It being so late here in Australia (coming up on midnight) and me being both jet lagged and short of sleeping, I’ll come back to some of other points in more detail later. But here are some fast hits:

• Not A Portal: The goal remains for Google to still get users off the site, rather than to try and host content that some feel is a way for Google to either be a media company or capture the "second click." But in some cases, Google hosts content because it feels otherwise, the content wouldn’t exist — or not as much would be out there. YouTube and Google Book Search were examples she gave.
   
• iPhone & Mobile: The iPhone in particular continues to show growth to mobile searches. Could Google tell how many use the iPhone to reach Google through the 2G cell network versus hotspots/wifi? Yes, and the traffic is roughly 50/50, off the top of her head.
   
• Social Search: Tapping into your friends to refine search results is an interesting idea but one that remains fraught with problems, as you probably don’t want to actually share some search results with friends. There are other issues, and she expects at the moment that this may be a minor signal used to influence results and more likely to suggest potential sites to visit.
   
• Orkut: She reiterated that the Orkut social networking site that Google runs remains strong worldwide. But she said that it might be that for the US and other key markets where it does not lead, the company might need to re-brand or build entirely new social networking services.

Postscript by Barry: Neerav Bhatt summarized his notes on the SMX Sydney conference as well.

Brazil Senate orders Google to identify website pedophiles via AFP reports a Brazilian Senate has ordered Google to hand over the profiles of 3,261 suspected pedophiles yesterday. However, according to The Inquirer, Google is willing to help Brazilian authorities but not hand over users’ personal information.

Sergio Suiama, Sao Paulo’s federal prosecutor, said that over the past two years, “nearly 90 percent of the 56,000 pedophilia complaints on the Internet were related to Orkut.”

Suiama added, “The dissemination of Orkut in Brazil has turned the country into a distributor of child pornography and Google doesn’t seem to be worried by that.”

In fact, 55-percent of Orkut’s users are Brazilian.

This saga between Google/Orkut and Brazilian authorities has been going on for over two years now. For past history on this, go here and continue clicking backwards in time.

Postscript: Google shares info on suspected pedophiles from News.com clarifies that by court order, Google is required to hand over user profiles. In fact, Google is handing over 3,261 suspected pedophiles to Brazilian authorities.

A much discussed blog posting this morning comes from Saul Hansell at the New York Times, who spoke to both Google and Yahoo about their plans to turn their email products into social networks, in a manner of speaking: “Inbox 2.0.” The plans discussed in the post suggest some clever and creative thinking about how both companies can leverage their existing products and integrate them with other properties. But people at both companies also seem to be in a kind of frenzy, which may turn out to be unjustified in the long run, over how to compete with Facebook.

Here’s what Hansell says about Google’s plans:

When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

We’re left to “read the tea leaves” a bit there and figure out how some of these properties might be tied in together. iGoogle has been gradually becoming more “social,” as has Google as a whole, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see profiles tied into iGoogle and iGoogle tied to mail and so on. Orkut, which has been growing, suffers from what might be called “the Froogle problem.”

Despite its clever name, many people never fully recognized that Froogle was Google Shopping. So Google eventually changed the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Such a functional name change might be in order for Orkut too, especially as part of the larger effort that Hansell’s post suggests.

Here’s what Hansell says about Yahoo’s plans:

Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her….

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up….

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, [Garlinghouse] said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on….

It seems like there is too much complexity here, leading to potential confusion. Yahoo Mail is a huge asset for the company (and so is/was MyYahoo), but there may be too much of a good thing in this vision. Of course, it’s mostly informed speculation in Hansell’s post.

There is probably a growing need for a kind of “dashboard” or “control center” where people get feeds and content, organize favorites, present their resume or profile, and communicate with each other. There’s no single entity or site that does all these things.

Personal startpages/newsreaders/widget containers include Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo. Yahoo’s Delicious and MyWeb, among others, are good social bookmarking sites that help organize content for future consumption (and sharing). And sites like LinkedIn or Facebook offer profiles and personal pages.

There may well be a way for Google or Yahoo to bring these elements together in an elegant way — a kind of personal portal or uber-startpage — but if not done correctly or well, it could wreck a relatively good thing, at least in the case of Yahoo Mail.

It’s like that old joke: What’s a camel? A horse designed by committee. There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

As expected, the much-discussed Google social play turns out to be an alliance with other companies to "open up" social networks and their data to developers. TechCrunch and the New York Times both have early news of an expected announcement tomorrow on how Google, along with partners like Ning, Linked In, Friendster, and others, will introduce a set of common APIs — called OpenSocial — to be used for getting data from and writing applications for social networks.

The idea, as the New York Times explains, is to help combat the number of people who are developing for Facebook and not thinking of other social "platforms." Says the NYT:

"It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook,” said a person with knowledge of the plans who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the alliance. The group’s platform, which is called OpenSocial, is "compatible across all the companies," that person said.

Google has already been trying to do this on its own — promote itself as a development platform — as our Google Gadget Ventures: Get Paid To Develop Google Gadgets post from last June explains. But enlisting others will help Google make Facebook seem closed and on the defensive.

As I explained in the Google To Pressure Facebook To "Free" Social Data & Planning Google Earth World? post from September:

At a time when some worry that Facebook is too closed, the Google rumors make a lot of sense — that by pushing out whatever social information it has now, Google can make a play that all social networks should spill their data, thus robbing Facebook of its most important asset. But as I said in my TechCrunch comments, that type of push will haunt Google when you’ve got search developers asking why it doesn’t open up its massive search index.

That September post also revisits some of the recent changes Google has been doing to Orkut to try and make it more attractive.

TechCrunch reports that "OpenSocial" will have more information posted here tomorrow and will be:

A set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs

John Battelle has what looks to be a draft press release here. Much discussion is starting on Techmeme.

Postscript: Google’s sent me the following summary information about the launch:

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web.

Common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. OpenSocial will bring more powerful and pervasive social capabilities to the web because developers will be able to develop and distribute their applications more easily. Users will be able to enjoy new social features faster and in more of the websites, web applications, and social networks they use.

Benefits for Developers:

• A new, broad distribution network for developers – i.e., all OpenSocial-enabled websites
• Learn once, write anywhere
• Standards-based – HTML and JavaScript

Benefits for Web sites:

• Faster development – more features, more quickly
• Can engage a much larger pool of third party developers than they could without a standard set of APIs
• Can devote their resources to strategic projects rather than extensive API and developer support

Selected Partners

• hi5: Ramu Yalamanchi, Founder and CEO
• LinkedIn: Adam Nash, Director of Product
• Ning: Marc Andreesen, Co-founder
• iLike: Ali Partovi, CEO
• Slide: Max Levchin, founder and CEO