Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge cited a couple of Russian publications touting Microsoft’s upcoming arrival in Siberia. Microsoft’s construction could happen somewhere between the southern Siberia cities of Irkutsk and Angarsk, according to the report.

The scale will be less than that of the other two datacenters in Dublin and Chicago. Power and Internet connectivity do not appear to be a problem, given that Microsoft touted energy stability as an asset in a Kommersant article.

With 10,000 servers, Siberia’s Microsoft outpost would have a tenth of what Dublin will support. But Microsoft’s datacenter should be the biggest one in Russia when completed, said CNews.

Microsoft’s choice of location boiled down to proximity to potential customers along with other factors, the report said. Irkutsk has the power and the telecom capacity to support connectivity to the datacenter.

Where those potential customers might reside on a geographic basis is another story. Irkutsk’s population density rates less than four people per square kilometer.

Perhaps Microsoft anticipates a lot of usage from Siberian visitors from the north, and Mongolians from the south. Or as one commenter on Slashdot suggested, maybe the deal is a quid pro quo arrangement between Microsoft and the Russian government: you crack down on software pirates, and we’ll invest in a datacenter in Siberia.

Stranger things have happened in the world.

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Crain’s Chicago Business cited the cost at $500 million, with the datacenter occupying eight football fields in size. The facility should be open for operation by mid-2008.

The added infrastructure, along with similar projects varying in size and scope, give Microsoft the ability to compete with Internet powers Google and Yahoo on web services. Offering products like Office Live requires Microsoft to create a platform that won’t have a single point of failure.

The demand for web services like Software as a Service will abate if companies can’t satisfy demand reliably. This is what happened in the early days of client/server applications in the 1970′s, leading to the growth of the PC industry.

By spreading out capacity, Microsoft can ensure uptime and service availability, the competition has similar aims. While infrastructure doesn’t grab all the hype among tech industry observers, its importance along with companies spending big dollars on it shows the seriousness of the initiatives and the firms behind it.

The data available will illustrate which websites consumers are visiting and terms they are searching for online heading into the Holiday retail season.

The Hitwise Retail Data Center updates weekly and will feature key data on a market-by-market basis including:

• Top 20 Most Visited Websites from custom category of top 100 retail websites (U.S. only)
• Top 10 Shopping Search Terms among rotating categories
• Top 10 Visited Shopping Websites among rotating categories
• Top Four Fast Moving shopping websites
• Links to Latest Online Shopping related Blog Posts by Hitwise research analysts

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However, Google isn’t a hardware maker. Though their patent differs from what Sun puts inside of its Blackbox mobile datacenters, there’s every reason to think Schmidt and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz could agree on a generous cross-licensing deal.

This would let Sun build in the technology specified in Google’s patent, and Google gets a fleet of mobile datacenters uniquely suited to being plugged into all that dark fiber the company owns.

The timing of the patent, and the beginning of YouTube videos with ads on AdSense, may not be coincidental. Google has made significant promises regarding its AdSense video content.

Delivering on that promise requires infrastructure, an issue that Google probably understands as well as or better than they understand search. Here’s something else to consider.

What if Google rolls out 300 of these datacenters, plugs them into strategically located Internet peering points, and erects big towers next to them to provide wireless Net access. Maybe those towers will use WiMAX technology. Maybe they will work on the up-for-auction 700MHz wireless spectrum.

This is where rumors of the Google Phone get a lot more intriguing. We don’t see a GPhone as a compelling product unless Google runs the network, and can make VoIP and Net access available on the hotly anticipated GPhone device.

Antennas would do what the telecoms have failed to accomplish under ten-plus years of favorable conditions per the 1996 Telecommunications Act: go the last mile with true high-speed Internet access. Instead of fiber to the home, the signal will go through the air, probably for a nominal fee (if any) supported by Google’s ubiquitous advertising.

Gary Forsee must be glad he got pushed out the door at Sprint. Google could be in position to take a wrecking ball to the existing wireless access model for telecommunications.

Though their Dell lawsuit was thrown out of court initially, it has made it back to the state’s appellate courts. The Google suit names the search company, North Carolina’s governor and commerce secretary, and others.

Prospective jobs for the region would average $48,000 over the 200 or so people Google expects to hire for the datacenter. Once a furniture making power, North Carolina has been hammered by cheap imports, plant closings, and the subsequent loss of jobs.

Even with a relatively bright light of hope from Google’s proposal, the NCICL lawsuit filed on behalf of three complainants focuses on what the group believes is more important: overly generous tax incentives.

The group detailed these incentives in a June 2007 report, available at the NCICL website:

The project is anticipated to bring 200 jobs and a nearly $600 million investment in exchange for a 100% refund of business personal property taxes and a 80% refund of real property taxes for the next 30 years. The value of the incentive has been estimated as high as $165 million, over 40% of the value of all local incentives given out during the study period.

Of the 14 incentive packages approved in Caldwell County from 2004-2006, Google was far and away the most significant, comprising over 99% of the total awards.

A broader look at the impact of Google’s datacenter and its likely employment would provide a better view of whether or not the state gives up too much with its incentives. New workers will pay taxes on their earnings, property taxes when they buy houses, and sales taxes on their purchases.

That doesn’t even count the potential for business development to complement any expanded demands for commercial businesses. People need to eat lunch and buy gasoline, and someone certainly will try to meet those elevated economic demands in the area surrounding the datacenter.

You have to give to get, and North Carolina’s giving may result in a bigger gain over time. There are plenty of states that would eagerly make a deal with Google under these terms for that reason.

New Google Backlink Update. Monday morning when I came in to work I saw this RLRouse headline in WebProWorld: “Another Google update has begun…”

I immediately began scouring forums and calling experts to find out more information.

Getting the Story First I called Google-hawk Daniel Brandt, who noted that some of his Scroogle pages have pagerank now for the first time. He also mentioned a way to see how the page ranks have changed if you look in different datacenters. He’s heard of some people with more backlinks now, and some with less.

It could be a week or more before these changes show up on the main Google search page, according to WebProWorld member rlrouse.

For a full and too-techie-for-me description of how to check updates on backlinks and pagerank, look at RLRouse’s datacenter post.

Google Datacenters Down. Mr. Brandt pointed me to SEOChat, where I found some welcoming and informed folks and a post entitled “What’s up: -gv and -va OFFLINE, Update coming?” I learned that when an update’s coming Google usually takes down some datacenters. At the time of the post, the www-gv.google.com and www-va.google.com datacenters were down.

There’s some speculation that this update may further diminish the value of crosslinking.

Digging Deeper. During my conversation with Jim Hedger of Stepforth I learned that Google updates its backlinks monthly. What’s significant about this update is that it’s happening early.

The earliness, according to Jim, is significant for two reasons. For one it shows that Google’s still trying to recover relevance from the Florida update (remember, they have to do all of their testing in real time). Secondly, there could be more to the update than backlinks.

The reason this is NOT a major update like the Florida update is that, according to Jim, Google’s still evaluating what they learned. “They’re in tremendous competition with Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s coming up behind them. There’s no way they’re going to dump what they’ve learned in the last two months.”

I asked Jim when we could expect to see the results fully in place. “Next week will be when we see what the changes really are. Watch next week. The analysis of the update we see next week will show us how brilliant the SEO industry is.”

By SEO industry I’m sure he meant Stepforth. He promised to call me when he’s got some solid update analysis.

Read Jim’s SEO articles here.

Keep checking the Google Backlink Update forum in WebProWorld. I’ll post there when I learn more.

Further Reading: Great Glossary of SEM (search engine marketing) terms from the SEMPO (search engine marketing professional organization) site. http://www.sempo.org/search-engine-marketing-glossary.php

Best Wishes,
Garrett French + The WebProNews Team

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.