Numbers from comScore this week, revealed that Google sites account for nearly 30% of all time spent online in India and Brazil. That is three times higher than the average.

The H1N1 flu virus has hit Google India, and although things aren’t as bad as they might have been, it’s having some rather significant effects: around 100 people have gone to a hospital for swine flu tests, and a Hyderabad office will remain closed for two full days.

Facebook’s scoring some big gains in the world’s second- and fifth-most populous countries.  New stats indicate that the social network’s growth rate has started imitating the upright angle of a hockey stick in both India and Brazil.

Here’s an interesting fact for you: India is the world’s second-largest country in terms of population.  And here’s one more detail: by unveiling Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu interfaces, Facebook has put itself in a good position to pursue India’s citizens. 

After a long period of focusing on American content, it looks like Hulu’s going global.  One fresh deal has netted the site shows from the UK, while another partnership will result in the sharing of Bollywood films.  Plus, movement in the opposite direction – Hulu allowing access overseas – is being discussed.

India’s 15th general election is fast approaching, and Google’s determined to help anyone wanting to either participate in or monitor the event.  The search giant launched the Google India Elections Centre in both English and Hindi to facilitate the spread of information.

Google India has introduced a Firefox extension in Google Labs called Google Noticeboard, which is designed to help people access and share info over the Internet via public digital noticeboards.

The application is aimed at communities with access to shared computers. They can use the noticeboards to exchange messages related to community announcements, social interactions, etc.

Messages on noticeboards are publicly accessible. They can consist of text, or can be voice-based.

comScore released a couple of interesting reports today. The first involves the social networking landscape in Europe. According to comScore, France in particular had a big year when it comes to social networking, growing by 45% with Facebook as the leading network.

Today, Google launched an initiative called the Internet Bus Project, designed to show off  all the Internet has to offer to cities in Tamil Nadu, India. The purpose is to introduce people that are not familiar with the Internet to the education, information, communication, and entertainment it has to offer.

MySpace users in India have been offered the chance to watch new movies before they premeire in the country. The program is called MySpace’s Black Curtain Screenings.

Reports have been surfacing since last night’s election that while overall, India seems to have embraced the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States, there have been some worries among the country’s people due to Obama’s position on outsourcing.

Google sites received the majority of searches conducted in India according to a study of the online search market from comScore.

Google sites in India had more than 1 billion searches conducted in June, representing 81 percent of the market. Yahoo sites ranked a distant second with 117 million searches accounting for 9.4 percent. Ask Network landed in the third spot with 24 million searches representing 1.9 percent of the market.

The Wired Blog Network, revealed the mystery behind the Google defamation law suit in India.

Many American software developers hang on Facebook’s every word.  MySpace gets a fair amount of attention, too.  But Orkut is popular in other parts of the world, and it turns out that Indian developers are much more interested in it than in any potential competitor.

Anyone who’s ever found traditional search results to be a little one-dimensional should be glad to hear that Yahoo’s addressing the issue.  Something called Glue Pages Beta slaps together normal search results, Google Blog Search results, Yahoo Answers results, HowStuffWorks articles, Wikipedia entries, Flickr images, and YouTube videos all in one place.

YouTube has launched a localized version of its site in India.

The India YouTube will feature regional and localized content with a search hompage that focuses on videos and links related to India. The content uploaded by users in India would appear as top favorite videos and recommended content on the site.

"We are very excited to bring a local version of YouTube to India considering the passion of users here for music and entertainment." said Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube.

If you thought MySpace was an American phenomenon, you thought wrong.  The company wants you to know that it’s been successful in all sorts of countries, and is continuing to expand throughout the world.

If, in its effort to simplify and streamline, you were expecting Yahoo to shut down some overseas operations, you may still be right.  Serious cuts shouldn’t take place in India, however – Yahoo is creating a new research lab in this country.

Its current designation – we won’t call it a name – lacks imagination, to say the least.  But Google.org, the Soros Economic Development Fund, and Omidyar Network have created an entity that should be of great help to small- to medium-sized Indian businesses.

In the midst of an absolute flood of them, we’ve got another trickle of firings to report: 40 people were let go by Yahoo India.  The truly strange part, though, is that Yahoo India is still looking to add over 500 new employees.

We’re still waiting to hear what caused damage to several underwater Internet cables; it’s likely to be either especially interesting (in an apocalyptic, WWIII sense) or completely mundane (think rusty old anchors).  But either way, affected nations are getting their access back.