Anyway, Google is now officially 9, having launched in beta on April 1st, 2004. In celebration of that, Google has posted a fun little infographic that deals with the evolution of the product.

“Gmail was inspired by one user’s feedback that she was tired of struggling to find emails buried deep in her inbox. So we built a new email that leveraged the power of Google Search. You told us you were tired of spam, so we set to tackling that, and today your feedback makes it possible for Gmail to filter out well over 99% of incoming spam. You also said that you needed tools to deal with information overload, so we introduced Priority Inbox to help you manage your email (and we’re still exploring new ways to it even easier),” says Google software engineer Zohair Hyder.

As you march through the past 9 years of Gmail, you remember that it took Google nearly two years to add Gchat to Gmail, and how long it took for Google to open up signups Gmail (three years after the beta launch). Not everything that’s happened with Gmail has been a hit with users (for a recent example, check out the reaction to the new compose box), but with hundreds of millions of active users, I guess we can say that we’re pretty happy that Gmail is around. It’s a lot more useful than most 9-year-olds I know, let’s put it that way.

Check out a trip down Gmail memory lane below (click to enlarge):

We hope.

Since it’s all up in the air anyway, we might as well look at some alternative methods of choosing our winners. Earlier this week, we told you that LinkedIn had picked its national champion based on a ‘dedication score.’ They chose Gonzaga.

Now it’s Facebook’s turn. Their bracket is based on the buzz each team received in the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday.

In the Final Four, Facebook has Duke, Notre Dame, Michigan, and Indiana. From that, Duke and Michigan advance. In the end, the Duke Blue Devils end up taking the title. Facebook says that Duke was the “most-hyped” team leading up to Selection Sunday, and that’s why they’re giving them the title.

I’d say that this signifies fan support, and we all know that this is vital for any team to advance in the NCAA tourney. But when you’re talking about a team like Duke, there’s a pretty good chance that the “buzz” is anything but support.

As a UK fan, this whole notion that Duke may win the NCAA tournament can go straight to hell. Anyway, here’s Facebook’s data:

Are you watching the NCAA tourney? Are you also following the social media response on Facebook or Twitter? What do you think of Facebook’s bracket? Let us know in the comments.

Google

Here are the top five most searched Oscar nominees, according to Google:

“At the end of the show, Best Picture winner ‘Argo’ held the #6 spot, followed by Ang Lee, Christoph Waltz, ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and Halle Berry,” notes Google software engineer Nemo Tamir.

Google also shared the most searched red carpet dresses:

“This year’s Oscars brought with it a number of unexpected moments that grabbed our attention,” said Tamir. “Early in the show, Seth MacFarlane was visited by William Shatner in full Captain Kirk regalia, come from the future to save Seth’s monologue; at 8:36pm ET, searches for [kirk] spiked to almost 1,500 per minute. Later in the show, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and ‘Skyfall’ tied for sound editing, and people flocked to the web with questions. Searches for [tie] spiked to more than 5,000 per minute, with many people wanting to know [has there ever been a tie in the oscars]. And in a final surprise, First Lady Michelle Obama introduced the Best Picture nominees and opened the winning envelope for ‘Argo.’ Searches for [michelle obama] spiked to 4,500 per minute.”

Twitter

“All in all, there were 8.9 million Tweets about the 85th Academy Awards: 2.1 million during the red carpet, and 6.8 million during the awards show. People at home (and in the audience) tweeted as the night’s most exciting and entertaining moments unfolded,” says Twitter’s Fred Graver.

More Twitter stats:

Best Picture award for Argo: 85,300 TPM
Adele performs “Skyfall”: 82,300 TPM
Best Actress in a Leading Role for Jennifer Lawrence: 71,600 TPM
Best Original Song for Adele: 64,000 TPM
Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Anne Hathaway: 60,400 TPM

Facebook

Facebook says Oscars buzz was at an all time high on the social network this year. According to the company there were 66.5 million Oscar-related interactions on Facebook.

“The event scored a 7.17 on the Facebook Talk Meter, trumping last year’s awards ceremony, and we saw the most buzz in the Northeast (New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut) followed by California,” says Facebook data analyst Allie Townsend. “‘Oscars’ received three times more mentions this year, while the Best Picture nominees racked up twenty times more mentions than 2012. ‘Les Miserables’ had the most Likes of this year’s top films, and despite being set in France, the film’s largest body of fans are in London. It was also the favorite film among women and people ages 13 to 17.”

Django Unchained, however, got the most mentions, Townsend says. It was the “clear Best Picture Choice” among men, she says.

“Best Picture ‘Argo’ was the most-talked about winner of the night, as mentions of the film increased by 2,460% and mentions of Ben Affleck increased by 23,500% as the director, star and producer made his acceptance speech,” says Townsend. “Affleck also launched his new Instagram account from the red carpet and shared behind-the-scenes photos throughout the night, including this one of his name being engraved on Oscar trophy itself.”

Facebook put out the following infographic looking at the trends:

“For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years,” he says on his site.

And thus begins a truly fascinating look into the world of porn – its demographics, characteristics, trends, history, and more.

Millward combed through the Internet Adult Film Database, the porny version of the IMDb, which houses records of over 120,000 adult films and over 115,000 adult film actors/actresses. Through careful analysis of a very large sample size, Millward has put together the mother of all porn infographics.

According to his research, the average porn star is a dark-haired caucasian girl from California, measuring 34-24-34 and coming in at 5’5″ and 117 lbs. She has a 34B bra size, probably has a tattoo, and will most likely spend three years in the industry. Over the course of that career, she’ll appear in 19 films. Her name is Nikki Lee.

Check out his handiwork below. There’s a little bit of NSFW content in the graphic, but no NSFW images.

[via Gawker]

Crap, that means that you have a pretty solid chance of your house being destroyed by an asteroid, right?

Wrong. The odds of that happening are actually pretty terrible – like one in a few trillion depending on how big your house is. Movoto has created a neat little interactive infographic that lets you calculate that probability.

Mine was about 1 in 1.8 trillion. I feel pretty safe.

On Friday, February 15th, an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will pass by the Earth. When we say “pass by,” we mean that it will come within 17,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. So it’s not going to hit you – you can sleep tight.

[Movoto via Geekosystem]

Probably the most telling piece of data collected in the study is that nearly half (48%) of all women surveyed do some Facebook digging on their date partner before the date begins. Only 38% of men copped to doing pre-date Facebook research and 49% said that the practice was “unacceptable.”

Women are also more likely to be turned off by what they find. 49% said they would cancel a date based solely on information unearthed by their Facebook research. Only 27% of men said that they would cancel.

Both women and men are aware of the need to “clean up” their Facebook profiles in order to put their best online foot forward (26% and 27%, respectively).

Other interesting stats from the study:

• Over half of single men (57%) and 45% of single women have received a sext (sexy photo or explicit text), and 23% of these singles have shared them with others. Of that 23%, a whopping 42% of men and 28% of women said they shared the sext with three or more people
• 42% of single men reported they would not be offended if a recipient shared their sext with others, vs. 13% of women.
• 77% of women would not date someone who was secretive with their texts vs. 53% of men.

According to the studies, the industry is valued at up to $270 billion per year, paying out $90 billion in wages. The U.S. alone has over 500,000 people employed in the industry.

“We’re proud of the contributions that Google Maps and Earth, the Google Maps APIs and our Enterprise solutions have made to the geo services industry and to making maps more widely available, but there’s a long way to go,” says VP Google Geo, Brian McLendon.

“1.1 billion hours of travel time saved each year? That’s a lot of time,” says McLendon. “Also, consider UPS, which uses map technology to optimize delivery routes—saving 5.3 million miles and more than 650,000 gallons of fuel in 2011. And every eight seconds, a user hails a taxi with Hailo, which used maps and GPS to deliver more than 1 million journeys in London alone last year. Finally, Zipcar uses maps to connect more than 760,000 customers to a growing fleet of cars in locations around the world.”

Full reports can be found here.

They may be retweeting, but that doesn’t mean they’re clicking.

HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella looked at 2.7 million tweets that contained links and found absolutely no correlation between retweets and clicks. And the click to retweet ratio was far from 1:1. He found that 16.12% of the tweets had more retweets than clicks on the link, and 14.64% of the retweeted tweets hade zero clicks.

That means that a significant portion of Twitter users are retweeting your links without opening them up.

Blame it on Twitter bots or blame it on real users. The point is this: just because your tweet received a lot of retweets, it doesn’t mean that people were actually visiting your site and checking out your content.

Check out his full infographic below:

[via All Twitter]

Did I say exciting? I meant unbearable, excruciating, exhausting, and miserable. If you’re in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, or a handful of other states – chances are you’re up to your eyeballs in campaign ads. Now, thanks to Google, we can see just exactly how much each candidate is spending in these key swing states, as well as get some insight into how the candidates are being searched across the network.

The Google Politics & Elections team has just published this infographic on spending, searches, and new results in eight key swing states. What we see is a big spending gap between President Obama and Mitt Romney, with the former taking a pretty big lead. We also so that in most areas, President Obama has garnered more search interest. Check it out:

Google has also put out a scorecard of some Google-related stats including Google+ followers, YouTube views and subscribers, and search interest (nationwide):

And the location-based social network has obliged, looking at check-ins from the last year and seeing which states reigned supreme in a variety of hot-button political topics. To determine whether a state was “red” or “blue,” Foursquare looked at how they voted in the 2008 election.

You may be surprised to learn that Texas led the red states in check-ins at gay bars, followed closely by Georgia and Utah. On the blue state side, Florida may be the most obese states in terms of fast food check-ins. They’re followed closrly by Illinois and Wisconsin.

Another interesting tidbit: Red states go for tacos, while blue states go for burritos.

Check out some more red state/blue state comparisons in the infographic below:

[via AboutFoursquare]