The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark.

About a month ago, Google announced some things it was doing that would improve the way sites rank across different language versions of its search engine, in an effort that would clearly make Google more useful on a global scale. In what seems to be a continuation of this tradition, Google has announced a couple more language-based improvements to its products.

Last week Google revealed the fastest growing search terms for the United States, which we looked at here. Now Google has released their year-end Zeitgeist, looking at a number of categories in (for the first time) over 30 different countries.

Facebook has been making a lot of efforts to expand internationally, and that continues today with the promise of a new team in France starting with one guy.

Google is doing a lot of things to improve the way they rank sites across all of the different languages of the world. Some examples of where improvements are being made include taking into consideration things like:

This is one of those posts where you get to tell me what opinion Marketing Pilgrim should take.

The WSJ is reporting that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to follow a common set of principles that will govern how they do business in countries that might restrict free speech.

If there was any doubt remaining that bloggers can be considered journalists, consider that lack of faith obliterated. An Egyptian and a Burmese blogger are the first of the blogger-kind to receive the Knight International Journalism Award.

Operating in over a hundred countries means Google has to juggle a lot of laws and cultural differences as they try to present information as openly as possible.

Searchboth.co.uk is a new site that allows you to search both the Google and Yahoo search engine at the same time.

The appeal of Google’s mobile operating system, Android, and an alliance of handset makers, has not registered with two major phone OS builders.

AT&T announced today a new international plan for iPhone users.

On Saturday night, parts of San Francisco went dark, and it was to some degree Google’s fault.  Google deserves credit, and not blame, for this occurrence, though, since it was part of an energy-saving initiative.

There may be some seafaring pirates still out there, somewhere in the South Pacific, but modern day pirates operate in digital formats. The most recent booty attained by the notorious PirateBay: a shanghaied domain formerly belonging to their fiercest enemy.

Google and IBM have partnered to give some of the world’s best young minds access to hundreds of linked computers.  What’s more, the companies aren’t doing this out of direct self-interest, and have teamed up with six universities.

Recently FUSA Capital Corp launched iheard, a search engine for music, sports and talk radio stations.

About the search engine:

When Google’s U.S. market share changes by a percentage point or two, it doesn’t turn many heads – Google has been ahead, is ahead, and will presumably stay ahead, regardless.  But as Google’s Chinese share changes, a lot of eyes are watching to see what will happen.