Google is making an additional $600 million investment to expand its Berkeley County data center in South Carolina, according to the office of state Governor Nikki Haley.

The expansion brings Google’s total investment to over $1.2 billion and includes a third, eco-friendly building to help cool the data center’s servers. Google announced construction would begin soon.

The Berkeley County data center holds various computer systems and components that support services like Search, Gmail, Google+, and YouTube. It also boasts 110 full-time jobs, provides free Wi-Fi to the downtown area, hosts functions to help educate the Charleston community on Google products, and has awarded roughly $648,000 to local non-profit organizations and non-profit schools.

See more photos of the Berkeley County data center in Google’s photo gallery, or get more details on the expansion in the press release below.

(via TNW and SCNow.com)

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Google just alerted Wall Street analysts that their Q4 2012 earnings estimates do not accurately reflect the yet-to-be-reported results.

In other words, their numbers are too high.

The company gave a sneak peek at the upcoming results on its Investors Page this morning. Google’s earnings call is scheduled for next week, but it apparently wants to warn folks before hopes get too inflated that it will not include numbers from Motorola’s set-top box division.

The Internet Giant acquired Motorola last year and has previously said it plans to sell the Home business. While this is not new information, Wall Street is apparently in the dark on the situation. Google explained:

 In short, financial results from Motorola Home will be presented as a separate line item in our 2012 consolidated statements of income.  While this is a standard accounting treatment (more details below), people who follow our company may not be fully aware of how it impacts our financial reporting. For example, as of this writing, a majority of Wall Street analysts who cover Google have not reflected the Home business as discontinued operations in their estimates.

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Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page hasn’t been talking much lately, probably because of his mysterious voice issues, but he sat with Wired recently to discuss everything from his company’s ambitions to the competition, a.k.a. Apple.

When asked why Google encourages its employees to “tackle ambitious challenges and make big bets,” Page said he worried that something has gone wrong with the way companies run these days.

“If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event,” Page added. “But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes.”

Therefore, Page said his job is mostly trying get people focused on non-incremental things—like Gmail.

“When we released that, we were a search company—it was a leap for us to put out an email product, let alone one that gave users 100 times as much storage as they could get anywhere else,” he explained. “That is not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.”

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Google’s Nexus 7 has surpassed Apple’s iPad and continues to gain market share in Japan, according to a Japanese newspaper.

A report by Nikkei (translated) on Thursday said the Nexus 7 had 44.4-percent of the market, where as the iPad only had 40.1-percent, based on a survey of 2,400 consumer electronics stores in Japan. Research firm BCN conducted the survey in December.

Nikkei attributed the gain to the Nexus 7’s more affordable price point, but the survey noted there was an iPad Mini shortage in stores that may have affected the reported market share percentages.

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So, earlier this week, the Internet was ablaze with criticism after a series of panoramic pictures from Botswana surfaced and suggested one of Google’s Street View cars ran over a donkey when capturing imagery.

Well, Google defended itself today and provided full photographic evidence to prove it did not commit a hit-and-run offense. The new photographs indicate the car’s direction and show the donkey actually walked away after randomly lying in the road:

As our imagery below shows, the donkey was lying in the path – perhaps enjoying a dust bath – before moving safely aside as our car drove past.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gblzLsDPLkc&feature=player_embedded]

Google’s homepage Doodle for today is an interactive game that puts folks behind the wheel of a Zamboni.

Frank Zamboni invented the Zamboni Ice Resurfacer, also known as a “Zamboni,” in 1949, and today is his 112th birthday. The inventor died of lung cancer roughly 24 years ago, but Google is celebrating his life and invention today because both made hockey games and ice skating practical.

Google often features its traditional logo in various modifications for special events or competitions, and the creative logos have since become known as Google Doodles. Google paid homage to a multitude of holidays and anniversaries in 2012, for instance, and a few of the more notable Google Doodles included the 200th Anniversary of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 161st Anniversary of Moby Dick’s First Publishing, and 107th Anniversary of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Today’s Google Doodle shows skaters messing up the ice, as seen in the video above, and it’s Web surfers’ responsibility to resurface the scuffed ice using the Zamboni. Users can navigate the machine with the up, down, left, and right arrow keys or just their mouse.

A more difficult level starts each time the ice is resurfaced, but users also run the risk of running out of gas. So, be quick and efficient. Also, watch out for banana peels or accidentally killing the driver at unsafe speeds by slamming the Zamboni into the arena walls.

Check it out:

• www.Google.com

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Facebook’s mysterious press event is underway, and the company just unveiled a new graph search feature on stage that aggregates granular results based on user engagement and interest and provides Bing-powered Web results.

Many rumors indicated Facebook would unveil a new search function that would rival Google and likely introduce a better way to browse through the social network. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed graph search is not just web search, though.

According to The Verge, Zuckerberg said graph search would show the answer and not just links to answers: “We are not indexing the web. We are indexing our map of the graph, which is really big and constantly changing.”

People in a user’s friend network apparently rank results, while mutual friends and various “signals” sort other results in the Facebook network. There is even a “refine this search” option on the right that lets folks further narrow their results. The graph search is in beta, Zuckerberg noted, and people, photos, places, and interests form the foundation.

In today’s showcasing of graph search, a demonstration of Maps, refined by likes and location tags, was shown off, as well as an example of Places search, akin to Yelp, which showed a better way to find places via where friends have been and what they’ve liked, and Photos search. Engagement, likes, and comments apparently organize images, places, interests, and other searchable items.

Meanwhile, a Search box serves as a “title for the page,” Zuckerberg added, and the content appears below it. He demo-searched for “Friends of friends who are single men in San Francisco and who are from India,” and a listing of related men and their Facebook profiles filled the search results.

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Facebook plans to hold a press event today that—if rumors are factored in—could launch a new search feature, ad platform, improved apps, or even a smartphone that would bring it up to speed with, or at least give it an edge against, its primary foe, Google.

Facebook will kick things off at 10 a.m. PST at its headquarters in California, but the company hasn’t given any hints about what is in store other than inviting the media to “come see what we’re building.”

The Wall Street Journal, via the Associated Press, said a new search function, if unveiled, would likely introduce “a better way to sift through Facebook for people, businesses, events and everything else available on the vast online network.”

Pocket-lint.com said definitively that Facebook would launch its own search engine soon. The website claimed it heard from sources that Facebook plans to take on Google “at its own game.” Although exact details as to how are unclear for now, the website said Facebook’s new search feature would “shake everything up.”

Business Insider, however, asserted a new mobile ad product is in the works. Advertisers can only buy display ads on the desktop version of Facebook at the moment, but a new mobile strategy will soon, according to the website’s unnamed sources, “allow advertisers to buy mobile ad inventory through FBX.”

PCMag tossed rumors to the wayside and called for better mobile apps. It referred to the existing apps as “often sluggish and unstable,” but it also admitted the native apps work better than the HTML5 versions. Still, the website said, Facebook “needs to announce” an overhauled offering.

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[youtube=http://youtu.be/s1PPYo6WL-Q]

Google announced its sixth-annual U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition yesterday and invited children to illustrate their best day ever as part of the theme.

Google often features its traditional logo in various modifications for special events or competitions, and the creative logos have since become known as Google Doodles. Google celebrated a multitude of holidays and anniversaries in 2012, for instance, and a few of the more notable Google Doodles included the 200th Anniversary of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 161st Anniversary of Moby Dick’s First Publishing, and 107th Anniversary of Little Nemo in Slumberland.

The Internet Giant started a competition six years ago to have students from across the United States design a clever doodle based on a theme. The winning student earns many valuable prizes and a spot on Google’s homepage. Google gave a few doodle examples for this year’s competition theme via the official Google blog:

“Today we’re announcing our 6th annual U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition, inviting K-12 students around the country to create their own “doodle” (one of the special Google logos you see on our homepage on various occasions). This year’s theme: “My Best Day Ever…” Breakdancing with aliens? Sure! Building a fortress of candy? Okay by us! Riding to school on a brontosaurus? You get the idea (…)”

Last year’s winner, Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisc., drew a Treasure Island-like doodle for the “If I could travel in time I’d visit…” theme and won a treasure chest of prizes. His awards included a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer, and a $50,000 technology grant for Prairie School. His doodle also appeared on the Crayola 64-crayon special edition box last fall, as well as the Google homepage.

This year’s winning artist will get a $30,000 college scholarship and $50,000 technology grant for his or her school, while the winning doodle will land on the Google homepage for a day. In addition, all State Winners will have their artwork on display at the American Museum of Natural History from May 22 to July 14.

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Google launched Chrome 24 for Windows, Mac, and Linux just last week, and now it has already released Chrome 25 Beta with a Web Speech API.

The Web Speech API will let users have “new, interactive experiences with web apps,” according to the official Google Chrome blog. The JavaScript API will further allow developers to “integrate speech recognition into their web apps.”

Google has pushed voice recognition and dictation on Android devices as of late and is clearly trying to bring desktop capabilities up to speed with today’s Chrome Beta release.

Chrome 25 Beta will also auto-disable some silently added, third-party extensions on Windows, but a notification will allow users to re-enable such extensions.

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FTC’s Jon Leibowitz

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission ended its probe against Google last week, and now the agency’s chairperson, Jon Leibowitz, is discussing the controversial decision with TPM.

“We did what were paid to do and what the law requires,” Leibowitz told TPM. “We went after a company [Google] where the law required us to do so, and forwent bringing a case where the law required us not to bring one.”

The FTC investigated claims as to whether Google gave itself an unfair advantage in search results and blocked sales in America of competing mobile devices. Leibowitz said all five commissioners, from both ends of the political spectrum, agreed that the evidence “militated” against an antitrust case.

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