Google hosted an event Thursday for its new 100,000-square-foot campus blocks from Venice Beach. David Sarno tells us the facility will become home to a variety of business units, including its search engine, ad sales and Google+ social network. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended the event, welcoming the move from Santa Monica to Los Angeles. 

Emil Protalinski tells us that Google has begun to index Facebook comments on third-party Web sites, along with AJAX and JavaScript content. He says these comments are usually not picked up by search engines, but Matt Cutts, Google's Webspam guru, confirmed the move on Twitter. Apparently, GoogleBot has learned to read comments dynamically loaded in AJAX or JavaScript. 

Microsoft has released research showing that friends influence buying decisions more than experts. it all comes down to word-of-mouth marketing, but in this case it's done online rather than in person. That's an important distinction, given Microsoft's partnership with Facebook. David Coursey points to technology as an example. Apparently, Microsoft research suggests that although technology matures, consumers still need help making decisions because of complexities. 

Taking a cue from Bing Maps, Google now offers a 360-degree view of stores in Google Maps. The tool shows the interior of a restaurant, along with a summary of the type of cuisine, prices, transit accessibility and business hours. It means Google more tightly integrated Google Places with Google Maps and google.com. Clint Boulton provides a few examples, and highlights the importance of local and personalized search. 

Kayla Kurtz provides five easy tips to test ad copy in order to consistantly increase click-through and conversion rates. Be sure that customers know the name of the company and the exact services it provides. Also consider highlighting the services the company is known for. It may require seven to 10 ad copy iterations before finding the one that converts best, but Kurtz shows us how it's done.

Kristi Hines dives into Web site analytics and keywords to contemplate Web site bounce rates. She suggests starting by drilling down into the content, site content and pages in the new version of Google Analytics to see the Web site pages that are receiving the most page views. New tools allow marketers to sort the bounce rate by clicking on on a column to view pages with the highest to lowest on the site. After highlighting how to discover the best content on the site, she takes us through finding the best traffic source and keywords, and lists ways to improve …

Google has connected the location targeting feature with Google Maps to make geographic location targeting easier for advertisers, according to Jeff Allen. It makes the feature more accurate, provides location recommendations, and offers up details about locations. Allen describes what goes on the backend, and also tells us about what marketers will see in the user interface and how the changes will impact campaigns.

Ever wonder where the search engines store data and how much power it takes to run the data centers that collect and store the data? An enormous amount of data gets collected and stored daily. Tom Cheredar takes us inside five of America's largest data centers. He tells us it takes 11 diesel generators to power Microsoft’s 700,000-square foot data center in Chicago, which stores data for XBox Live, the Bing search engine, email service Hotmail, and more than 200 other sites. Twitter’s QTS Metro data center in Georgia supports and stores data for 100 million active users, and it …

The Associated Press provides a roundup of what Q3 earnings reports reveal about the state of online advertising. The timeline presents tidbits from Google, Gannett, Yahoo, The New York Times, Microsoft, McClatchy, Interpublic Group, and WPP Group. For example, Gannett said its overall publishing business ad revenue for digital and print fell 8.5% to $592 million. Digital revenue in that unit grew, but it is not large enough to offset declines in print advertising. Not all pure-play online publishers or engines did well. 

Yahoo has agreed to acquire Interclick for $270 million in cash, the company announced Tuesday. The deal should give Yahoo the boost it needs to help advertisers more finely target ad messages to consumers. Speculation suggests that Yahoo will use Interclick's technology to revive display ad sales. The move points to Yahoo's determination to sell off Asian assets and redistribute proceeds to shareholders, rather than sell off the company piece by piece.