Google’s project to digitize the entirety of the world’s newspaper archives has been shut down,Search Engine Land reports. In the three years the project has been running, around 2,000 newspapers spanning decades have been digitized, not just making it easier than ever to access old news, but ensuring these journals of history aren’t lost to natural disaster. The existing archive of digitized news willremain online and searchable, but Google has pulled all development resources and will not be scanning new submissions from its newspaper partners....

Google hasreleased a WordPressplugin that simplifies the process of verifying your ownership of a site, giving you faster access to a variety of Google services. Verification is required to add a site toGoogle Webmaster Toolsor use certain features of AdSense, Merchant Center, Sidewiki and more. It generally requires you to add a TXT record to your DNS records, upload a HTML file to your site’s root directory, or add a tag to the homepage’s header....

According to areportpublished bycomScore, Latin Americans conducted a total of 18.5 billion searches in March 2011, an increase of 21% from the previous year. 90% of these searches were conducted on Google Sites. The increase in search query volume was mostly driven by a 14% gain in the number of unique searchers and by a 6% increase in the number of search queries by user. The average is now 167 queries per month....

Goolge has purchased 10,23 patents from IBM that it may use to help it defend itself against Android-related lawsuits, reportsBloomberg. A spokesman for Google confirmed the transaction today, which occurred on August 17th and was recorded yesterday, September 13th. The patents cover a wide range of topics from server architecture to wireless devices. Bill Slawski ofSEO by the Seahas taken a look at the patents involved and picked out a few that stood out to him....

While we’re fans of Google’s auto-complete and instant features, this is something that we’re going to have a hard time dealing with. Google, in a move that can only be seen as pandering to copyright agencies, has started censoring what it sees to be “piracy-related” searches from instant and auto-complete search results. According to an articleat TorrentFreak, Google had announced the change a few weeks ago, but has now rolled out the feature without public notice....