A french SEO guy claims that Google is able to update its index in 14 minutes. The guy based his comment on a test he made: he published an article on his blog, which was appearing a few minutes later on Google Blog Search, and then directly on Google’s default web results. The guy also backs his comment with what a Google Engineer from Googleplex had supposedly said to a friend of his.
It could have been true if Google hasn’t announced a few months ago the launch of Universal Search, a new feature that consists of displaying different kinds of content such as Images, News, Videos, etc directly into web results.

What the guy noticed was just Universal Search in action, Google has displayed the blog post directly in their web results, and not only in their Blog Search results.

So it was not an update of their entire database, but rather just the displaying of a blog post based on the user’s query.

Source: Seo By the Sea 

A few years ago, Altavista was the leading search engine in France. Immediately after Google launched its search engine there, people left Altavista to try this new and simple search engine, and didn’t turn back. Altavista was indeed becoming full of spammy pages and people were just annoyed with that.

A study made by French agency Xiti shows that Google’s market share is now close to 90% in this country, followed by Yahoo, MSN, Free etc whose market share has been going down for the last few years.

I don’t know what we should say about these figures? Should we be scared or happy?