Latin America Googled

Latin America is a tempting market for search marketers, with more than 80 million users and ever increasing broadband penetration. Latin America is one of the fastest growing Internet communities in the world,'’ said Larry Page, co-founder and president of Products, Google Inc.

Search marketing in Latin America is poised to grow to an estimated number of $337 million expenditure in 2009. (Data: SEO Roundtable) Google is the number one search engine by page views.

On March 1, 2007, Google hosted the first-ever Google Code Jam Latin America competition. Registrations definitely exceeded expectations: more than 5,000 eager programmers from around the continent signed up.

This past week, Google opened its third operation base in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Argentina will be the third-largest headquarters for Google business development in the world, after those in California and Ireland. We would like to capitalize this context in more than one way. One is obvious: business, but we are also very interested in adopting products, users’ sophistication and the increase access to information in general.” says Gonzalo Alonso, General Manager for Spanish Speaking Latin America at Google.

Google’s other offices in the region are in Mexico City, and in the Brazilian cities of Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte.

No doubt, Google is taking Latin America’s role in the internet world seriously!