Google has Olympic fever

Since Google is spending a lot of time and money making sure they are the number one search engine in every country, or at least trying to, it's no surprise that Google has been looking at the Olympics as a huge opportunity that can't be missed.

According to the IOC (Internation Olympic Committee), they will be publishing Olympic coverage to 77 countries on YouTube starting on August 8th. Interesting enough, even though Google has agreed to broadcast event coverage in these countries, there are going to be some upset people. Users from countries where the IOC has granted exclusive broadcasting agreements (like the United States, United Kingdom and Canada) will not have the luxury of viewing Olympic coverage on YouTube. This is an excellent opportunity for Google to gain global user share for YouTube.

Along with this agreement with the IOC, Google has also began showing information in their search results that keep you on top of event schedules. Common searches for Olympic data will show an easy to use box (called a OneBox) at the very top of the page.

In other related news, the NBC Olympic website has been the source of some attention too. The website is actually a huge win for Microsoft -- it will make use of Silverlight for all its content, which should be an easy way for Microsoft to get millions of people to install the Silverlight plugin for their browser. But, not to be outdone, Google has announced that DoubleClick will be the engine serving up advertisements on the website using a new technology that lets publishers embed advertisements into Silverlight applications.

The Olympics are almost here -- maybe we'll see some more interesting developments in the next few days.