Google announced that it had acquired "Begun," a Russian contextual ad service, for $140 million. The service had been a unit of Russia's Rambler Media. Rambler also owns the Russian portal Rambler.ru. As part of the deal, Google-enhanced search results and ads will appear on the Rambler portal site.

According to Reuters, Rambler expects annual growth of online ad revenues to be 50 and to reach $1 billion by 2010.

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