Google

The first mobile phone based on Google's "Android" system will be available on the T-Mobile network in October. But insiders say the device, while functional, lacks the grace and style of its obvious market rival, Apple's iPhone. As we reported back ... in November, Google opted against launching its own mobile phone, instead developing an open source software package with the idea that it could encourage manufacturers to develop cheaper handsets. The belief at the time was that Google might get back its investment by negotiating a cut of any advertising revenue network carriers would make ... (view more)

Google has said sorry to users of its Gmail service after they were left without access to their emails for almost two hours early last week. The firm made a rare apology on its official blog after the outage, saying "The issue was caused by a ... temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly." (Source: blogspot.com ) There has been some speculation the problem may be connected with a recent change to Gmail's contacts system, designed to separate contacts users have manually added from those which are created automatically when you send or receive a ... (view more)

Google is to introduce close integration between its two main advertising systems. It should mean better targeted ads, though it will lead to extra tracking information on users' computers. The changes involve both Doubleclick -- an online ad ... company Google bought for just over $3 billion last year -- and Google's own Adsense system. They work in different ways: Doubleclick tracks the browsing history of a user and builds up a picture of their interests, while Adsense ads are specific to a particular website's content (though they do take into account a user's geographical location to provide ... (view more)

Google has upgraded its Google Search Appliance, making it better and smaller. The "Google for the office" appliance is a box (previously a rack of 5) that can store and search through 10 million documents. Usually sold to large businesses and ... government in a refrigerator-sized rack, the new version offers the same punch in a smaller package. The boxes run on Dell storage hardware but use Google software for searching. New features include greater security encryption and the ability to search in 27 languages and deliver results in 40. The system can also provide notifications when documents ... (view more)

Chinese Internet use is notoriously restricted, which may explain why Google -- a North American cultural icon -- is not the major search engine used by the nation's Internet-connected public. Instead, Baidu is to the Chinese what Google is to the ... rest of the world. Within China, Google has only 26 percent of the search market share, while Baidu holds 63 percent. (Source: crn.com ) Google may be edging in through the launch of a free music search program. How? Baidu is the main gateway for Internet music piracy in China, where less than 1 percent of music downloads are legal. Google's new ... (view more)

Google's Street View mapping system has got the go-ahead from regulators in the United Kingdom, but is continuing to cause legal problems in the US. The system involves taking photographs of streets in major cities around the world. Unlike the ... better-known Google Earth system, these are not satellite images; instead photographers take shots from a standing position. This allows Google to produce maps which are more human-eye than bird's-eye. Britain's Information Commissioner had been asked to investigate the project after complaints it could be a threat to privacy because people might be ... (view more)

There are now more than a trillion web pages...and those are just the ones Google knows about. Google's index of web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to a billion (one thousand million) in 2000 and now to a trillion (one million million) in ... 2008. The search engine firm announced the statistic as a way of publicizing its position as the market leader (ahem, gloating). Writing in a post on the company's blog, software engineers Jesse Alpert said that the Google system reprocesses the entire index several times a day, each of which is equivalent to checking every road intersection in a ... (view more)

Wikipedia is everyone's one-stop-shop for quick answers online. The name, an amalgamation of 'wiki' (a collaborative website) and 'encyclopedia', is the "biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet." Once virtually alone in its ... field, the site faces new competition from Google. The seven year-old site has over 75, 000 contributors and over 10 million articles published in over 250 languages. Allowing people from all walks of life to write, contribute to and supplement articles has allowed it to amass a truly global, if not academically sound, archive of information. There ... (view more)

Google has announced two new security measures for its Gmail service: a partnership with eBay and PayPal to reduce phishing attacks, and a tool to warn users if somebody may have illicitly accessed their mailbox. The firm has teamed up with the ... auction and money transfer sites because they are two of the most common targets for phishing, a technique where hackers send emails that appear to be from the company and include links to bogus sites in the hope of capturing user names and passwords. Gmail already highlights potentially suspicious emails with a red box and removes any links those ... (view more)

There's been a surprising amount of buzz about a one-word change to Google's home page: 'privacy'. The company has added a link from the front page of the site to the various privacy policies for the first time. It ends a prolonged debate about ... whether or not Google was breaching state laws. The controversy arose in May when the New York Times pointed out that a 2003 California law requires commercial websites based in the state to clearly display a link to its privacy policies from its home page. At the time, Google argued that it had taken care of this with a link to 'About Google'; however ... (view more)