New Google filing presses for role in Microsoft case from the Seattle PI covers how Google has now formally applied for a direct role to participate in how a judge evaluates whether Microsoft’s desktop search in the Vista operating system violates an anti-trust agreement.

In the last installment of this saga, the judge had ruled that she was satisfied with changes that Microsoft proposes to make to how desktop search operates and that if Google disagreed, it needed to work through the US Justice Department and various state attorneys that are party to the Microsoft anti-trust settlement.

Google would prefer to directly address the court. In particular, it wants to prevent the anti-trust settlement from expiring this November, to ensure the proposed changes to desktop search are fully in place. This week’s filing (PDF file) is intended to win over a place at the table from the judge.

Stay tuned.

Google Desktop is now available for those running Linux as their operating system. You’ll find Google Desktop for Linux for download here..

Google Desktop for Linux was developed by Google’s Beijing engineering team and runs on Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, SUSE 10.1, and Red Flag 5. The available languages include English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

Google seeks to extend Microsoft antitrust decree from Reuters reports that Google has asked a federal judge to lengthen the period when Microsoft’s operating system is subject to antitrust reviews in order to ensure desktop search players can remain competitive with Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft agreed to change various ways they handled the integration of desktop search in Vista, in response to a complaint lodged by Google. However, Google remains worried that the changes won’t be fully in place before the wide-ranging "consent decree" reached between Microsoft and the US government expires this November. That decree restricts what Microsoft can do within its operating system to ensure it allows for competition.

Postscript: U.S. judge tells Google to work through Justice Department from Reuters and Judge rejects Google’s anti-Microsoft antitrust bid from News.com provide an update that the judge is currently satisfied with the agreement reached between Microsoft and the US Justice Department over desktop search and made no comment on Google’s request for the consent decree to be extended. Instead, she’s first considering whether Google has even made that request in the proper legal manner.

Microsoft to change Vista after Google complaint from Reuters reports that Microsoft has agreed to make changes to their Vista desktop search application to make it easier for people to change the default search provider.

Microsoft will make the changes in reaction to a Google antitrust complaint lodged with the US Justice Department. Google claimed that the manner in which desktop search was built in to Vista put competitors at an unfair disadvantage. Microsoft said they will change it so that it would make it easier for people to select their own desktop search default. In addition, Microsoft said they would make it easier for third-party developers to optimize their desktop search tools for Vista.

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said:

These remedies are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers.

We are pleased that as a result of Google’s request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state Attorneys General have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista.

Microsoft had called Google’s claims “baseless.” Meanwhile, Google has a deal with Dell to be the default desktop search client on those computers. Danny has pointed out the irony in that: said, “Google is all for consumer choice, except where it can buy that option away from the consumers by partnering with vendors.”

Further reports at Techmeme.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have good stories out about how Google is asking the US Justice Department to investigate whether the desktop search tool built into Microsoft’s Vista operating system violates a 2002 anti-trust action settlement that the US reached with Microsoft preventing it from designing operating systems that limit consumer choice.

Google Intensifies Microsoft Fight is the story from the Wall Street Journal that covers how Google sent a 50 page white paper to the Justice Department and various state attorneys in April covering its allegations against Microsoft. Writes the WSJ:

In its April white paper, Google alleged that Microsoft didn’t allow search bars in Vista that consumers can use to initiate searches to work with desktop-search software other than Microsoft’s, said lawyers familiar with the matter. In addition, Google argued it was practically impossible for consumers to turn off the indexing feature of Microsoft desktop-search software that catalogs users’ files, which meant a computer’s performance was slowed down if it used a second desktop-search application.

A Microsoft spokesman said it is possible to turn off its own desktop-search feature, though acknowledged it isn’t easy. The company said consumers can access Google Desktop Search in a variety of ways through Vista, including directly by icons on the desktop and in the "Start" menu. It further said that Microsoft’s desktop-search indexer doesn’t use any computing power when Google’s own indexer or other applications are in use, so it doesn’t affect performance in the way Google alleged.

The allegations are due to come before federal court later this month for a first formal discussion.

Microsoft Finds Legal Defender in Justice Dept. from the New York Times covers how the top anti-trust official, assistant attorney general Thomas O. Barnett, urged state prosecutors to side with Microsoft and drop investigating Google’s allegations.

Postscript From Danny: Google has played the "Microsoft limits consumer choice card" before in terms of Internet Explorer 7, though not apparently so formally. Google & Dell’s Revenue-Generating URL Error Pages Drawing Fire provides some background on this and covers how Google is all for consumer choice, except where it can buy that option away from the consumers by partnering with vendors. Meanwhile, Microsoft poked back at Google as needing antitrust regulation in the case of Google wanting to purchase DoubleClick.

Being a non-developer I was a bit of a fish out of water at Google Developer Day yesterday. The event, which took place in the 10 countries where Google has offices, was intended to showcase Google Gears and the company’s various APIs. I attended the event in California, which was moved from Google’s Mountain View headquarters to the San Jose Convention Center to accommodate demand and attendance.

The Gears initiative is about creating an open standard to help turn the Web browser into a better, richer development platform and enabling applications to work “offline,” when there’s an inconsistent or non-existent Internet connection.

Fundamentally it bridges the current gap between the browser and desktop software.

Sergey Brin, in a roundtable interview with press after the morning session yesterday, specifically deflected competitive questions about Microsoft and said instead that the company was responding to user feedback and unmet needs in rolling out Gears. He said that there had been a “huge uptake” in Google Docs and that users wanted the ability to work with these tools offline.

“I want access to my stuff and don’t want to have to worry about devices or operating systems, with everything in the cloud,” Brin added. There were two opposite use cases that kept coming up: business travelers on airplanes and the developing world.

The ability to access applications such as Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail on an airplane (where there is no connection) will make these apps more useful to enterprise users. (Google Reader is currently available but these other applications have yet to be rolled out for Gears.) At the opposite end of the spectrum, developing countries with limited or spotty Internet access will be able to use Google Apps — or any third party applications built on Gears.

Notwithstanding the avoidance of Microsoft competitive questions, the de-facto availability of these Google applications offline does address one barrier to adoption by business users in particular. They will not take market share from Microsoft Office any time soon but a segment of users may find Gears-enabled Google Apps to be a reasonable alternative in some cases.

Brin said also that the initiative was not just about access to applications but also their performance and responsiveness. “We started to fix the browser [with Gears] but there are still other problems to be solved.”

Other Google representatives at the table made the point that this was less about Google than creating a richer browser development platform for others. In that sense this is a logical extension of what Google started by releasing its Maps API to the world. They said that Google would benefit ultimately, albeit indirectly, through third-party creativity and applications that they expect to come out of Gears. Google Mapplets is an example of that.

With Maps and mashups Google built a “developer community” indirectly and somewhat passively. I got a very different feeling from yesterday’s event. Here was Google, as Web services and browser-based software company, self-consciously trying to extend the momentum and excitement it had generated with its Maps and other APIs into entirely new realms.

Want Google Desktop for the Mac? More than two years after it was released for the PC, it’s finally available for the Mac, says Google (and said also here). And here’s what Mac folks are saying about it on Techmeme.

Google Desktop has released a version five with new features and updates. Kevin Tom, Product Manager of Google Desktop, explains that they added:

• A new sidebar with “completely new look and feel.”
• A gadget redesign to make them “easy to tell apart, easy to read, and easy on the eyes.”
• Improvements to desktop search by adding “preview search results.”
• Enhanced security with warnings of potential data theft issues.

More details are available at the Google Blog and Inside Google Desktop Blog.

BusinessWeek reports that Google Desktop had a major defect that could have potentially enabled hackers to view personal files on a computer with Google Desktop installed. The hole was plugged February 1st, a few weeks after it was discovered by Watchfire Corp. Google says it has no evidence the vulnerability was exploited.

Google Desktop was vulnerable to what security experts call a “cross-site scripting attack.” This vulnerability would potentially enable hackers to place malicious code on your personal computer. The hacker could then search all the files on the personal computer and possibly even take over the machine.