In a surprising turn of events, Germany's top civil court overturned two lower court rulings on a case involving Google's autocomplete function. According to the ruling, it is Google's responsibility to block libelous words that appear next to a name via the autocomplete function if Google has been alerted to the defamatory words. The plaintiff in the case was an unidentified nutritional supplements company that filed the lawsuit against Google because the German-language site's autocomplete function was adding the terms "Scientology" and "fraud" to the company's name in search queries. The [...]

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Institute for Information, located in Taipei, Taiwan, has brought a patent lawsuit against Google in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. According to the case, the research institution claims Google Search, Google+ Local and Google Places infringes on the Institute for Information's patented information retrieval system. The patent in question was issued to the Institute for Information in January of 2005. Titled, "Information retrieval system with a neuro-fuzzy structure," under US Patent Number 6,845,354, Law360.com stated the Institute for Information's patent covers [...]

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The EU released documents this morning that detail Google's antitrust settlement proposals and explain the Competition Commission's position on various aspects of the investigation. First here's what the EU says Google has proposed: Google offers for a period of 5 years to: (i) - label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results, - clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and - display links to three rival specialised search services c [...]

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Microsoft's "Scroogled" ad campaign, which attacked Google over paid inclusion in shopping and Gmail over privacy, is coming to an end. KQED reports that Microsoft will stop TV, newspaper and social media ads promoting the Scroogled message: "That part is about finished," Stefan Weitz, Microsoft senior director of online services, said on Thursday. Microsoft launched the Scroogled campaign last November to attack Google's all-paid-inclusion shopping search results. Our stories below cover more about this: Bing Attacks Google Shopping With “Scroogled” Campaign, Forgets It’s Guilt [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: General | Google: Gmail | Google: Product Search | Microsoft | Microsoft: Bing Shopping & Cashback | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: General | Microsoft: Marketing

There is a new movie coming to theaters on June 7th named The Internship. It is a comedy movie about what it is like to work at Google as an intern played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. The movie is about two older men who know nothing about computers who recently lose their jobs. They decide to try to get a job at Google by interning there first. The trailer was released yesterday via Google+ and here it is for you all to see: We've known this movie was coming since August 2012 and been tracking it's progress from when the filming started at the GooglePlex to the movie pos [...]

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Over two years ago, Google enabled users to customize the Google home page with their own image or graphics from a library of images. But now that feature is going away. This is coming to a surprise for many Google users because Google quietly announced this news late on a Friday afternoon saying: Classic Plus is a Google Search feature that lets people upload or select images to use as a background on Google.com. Users won’t be able to upload new pictures starting from October 16, and we'll turn the service off in November 2012. You'll continue to have access to any images you've [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: General | Google: iGoogle | Google: Personalized Search

With the Apollo moon missions on many minds, after the death this weekend of the first moonwalker, Neil Armstrong, Google has an interesting post out about how a single search uses as much computing power as consumed by the entire Apollo program. Much as been written about how little power the Apollo flight computers had, such as the guidance computer having less than half the power of an old IBM PC XT or that our cellphones have more processing power than the on-board systems. Google's post on Apollo's computer power took a much broader view. It looked at all the computers used in the [...]

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One of the seminal moments in George Orwell’s 1984 occurs when the hero – Winston Smith – is finally convinced by his torturers that 2+2=5. The point of the scene is to show how Oceania (the totalitarian regime in which 1984 is based) has so much control over the mind of its citizens that it can even convince them to reject the fundamental rules of mathematics! Another of my favorite moments from 1984 occurs when the ironically named "Ministry of Truth" retroactively changes an old newspaper article regarding chocolate rations so that a new change in rations looks like an incre [...]

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[caption id="attachment_129278" align="alignright" width="210"] Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com[/caption] Ever wonder what it's like being an intern at Google? Well, don't look to an upcoming film, called "The Internship," to provide much insight, even though the movie, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, is set at the search giant, as reported by Search Engine Watch. The comedy, which Vaughn expects to garner an "R" rating, features Vaughn and Wilson as 40-something salesmen who try to start over after getting laid off -- by becoming interns at Google. "We get free food, we get to pla [...]

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It was right about this time last year when we gave Google the winner's trophy for a series of gags that put all others to shame. We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool's Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google's international properties. Below is a recap of Google's (and a few others) pranks, and we'll do our best to update this as the day goes along. Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR The main joke at the moment is Google's "announcement" of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, which b [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | Google: Chrome | Google: General | Google: Gmail | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Google: Other | Google: Parodies | Google: Street View | Search & Society: April Fool's | Top News | Yahoo: Flickr

Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It's both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. The video is also a nice follow-on to the look under the hood of search that Google released in August. From the Google blog post announcing the video, Google sums up its approach to improving search: "Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That mean [...]

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Google operates one of the largest cloud-based computing systems in the world, and takes great pride in its reliability, investing significant amounts of both money and human resources to make sure that all of its services are always-on and accurate. Here's the story of how, to eliminate what many would consider an almost insignificant issue, Google conducted a "smear" campaign and created software that "lied" to its own servers—all to improve performance and eliminate potential errors that most of us wouldn't even notice. Inside Google's Time Warp As searchers, we want fresh resul [...]

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Google’s going through an extraordinary time. It faces anti-trust investigations in the US and the EU. Competitors worry more and more about it, as the company seems to continually expand into new areas, such as social. Some consumer groups worry about privacy issues and data collection. Some marketers worry that the company might be too powerful a "gatekeeper" of traffic. Yet the company remains popular with consumers. Can Google navigate the challenges it faces and come through living up to its "Don’t Be Evil" motto? We're delighted to have some of the world's foremost experts on Goog [...]

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Google announced they are starting a new service named Page Speed service. Essentially, this service will be Google fetching the content on your web site and then serving it up with speed improvements of 25% to 60% to the rest of the world, including Google's bots. Google will eventually charge for the service but has not yet said how the pricing structure will look. The service includes: An online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. Switch your domain name to point to Google's DNS. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers It rewrites your [...]

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Google has launched a new service at wdyl.com, which stands for "What Do You Love" from Google, which allows users to search for anything and see what comes back from a variety of Google's many different search resources. Over the years, Google has continued to add new products, services, portals, and features to their portfolio. Keeping up on all that Google has to offer has been hard. There are pages that show Google products options, or new products and pages that have Google ad options and the list goes on and on. One single page of all of Google's services and products is hard [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Custom Search Engine | Google: General | Google: Other

We continue to hear about Facebook's 700 million users, on the way to a billion worldwide. According to comScore Google is already there, at least looking across all its websites. Google: The Biggest Network Of Sites The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company's network of web sites over the past year: comScore gets its data from a global panel of roughly two million internet users from which it extrapolates findings to the entire online population. This sampling methodology has been much criticized but remains the stand [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: General | Google: Orkut | Google: Outside US | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Size | Top News

In the words of Borat, the fictional Kazakh journalist and alter-ego of comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, the government of Kazakhstan is not being "very nice" to the internet. The autocratic government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has been for the past several years seeking to assert more control over the internet and online content available to Kazakh citizens. It recently issued an order that all internet traffic with ".kz" domain names had to be routed through servers within the country. Google isn't having any of it and said that it would no longer operate Google.kz: Last month, the Ka [...]

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Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt just finished being interviewed at the D Conference by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, and there were a number of interesting revelations that came out. I thought a list of highlights was in order. The highlights below are roughly listed in the order they came up during the interview, rather being in order of what I think are most important. Anything quoted is the quote as best I caught it. These all come from my full live blogging of the event. See also coverage from others on Techmeme. Any typos, I'll catch later. Right now, I need to seek out fo [...]

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With management changes and numerous other efforts Google is trying to "get back to its startup roots." So how about a video from when Google was really a startup. On the Xooglers blog (and below) is a video of a "TGIF meeting." Taken in 1999 by Doug Edwards, who was then the director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google, it almost plays like a scene from the NBC show "The Office." The video presents a pretty routine employee meeting: announcements are made, some new employees are introduced and an informal birthday party happens. According to Edwards' blog post the comp [...]

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