Google is one of the smartest, most innovative companies in the world, but in its core business — online search — it’s being routinely shown up by Microsoft’s third-place search engine, Bing. Bing is a surprisingly fast-moving, innovative product — and it’s forcing Google to play catch-up time and time again. Years ago, for example, Google set itself apart from other search engines by...
Google’s image search service will be getting a revamp this week, aimed at making the search function easier to use, and to provide more relevant results. The redesign is essentially the service’s first major makeover since Google Images went live in 2001. At that time, only 250 million images had been catalogued by the Mountain View, Calif. search company. Now over 10 billion images...
Google announced a Python-based command line utility it’s calling GoogleCL. The tool brings various Google services to the command line, including Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Picasa, Docs, and YouTube. Once it’s installed, you can then access Google’s services from the command line. Access to the services is generally limited to a few commands, usually “Add/Upload,” “Delete”, and “List.” YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger all let you...
Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible...
The first of the month always brings a bountiful harvest from Google’s blogging troops, and two posts yesterday pointed us to some nifty changes to Gmail’s labels features and passed along some cheerful numbers concerning spam levels as measured by the company’s Postini group. With one notable exception, those who rely even moderately on Gmail’s labels ought to like where things are going. The...
LimitNone, a small software-development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion (£508m) in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the company and misappropriating its trade secrets for the Google Apps online service. Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove that is designed to let people move email, contacts and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google’s...
Overnight, Google got a new face on the Web–one measuring 16×16 pixels. The search giant updated its favicon, the eensy little 256-pixel logo that appears in browser locations such as bookmarks, URL location bar, and window tabs. The old icon, a capital G in a black box, has been supplanted by a cuddlier-looking blue lower-case g. It’s a minor change, to be sure. But...
Have you had problems receiving e-mail from Gmail users recently? If so, you’re one of thousands. Over the past month, major anti-spam vendors have had to apply scrutiny to Gmail in a way they haven’t had to before, and the result is reduced delivery performance and sometimes outright blocking of Gmail. Some messaging hosts are being instructed to reject SMTP connections from Google. Ars...
Although yesterday’s completion of the Google + DoubleClick deal gives the combined business a big boost against Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is already planning staff layoffs. “I’m pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today,” Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in his blog yesterday, when the ink on the deal was still barely dry. “An immediate task...
Google, already the world’s most popular spot for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too. The Mountain View-based company is taking its first step toward that goal Thursday with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people working in the same company or...
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