Barack Obama, one of the top Democrat candidates for President in next year’s election, visited Google yesterday and talked about his technology industry platform, among other things. Here’s video of his speech:
Google Has Controversy On Its Mind
Operating in over a hundred countries means Google has to juggle a lot of laws and cultural differences as they try to present information as openly as possible.
EU Lengthening Probe Into Google, DoubleClick
European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes isn’t quite ready to rubber-stamp Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick.
UK’s First Site That Searches Both Google & Yahoo
Searchboth.co.uk is a new site that allows you to search both the Google and Yahoo search engine at the same time.
Could Google Finally Deliver On Old AOL Promises?
Two years ago next month, Google bought five percent of AOL for a billion dollars. Yeah, you might have forgotten that, but it was a really big deal at the time.
While Google’s main motivation was to keep being the search technology for fifth-place AOL Search, there was a lot of talk on both sides about the two companies working together. The big get, mentioned right in the press release: Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger integration.
Google Maps Adds CleanScores Ratings
Google Maps now integrates ratings from CleanScores, a website which shows you which establishments have failed food inspections.
Google Still Waiting On SEC For Stock Quotes
When writing a story that revolves around stock prices, I prefer to wait until the market’s closed – don’t want the story reversing itself as I type, after all. I’ve found that market updates from Google (and Yahoo and MSN) are a little slow, though, and for this, we can blame the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Google Transit Makes Itself Useful In Europe
Public transportation doesn’t seem too tempting when you’ve got a car in the garage. But if you’re on vacation in another country, those sorts of systems start to look quite nice, and so we welcome the introduction of Google Transit trip planner for Europe.
Google and BizRate.com Break Up
Google Checkout Makes Shopping Sites Undesirable
As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:
Google Helping the Autistic with Project Spectrum
Take a look at this video, where Google explains Project Spectrum, an effort by Google to help those with autism take advantage of their gifts for working and expressing themselves visually using Google SketchUp, its free 3D modeling software: