Advertisers and publishers who work with us have long asked that we complement our search and content-based text advertising with display advertising capabilities. DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling us to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies.

As the combination of Google and DoubleClick delivers better, more relevant display ads, we're also looking forward to delivering an improved online experience to users. Because user trust is paramount to the success of our business, users will continue to benefit from our commitment to protecting user privacy following this acquisition. And our scale and infrastructure mean that users will also be spending less time waiting for web pages to load. Ultimately, we believe that by combining our advertising network with DoubleClick's display ad serving products, and by investing resources in the display ad business, we will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue. That in turn will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content for Internet users everywhere

Google Video went through many revisions before taking the state it has today - a video search engine - at one point offering TV screen caps, at another trying to match YouTube feature for feature, and now fading away as a destination now that YouTube is owned by Google. Interestingly, the ability to make purchases through Google Video actually preceded the company's launch of its payment service, Google Checkout.

I've been tracking the Google Video RSS feed of items for sale since about the time we started NewTeeVee, and literally the only thing that comes across is episodes of the Charlie Rose Show. I don't think the payment option was a very heavily used (or promoted) service.

On the other hand, it's not like iTunes is stepping up to help independent video producers sell their wares, so it's somewhat disappointing to see this go away.

It is not a surprise, that both Google and Amazon want a slice of PayPal's cake. In the most recent quarter, PayPal had net revenues of $454 million, up 34% over the $339 million reported in Q2-06. More importantly, PayPal Merchant Services transactions jumped 57% to $4.92 billion globally from the $3.13 billion reported in Q2-06.

Why do some of my search results say "This site may harm your computer?"

This warning message appears with search results that we've identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer. We want our users to feel safer when they search the web, and we're continuously working to identify such dangerous sites and increase protection for our users.

Malicious software is often installed without your knowledge or permission when you visit these sites. Some examples of malicious software include programs that delete data on your computer, steal personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers, or alter your search results. For more information on these types of sites, please visit http://www.stopbadware.org/home/help

Even if you click on the title, you won't be able to visit the site: Google explains you once again that the site could be dangerous and recommends you to visit another search results or to change your query. The only way to visit the site is to copy the URL and paste it in the address bar, which is not an obvious or a trivial task for an ordinary computer user.

Known as Gmail in most countries, it had to change its name to Google Mail in the UK and Germany due to trademark disputes.

A by-product of moving from the invitation only system should bring to an end a current spate of people making money by selling Gmail addresses.

Gmail was already freely available in US and a few other countries.

Although Google posted in Gmail's help that "anyone in the world is now welcome to create a Gmail account at mail.google.com/mail/signup", Google's definition of the world was pretty limited.

Gmail is now a public beta in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan, according to BBC. If you live in one of those places, you can go to Gmail.com, and look for "Sign up for Gmail" or you can visit this page to create an account.

As reported on Digg, the exploit takes advantage of the fact that Google puts your details into a JS file. As a result, if you're logged into Gmail and browsing the web, any rogue website can declare the function "google" and then parse all your contacts. The only way to safeguard yourself is to disable Javascript in your browser (or enabled it for trusted sites only) or simply climb into a hole and not browse while logged into Google services like Gmail, Blogger, Orkut, Reader, Calendar, etc. -- you know, the sites you typically have open all day long. For obvious reasons, we will not link directly to the site which demonstrates the exploit on your personal account due to the risk of running possibly malicious code. However, we tested it and found our most precious account -- and those of our contacts -- correctly identified and ready for harvest. But hey, even though Gmail has been out since 2004, it is still "beta"... right?

Google's plan will give the publishing business a high-tech twist: the company will expand its computer system, which already auctions off advertisements on millions of Web sites, to take bids for newspaper ads as well. Hoping to reach out to a new crop of customers, such as small businesses and online retailers, many of the largest newspaper companies, including Gannett, the Tribune Company, The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company and Hearst, have agreed to try the system in a three-month test set to start later this month.

For Google, the test is an important step to the company's audacious long-term goal: to build a single computer system through which advertisers can promote their products in any medium. For the newspaper industry, reeling from the loss of both readers and advertisers, this new system offers a curious bargain: the publishers can get much-needed revenue but in doing so they may well make Google -- which is already the biggest seller of online advertising -- even stronger.

Tom Phillips, who runs Google's print operations, said the company was attracted by the $48 billion spent every year in the United States on newspaper advertising. Google, nonetheless, is trying to position itself as a friend of the newspapers.

"Print adds value the Internet doesn't have," he said. Mr. Phillips, the former publisher of Spy Magazine, was hired by Google earlier this year. "It is a different browse-able reading medium."

Today we launched Google Code Search, which gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. I am really excited about this launch, as it caps off a long sequence of Google product launches for developers in the past year, including Google Maps API v2, Google Calendar API, Google Web Toolkit, Google AJAX Search API, Google Checkout API, project hosting on Google Code, Google Base API, and Google Gadgets for Your Page. Google's developer team is focused on building tools that help developers extend and improve Google's products and improve their own applications, and we are really excited to see all the amazing things that have been created already (traffic map for your Google homepage, anyone?).

The success of the Google Maps API taught us that an API doesn't need to be complex to be powerful, and that principle has formed the basis of our API design. If you haven't seen how far cut-and-paste can get you, check out the list of sample applications we've published for the AJAX Search API. Or check out the Google Calendar API examples; to get a feed of your calendar entries, you just need to fetch a single URL from Google's servers.

We have also launched a number of general-purpose developer and open-source tools like Google Web Toolkit and project hosting on Google Code. Our view is what's good for the web is good for Google -- we want users to have the best online experience possible, and we hope these tools will help developers create compelling applications for their users.

That's because Google's markedly better than Yahoo and other rivals at squeezing more revenue for itself from the advertising it serves up, eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman said during a Monday interview. Also, Google's reputation as the online ad leader makes it more of a first choice for businesses trying out online advertising for the first time.

"These growth numbers establish Google as the unrivaled king of online advertising universe, leaving Yahoo, with its greater advertising diversity and years of media experience, struggling in second place," Hallerman said.

The eMarketer report also shows what a difference a year can make. In 2005, Yahoo and Google had virtually the same amount of U.S. ad revenues. Yet by the end of 2006, Google is expected to pocket almost twice the amount of U.S. ad revenues as Yahoo, according to the new eMarketer report.

This year, according to eMarketer, Yahoo will garner about $2.86 billion in U.S. ad revenues, or an 18% share. It's not a bad year, Hallerman notes, yet Yahoo's share of the U.S. online ad pie will drop this year, albeit fractionally.

Google wouldn't disclose how much it paid for the property just a few miles from the company's campus in Mountain View, California.

"We were pleased to have the opportunity to purchase the place where Larry and Serge did early work," Google spokesman Jon Murchinson told AFP. "We bought it to preserve it as part of our legacy."

Brin and Page were students working on doctorate degrees at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, when they rented the garage from Susan Wojcicki so they could begin building Google.

Brin and Page were, in essence, leaving the security of university life to brave it in the business world, the company said.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

In its latest quarterly test, Lyris tracked more than 57,000 e-mail messages, sent from 57 different businesses and nonprofit organizations to scores of e-mail addresses it owns in many different domains. The messages included marketing pitches for electronics and perfume, and noncommercial matter like a wine newsletter. None of the senders were Lyris clients; all the recipients had signed up to receive the messages.

In the most recent test, 3.3 percent of those e-mail messages were treated as spam by American Internet providers — something that marketers call a false positive.

Since the distinction between spam and legitimate e-mail is not always readily apparent, most providers have had to learn which marketers are legitimate. False positives result when they get it wrong. Individual marketers also get more false positives when they send badly aimed pitches, leading recipients to tag their messages as spam.

For every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. For example, if you spent $1,000 on AdWords last month, this month you can process $10,000 in sales at no cost. The more you spend to promote your business through AdWords, the more you save on transaction processing fees with Google Checkout.

The results page gives users the option to narrow down or filter to produce desired results. For example, I searched for migraine and it let me choose from various options including: treatment, research papers, symptoms, news and alternative medicine. Clicking on "From medical establishment" gives even more options.

Basically, Google Health is what I expected -- an enhanced way to search for health related material. Lots of people were hoping for a more feature-rich product (including myself) but that's not usually how Google operates. They like to see and hear what people want before they spend time developing what they think people want -- this is how they get things done so quickly.

The company will require that all of its cafes and cafeterias serve only the pricier cage-free eggs, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Google uses about 300,000 eggs a year along with 7,000 pounds of liquid egg products.

Animal-rights activists charge that caged chickens -- sometimes called battery-raised, because the cages are piled high -- have miserable lives during their productive egg-laying months, confined six to a cage with only 67 square inches of floor space per chicken. Egg farmers say caged chickens are just as happy as -- and healthier than -- those raised outdoors or in open barns.

Google is jumping on a bandwagon that already includes America On Line and Bon Appetit Management, a catering company serving a number of Silicon Valley companies. Several universities have also pledged to serve cage-free eggs.

Google already has Google Earth, a 3-D mockup of the planet generated from satellite photos. But Google wants you to do more than just zoom through its virtual Earth. The company wants you to add on to it, too.

At the end of April the company released, for free, a popular 3-D modeling program it bought called SketchUp. Google is encouraging developers to use SketchUp to build 3-D layers on top of Google Earth. There's even a website Google provides called 3-D Warehouse, where you can demonstrate what you've built in Sketch Up.

The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator.

The beta version of Google Calendar, which can be accessed without a Gmail account, enables users to search for and add events from within the program or through Web sites that use open standards for calendars. Such sites are invited to add Google Calendar buttons next to events they list.

Users of the new Google application can also access events from friends' shared calendars and import events from Microsoft Outlook. Once they add events, they can use a "Search My Calendars" searchbar to find them. Events can also be created by typing simple messages like "Lunch with Kate 11:30 a.m. Wednesday" in the program's "Quick Add" bar.

Taking a page from sites such as InterActiveCorp's Evite, Google also built invitation management into Google Calendar. Users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with an e-mail account. They can also send event reminders via e-mail or cell phone text message, and keep track of RSVPs from within the program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a customized view and display only certain events at a time on their calendar view.

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The case worries privacy advocates, given the vast amount of information Google and other search engines know about their users.

"This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared," said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. "The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives."

It's all worth remembering for two reasons. First, that kind of mania has taken hold of another stock -- Google. Last week, Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, one of the best known experts on the search industry, put a $600 price target on the stock, only to be topped two days later by Mark Stahlman at Caris & Co., who said that over the longer term Google would likely hit $2000. The stock, which had been trading at about $425, instantly shot up to near $475. It closed Thursday at $463.

Second, Henry Blodget himself has become one of Google's most vocal bears. Indeed, on Tuesday, readers of his blog, InternetOutsider, found the following next to a picture of a grizzly: "No one else is writing this piece, so it will have to be me. I should say upfront that I'm not predicting that this will happen (yet), and I'm certainly not making a recommendation. I'm just laying out a scenario that could kneecap Google and take its stock back to, say, $100 a share."

The web giant's co-founder Larry Page announced the service at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

US network CBS is making shows like CSI and Star Trek available to buy online.

Google is the latest company to explore the idea of selling video on the net, following Apple who led the way with its iTunes online store.

Google representatives in the U.K. denied the LA Times report as "wholly inaccurate", stressing the company's good relationships with existing PC makers.

Speaking to Macworld UK they said: "We have many PC partners who serve their markets exceedingly well and we see no need to enter that market."

The LA Times reported on Sunday that the purported Google PC could cost as little as a couple of hundred dollars because it would not use Windows.

The report notes that most classified advertising publishers, including newspapers and online leaders like Monster.com and Realtor.com, follow the traditional pay-for-placement model, but Google is providing free listings and plans to make money through paid ads placed alongside the free content and through upgrade sales to advertisers.

The report examines Google's strategies and potential problems in the classified field, and outlines ways more traditional publishers have to strengthen their classified services to remain competitive.

"Google is being disingenuous, at best, when it claims Google Base isn't targeting classified advertising," Zollman said. "It's making a strong push into classifieds, as we show in this report. The company should be more honest about its plans, both with potential partners and the public. Microsoft, at least, has been straightforward about its 'Fremont' classifieds project."

"A critical new ingredient we'll see (in 2006) is the acceleration of disruptive business models; 'open innovation' in IT product and service development--the open-source effect--and online delivery of IT as a service--the Google effect," Gens said in a statement. "These disruptive shifts will force most vendors to perform a strategic 'gut check' as they enter the year."

The "Google effect" that Gens described would be prompted by the fear that the search giant will dominate more markets in the years ahead.

"While much of this disruption will be years in the making, and will be overhyped in 2006, the more important impact of 'Google as a disrupter' will be as a spur for traditional suppliers to disrupt themselves before competitors do. This will be evident in enterprise applications, information management and IT services," IDC said.

Gens also believes that open-source-like collaboration will grow in popularity.

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

While it is true that big companies buy domain names to prevent cyber-squatters, there is no point on squatting on a domain that has no services attached to it, so Google might be up to something. Again.

One thing that has people concerned is Analytics' ability to track keywords from other search engines. Google promises they will not be using competitor info to their own advantage, which is all based on trust I assume. But since you could be exposing that data, is there any guarantee they won't? Google's And what does this mean for companies like StatCounter and Web Side Story? Will the freely available tools from Google displace them, or usher in a new era of free web analysis?

The AOL job cuts, which fall in line with similar cuts made periodically over the last few years, reflect a dropping user base that has been driven by a number of factors, Grey Consulting founder and principal analyst Maurene Caplan Grey told the E-Commerce Times.

The analyst, who doubted increased user savvy was behind the cuts, indicated a recent instant messaging deal for interoperability between Microsoft and Yahoo may have also contributed to the job cuts, and further subscriber loss is likely to increase the chances of an acquisition.

Grey added that, although its user base is dropping, AOL still retains a substantial subscriber base of millions, which may be attractive, particularly to the ever-expanding Google.

Analysts and blog commentators have been abuzz this week over purported Web page screenshots showing a new service called "Google Base." Another related service could offer online payments and would put Google head-to-head with eBay Inc.'s PayPal payments service.

"Google Base" as depicted in screenshots on Google-watching sites encourages users to post details of their small business enterprises, articles on current events, automobile listings and even scientific research.

"We are testing new ways for content owners to easily send their content to Google," Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said in a statement.

"We're continually exploring new opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don't have anything to announce at this time," Rodriguez added.

Microsoft is in talks with Time Warner over the sale of AOL or a business partnership, the New York Post reported Thursday. Details of the discussions are murky, but the two companies appear to be discussing a wide array of possibilities, including combining efforts in Internet searching, instant messaging and online advertising, according to the Associated Press

While speculation centered on Microsoft buying all or pieces of AOL, the New York Times reported that Microsoft offered to sell its Internet division to Yahoo and AOL so it could focus on Web searching. The offers ultimately spurred the ongoing discussions with AOL.

Microsoft and AOL declined to comment on the reports.

An alliance between the two companies could result in an even more formidable competitor to Google and Yahoo, both of which have strong head starts over their peers in search technology and online advertising.

One of the most elaborate proposal under discussion would involve combining America Online with the MSN Internet portal and dial-up Internet business, creating the world's largest Internet company. The venture's Web search would be provided by Microsoft. A combination along those lines would be a significant blow to Google, which provides the Web search on AOL's services. This year, 11 percent of Google's revenue came from advertising it placed on AOL sites.

A combination of AOL and MSN would have 18 percent of the search market in the United States, according to Nielsen NetRatings, making it third after Google, with 46 percent, and Yahoo with 23 percent.

Google based its software on open standards, so it will work with smaller networks that are based on the same technology. Text messages can be exchanged with users of Apple Computer Inc.'s iChat, Cerulean Studios' Trillian and the open-source Gaim program.

Google also is inviting programmers to build its technology into their software.

"It means other people and developers will be able to add value to our network by being able to add this to computer games, productivity applications and anywhere else they want," said Georges Harik, director of product management at Google.

The new Google program features a basic user interface with few graphics, much like the main Google search site. It does not spawn pop-up windows or display ads like America Online's Instant Messenger.

The article, by Elinor Mills, a CNET staff writer, gave several examples of information about Google's chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, that could be gleaned from the search engine. These included that his shares in the company were worth $1.5 billion, that he lived in Atherton, Calif., that he was the host of a $10,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Al Gore's presidential campaign and that he was a pilot.

After the article appeared, David Krane, Google's director of public relations, called CNET editors to complain, said Jai Singh, the editor in chief of CNETNews.com. "They were unhappy about the fact we used Schmidt's private information in our story," Mr. Singh said. "Our view is what we published was all public information, and we actually used their own product to find it."

He said Mr. Krane called back to say that Google would not speak to any reporter from CNET for a year.

In an instant-message interview, Mr. Krane said, "You can put us down for a 'no comment.' "

Depending on the exact details, Google's move could potentially threaten eBay's successful PayPal service, which generated $233.1 million, or 23% of eBay's revenue in the first quarter. PayPal has been widely adopted by buyers and sellers on eBay's auction marketplace as a way to pay for purchases. Recently, eBay has been trying to expand PayPal's presence as a payment system for other Web sites. In the first quarter, 71% of PayPal's revenue came from eBay auctions, the company says.

"It could be a pretty big negative for eBay if it happens," says Safa Rashtchy, Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Mr. Rashtchy said he believes Google is also working on a classified-listing service, which also would compete with eBay, San Jose, Calif.

Among the five major search sites -- Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., MSN, America Online Inc. and Ask Jeeves Inc. -- Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were cited for making their headings fainter and their disclosure statements harder to find.

"If you want to call attention to something on a page you put headline above it, [but] you don't make it smaller and more faint," said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch.

Yahoo also received the most criticism about its paid inclusion program, since it is the only engine among the top five to still use the practice, and because one way it charges included sites is based on the number of clicks on their listings.

Currently, Google's news search returns results based on how recently a story was posted online and how closely the story appears to align with the keywords in related stories. However, the search giant has filed for a patent on an improvement that seeks to filter stories by certain measures of quality as well.

Critics are already noting that the approach might be flawed or at least misleading. Short of having news stories read by experts who could rank them based on quality, the technology will instead rely on pre-determined factors such as the reputation of a news site, how much Web traffic it generates and how old and large the organization that produced the story is in terms of news bureaus and employees.

It's one matter when the search engine caches a page you can't get anymore; that's a copyright violation but an all-in-all benign one in the sense that it's only giving you content you could not otherwise see (no different from, say, the web archive).

But it's quite another matter for Google to get in the way of serving current content. This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising.

It also means that Google is copying content on its servers and serving it from there and thus is violating copyright.

And it means that Google is in a position to snoop on data on consumers' usage of sites that Google does not own: That is, Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these "accelerated" pages.

First of all, Google has been noted to be purchasing large quantities of 'dark' fibre-optic capacity, on the cheap (much excess capacity was laid during those heady days of irrational exuberance) to increase its proprietary network bandwidth. To what end? Some of the most far-out rumours say that Google is developing a Skype-esque software that will allow high-quality voice communications over the Internet, costing virtually nothing to the consumer. If Google is making a play into the telecom arena, it would be a relatively late-comer in an arena that is widely populated.

Not unlike its e-mail and mapping software, which are entirely Web-based, Google will release an operating system that will be completely networked and centralized on its servers. You will literally no longer need any software running on your local computer (except the Google Web-browser of course, and a network connection). The computing experience will involve booting your computer, logging into the net, and having access to all your programs (and most of your data) which will reside happily in the ether — all protected and secure, we will be assured, by the good god Google.

Even Google, the Web's self-proclaimed "Do no evil" company, is experimenting with a technology called AutoLink that inserts button-shape links on other people's Web sites that lead back to Google or to Google partners like Amazon.com. Google says it is still only experimenting with AutoLink but, ominously, adds that it is exploring ways to increase the technology's scope. If that happens, predicts New York intellectual property lawyer Jeffrey Neuburger, "There will be some litigation."

Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.