London-- Have you ever imagined taking a stroll in New York City’s Time Square, all the while sitting in your home in UK? Well, having access to Internet, you can take that same stroll down the streets of New York absolutely free. No air fare, no jet lag, no translators needed. Search Giant Google is prepared to debut Street View for UK some time next year as the mind-numbing process of collating and processing millions of photographs of Britain’s streets and roads continues in full swing.

Google Earth, the popular geo-tagging service has been utilized for varying purposes in the UK, such as from locating pools to swim in by nefarious teens to planning vacations and driving routes, but, missing from the UK Google Earth service is the street view that is popular in the US.

London -- A team of eagle-eyed conservationists from Kew Garden have discovered a treasure trove of biodiversity in previously uncharted territory in the southern African nation while scrolling around internet map on Google Earth.

“Hidden Paradise” Yields New Species

The mountainous area of northern Mozambique in southern Africa - crowded with colorful birds, strange insects and rare plants - had been disregarded by wildlife experts and map makers due to inhospitable terrain and decades of civil war in the country.

But while sneaking around an area of Mozambique on Google Earth, which allows the viewer to look at satellite images of anywhere on the globe, researchers found a path of green forest, which had never been spotted before.

New York-- Just a short time back, Google made several changes to its image search, and has now unveiled a new search bar for Google Image! And last week, Google released yet another update to their image search engine

, adding new photo content and has enhanced its Image search to include supplemental content such as clip art and line drawings.

Much like with email, now the rivalry between Google and Yahoo seems to be heated on the image search front as well.

Yahoo has recently rolled out some improvements, and now Google is offering up a nice feature of its own in allowing you to choose more types of results you are looking for when you use Google Image Search. Sean O’Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search writes on the Official Google Blog:

San Francisco-- Search engine goliath Google Inc. has recently made a lot of advancement with Google Apps in 2008. Meanwhile, in an attempt to further improve its services, on Friday released a new feature that enables users to find and access their Google documents straight from the desktop -- that makes us wonder if Google Desktop is a hidden gem we have overlooked.

Dubbed Google Docs Gadget for the Desktop, as a bonus, the new tool enables users to drag and drop spreadsheets, presentation, and word processing files right into the gadget for immediate uploading it to your account.

According to Google Desktop programmers Ronald Ho and James Yum explain why this is useful:

Tokyo-- Ever since it was launched in May, 2007, Google Street View has been constantly drawing criticism for intruding over people’s privacy. A group of Japanese journalists, lawyers and professors last week demanded that the US search giant Google Inc. to close down its “Street View” feature of Google Maps in the country, saying it violates people’s privacy, according to a Reuters report.

“We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing severely violates a basic right that humans have,” said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and head of the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, in a telephonic interview with Reuters.

Washington-- comScore, Inc., a leader in analyzing the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. As expected, search engine titan Google snapped up a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from comScore show.

November 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites managed to pose a 0.4% increase with a total 63.5% while Yahoo’s sites recorded a drop by 0.1%, Microsoft 0.2%, Ask.com 0.2% and AOL LLC increased by 0.1%.

., -- Search engine goliath Google’s continuous efforts in keeping its cash-cow alive as ever, has recently released an upgraded

, which mainly focuses on providing advertisers with campaign critical metrics, is now available for download.

The previous version of AdWords editor was 6.5.1. This version 7.0 of AdWords editor has been released barely 2 months after the last major upgrade released in Oct 2008.

When you open AdWords Editor you should be prompted with the upgrade screen automatically. So, before start upgrading, you can easily checkout which version of AdWords editor you are currently using by opening AdWords Editor, then view Help/About AdWords Editor.

San Francisco -- Google has been vigorously working overtime to ensure that their billions in advertising revenue continue to multiply irrespective of declining global economic conditions. Their strategy: place sponsored listings into every pixel of the screen. Google Suggest, a drop-down feature in Google Search that auto-completes prospective searches, has begun testing ads that accompany the suggestions that appear when people begin typing in a search query.

Google Suggest is bundled with “a novel search feature that provides real-time suggestions while you search.” Well Google is now performing test for the placement of AdWords ads in its recently launched Search Suggest, which appeared in August this year after years of testing in Google Labs.

Mountain View, Calif., -- Search titan Google Inc. at its mobile blog announced that following its debut on Android as well as versions for the iPhone and BlackBerry, it is now adding “Street View” support of Google Maps on the Nokia Symbian/S60 and Windows Mobile smartphone platforms, which are popular in parts of Europe and Australia.

Street-level views allow you to see actual views of your travel itinerary. This will make traveling easy for people using these devices. Now you can travel around with Google maps in your device that will help you to locate your destination easily.

Street view empowers users to have a visual view of buildings, trees, landmarks that they are looking out. It offers complete visual view of street when locating your destination.

San Francisco -- A few weeks ago, shortly after introducing the SMS feature for GMail…Google suddenly pulled the service back due to some glitches. Well, Google has reintroduced the feature back, and this time for good. This Labs feature enables you to quickly send SMS messages via Gchat -- perfect for continuing to annoy your contacts with your witty links well after they leave their computer.

Google said the service encountered some problems with its first attempt to allow chatters to send text messages through their instant messaging program. Most users who checked the feature found it would not fully enable. Google assigns phone numbers for GMail SMS messages and provides keywords to block or turn off messages.

New York -- Google has recently been introducing a lot of nice and nifty upgrades for the Gmail, courtesy of Google Docs. So, when you receive your next mail with a PDF file attachment in Gmail, it would not open your native PDF viewer (like the slow-to-load Adobe Acrobat), instead it allows you to simply hit the “View” link next to it. Just click this link and the PDF opens inside the browser.

From now on, users’ will no longer need to download all the PDF files that come as attachment in your mail. “Clicking ‘View’ quickly opens the PDF inside your browser, complete with the graphics and formatting you expect to see in a PDF. You may have seen this feature before, in Google Docs. It is the way that we did uploading and viewing of PDFs online,” explains Google.

San Francisco -- Search titan Google Inc. pulled the “beta” test label off its Chrome browser, quickly granting a stamp of approval, releasing the browser as a polished product in a direct challenge to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Internet Explorer, the company announced today.

The California search engine behemoth -- known for keeping new software offerings in beta, or test, modes for what seems like ages -- says Chrome proved its merits, and in a relatively brief 100 days.

Google’s age old free web-based Gmail service still marked as “beta” even though it was launched nearly five years ago.

Washington -- Search titan Google Inc. refusing to take a break until it has made every bit of information in the universe searchable, made another stride towards ingesting the entire world’s printed knowledge. It has just announced plans that...

New York -- As part of Google’s unending effort to wring-out more ads dollars out of its online activities, and responding to “advertiser feedback received over the years,” Google AdWords now permits clients to produce search ads for hard alcohol and liqueurs across its content network in the United States.

New York -- It has been a hectic week for those who are interested in Google’s Android OS has been blocked from using it because currently it is available only on the T-Mobile G1. But fortunately, if you are a developer tempted to get your creative developer hands on a T-Mobile G1 -- then Google is seemingly committed to making your dreams come true as it announced the availability of a SIM- and hardware-unlocked version of the first Android smartphone.

As the name implies, the Android Dev Phone 1 is a SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked version of the T-Mobile G1. The Android Dev Phone 1 with a system image is being released to allow developers to create Android applications, and will ship with a bootloader that will allow the user to flash unsigned custom Android builds.

San Francisco -- Search titan Google Inc. on Friday rolled out an updated interface to Google Reader habitués when they next logged into the platform to find a renovated, much cleaner and faster interface from which to manage their RSS feeds. The aim is to simplify things with an attractive look and feel. The new look eliminates much of the color seen in previous iterations of the RSS reader, while setting up a foundation for a more streamlined and customizable navigation system.

The biggest alterations apart from a new look include, collapsible navigation, more visibility for your friends’ shared items, enhanced feed bundles and luckily the ability to hide unread counts.

New York -- Internet search behemoth Google Inc. amid slowing revenue growth; plans to squeeze more ad dollars through new projects, has enthused further interest in its television advertising platform, entered into partnership with Hallmark Channel that will enable advertisers access to high-quality family-friendly programming through the Google TV Ads program, the companies said Wednesday.

Hallmark Channel is owned by Studio City-based Crown Media Holdings Inc.

The deal enables advertisers to reach even more viewers by using Google TV Ads platform, all of the ads will be placed on both the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel.

New Zealand -- Search engine giant Google Inc. on Monday unveiled its controversial “Street View” on Google Maps in New Zealand, making it the seventh country that the popular on-the-ground mapping service is available in. New Zealanders can now take a virtual view of their homes and streets from today, but faces of people have been blurred to protect their identity. 

The free online program allows Internet users to take a virtual “walk” down city streets and lets users view and navigate 360 degree street-level imagery of local cities, towns, regions and remote areas from different angle on their computer screens.

The imagery was collected by a team of Googlers who traveled all over New Zealand to document every single public road in the country over the past year. The team drove Holden Astras, which had cameras mounted on a pole on the roof.

Los Angeles -- Google Maps on Wednesday released a greater redesign and the new street view also received some user interface changes that are pretty fantastic and much more prominent. The latest release now lets users to drag a little human figure named “Pegman” over any streets that light up blue and get a preview of Street View for that location.

Now, whenever a user is viewing a map and wish to experience the reality in cities where Street View imagery is available, you will see a male icon illuminated in orange on the right side controls. This, Google refers it to as “Pegman.”

To activate the Google Maps feature, clicking and dragging the “Pegman” character off the top of the zoom slider and dropping the icon will transfer you to Street View, which will take up the entire maps portion of the screen.

New York -- Search engine giant Google Inc. has started to feel the chilling effects of the drooping economy, is in the process of axing down a contractor workforce that numbers about 10,000, the company confirmed Monday.

Behind the scenes Google has been cutting off workforce since August, and that number is expected to climb toward 10,000 according to WebGuild.

“Hundreds” of employees have been set free in the past few months, the company’s sources reported -- and, they say, a loophole has allowed Google to keep quiet about the cutbacks. The contractor cut story made the rounds Monday after the release of a Silicon Valley WebGuild story with the alarming headline of “Google Layoffs -- 10,000 Workers Affected.”