Mountain View, California -- Are you fed up of shuffling away from Gmail to navigate and listen to your Google Voice messages? Well, Google on Thursday lifted that tedious task by adding a new feature in Gmail labs that allows you to play Google Voice voicemails right from Gmail.

“Previously, clicking on 'Play Message' opened a new page in your browser, but starting today, you can play voicemails right in Gmail,” Vincent Paquet, Google Voice product manager, wrote in a blog post.

If you are not closely acquainted with Google Voice, Google compares it to Gmail for phone calls and text message. In a long awaited feature of Google Voice was a simple one: forward inbound text messages to email. Google Voice users get voicemails auto-transcribed and emailed to them, but text messages were not.

Mountain View, California -- Search engine giant Google is planning to roll out a micro-payments platform to support the newspaper industry that would enable them to charge a nominal amount for to buy digital content through its Checkout online payment system, an idea that could help publishers struggling with the impact of the Internet, according to a report on Wednesday.

This onerous Google project was first revealed by the Nieman Journalism Lab, in a document that Google sent to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies to formulate ways to help online publishers monetize digital content more effectively.

Harvard University's Nieman published the Google proposal on its website, niemanlab.org, and described Google's willingness as somewhat “surprising” given “the newspaper industry's tenuous relationship with Google.”

Mountain View, California -- If you see something a bit different on Google.com, do not panic or adjust your screen. Something is different because Google today announced it has increased the size of the search box that appears on its home and results pages, giving users more space to enter their queries.

“Although it is a very simple enhancement, no effect whatsoever on Google's searching capability or functionality, nevertheless we are excited about it,” said Google VP Marissa Mayer in a blog post announcing the change. The company said the change “s-u-p-e-r-sizes” the search box, but users can be the judge.

Google said the reasoning behind the change was to stress their focus on search. Apart from the bigger search box, Google is also making the search terms you enter larger as well as the search suggestions that appear when you time your search terms.

San Francisco -- Google Inc. on Wednesday attempted to inform financial analysts that regardless of all the care it dedicates to projects like Google Apps, staying on top of search and search advertising is what really matters. The search titan detailed a series of new search ad formats by incorporating its paid search ads with video, product images and other features as the Internet company strives to refine its money-making capabilities in a tough advertising environment.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company in a Webcast with investors and analysts on Wednesday, said that it continues to realize many opportunities to improve search and search advertising by developing new formats, tapping the mobile Internet and making it easier for advertisers to manage their ads. Google executives walked through a variety of innovations designed to make its search ads more relevant to users and more effective for advertisers.

“The search advertising industry is still very much in its infancy. I believe we are just getting started,” said Nick Fox, who oversees Google's ad quality program.

Dubai -- With the Internet crowds increasing up in Arabian Peninsula, search engine behemoth Google, running after its arch rival Yahoo to capture the market share, yesterday in Dubai and Cairo, unveiled Ejabat (Answers), aimed at the Arabic language users on the web, developed by its Arabic Labs team. The service is similar to Yahoo Answers, but in real time, and in Arabic.

The online service unveiled Tuesday would allow Arab users to answer each other's questions, a move designed to boost the amount of Web content available in Arabic.

The new service comes just two weeks after Yahoo Inc. has successfully acquired the biggest online Arabic portal Maktoob, aspiring to better serve the speedily expanding population of young and tech-savvy people in the Middle East, and as always Google did what it does better: break in raw markets.

Brussels -- In a move to appease European publishers' concerns over book digitization, Internet search giant Google Inc. on Monday said it will pull out all European books that are still listed as commercially available from a $125 million U.S. settlement with publishers to scan orphaned and out-of-print books in the U.S. and sell them online.

As the European Union evaluates a U.S. deal between Google and publishers, the company offered concessions that is aimed to pacify the concerns its book digitization project has raised in Europe.

U.S. publishers sued Google for disrespecting their copyright when the company started digitizing books. They then reached a revenue-sharing settlement covering books that are still copyright-protected, ones whose copyright has expired, as well as the huge number of books that are technically still protected but have fallen out of print and where the copyright owner cannot be located.

Beijing, China -- Google is once again regaining its position in China after a row in which authorities accused the US Internet giant of illegally disseminating pornographic content, as the Chinese authorities now approved of Google's efforts to filter porn from search results on its China portal following state-led criticism of the links, the former head of Google China KaiFu Lee said on Monday.

China has criticized Google of illegally disseminating pornographic content.

Chinese authorities have criticized Google of illegally disseminating pornographic content as part of a wider suppression on what authorities claim is unhealthy Internet content. Google's sites have been intermittently blocked in recent months.

Rome, Italy -- Google late last week received a piece of bad news as Italy's Antitrust regulators have expanded their investigation of Google News to include the company's search engine in that country, according to reports.

According to reports, the investigation began last week by Italy's Antitrust Authority that now wishes to take a closer look at Google's overall operation, based on complaints from the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) that the news aggregation site, “Google News Italia,” was making it harder for them to attract users and advertisers.

Google Italy's offices got searched, and the concept of an $18.5 million fine was mentioned. Google denies the charges.

“Considering that, from the assembled documents, it appears that Google News Italia is managed by the company Google Inc ... it is deemed necessary to broaden the ongoing investigation to the company Google Inc.,” the competition watchdog said in a statement on its website (www.agcm.it/).

Shanghai, China -- Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google's Greater China operations, a former Microsoft executive and the subject of a resentful employee custody battle between Google and Microsoft, appointed to commence Google's business in the most populous country in the world, is stepping down in mid-September from the company after working for years to establish the Internet giant as a formidable player in the country to start a new venture in Beijing, Google said Friday.

Lee, who stepped out of Microsoft in 2005 to take over Google's operations in China, where Google arrived later than some of its rivals to establish a beachhead, is resigning from the company to start his own venture and will be succeeded by two Google employee, the company confirmed. Lee's departure was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

San Francisco -- Aiming to eliminate the cumbersome process of typing for its users, search engine titan Google has recently added its predictive Google Suggest feature to Google News. “We are delighted to announce that we have enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish versions,” Google said in a blog post.

Now when you go to search for something on Google News, and as you begin to type in a query, Google will attempt to work out what you are searching for and offers relevant suggestions in a drop-down menu. The feature has been available on Google.com since August 2008.

San Francisco -- In an attempt to lure entertainment business that has so far remained aloof from search advertising, and to win over entertainment advertising dollars, search engine giant Google has teamed up with self-service video creation company “SpotMixer” to offer small and medium sized businesses a chance to win $25,000 worth of free national TV advertising for the “TV for All” video contest on YouTube.

With the passing of time, “Text ads,” which has become a synonym with search advertising industry, lacks much of an attraction as a medium for promoting a movie but Google is trying out a new search ad format to tap into this potentially huge market.

Google AdWords users will now have a new alternative for creating in-stream video advertising now that One True Media's SpotMixer's do-it-yourself online video ad technology has been integrated within AdWords' In-Stream Video advertisers, an arrangement that allows users to make videos that can run over the Google Content Network or on YouTube.

Mountain View, California -- Millions of Google's free e-mail service users were handicapped for about two-hour from accessing Gmail as it failed again on Tuesday afternoon, when users attempted to log on to find the service is no longer operational, seems to be the result of overloaded servers, a problem that Google acknowledged.

Gmail may be out of beta, but it is still not geared up for prime time Tuesday. (Credit: Google)

This Gmail outage is the fourth occurring this year, and last year Google apologized for a 15-hour outage. Gmail users from the world over announced problems on the Gmail forum, and remarks over the problem flooded Twitter.

San Francisco -- Search and advertising behemoth Google Inc., has inked a deal to distribute Chrome Web browser in Sony Computers to be sold in North America, clamping the company's first such deal with a PC vendor since it introduced the Web browser last year to compete with Microsoft.

Sony began installing Chrome in PCs bound for North America in May, a Sony representative said. The deal was initially a test run for the two companies, but it could expand the reach of Google's novice product which falls behind browsers offered by Microsoft Corp and the Mozilla foundation in market share.

Google spokesperson Eitan Bencuya said the deal with Sony went into effect this summer, but declined to give further details of the terms of the deal, such as which Sony PC models would be pre-installed with the Chrome browser, or any financial terms.

Mountain View, California -- Although Google Translate certainly need to polish up to become more perfect in many of its translations, nevertheless, the site offers an incredibly useful tool when trying to interpret a word, phrase or entire site in a foreign language. Internet giant Google on Monday announced that it had added nine new languages to its Translate service, its automatic translation program.

At last, Google unleashed a way for people to transcribe one language into Yiddish.

The Mountain View, California-based company, in a blog post, said Google Translate, which already features dozens of widely used languages including English, French, German, Japanse, Chinese, and Russian as well as some more obscure languages, today, added nine more languages that are Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. This brings the total number of languages supported by the service to translate to 51.

New York -- Google, being a champion behind efforts to make the world's information “universally accessible and useful” and Creative Commons, a nonprofit Copyright campaign advocacy group, last week announced that it has received a gift from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe -- to the tune of $500,000.

One intriguing question is exactly whose checkbook the donation issued from; a post on the Creative Commons blog always puts Wojcicki's name first when naming the pair. A relevant point is that “Fortune” attached Brin's net worth at $12 billion in mid-March.

A post over at the Creative Commons blog says:

“Today's challenging economic climate has made it difficult for nonprofit organizations like Creative Commons to raise funds, making Wojcicki and Brin's wonderful gift all the more appreciated. CC is busier than ever -- we are working with artists, scientists, educators, students, programmers, entrepreneurs, companies, universities, governments, and cultural institutions around the world to increase sharing and improve collaboration in ways that benefit all parts of society.”

London -- With the mounting pressure from competitors and various organizations, regulators in Italy have initiated an inquiry into Google News at the behest of publishers who allege the Mountain View giant of dropping their sites from its search results unless they agreed to be part of Google News.

The inquiry has been initiated in response to a complaint that was filed by an Italian Newspaper Publishers Federation, FIEG, which also denounced that the use of its members' content on Google News Italia has a negative impact on their ability to attract users and advertisers, the Antitrust Authority said in a statement.

Google News has come under fire in Italy. (Credit: Screenshot by eBrandz)

San Francisco -- Ever wonder which pizza restaurant you went to last time you were in town? Well, Google has now made it easier to find out businesses in Street View in Google Maps to refresh your memory. A recent update to Google Street View drops an informational pin on the location, when a user does a local search, the bubble that pops up on business results will show a Street View link.

The latest enhancement to Google Maps is not that big, but it should make it just a little bit easier to find that business you have been searching for. Now let us say after you are up and dressed, you want to grab some pizza. Simply click on the “search nearby” link and enter “pizza.” Google pulls you out of the street view to show the closest places to grab a slice. The company has added a link to Street View directly onto the business listing dialog popup on Google Maps.

San Francisco -- Search and advertising titan Google Inc. is leaving no stone unturned in an attempt to collect every advertising dollar. The company has just announced plans via a post at the Inside AdSense Blog that it is opening up its ad platform to multiple Google-certified ad networks that will soon be competing with AdWords advertisers to appear on AdSense sites.

This means that the networks will have to meet some strict standards as non-AdWords publishers will soon be able to bid on Google ad auction.

This new favor may be either because of the weakening growth in revenue or because it feels comfortable enough with its lead, Google is opening up its AdSense program to third-party ad vendors.

Mountain View, California -- If you are operating a business empire that is spread across more than one country or region, then communicating the simplest things to your employees becomes painful; and that sometimes as well creates a blunder out of it. However, Google on Thursday, added automatic translation to Google Docs empowering users to translate documents on the spot into 42 different languages.

Google already provides an independently operated translation service called Google Translate. It allows users to plug in text and translate it to a number of different languages. Google Docs' latest smart translation powers are based on the same technology and offer the convenience of translating documents without the need to cut-and-paste into a separate Web site or service.

The new feature, tucked away in a settings menu, is exceedingly simple to use that intelligently detects in which language the original document is written. With a document open, simply select the “Tools” option. “Translate Document” appears in the Tools listing and lets you pick which language you would prefer the document to be translated into.

Mountain View, California -- Google is quickly following the race to keep pace with the industry leader, today announced that it would embrace the EPUB digital book format for its distribution of digital books, allowing users to download over 1 million public domain books, which is an open and free industry standard for electronic books, giving the standard a significant boost in the ongoing tussle for a dominant digital book format.

In recent months, EPUB format is supported by a wide variety of different applications, and is one of the dominant formats for digital books. Sony two weeks ago also said it would begin selling digital books in the format, and now Google is following the footstep in the same direction, so it should be easy for many people to access literature this way.

EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and backed by companies such as Adobe Systems, Random House, Harlequin and OverDrive, is a technology standard that strives to be what MP3 is to digital music files and MPEG is to video.