New York -- Following in the footsteps of Yahoo's recent integration with Facebook to its content network, and today search giant announced that it will rolled out a twitter integration feature on its Friend Connect platform which will allow any one with a Twitter or Google account to log-in into a website if it supports Friend Connect platform.

Beginning immediately, a user will now be able to instantly get connected using either his Google account or Twitter ID with sites that use Google Friend Connect. And if they have signed in with their Twitter credentials, their username and profile picture are passed through OAuth back to Friend Connect. Significantly, it means that you can easily tweet with the click of a button. And any comment they leave on that site can be automatically tweeted out.

San Francisco -- Global search engine leader Google has recently been playing around with various homepage designs has formally introduced a brand new version of the search engine's redesigned iconic homepage that clears out all the on screen clutter that has moved in over the past few years and features a sleek fade-in effect that hides all the elements of the page except the logo, search bar, and the buttons.

In a blog post introducing the change, Google said it had tested with 10 different versions of the fade in design before finalizing on the one that has gone live.

Writing in the blog, Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience, Kris Hom, software engineer, and Jon Wiley, user experience designer, said: “Similar to the new super-sized search box we rolled out several months ago, this change is one that is very noticeable at first, and then quickly becomes second nature. We hope you like it.”

Mountain View, California -- Google, facing the wrath from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and some other newspaper owners over the way it offers free access to newspaper articles, said it will allow publishers to set a new parameter on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine, the company has announced.

Under the First Click Free program, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites so that readers would not be able to look at more than five pages in one day.

New York -- For those of you courageous, there are few things more terrifying than the idea of going anywhere near a shopping establishment on Black Friday. Nevertheless, if you have been to Times Square in New York City over the past couple weeks, you might have observed that Google Search by voice is powering Times Square's largest combined displays -- a promotion that will allows users call a number, request a search by voice, and see the Droid-powered results on a huge electronic billboard.

Paris, France -- Google Inc.'s recently revised settlement might have satisfied some objections by authors and publishers, but the controversy may be far from over. Last week European Union ministers have gathered to counter plans by web giant Google to build a joint project on the digitization of books, French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said.

In fact, legal experts and industry analysts who have been closely observing the case believe the fight over Google's ambitious book-scanning efforts is just starting all over again. The EU ministers argue that the project should not be controlled by the private sector alone.

The argument at hand is the ability of the Mountain View, Calif., search company to make available on the Internet digital copies of millions of out-of-print books and “orphan” books, works whose copyright holders cannot be found.

San Francisco -- Google is currently testing a new appearance for its iconic search page, featuring cleaner, bolder graphics and a default side bar with bigger search buttons, brighter colors -- bold white typeface on bright blue -- with a slightly different logo, one without the shadows.

The new aspect is being discovered by a small number of Google users over the past week or so who have already been witnessing the changes as the company tests the new user interface, but not everybody was able to gain access to the interface, although it is not clear when, if ever, the new search interface will be widely deployed.

As you can notice from screen shots below, the revamped Google logo ditches its 3D shading and shadows while the search buttons switch to white text against a bright blue gradient background. It would appear the search team has been smitten by the look of the company's new collaboration stuff, Google Wave.

Mountain View, California -- Adding attachments at times to Gmail can be quite annoying when the Internet connection is slow or intermittent. Google just this week began promoting its offline strategy with the announcement of the ability to include attachments in composed emails when offline. “Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you are offline you would not be able to include in-line images),” Google wrote in a blog post. “Just add the attachment and send your message.”

Earlier this year, Google unveiled an offline version of Gmail, and since then has been regularly enhancing features in Gmail and has now added offline attachment support for it. Built on Google's Gears platform, the feature downloads a cache of your mail to your PC. When you are logged on the Web, it syncs the cache with the Gmail servers. Google Chrome web browser users have Google Gears already installed.

Germany -- Search engine behemoth Google once again stomped in to strict privacy fracas in Germany. Data protection officials in Germany are warning website owners that the use of Google Analytics, the free commodity that enables website owners to derive aggregated statistics about their visitors, is once again facing a potential ban in Germany after several federal and regional government officials objected to it over data protection concerns, according to reports in national newspaper Die Zeit.

Earlier this year Google's controversial panoramic mapping service “Street View” came under scrutiny over privacy protection in Germany, and now a group of state and federal data protection analysts are meeting on Thursday and Friday to talk about whether the use of informational tools such as Google Analytics are legal according to German law.

Mountain View, California -- Stranded in the middle of a foreign land, armed only with a mobile phone? Search engine titan Google has unveiled a mobile version of its new movie search service for the Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Pixi, Android-powered smartphones and Palm's webOS, to make on-the-fly searching for movies easier.

With this latest mobile fine-tuning, Google's movie search can locate theaters showing a movie and even play a trailer on mobile devices. Genre filters in Google movie search allow finding movies by type.

Mobile Movie Search Optimized

San Francisco -- Barely days after it announced plans to gobble up Teracent, an online display advertising company, Google on Wednesday offered a glimpse on its blog of the current and still developing many forms of advertising we can expect to see in its search results. Google has now introduced a new feature in search ads, making it available to all U.S. Advertisers, which include videos and maps as well as images and price comparison features for specific products.

The new feature is labeled Product Extensions and it collects information from an advertiser's account in Google Merchant Center.

Mountain View, California -- In an attempt to make TV advertising more accountable -- and to sell more of it through its online auction service – Google today announced it has made a license agreement with DVR company TiVo that enables the Internet search provider to integrate TiVo set-top box viewing data into its measurement of audiences for inventory sold through the Google TV Ads platform.

Yes, it is true that the two Silicon Valley companies are teaming up. The deal includes around 3.6 million subscribers to the universe of set-top boxes that Google TV Ads has to draw on to analyze the second-by-second TV viewing behavior of audiences. Google also has a deal with Dish Network and access to more than 13 million set-top boxes via the satellite carrier.

San Francisco -- Black Friday sale is a few days away but, web search behemoth Google Inc. is continuing its late-year spending spree, on Monday announced that it is buying Silicon Valley display advertising technology startup Teracent, which expands its competition with display leader Yahoo Inc.

“Teracent's technology can select and adopt from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time -- tweaking images, products, messages or colors,” Google said in a blog post. “These components can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.”

Online advertising is separated into search -- normally text ads associated with content on a Website -- and display, such as banner ads that are often used as marking tools by corporations.

Mountain View, California -- Google has reinforced its map search considerably since introducing in July, and has since made one upgrade in October, and now the search titan is making many other interesting changes to make property searches easier and search results more useful for users, the most significant being the option to search for properties by simply adding “real estate” to a map search.

The enhancement also extends to other variations of the keyword and search combinations, such as “homes for sale,” and link locations to individual “place pages” which offers searchers with more information.

San Francisco -- Similar to most “mobile versions” of websites, Google News was made compatible for use on devices attributing what Steve Jobs once called “the baby Internet.” Google just made some improvements to this service which is available now for iPhone, Android and Palm Pre users.

The enhanced Google News Mobile is far more feature-rich than the old one and is more consistent in its appearance with the desktop version compared to the old “mobile-optimized” Google News. So, if you are so accustomed to checking out Google News on a web browser Google tried to emulate the same look and feel to the Google News mobile, providing them with the “same richness and personalization” on their mobile devices as they expect from their desktop.

Mountain View, California -- In addition to recently rolling out real-time Translation and Text-to-Speech service, search engine titan Google, in a significant move toward making millions of YouTube's massive inventory more accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, on Thursday also unveiled automatic captions and timing features for YouTube videos.

Google on Thursday said that it has combined its machine-generated speech-recognition technology with the existing YouTube caption system, which would initially be available only in English and on videos from 13 YouTube “partner channels” but it expects to extend the feature eventually to all videos uploaded to the site.

Los Angeles -- Everyday the web is spreading out to more countries, making it difficult to converse with people, hence translations has becoming even more important. Google on Tuesday, extended its much-loved Translate service with a bundle of useful new features. The service can now translate around 51 different languages, and some interesting features, but Google took it to the next level with a completely overhauled interface.

The biggest feature and the most useful one is the new real-time translation, allowing you to get the results instantly. Once you enter the text in the text box, the translation in your chosen language will automatically appear underneath, no need to press the “Translate” button. Oddly, though, the “Translate” button is still present.

San Francisco -- Expanding in to the territories of web designing, Google Sites, which was introduced around two years back, on Tuesday Google announced the addition of new templates and a public gallery, empowering businesses and consumers an endlessly simplifies for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required.

The search giant introduced Google Sites in February, 2008 and has appealed to tens of millions of users since then. Google Sites is based on technology Google benefited with its acquisition of JotSpot, a provider of wiki creation tools in October, 2006.

Mountain View, California -- After attaining success with last months release of “Similar Images” feature in Google Labs, web search leader Google on Tuesday unveiled that it is publicly experimenting with a new image search interface, that helps users find and explore images being offered by Google, dubbed as: “Image Swirls,” which delivers image search results in a different and more visual interface.

The concept behind Google Swirl characteristic is similar to the “Wonder Wheel” options that allows users to explore related search queries with text and was recently introduced in Google Search Panel. But as for Swirl, which works with actual images not just image queries. Google describes Image Swirl:

Mountain View, California -- Google has scooped up Microsoft's former Startup Whisperer, just two weeks after Redmond dumped him on the street. As you may remember that just 12 days ago in a most recent round of layoff, Don Dodge, the Microsoft startup evangelist, was given a pink slip as part of a broader workforce reduction. Last week he was seen in Silicon Valley to “see friends” according to him.

Until the first week of this month, when he was among the approximately 800 employees dismissed in Microsoft's latest round of layoffs, Don Dodge, was the director of business development for Redmond's emerging business team.

In his blog post announcing the move, Dodge sounds pretty mixed in his feelings about his former employer. A veteran of countless startups-including AltaVista, Napster, and Ray Ozzie's Groove Networks - he was a kind of über-evangelist to outside startups and developers.

New York -- YouTube on Monday announced that it is making alliance with Univision Interactive Media, the most-watched Spanish-language media network in the U.S., to feature short and full-length programs from the Spanish-language broadcast network to on Google Inc.'s online video-sharing site YouTube.

This will be the first third-party site to host the Univision content, according to YouTube. On the YouTube Blog, Strategic Partner Development Manager Laura Lee described the importance of this arrangement by stating that the size of YouTube's Hispanic audience has increased by 80 percent in the last year. She also stated that this deal counts as “one of YouTube's most comprehensive partnerships for full-length content to date.”