San Francisco -- Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, released a new Google Labs property called “Social Search,” which is intended to help Google users to find “publicly available web content from your social circle online”, became live, the company said on Monday.

Google Social Search is intended to “deliver more relevant public content from your broader social circle,” Google said in a blog post.

Mountain View, California -- After observing that a vast number of web searches stemmed from smartphones, search engine behemoth Google last week announced that it had introduced a new feature available with its “Google Custom Search,” namely the fact that it now formats search results to fit on mobile phones.

Earlier this month, the Mountain View, California, company has rolled out AdSense for mobile to optimize advertisement potential on these devices. Introducing a mobile version of Custom Search was one of the most requested features in Google's recent Product Ideas survey, the firm said.

Los Angeles -- Having access to dozens of sources for the latest news events in the tech world right at your fingertips, and if you are an avid Google Reader user as well, you now have the reason to enjoy... The search titan, last week added some new personalization features to its Google Reader to help tailor content on its Web 2.0 feed more neatly, by tracking a user's online habits, the company wrote in a blog post.

The Mountain View, California, company has unveiled two updates that includes something called the “Explore” section that appears under the “People You Follow” section. The new Explore section appears in your sidebar above your already-existing folders and feeds and provides you with “Popular Items” and “Recommended Sources.”

San Francisco -- Google on Friday, unveiled several aesthetic refinements to its Maps program, the biggest changes since its initial launch 4.7 years ago, the company said. The changes come in a variety of forms, such as sharpening up the imagery, improvements to color, density, typography, and road-styling. These changes are visible instantly in the “map” and “hybrid” views around the world.

For this map of San Francisco, for example, Google has improved the readability and density of the roads, in contrast to background detail such as local roads, and neighborhoods and major arterial roads. Notice how the roads and names are visible more effectively in the new version. As visible in the above photo, the thick street outlines that can make maps harder to read have been eliminated.

Mountain View, California -- Google is preparing to bestow upon beleaguered record companies a potentially powerful boost by allowing music lovers to listen to songs or buy them directly from search results pages in a partnership to be unveiled next week with online music sites, according to reports Wednesday.

So far nothing is apparent about the service, which is rumored to be called “Google Music,” “Google Audio,” or “One Box,” although it is confirmed that it will be announced next week and as part of a service tentatively called “Google OneBox,” according to five executives who were close to the matter but declined to be identified because they are not authorized to disclose the information.

San Francisco -- In a surprise announcement at Wednesday's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience, revealed that users of Google's search engine will soon be able to display content created by friends in search results lists through an upcoming Google product called “Social Search”.

Currently, the feature is in the “Google Labs” hatchery and will require a Google account and a Google Profile to work. Those who opt in will find content created by people from their own social graph included at the bottom of Google's search results. To utilize the new functionality, users must be signed into Google, and must inform Google which profiles on the various social networks belong to them.

Mountain View, California -- Last year, Google Analytics team unveiled a ton of novel features and this year they are at it again. The search engine behemoth today at the annual meeting announced a slew of new features for its Google Analytics service, there are some quite useful features in those updates. These new enhancement gives the Analytics tools more power, flexibility and intelligence.

As part of its upgrade to Google Analytics announced today, Google is introducing a number of useful enhancements, including the ability to track traffic to both mobile sites and applications, and explanations of what device is being used. The company is building a new intelligence engine. This means that marketers will be able to track digital campaigns across web and mobile platforms, with the most significant changes in a site's metrics when you view its profile in Analytics.

San Francisco -- People around the globe already enjoy many of Google's services online. But how about enjoying in-flight Wi-Fi and that for free? For the next three months, travelers flying on Virgin America over the holidays, will be able to access those same services from above Earth too. Virgin America is teaming up with Google to offer free in-flight Wi-Fi service on every flight during the holiday season, thanks to Google, the companies said Monday.

At a time when air travelers are faced with burgeoning fees for just about everything, Google and Virgin America on Monday announced they are partnering to offer free Wi-Fi Internet connectivity to all Virgin America passengers traveling between November 10, 2009, and January 15, 2010.

Los Angeles -- Search engine titan Google Inc., normally famous for creating its global business empire using little or no any conventional marketing method to promote its wares, has nonetheless found that such an approach is effective for its enterprise products and, has launched its biggest ever international advertising campaign running across six countries using the tag-line “Gone Google” designed to win over users of Microsoft products.

Google said more than 2 million businesses now employ its online office software, and the Web search leader is going global with an advertising campaign to entice customers away from Microsoft Corp and IBM products.

The “Gone Google” campaign is targeted at IT and business executives who influence IT purchasing decisions, and is configured to sell them on the benefits of using products like Google Apps and the Search Appliance enterprise search device.

San Francisco -- Based on various reports that appeared this morning, it looks as though Google was narrowly escaped from weathering a storm of bad publicity. According to a recent report from a technology blog site that claimed to have discovered an apparent transcripts of some voice mail messages from “Google Voice” that Google indexed, and these were showing up in search results. Following the brouhaha that the company's nearly universally lauded service, Google Voice, was actually compromising user security in a major way. Google has decided to modify its policy and not index them to prevent this from happening, but some of the damage is already done, the company said Monday.

Since its introduction in March, Google Voice enabled users to post voice mail transcripts on public Web pages. But, according to various reports, Google search has actually been crawling user voicemails, making them public and discoverable. About 31 seemingly random voicemails were apparently discoverable through search.

Mountain View, California -- If you are an avid Google Docs user, and receive bulk of emails with links to documents that your friends share with you. Google has earlier made it easier for Gmail users to preview items such as YouTube videos and Picasa Web albums without leaving their Gmail inboxes. Now, the internet search leader has added another feature to Gmail that lets you preview the contents of Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, and presentations directly in your inbox.

Previously, opening these links in another tab or window was sort of annoying. But beginning today, users can preview the contents of a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation right in your Gmail inbox.

Frankfurt, Germany -- Global search and advertising giant Google Inc. on Thursday, disclosed its intention at the Frankfurt Book Fair that in the first half of next year it intends to launch an online bookstore named “Google Editions” that will offer books in digital format that can be read on laptops, cell phones and other mobile devices with a Web browser, threatening to upset a burgeoning market for dedicated e-readers dominated by Amazon's Kindle.

The Internet giant said that it will initially offer about half a million e-books in partnership with publishers with whom it already cooperates, where they have digital rights. Readers will be able to buy e-books either from Google directly or from other online stores such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. Google will host the e-books and make them searchable. The e-books can be read on a range of gadgets, including e-book readers, laptops and cell phones. The store is slated to open next year.

London -- Google owned popular video sharing website on the planet, YouTube, which claims to have unlimited amount of content to present to users at any givent moment, which also receives 20 hours of video footage being uploaded to YouTube every minute, then how does your video stand out in the crowd? In an attempt to comb out those willing to pay for placement, Google on Wednesday launched a new auction-based ad platform called “Promoted Videos” program to AdWords.

The official announcement, posted lately on YouTube Biz Blog, adds news that the new feature has evolved into a much broader vehicle for advertisers since it launched in the US last year.

Washington -- Despite the huge marketing and advertising thrust Microsoft has given Bing, the new search engine failed to gain much ground among users in September, while Google Inc. continued to lead the U.S. core Web search rankings in September, whereas rival Yahoo! Inc. claimed a distant second, according to data released by Internet data tracking firm comScore Inc. Wednesday.

Americans performed 13.8 billion core searches in September, dropped 1% from 13.9 billion core searches carried out in the previous month that had one additional day compared to September.

Mountain View, California -- Google Docs has long enabled users to collaborate their documents between one another. Google Docs has announced some new updates this week that makes it easier for users to share items, upload multiple documents, as well as to collaborate and work together on particular Google Docs files. The new tweaks also brought a slight change to the Google Docs homepage with a more uniform and simpler look.

In the past, Google Docs users had to set the access permission status for documents, spreadsheets and presentations each at a time. But Google has kept to its commitment it made back in July to enable Google Docs users to establish shared folders.

But once Google completes rolling out its fresh round of Google Docs changes, sharing a group of items or files is now easily done just by putting those items into a folder and then sharing that folder to members of your working group.

San Francisco -- Google Voice has created a buzz for a while now, but since its inception, the service has been open to only a limited number of users. Google on Tuesday in a blog post said that it will now allow Google Voice testers to invite “friends and family” to join the service.

According to Google, Voice users have been requesting to “share Google Voice with friends and family.” To fulfill their request, the company said, in the next few weeks, it will gradually add an “invite a friend” link to the left-hand side of Voice users' in-boxes.

So, when a user wishes to invite a friend, they only need to enter the recipient's e-mail address, append a short message, and send it off. The recipient will receive the message and a link allowing them to sign up for the innovative (and free) service that offers a plethora of telephony features, including the ability to divert all of your home, mobile, and work calls through a single number, as well as record calls, and read transcriptions of voicemails.

Vancouver, Canada -- In a service that raises privacy concerns in other countries where it has been implemented, and despite progressive talks with Canada's privacy commissioner, search engine behemoth Google Inc. last week activated its controversial Street View mapping service to 11 cities in Canada, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa among other to millions of viewers over the Internet.

Canadians can now take a tour of their streets on Google's Street View, which became live in Vancouver and several other Canadian cities last week.

San Francisco -- Google owned widely popular video-sharing website YouTube today revealed that it has surpassed a new milestone by serving up more than one billion video streams a day. The billion videos announcement was made by YouTube's Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO in a blog marking the third anniversary of its acquisition by Google.

“Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube,” Hurley said in a blog post. “This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you,” he said.

Washington -- Recently, Google has been facing a tough time. Earlier this week, the search giant was busy defending the company's book-scanning project, and now its Google Voice application is being questioned for additional investigation from the government. Two weeks after AT&T complained about anti-competitive activity by Google Voice -- The US Federal Communications Commission on Friday responded via a letter sent to the Mountain View company, asking it to provide details by October 28 on its much-discussed Google Voice, explaining whether Google has violated telecommunications laws with its Internet phone service that has been refusing to connect some calls to rural areas.

The inquiry comes after complaints from telecom giant AT&T and a group of bipartisan lawmakers, blamed Google of violating FCC open-internet policies with Google Voice, requesting the authority to take up a review of the service that blurs the line between traditional telephone and Web services.

San Francisco -- Google clearly wants users to have a smooth experience when using its search engine. The search titan has just unfolded a novel option to view PDF files in search results -- by providing the Quick View facility that would display these PDFs right onto the browser with all the PDF formating features intact.

Although in the past, it was only possible to view these PDFs by clicking on “View as HTML,” without compromising on the original formatting, such as graphics, tables and fonts, before being downloaded as PDF documents to view them in a separate viewer application.

“Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application. To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking 'View as HTML',” Krista Davis, software engineer, and Raj Krishnan, product manager, wrote.