Jaikumar Vijayan

Google will no longer require news publishers with a paid subscription model to provide at least some free access to their content in order to ensure they get discovered in Google News and Google Search. After ten years of insisting that such publishers implement a so-called “First Click Free ” policy, Google on Monday said […]

U.S. government requests for user data held by Google reached an all time high in the first half of this year, Google’s latest Transparency Report, released Thursday, showed. Between January and June this year, the U.S. government put in 16,823 requests with Google for user data belonging to 33,709 accounts. That is the most data […]

Google has released more details about the company’s approach to authenticating and provisioning employee access to IT systems and services. Google has so far released four whitepapers describing various aspects of the approach, which it calls BeyondCorp. The previous papers have dealt with the technical challenges associated with implementing BeyondCorp, a so-called zero-trust approach that […]

Barely 10 days after Amazon announced a per-second billing option for customers of its Amazon Web Services cloud platform, Google has responded with a plan that extends per second billing to almost all Google Cloud Platform services. Up to now, Google has offered per-second billing for some of its cloud storage options and for those […]

Google is reportedly planning to spin off its online shopping services operation into a separate business unit to satisfy European Union regulators’ demands that the company level the playing field for rival comparison-shopping sites. The standalone Google Shopping unit will have to bid with other shopping sites for ad placement on top of Google’s product […]

Google has released a set of new tools to help advertisers deliver highly personalized ads on YouTube. The tools use information like an individual’s search history, the places they visit, or the apps they may have downloaded to deliver YouTube ads that are much more likely to generate sales than non-targeted ones, the company said […]

Google has added support for natural language processing in its Cloud Search tool for customers of its G-Suite collection of cloud-hosted productivity apps. The new feature allows office workers to use intuitive, natural language commands to search for documents, files and other content in their organizations. Users can type in simple queries like “Docs shared […]

Startups writing applications for Cloudflare’s App Platform can now qualify for up to $100,000 in credits to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for their development work. Some startups will also be eligible for round-the-clock technical support and access to engineers from Google’s technical solutions team under a collaborative initiative announced by the two companies Sept. 19. […]

Google is proposing an auction plan that would enable competing shopping sites to bid for any spot in Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLA) section that appears at the top of the results page when people search for products, according to a Reuters report. The proposal is in response to a directive from European Union antitrust […]

Three female Google ex-employees have filed a pay discrimination lawsuit against the company. The complaint, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco Thursday accused Google of systematically and knowingly paying women lower wages and compensating them less overall than male employees with substantially similar skills and experience. The three ex employees who […]

Google’s efforts to keep its mobile app store free of malware-laden applications appears to be very much a work in progress considering the recent success cyber-criminals have had uploading rogue software to it. This week two security vendors issued separate advisories warning about finding malware-infested applications on Google Play. Check Point Software said it had […]

Yelp has accused Google of scraping photos of local businesses from Yelp’s site and displaying them in Google’s own local search results in violation of commitments the search giant had made with the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in December 2012. In a letter to the FTC, Yelp’s vice president of global public policy, Luther […]