Jaikumar Vijayan

The pre-spring clean out at Google continues unabated. Barely four weeks after pulling the plug on the Google Glass Explorer Edition and just days after announcing its decision to retire the Helpouts video service, Google appears to have ended another of its ventures. This time around, it is Google’s Sparrow email app for Apple’s iOS […]

In what appears to be a response to recent criticism, Google has added a 14-day grace period to its 90-day deadline for software vendors to patch security vulnerabilities reported to them under the search giant’s controversial Project Zero vulnerability research and disclosure program. For disclosure deadlines that expire on a weekend or a holiday, Google […]

Google has decided to pull the plug on its Helpouts expert help video service barely 15 months after launching it. The company will shut down the service on April 20 because of what it described as a lack of market interest. “Since launching in 2013, Helpouts has been a home for people to connect with […]

Under fire in Europe over its privacy practices, a senior Google executive admitted to German lawmakers that the company has made some mistakes in the past but insisted it remains firmly committed to protecting consumer privacy interests. In an address to the Bavarian Parliament this week, Rachel Whetstone, Google’s senior vice president of communications and […]

Unconfirmed reports that Google could soon launch a mobile payment service called Plaso have stirred speculation over the future of the company’s existing Wallet service and its commitment to the near-field communication (NFC) protocol for mobile payments. Google’s alleged plan was reported earlier this week by The Information, which described the service as something that […]

Google has released a new open-source toolset for developers struggling to measure the relative performance of the Google Cloud Platform against cloud offerings from other vendors. The company’s new PerfKit Benchmarker offers what Google claims is a way for organizations to do an apples-to-apples comparison of application performance on cloud platforms from different service providers. […]

Over the years, Google has taken considerable pride in its efforts to make company data centers greener. The Internet behemoth says its data centers already use 50 percent less energy than those belonging to other companies, and it has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars over the years in making them even more environmentally friendly. […]

In a move that is sure to appeal to hypochondriacs everywhere, Google will soon start serving up what it claims will be high-quality medical facts on more than 400 common health conditions via Google Search. Users researching common, and not-so-common, ailments on Google will get relevant data on the topic that the Internet search giant […]

Google is offering 2GB of free storage to users who review and manage their Google Account security settings over the next few days. The company announced the offer Tuesday, on Safer Internet Day, as part of an effort to get users to pay more attention to online security. “We have many protections in place to […]

A Google-appointed group of advisors said the company has little reason to implement the European Union’s right to be forgotten mandate on a global basis. In a 44-page document released Feb. 6, the eight-member panel of academicians, rights advocates and legal experts held that Google could meet the objectives of the mandate by limiting its […]

Google’s search engine results could soon include real-time tweets from Twitter under an agreement that the two companies confirmed on Feb. 5. A Google spokeswoman late Thursday confirmed the partnership between the two companies in an email to eWEEK in which she said she did not have any additional details to share at the moment. […]

Google has quietly started shipping Android 5.1 Lollipop, the latest version of its mobile operating system, on Android One smartphones in Indonesia. The company has not officially announced the new Android version yet. So not many details are available on the changes that Google has introduced with it. But the Android One home page for […]