Steve Bryant

A Google researcher says the key to understanding Google’s strategy is to look beyond the consumer applications of its patented technology. The USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) published twelve Google patents last week, revealing more details about the company’s eforts to employ geocoding technology in its search applications. The patents (summarized by SearchEngineWatch here) […]

Hackers have stepped up their attack on Google’s sites, this time targeting Gmail. Websense Security Labs reported Monday that phishing attacks against Google have increased in sophistication. In the latest attacks, users are shown a spoofed copy of the Gmail log-in page with a message claiming, “You WON $500.00!” The page tells the reader that […]

Update: The new Google office will be primarily for the company’s advertising efforts. The New York Times reports today that Google will open a research center office in Ann Arbor, Mich. The center will have 1,000 employees, and Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm is expected to make the announcement this morning at the Michigan Capitol in […]

Update: The folks at LiveSide provide some more details on Microsoft’s Live Drive and on something called Project M, which will apparently provide a single GUI to access any of your data from the Web to your desktop and other devices. The GDrive rumor mill got a big turn today when a blogger stumbled upon […]

Google has tightened integration between Google Base and Google Checkout. Google now allows Base users to specify Google Checkout as the payment option on bulk uploads. Some observers, such as ZDNET’s David Berlind, have noted that Google Checkout means Google is just baby steps away from launching an eBay-like service. The combination of Google Base […]

A blogger today discovered a Web page on a Google-owned site that suggests that Google is indeed building an online storage system. Blogger Corsin Camichel discovered a Web page on writely.com that outlined features and offered download options for the storage system. The Web page labeled the service “Platypus (GDrive).” Google bought writely.com in December […]

First an exploding Dell laptop, then overheating Lexar flash drives. Are Google software distributors going up in flames? Dell, which distributes the Google Toolbar, made the news last month when a Dell laptop exploded at a conference in Japan, spewing flames and sparks and burning a tablecloth. Fast forward to this week, when the U.S. […]

On one level, Google’s mission and the military’s mission are the same: organize all the world’s data. The results are a bit different. Google drops a new feature, the military drops a new bomb. But both organizations have a vested interest in knowing as much as possible about everybody else. According to a recent article […]

Starting today, Google Pack is available internationally in 16 countries and one former British protectorate (Hong Kong). The pack contains all the goodies you love, including Google Earth, Picasa, Google Toolbar, Firefox, Adobe Reader 7 and more. The contents of Google Pack change for different countries. For example, Google Pack in the United States consists […]

“Closing one’s ears to the complaints of partisans would also entail closing one’s mind to the substance of their arguments.” — Daniel Okrent, former ombudsman, New York Times. Google should hire an ombudsman. This is not a new idea. But given Google’s recent problems in court, its page-ranking dalliance with a Moldavian hacker, and a […]

Is Google cached out? Following a string of problems with its page-rank and site: operator algorithms, some Google users are reporting Google cache errors that apparently reveal lines of Google code. One poster on the Digital Point forums posted what appears to be part of Google’s page rank code, including values such as “pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round,” “use_spamscore” […]

It’s a Google vs. Yahoo smackdown as the two search and media giants battle for the Q2 crown. Although neither company’s stock price is anywhere near 52-week highs, Merrill Lynch has raised its second quarter revenue and earnings per share estimates for Google based on “improvements to monetization from advertiser use of ‘broad match’ and […]