Google announced on Friday that it is buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

The Internet search colossus will combine DoubleClick’s technology with its proven advertising platform.

Google and DoubleClick, which is based in New York City, will provide an efficient way to manage both search and display ads online, according to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

San Francisco - US President George W. Bush is no longer Google’s top response to Internet searches for “miserable failure.”

Queries for French military victories no longer take one to “defeats.”

Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for “drunken despot.”

And Russian Internet users that type “enemy of the people” into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation’s leader, Vladimir Putin.

The search colossus says it has finally defused such “Googlebombs,” search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.

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Investors of eBay headed into the end of last year with some trepidation. The concern: an 800-pound-gorilla named Google  would give eBay a drubbing during the 2006 holiday season. The search giant aggressively moved into eBay’s e-commerce territory in 2005 with a product-listing service called Google Base. Last year, it stepped up the challenge, launching Google Checkout, a competitor to PayPal, eBay’s online payment processing service. The new offering was dubbed by press as a PayPal “killer” before it even debuted.

The big surprise of the season, however, was the strength of the services supposed to be suffering at the hands of Google. PayPal posted revenues of $417 million, a 37% growth rate compared with 2005’s fourth quarter. The payment-service company handled a record $11 billion in transactions, up 57%.

San Francisco - Google Inc has set aside more than $200m in its just-completed takeover of YouTube Inc to cover possible losses on the deal.This creates a financial cushion that might protect the internet search leader if it is hit with legal bills for the frequent copyright violations on YouTube’s video-sharing site.

Without elaborating in a late on Monday statement, Google said it is withholding 12.5% of the stock owed to YouTube for one year “to secure certain indemnification obligations”.

The Mountain View-based company disclosed the escrow account in an announcement commemorating the completion of its much-anticipated YouTube acquisition. As of Tuesday afternoon, Google representatives had not responded to requests for more details about the escrow account.

Buying San Bruno-based YouTube cost Google 3.66 million shares of its prized stock, including a convertible warrant. As of Tuesday, those shares were worth $1.79bn - above the targeted purchase price of $1.65bn announced last month.

California - Google has confirmed that it unwittingly disclosed login and password information of more than a dozen users.

Earlier this month, more than a dozen Google users thought they were doing the right thing by submitting suspicious internet addresses to a Google website designed to help fight online identity theft.

But tacked onto the end of the addresses they sent to Google was information they didn’t intend to share - including bank account numbers, user names and pass codes.

And that’s only half the story - a cautionary tale for unwitting internet users who trust in all things Google.

Perhaps because the company’s tech-savvy engineers figured that consumers would know better than to transmit such private data, they failed to delete it or otherwise protect it before posting it to Google’s list.

It wasn’t until an online security firm discovered the data that Google was alerted to the problem, according to the firm, Finjan Inc, which runs the Malicious Code Research Centre in San Jose.

Hamburg - Google, the world’s biggest web-search engine, had its German website cut off from the internet early on Tuesday, apparently after somebody hijacked the rights to its google.de address.

German surfers who tried to enter the Google site instead saw a webpage hosted on the servers of a tiny German online provider, Goneo.

“The problem was fixed in a short space of time,” said Stefan Keuchel, a spokesperson for the German branch of the US company, which earns most of its revenues from online advertising. Read more »

It appears Google has replaced recent satellite imagery of British military bases in Basra with pre-war snaps following Army claims that terrorists were using Google Earth to plan attacks on its facilities.

According to a recent report in the Telegraph, “documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google”. The images showed in detail “the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks, and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked”.

On the back of one set of images showing the Shatt al Arab hotel - home to 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group - insurgents had written the “precise longitude and latitude”.

An intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group said: “This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks. Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?

“We are concerned that they use them to plan attacks. We have never had proof that they have deliberately targeted any area of the camp using these images but presumably they are of great use to them.

“We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas, such as tents.”

Reports online claimed that the Gmail web mail service had a flaw which enabled anyone with a website to steal email addresses from visitor’s Gmail accounts as long as they were logged in to the service on their computers.

Google acted fast and has fixed the bug. This flaw was similar in nature to another flaw recently discovered in the Gmail service and was first reported by Googlified.

Interestingly, the bug appeared only after Google modified their Google Video service to make it easier for their users to forward the video links to their friends listed in their Gmail address book.

A Google’s spokesperson has confirmed that they have completed the implementation of fixes and this bug is no longer relevant for their users.

www.techwack.com

Google has fixed a security hole in several of its services that exposed the address books of Gmail users, the company said Tuesday.

An attacker could create a malicious Web site that would copy all the entries in a Gmail user’s address book, a potential treasure trove for spammers, according to a description of the problem on the “Googling Google” blog. The only condition is that the user would have to be logged in to Gmail or another Google service.

The issue came to light after Google watcher Haochi Chen probed a feature in Google Video over the weekend. The feature, called “Pick People to Email,” lets users select contacts from their Gmail address book to send them a video. However, the feature also opened up the address book to others, Chen discovered.

Chen alerted Google over the holiday weekend. Heather Adkins, an information security manager at Google, confirmed Tuesday that the company heard about the Google Video issue and fixed it within hours. The search giant later learned that the same problem also impacted other services and resolved those issues within a day, she said.

“To our knowledge, no one exploited the vulnerability and no users were impacted,” Adkins said in an e-mailed statement.

www.zdnet.com

One of Gmail’s biggest bragging points is that it offers an ever-increasing amount of storage. It’s a new year, though, and the times, they are a-changing (with apologies to Bob Dylan for that line). Gmail’s storage capacity appears to have leveled off at 2800 megabytes.

This might be only a temporary hiccup, but no one seems to know. An added point of concern for worriers: Google is usually pretty quick to fix these things, and the problem (if it can be called that) was first noticed early yesterday morning.

On New Year’s Day, Nathan Weinberg wrote, “Gmail remains frozen at 2800 [megabytes] of storage, which is plenty, and a reasonable enough number that it may even be by design. I’m guessing Google will either fix it and say nothing, or freeze the counter and declare 2.8 GB to be the new Gmail storage limit (so much for Infinity + 1).”

www.webpronews.com

I liked the article written by Google on their blog about how you can get paid to do something that you enjoy. Maybe NGO’s should take a leaf from Google and relise that people need hand ups and not hand outs.

It is all about how Adsense furthers small communities across the globe with their payouts and how this filters down to the broader economy. Very interesting read.

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This is an interesting post on Googles Blog at:

Google explains. At the outset, I want to acknowledge what I hope is obvious: Figuring out how to deal with China has been a difficult exercise for Google. The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship – something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. Despite that, we made a decision to launch a new product for China – Google.cn – that respects the content restrictions imposed by Chinese laws and regulations. Understandably, many are puzzled or upset by our decision. But our decision was based on a judgment that Google.cn will make a meaningful – though imperfect – contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.

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Google is offering merchants free use of its online payment service as it squares off against eBay’s market-leading PayPal.

The Internet search giant introduced Google Checkout in June, with sweeteners such as free ad credits for merchants. In November, it began offering rebates to consumers, $10 off $30 purchases. PayPal quickly matched the offer.

On Wednesday, Google ratchets up the pressure by dropping merchant fees through 2007.

“I’m thrilled,” says Lanny Morton, whose Sportscloseouts.com uses both Google Checkout and PayPal. “The online business is really competitive, and every little percentage helps.”

Merchants pay a variety of fees to use the services. PayPal charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction on sales up to $3,000 a month. Google’s fee is 2 percent of the sale plus 20 cents, less if the merchant is a Google advertiser.

There’s a rumor going around that Google is investing a major stake in a Chinese P2P startup called Xunlei1 (or Thunder). Xunlei is reported to have between 75 million to 100 million downloads of its software, and has raised previous funding from Morningside2 and IDG Ventures3. The rumor is that Google, along with Ceyuan Ventures4, is participating in Xunlei’s next round of funding, and a source says that the pre-money valuation is around $100 million.

We haven’t been able to confirm this planned investment with the companies, but have heard this from three different sources in China and recently read the rumor here, too5. We contacted Google and they naturally said “we don’t comment on speculation or rumors.” Ceyuan Ventures and Xunlei didn’t get back to us.

A source tells us that Xunlei’s software is getting an average of 140,000 downloads per day and the company has around 200 employees. The source also says that the company is working with television stations to do P2P downloads of television content that they attach ads to, and content partners include Phoenix TV and Hunan Satellite TV. There’s even a rumor from site ChinaByte6 that the company plans to partner with Horizon Media Group’s mobile community website 139.com to release an IM service soon.

Google Inc.-owned video-sharing site YouTube.com has removed nearly 30,000 video files from its site after after complaints of copyright infringement by Japanese media companies, an industry group said on Friday.

Many analysts and journalists accross the tech world predicted that Google had bought itself a whole heap of copyright trouble when it recently acquired YouTube for $1.65bn.

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers found some 29,549 music video, movie and TV clips which had been posted onto the popular site without permission.

Source: Reuters