Jaikumar Vijayan

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 […]

Google this week announced a final timetable for withdrawing support in the Chrome browser for websites that use Symantec-issued authentication certificates. The timetable gives organizations that are using Symantec authentication certificates to replace them or risk having their sites flagged as unsafe by the Chrome browser after the final deadline passes. In an announcement on […]

As expected, Google has appealed the massive $2.9 billion ( antitrust fine that European Union regulators imposed on the company this June. The EU General Court will review the appeal, but it’s not expected to issue a ruling for at least the next 18 to 24 months. Reuters was the first to report on the […]