Steve Bryant

A blogger discovered evidence of several new Google features yesterday that hint at the company’s product direction. While investigating a Google subdomain, Tony Ruscoe found the following experimental new Google services: Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Google RS2, Mobile Marketplace, Local and Weaver. Ruscoe found the products by logging […]

Federal agents requested and retrieved records from Google concerning a Gmail account that contained threatening speech, Google Watch has learned. The agents requested the records on June 22nd, 2006 after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) notified the FBI they had received a threatening e-mail. The recovered records included the offending […]

An Arkansas state judge has approved Google’s $90 million settlement in a click fraud class action suit against the company. According to Marketwatch’s Ben Charny, Google will provide up to $60 million in credit to affected advertisers dating back to 2002. $30 million will go to attorney’s fees. After the settlement, which was first profferred […]

Microsoft buys a patient information system. Could a battle with Google for the health care search and service marketplace be far behind? Microsoft yesterday announced the purchase of a patient information system that collects information from a variety of sources and makes it instantly available to health care professionals. The system, Azyxxi, was originaly developed […]

Yahoo named on Monday a database guru to study links between computer and human-aided search. Raghu Ramakrishnan, formerly professor of computer sciences at UW-Madison, is now at Yahoo Research helping the company define its social search strategy. Yahoo sees social search as a major part of its strategy against Google. Google relies on computer-aided search, […]

Google began giving AdWords customers data on invalid clicks on Tuesday, according to the company’s Inside AdWords blog. To display the data, Google released a new AdWords feature that gives AdWords customers a detailed picture of invalid click counts in their account, including “invalid clicks” and “invalid click rate.” “These clicks are filtered in real-time […]

Google can help coders find security bugs in open source code on the Internet, according to a new research project. The project, called Bugle, identifies common vulnerabilities in open source code using a collection of Google queries. The author of the project, Emmanouel Kellinis, has so far released a search string flaw that can help […]

Google plans to describe a new Google service for the open-source community at the Open Source Convention on Thursday. Greg Stein, an engineering manager who manages some open-source projects at Google, wrote that the company is “putting the final touches on it as I wrote this blog post.” Stein’s involvement in several open-source projects outside […]

Update: Includes response from Google. Google announced on Tuesday the ability to view live highway traffic data via cell phones. The new product, Google Maps for Mobile, is currently being offered to mobile phone users in 30 cities. Google Maps for Mobile is a beta product, according to the product page. Google said the new […]

Google’s proposed $90 million settlement does not do enough to prevent click fraud, said plaintiffs in an Arkansas court Monday, July 24. The 51 plaintiffs are members of a class action lawsuit first filed against Google in April 2005 and led by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles. Google agreed to a $90 million settlement to the […]