Steve Bryant

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 […]

Advertisers wasted over $800 million last year on phony clicks, prompting many to blame Google and Yahoo for extensive fraud, according to a report released on July 5. The survey, by Outsell, a market researcher in Burlingame, Calif., takes a close look at click fraud, which has been nagging Google and Yahoo for several years. […]

Google recently updated its Google Labs page to reveal more papers written by Googlers. Most of the papers are from 2006 and the latter half of 2005. A few examples: Efficient Computation of the Relative Entropy of Probabilistic Automata Names and Similarities on the Web: Fact Extraction in the Fast Lane Limits to Anti Phishing […]