Thailand has lifted a ban on YouTube about five months after videos mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej prompted the military-installed government to block domestic Web surfers’ access to the site. But there’s a catch, of course. In a Friday interview with the Financial Times, the Southeast Asian nation’s information …

I’m frankly surprised by the brouhaha that has sprung up around Josh Greenbaum’s reasonable question - does Google own the content that users of Google Apps create? - and my follow-on post. I continue to believe it’s a legitimate question based on Google’s loose language in the agreement. Let’s be clear: I don’t believe Google has nefarious designs on its Apps users’

No way, GPhone(Credit: Google) There’s nothing quite like rumors. Whether it’s the pudgy Nano or the Google Phone, there is always something worth speculating about. But before we start telling the world about the rumored Google Phone (or GPhone as it has come to be known), it’s time we consider the environmental factors that will cause this device to be a failure -

Mercedes-Benz USA has an answer to complaints that car navigation directions don’t measure up to those from sites like Yahoo, Google and Ask. The automaker has partnered with Google and Yahoo to allow users to send customized Google Maps and Yahoo Local Maps directly from a computer or Web-enabled …

We’re planning to refresh the Sandbox this Friday at 4 p.m. PDT. As a result, it will be unavailable for several hours and all the data will be cleared. You can regenerate your client accounts afterwards by sending any valid request to the Sandbox without a clientEmail header block.– Aaron Karp

Chocomap results for Brussels, Belgium(Credit: Chocomap.com) World maps aren’t just for cartographers anymore. The Chocomap is an online map even people with the strongest aversion to geography will be sweet on. It plots out the locations of specialty chocolate shops around the globe, giving addresses and brief …

Google said Tuesday that it signed a multiyear advertising agreement with CNN.com, giving Google a win over the news site’s former partner, Yahoo. As part of the agreement, Google will be the exclusive provider of contextually targeted text ads on CNN.com’s pages (via Google’s AdSense …

Due to some technical issues, we’ve decided to delay the release of v11 (originally planned for this week) for a few more weeks. While we could release some components of v11 now, we feel it is better to delay the entire release in order to minimize the number of versions we launch in a year. However, please note that v9 will still be sunset on September 10, 2007. Therefore, please make sure you have upgraded your applications to v10 by this

Late last night our engineers were able to implement the upgrades that were originally scheduled for this Saturday’s maintenance period. Therefore, we have canceled this weekend’s system maintenance. All systems will remain operational and available. — Jon Diorio, Product Marketing

Marissa Mayer at SES San Jose 2007(Credit: Chris Smith of Netconcepts)On the morning of day three here at Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, gave her keynote presentation. She said a lot of interesting things, but …

Google has gotten a lot of flack from privacy advocates for photographing faces and license plate numbers and displaying them on the Street View in Google Maps. Originally, the company said only people who identified themselves could ask the company to remove their image. But Google has quietly changed that …

We will be performing unscheduled AdWords maintenance from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, August 25, 2007. While all AdWords advertisements will continue to run as normal, you may not be able to perform API operations during this maintenance period.We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.–Jon Diorio, Product Marketing*** Update as of August 23 at 9am PT ***This maintenance period has been CANCELED Late last night our engineers w

Over the past few weeks we have tested and implemented server enhancements that enable us to drive greater efficiencies from some of our more costly operations. Therefore, we are happy to announce the following rate sheet reductions:addAds = 125 units (formerly 250) addCriteria = 25 units (formerly 50) These changes will take effect immediately.And as always, we encourage all developers to use list methods whenever possible (e.g. addCampaignList

This is a fascinating read from Baseline. I heard a bit about Hadoop and other Doug Cutting Lucene projects during a session at the O’Reilly Executive Radar session of OSCON last month. Hadoop is “an open-source project that aims to replicate Google’s techniques for storing and processing large amounts of data distributed across hundreds or thousands of commodity PCs

The meta description is an important element of your on-page SEO, yet its value is often underrated. Viewing everything in terms of search engine ranking impact blinds us to the opportunity that meta descriptions present search marketers. Admittedly, the meta description tag provides very little value in search ranking. Any …

It’s very hard to earn billions of revenues and profits each year. Painful, even! Or so the San Jose Mercury would have us think about Google. It’s hard to be successful! I assume that Google would rather be in this position than in the alternative position: no one cares about your product/service enough to sue you, reverse engineer you, or bother in any way with

This Rand-McNally road map from 1907 shows detailed directions on the Detroit to Toledo route.(Credit: Michigan State University Library) When Google unveiled its Street View service in May, it seemed the entire Internet went a little crazy. But now, thanks to Google Blogoscoped, I was looking at some 1907 …

If it wasn’t official before, we have it in writing now: Microsoft is directing at least a small fraction of its massive (by tech-industry standards) lobbying shop toward Google’s proposed purchase of DoubleClick. Veteran lobbyist Thomas Boggs(Credit: Patton Boggs) According to a recent public disclosure filing with …

What is up at Sun?! They distributed a news release on Wednesday afternoon trumpeting the fact that Google is distributing a free version of Sun’s StarOffice software suite in Google Pack. Well, Google has been doing that since Friday–five days ago! Word has been spreading around via blogs for at least four days. …

It’s interesting to see the Google Browser rumors make their way to the surface again. Chris Smith recently shared his thoughts on the possibility of the search company entering the browser wars and several of his points are attention-grabbers. First up is the noted fact that Google had registered …

Nearly two years after they were expected to announce a Microsoft Office killer, Sun Microsystems and Google may finally be planning to do it. Or not. By way of background, following much hype about a partnership in October 2005, Sun and Google held an anticlimactic news conference in which all they announced …

So, you want to work for Google but you don’t have a graduate degree in computer science from an Ivy League school. How about being a Google local search ads sales rep contractor? As such you can earn up to $10 for each business listing that is approved by …

Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman …

Good news for Yahoo: a new survey finds that customers are more satisfied with Yahoo than the other search engines and portals. According to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, Yahoo’s score in the index rose 3.9 percent over the past year to 79 while …

Got this lovely email from the fine folks at Google video today. The one Deep Space Nine video I bought from them isn’t really mine after all. It turns out they’re shutting off all Google Videos after August 15. That’s right, if you bought a video from …

Google offers shared storage for Gmail and Picasa.(Credit: Google) Are you the kind of person who posts a ton of photos and videos online but uses very little e-mail storage? Well, Google is now offering consumers the ability to buy additional, or overflow, storage when they reach the free …

For anyone that’s ever been quoted in a newspaper, you’ve likely read over the article with great anticipation only to conclude that the reporter completely missed the mark, (Credit: Google)or at least neglected something you feel is important to your story.It’s human nature; unfortunately there isn’t much you or the news agency can do to clarify and remedy the miscomm

Google may be getting a little overly zealous in its antispam efforts. The company says it accidentally disabled one of its own corporate blogs after mistaking it for spam. Google Blogoscoped first reported the problem with Google’s Custom Search blog. Apparently, the blog had an odd message full of …

Google News is getting an interesting feature this week, and by interesting I mean it’s downright peculiar. Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they’re somehow involved in it. The process is not for …

Google has added four more cities to its Maps street view: San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. San Diego is getting the same high-resolution imagery treatment that Google gives San Francisco; I’m not sure why. I just pinged Google and will update this post when I get an …

We plan to release V11 of the AdWords API during the week of August 20. This is the same week we were planning to sunset V9.Since we understand that some of you may prefer to upgrade directly from V9 to V11, we have decided to delay the v9 sunset by three weeks. Therefore, V9 will now be sunset on September 10.– Jon Diorio, Product Marketing

Posted by Brian Kennish, Support Engineer, Ad* APIsWe’ll be performing routine system maintenance on Saturday from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT. You won’t be able to access AdWords or the API specifically during this time, but your ads will continue to run as normal.

Just a reminder… per our announcement on April 20, we will shutdown version 9 of the API on August 20.Please make sure to migrate your applications to version 10 by August 20. You can find more information about these versions (including the release notes) at http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/index.html.– Jon Diorio, Product MarketingUPDATE as of Aug 7, 2007We plan to release V11 of the AdWords API during the week of August 20. Sin

A group of Japanese entertainment companies is criticizing Google for not doing enough to keep pirated material off YouTube. The group also said that it wants Google to disclose more details about the technology it plans to use to protect copyright and said the search company was taking too long …

We all know that online maps have their faults. One of them is that they tend to be optimistic. Google and Yahoo maps offer real-time traffic data with color coding on the map of the congested areas. But we all knew that the driving time given on the map was …

The latest group to chime in on Google’s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of ad firm DoubleClick is the–get ready because this is a long one–Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, to be referred to as the CIPPIC going forward. The CIPPIC is …

So the rumors were true. Google is getting into mobile. At least, that’s what the Wall Street Journal is reporting today. Mobile makes sense for Google (lots of future money there), but I wish it felt it could get the same effect by investing in an open-source browser, rather than rolling its own:
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